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Book Review: Labor Organizations: Life, Work, and Rebellion in the Coal Fields: The Southern West Virginia Miners, 1880–1922

movement would have been much stronger than it was in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, left-wing Catholics like Michael Harrington and HenryJ. Browne argue with equal fervor that the secularists exaggerate the influence and unity of Catholic antisocialists and that, in any case, the obstacles to the progress of socialism and communism in twentieth-century America have been so great that the Catholic contribution can hardly be termed decisive. The trouble with this debate is the narrowness of the question addressed. Both sides argue as if Catholic social thinkers and activists had no concerns other than to stop socialism. Douglas Seaton's Catholics and Radicals is the latest contribution to this forty-year-old debate. A work in the Karson-Foner tradition, the book in large part is an account of the efforts of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) to purge the Congress of Industrial Organizations of Communist influence. Except for minor points of detail, there is very little in this account that will be new to scholars familiar with existing literature on the topic. The early chapters of the book do contain a few observations worthy of comment, however. For one thing, Seaton writes at greater length than his predecessors about the social theory that guided the ACTU, namely, the corporatist theory. Catholic labor activists sought to recreate in modern industrial society the sort of social harmony that was believed to have existed between masters and men in the guilds of medieval Europe. The difficulty with the section on social theory is that Seaton sees the Catholic activists' corporatism as only a throwback to medieval times. He seems unaware of the work of scholars like Philippe Schmitter, Charles Maier, and Ellis Hawley, who have emphasized the emergence of a new corporatism, born about the time of the First World War and growing more powerful ever since. It is into this context that the corporatist philosophies of twentieth-century Catholic organizations should be placed. The other noteworthy point in the book is Seaton's argument that early twentieth-century Catholic social thought contained certain potentially radical elements, specifically, a critical attitude toward commercial civilization and an insistence that workers were entitled to "a living wage" regardless of their productivity. Seaton maintains that more fundamental loyalties to the Church and the institution o private property prevented Catholic social thinkers from ever following through on the implications of these ideas. This is a potentially fruitful argument. Seaton's main attempt o apply it -his analysis of the causes of the weakness of a small group of "progressive" ACTU members who sought to ally with Communist union organizers in 1938-suffers from inadequate research, however. His account of this episode is based almost exclusively on the ACTU's official newspaper, the Labor Leader (as is the entire book). He does a nice job of demonstrating how the progressives met defeat within the ACTU, but the nature of his source makes it impossible for him to explain how these Catholic radicals interpreted their experience. In other words, Seaton's account lacks color and depth. Finally, the author's insistence that Catholic social thought is inevitably reactionary is simply not convincing. During the 1960s, some of the "labor priests" discussed by Seaton emerged in public again. This time they were not fighting against Communists in labor unions but on behalf of the United Farm Workers, civil-rights demonstrators, and welfare mothers' campaigns for higher stipends. Others, like Father Charles Owen Rice of Pittsburgh, spoke out against American intervention in Vietnam. Today, the Catholic hierarchy is practically united in opposing both American nuclear strategy and aid to the government of El Salvador. Clearly, social Catholicism in the United States is a much more complex phenomenon than secular left-wingers like Douglas Seaton have allowed.