Source: brucewinston.com http://www.brucewinston.com/Gilded_Age.shtml
Artic les Socialism and Catholicism: The Left and the Right of the Labor Movement in the Gilded Age By Bruce Winston,
The study of labor history allows the understanding of today’s labor movement and assists in predicting the labor movement of the future. The ideologies that influence the thinking of men and women at any point in history have the ability to impact the future by influencing the present. This study looks at the labor movement in the Gilded Age through the view of two seemingly opposing ideologies. Kazin (1991), in his response to Kimeldorf’s (1991) implication that studies of labor history should move away from examining the role of unions, emphasizes the importance of the union as the means by which millions of workers made sense of their lives and reaffirms the importance of the study of the union and the worker. Kazin wrote: . . .Ken Fones-Wolf’s Trade Union Gospel: Christianity and Labor in Industrial Philadelphia, 1865 1915 directs our attention to an area of American working-class life -- the variation of religious experience -- which few labor historians have examined in any depth. Through discussing how both unions and employers used Christianity to promote their own secular purposes, Fones-Wolf intelligently refuses to reduce religiosity to its social or political functions. If uninformed by studies like these any synthesis of labor -- or American -- history is incomplete. (p. 105) Following Kazin’s advice, this paper looks at two opposing, yet similar, ideologies that mentally pulled on the worker and the labor movement during the Gilded Age. The thoughts of organized labor impact the political and social fabric of the United States’ society and thus are important to understand (Misra & Hicks, 1994; Yard, 1993). This paper differs from other organized labor thought examinations in that it looks at the impact of the far-left and far-right to see how organized labor evolved as it entered the twentieth-century. The effect of the foci of this paper -- socialism and Catholicism -- on the labor movement and the subsequent effect of the labor movement on society is a dynamic relationship that must be viewed from the perspectives of: (a) politics, (b) society, (c) economy, and (d) technological changes during the Gilded Age. Welch and Leege (1991) state that “. . . scholars are paying closer attention to the measurement of religiosity and to the mechanisms by which religious values become politically relevant” (p. 28). Proposition This paper proposes that socialism and Catholicism pulled at the United States’ working class and attempted to influence the masses’ thinking toward work. If socialism and Catholicism were at the extremes of the labor ideology, then the labor movement would have sought to isolate itself from the influence of, while at the same time be vulnerable to infiltration by either, the left-wing or the right-wing ideology. This paper seeks to learn if this is true.