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By Root 7843 0

in New York, thought the American Church should adopt a more democratic style, one better suited to the American people. Corrigan also believed that New York’s Catholics should band together socially, and he launched a massive parochial-school building program, with Democratic Party backing. McGlynn, however, decried Corrigan’s goal of withdrawing into a Catholic ghetto, publicly opposed state aid to parochial schools, and decried the Church’s alliance with Tammany. The pastor of St. Stephen’s urged Catholics to break down differences with their fellow citizens rather than erect new barriers between them.

The two men did not see eye to eye on labor issues either. McGlynn wanted the Church to actively support working-class organizations like the Knights and CLU. The archbishop, like others of the affluent Irish upper middle class, was a strong supporter of the status quo and gratified that upper-class Protestants had come to see the Church as a source of stability. It was appropriate, Corrigan thought, for workers to want improved conditions, but they should wait patiently for such improvements to come their way, rather than engage in militant and clerically unsupervised self-help. Corrigan even urged a ban on the Knights of Labor but was thwarted by more liberal bishops in other cities.

Finally, Corrigan opposed political radicalism of any stripe. He was at one with the Council of Trent in condemning the “false doctrines or negations which flourish in our time and eat like a cancer into society.” These included agnosticism, materialism, naturalism, rationalism, any doctrine proposing that civil power issued from the people and not from God, and—most emphatically—“socialism and communism, the twin monsters threatening the social order of mankind.” When McGlynn took up with Henry George—a close-enough socialist to Corrigan’s way of thinking—it was the last straw. McGlynn, for the moment, was muzzled.

DYNAMITE!

The confluence of Catholic radicalism, Irish nationalism, and labor militancy greatly strengthened the ability of working-class organizations—and working-class neighborhoods—to bring pressure to bear on obdurate employers. When relatively powerless workers like bakers, store clerks, freight handlers, cloakmakers, or unskilled cigarmakers struck for shorter hours or union recognition, they were now backed both by the Central Labor Union and by newly energized communities.

Sometimes this support reached riotous dimensions. In March 1886 the miserably exploited horsecar drivers and conductors of the Dry Dock line along Grand Street went on strike to lower their sixteen-to-seventeen-hour workday (with no time off for dinner) to twelve. Organized labor raised funds to back the drivers’ efforts, and when on March 4 the city sent policemen to escort scab operators, sympathetic neighborhood crowds blockaded the tracks with barricades of wagons and rubbish. The superintendent of police now dispatched 750 men (25 percent of the force) to aid the company, posting five hundred along Grand Street and a phalanx of 250 around a car as it edged out of the stables. Now (as Harper’s Weekly noted) thousands of neighborhood residents and factory girls “groaned, hissed, and jeered from the sidewalks, while from every window there were angry jabbering and shaking of fists.” Crowds heaped coal, lumber, cobblestones, and bricks on the tracks while throwing rocks, eggs, and rotten vegetables at the police. When three hundred officers charged and clubbed protestors at Forsyth Street, rioters overturned and fired cars, but police bulled the car through from river to river.

In response the CLU that evening voted a citywide “tie-up” of every streetcar line, and the next day over sixteen thousand drivers, conductors, and stablemen refused to show up for work. Surface transit was utterly paralyzed, and though the elevateds kept running they couldn’t handle the overload. When the Dry Dock Company gave in, it touched off wild celebratory parades, cheered by thousands of men, women, and children waving blankets, sheets, flags, and brooms. The horsecar