[Peace-discuss] Religion and liberalism in America

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There seems to me to be a good bit of hasty comment (for lack of a 
better term) at the moment on the subject of religion and politics, from 
Christopher Hitchens to our own Robert Dunn.  Some facts might be 
appropriate.  Here's an interesting description of the matter from the 
Boston Review.  --CGE]


	In Search of the Common Good
	Lew Daly

When the Republican Party won control of both houses of Congress in 
2002, the view that “values matter,” once marginal in Democratic 
circles, suddenly became the talk of the town. To be sure, some analysts 
continued to argue that the Democrats had plenty of good policy ideas 
and simply required a better campaign strategy and effective 
policymaking once in office. But a new conversation had started, 
beginning from the premise that Democratic success depended on 
reclaiming the moral high ground.

John Kerry’s defeat in 2004, assumed by many to be the product of 
perceived Democratic deficiencies in “moral values,” gave this 
conversation renewed energy. And while some in the “new values” camp 
pointed to the importance of a specifically religious morality, others 
urged the Democrats to focus on a secular but morally demanding vision 
of the common good. In spring 2006 Michael Tomasky argued in The 
American Prospect that the Democratic Party should restore the idea of 
the “common good” to its proper place at the core of the party’s 
political identity. This argument provoked a widespread debate, and the 
term is now increasingly visible in the liberal apparatus of bloggers, 
think tanks, and even consulting groups.

The idea of the common good is the right place to start, but it is not 
well understood. More often than not it is used as a decorative term, a 
sound bite. Consider even Tomasky’s description: the liberalism of the 
Democratic Party, brought to power by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal 
and upheld for three decades thereafter, “was built around the idea—the 
philosophical principle—that citizens should be called upon to look 
beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest.” 
As a definition of the common-good tradition, this is uncontroversial if 
somewhat redundant. Probing further, however, he describes the common 
good as the “moral basis of liberal governance—not justice, not 
equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even 
prosperity or opportunity.” The contrast he ultimately makes here, 
separating the common good from concepts of justice, equality, and 
rights, is jarring, and the argument loses its bearing. In what seems a 
throwaway line, it becomes clear why. The common good, he claims, is a 
matter of “faith” rather than ideology—but “not religious faith.” It’s 
about “faith in America and its potential to do good.”

The common good of New Deal liberalism was certainly about faith in 
America and its potential to do good, but so was, for example, 
Roosevelt’s predecessor Herbert Hoover’s common good, which, Hoover 
said, “penetrates and profoundly modifies all the forces in the modern 
world in which we live.” What distinguished Roosevelt was his “deep 
conviction,” as he said during his fiery 1936 campaign, “that democracy 
cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of 
justice and of moral purpose.” The major religious bodies stood behind 
him in this, despite his own rather indifferent religious life (he was a 
nominal Episcopalian). Roosevelt’s seemingly casual faith was not, in 
fact, a reliable indicator of what his followers felt or understood 
about the New Deal and its mission. No president who preceded him in the 
20th century had so religious a following, or anything close to it. And 
none had so much support from religious leaders and particularly from 
Catholic thinkers.

Today we are so inured to the opposite problem of religious 
fundamentalism in the White House that the New Deal looks positively 
secular by comparison, but that was not how contemporary interpreters 
saw it. The Catholic press had little doubt that the New Deal’s vision 
of social justice was rooted in Christian thought. As Commonweal 
magazine urged readers to recognize, Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932 was 
“likewise the Catholic opportunity to make the teachings of Christ apply 
to the benefit of all.” The Christian journalist and editor Stanley 
Hoflund High, who organized the interdenominational Good Neighbor League 
to mobilize religious support for Roosevelt in 1936, similarly argued 
that “the fundamental objective of what we call the New Deal is 
religious.” This is the first time in modern history, he stated, “when a 
Government in any nation has set out to give practical application to 
the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

At a minimum it should be clear that the common good of New Deal 
liberalism involved much more than the bland commitment to 
self-sacrifice proposed by Tomasky. Indeed, it was in many ways a 
product of extraordinary developments in religious thought (if not 
“religious faith”). We cannot ignore or deny the religious roots of that 
ideal if we want a revival of the common good to motivate significant 
changes today.

The four decades surrounding World War I fundamentally altered the 
American balance of power, property and rights. Only a small minority 
had power, property, and effective rights at the turn of the 20th 
century, when the great “social question” of “poverty amid plenty” 
erupted into history. The dominant ideology of the Gilded Age—a 
concoction of laissez-faire economic theory, self-help mythology, and 
the mystique of constitutional law—was ruptured by new popular 
perspectives relying heavily on religious thought.

In the dominant view, the market was a system that distributed goods and 
services and allocated rewards by the laws of supply and demand, 
guaranteeing “natural” results according to the value of contributions; 
labor was a voluntary exchange, free of physical or political coercion. 
These assumptions about labor relations were subsumed in a 
constitutional framework of freedom, under the “due process” clause of 
the 14th Amendment. Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court 
decision throwing out a New York state law setting maximum hours for 
bakers, was the watershed case: to regulate work hours violated the 
employer’s constitutional right to set contractual terms as a party to a 
“free exchange.”

As the legal historian Morton Horwitz has argued, in the background of 
the new constitutional “freedom of contract” lay a corresponding shift 
in natural-law reasoning: by the late 19th century, the traditional 
“communitarian” thrust of Christian natural law had been completely 
supplanted by theories of individual “natural right” attached to private 
property and the prerogatives of business corporations. As we will see, 
this was not the final word on natural law and the economy; developments 
in Catholic thought, particularly, would challenge laissez-faire 
constitutionalism and natural rights alongside the better known theories 
of Progressivism.

Progressive theorists after Lochner exposed the abstract legal edifice 
protecting business as a circular, self-justifying myth. At the heart of 
their analysis was the issue of coercion; disparities of power—such as 
unequal bargaining power and the exclusionary power conferred by 
property rights—empty contractual “freedom” of any substantive meaning. 
Shielding private power behind freedom of contract, thus, was no 
different than leaving individuals unprotected from the power of the state.

These progressive ideas set the stage for new legislative powers in the 
private economy. Yet how these new powers of intervention should be 
used—for what purpose and for whose benefit and correction—evolved in 
another story. It was, significantly, a religious story; and most 
surprising of all, the Catholic Church, an embattled minority faith with 
a long history of passive neglect on social problems, emerged as the 
major protagonist. And the weapon it carried into battle was the “common 
good.”

One key part of the story of the Catholic Church and the New Deal was 
the dramatic exodus of urban Catholic voters from the Republican Party 
that began in 1928 behind Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential 
candidate on a major-party ticket. The trend was enlarged and 
consolidated by Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936. Another factor, less well 
known, was the extraordinary maturation of Catholic thought in this 
period, beginning with the late 19th-century pontificate of Leo XIII. 
American Catholic thinkers influenced by Leo (and themselves 
increasingly influential within American Catholic institutions) emerged 
as a distinctive presence in public life in the decade before World War 
I. This intellectual trend was part of a broader evolution of Catholic 
communities along two distinct but related paths: gaining acceptance 
within a majority Protestant culture; and embracing government action on 
the basis of Catholic social teachings.

Catholic support for McKinley-era Republicanism at the turn of the 20th 
century was a relatively brief (and somewhat inconsistent) interlude 
between two great eras of Catholic allegiance to the Democratic Party 
shaped by immigration patterns and religious identity. Coming in large 
numbers from Ireland and Germany in the 1840s and 50s, and in subsequent 
waves from Southern and Eastern Europe by the end of the century, 
Catholics were loyal supporters of the Democratic Party from the 
Jacksonian era through most of the Gilded Age. Like the Southern bloc of 
the Democratic Party, they feared losing their culture and way of life 
at the hands of the “big-government” Whigs and Republicans, with their 
culturally dominant Protestant churches.

Strong religious identity (often with strong ethnic divisions within 
confessions as well) was politically segmented in the 19th century in a 
way that is hard to appreciate today. The basic division was between the 
“pietists” and the “liturgicals.” Pietists were the evangelicals of 
their day, based mainly in the British-derived churches of the Northeast 
and their pioneer mission plantings in the Midwest—Presbyterians, 
Congregationalists, Methodists, Northern Baptists, and Quakers. 
Culturally and religiously dominant, pietist voters were reliably Whig 
and Republican in the 19th century. Spurred by spreading revivalism in 
the 1830s, the pietistic churches pursued social reform as a method of 
saving souls. They promoted coercive regulations such as temperance and 
Sabbath laws (while also fighting slavery and defending workers in more 
radical circles). But by removing liquor and other carnal obstacles to 
personal salvation, they also sought to absorb the “ravellings from the 
Old World” into the dominant Protestant culture. Their main targets were 
Irish and German Catholic immigrants, as well as German Lutherans: the 
so-called “liturgicals.”

The liturgicals were ritualistic and creedal, placing responsibility for 
salvation in the doctrinal and sacramental ordering of the church. For 
the German liturgicals, stopping at a beer garden after church on Sunday 
posed no threat to salvation—what biblical commandment or church 
ordinance did it violate? Pietistic regulation of such things was viewed 
as fanatical and oppressive. The regulations, along with the Republican 
Party’s nativist elements and sweeping anti-Catholic bias in the drive 
for common schools, kept most liturgicals, Catholic and Lutheran, 
solidly behind the Democratic Party from the 1830s on. As newer Catholic 
immigrants streamed into Eastern cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, 
and New York, and as Northeastern Protestants inspired by revivalism 
moved west to establish new churches and settlements in areas populated 
by older-stock immigrants, mainly German (Catholic and Lutheran), the 
religious contours of party politics became more defined.

The regular pattern changed dramatically in 1896 when William Jennings 
Bryan won the Democratic nomination for president on a fusion ballot 
endorsed by the Populists. Bryan’s pietistic biblical oratory, the 
Democratic platform’s inflationary silver plank, the prohibitionism of 
many of Bryan’s Populist followers (although not of his own campaign), 
and his opponent William McKinley’s refusal of support from the 
anti-Catholic American Protective Association helped create 
unprecedented fractures in the liturgical-Democratic alliance. The 
McKinley campaign carefully and successfully exploited them. Campaign 
chief Mark Hanna’s legendary winning strategy was partly built around 
swinging urban laborers in heavily Catholic Midwestern and Northeastern 
cities into the Republican column. McKinley’s working-class background 
(his father worked furnaces) and his rather non-pietistic Methodism 
deflated fears among the liturgical blocs, particularly German Catholics 
and Lutherans. The shift in 1896 (by as much as 20 points for Catholics 
by some estimates) was news back then, as one German-American paper 
(cited in Kevin Phillips’s book William McKinley) made clear:

     [The German voters] have many complaints against the Republican 
party, which. . . sought to combat the influence of Germans in every 
way, and annoyed them continually with Prohibition laws, Sunday closing 
laws and school laws. The Germans consequently turned their backs on the 
Republicans . . . and if the Democrats had not inscribed repudiation, 
bankruptcy and dishonor on their colors as a result of the union with 
the Populists, the Germans would have supported them this time also . . .

Bryan failed to hold for the Democrats in 1896 some heavily Catholic 
states including Wisconsin, Illinois, California, New York, Maryland, 
Delaware, and Connecticut.

One Midwestern Catholic who did note vote for McKinley in 1896 was John 
A. Ryan, the man who would lead the Catholic Church into the Progressive 
Age and the New Deal coalition. Ryan was born into a large Irish farming 
family in Vermillion, Minnesota. His interest in economic issues was 
ignited when he read the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator 
at age 11, and then Henry George’s worldwide bestseller on land reform, 
Progress and Poverty. In 1892, as a seminary student in St. Paul, Ryan 
cast his first presidential vote for James Weaver, the candidate of the 
People’s Party. Among the attractions of populism for an Irish farm boy 
from Minnesota was the heroic Ignatius Donnelly, a Minnesota congressman 
from Nininger (a few miles from Vermillion), and one of the few Catholic 
leaders of the populist movement (later to embrace spiritualism). 
Donnelly wrote the famous Preamble to the People’s Party national 
platform of 1892, which included a statement that expressed Ryan’s own 
developing point of view: “We believe that the power of government—in 
other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the 
postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an 
intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the 
end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in 
the land.” When Ryan read Leo XIII’s groundbreaking “labor encyclical,” 
Rerum Novarum, shortly thereafter (it was issued in 1891), the die was 
cast for Ryan’s life’s work of melding Catholic moral theology and 
social thought with American progressivism.

Ryan received his Holy Orders for the priesthood from John Ireland, 
Archbishop of St. Paul, whose lament in 1889 at Catholic silence on the 
“social question” had inspired Ryan along with his other readings. 
(“What has come over us that we shun the work which is essentially ours 
to do? These are days of action, days of warfare . . . Into the arena, 
priest and layman! Seek out social evils, and lead in movements that 
tend to rectify them,” Ireland declared.)

Although Ryan ardently supported William Jennings Bryan in 1896 (and 
witnessed his famous “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic Convention 
in Chicago), the mainstream of the Catholic Church, increasingly urban 
and industrial, was cautious if not fearful of the radical agrarian 
grievances at the core of Bryan’s support. It therefore remained caught 
between a Democratic Party now controlled by Bryanist populism, with its 
strong Protestant identity, and a Republican Party seemingly more 
tolerant (for a change) and sympathetic to urban immigrant workers, but 
essentially wedded to laissez faire. Faced with resurgent nativism as 
well, the Church’s transitional political identity at the end of the 
19th century left its social mission in disarray—“confused, ineffective, 
and devoid of passion and intellectual depth,” as the historian Joseph 
M. McShane writes in his book “Sufficiently Radical”: Catholicism, 
Progressivism, and the Bishops’ Program of 1919.

In Ryan’s first magazine article—a 1900 Catholic World review of Henry 
Demarest Lloyd’s A Country Without Strikes, a book on New Zealand’s 1894 
compulsory labor arbitration law—Ryan formulates a defense of “state 
interference with freedom of contract,” anticipating the arguments of 
progressive legal theory. At the time there was a more radical labor 
critique that rejected not only unequal bargaining power but the 
commodification of labor itself, often focused on John Locke’s idea of 
labor as an extension of the self.

But Catholic social teaching, beginning with Rerum Novarum, did not view 
the wage contract as intrinsically evil. In the Leonine approach 
developed by Ryan, what was important was the natural right of the 
worker, not as defined by Lockean labor theory but understood as the 
“moral means or opportunities by which the individual attains the end 
appointed him by nature.” This end, as Ryan stated in his first book, A 
Living Wage (1906), is a “right and reasonable life,” meaning a life 
consistent with the moral worth of the person as measured by his 
intrinsic and equally given (God-given) faculties of reason, 
self-improvement, and love of God.

Ryan regarded the wage system skeptically—even despairingly—for its 
separation of workers from the productive resources that could best 
secure prosperity for themselves and their families. Leo XIII believed 
workers need to be restored to ownership of productive wealth in some 
form, and both Ryan and Pope Pius XI, Leo’s great intellectual 
successor, strongly supported strategies to give workers a stake in the 
appreciating wealth of industry. But they did not draw a line against 
wage labor in principle. Instead they argued, as Ryan put it, that 
“human needs constitute the primary ethical title or claim to material 
goods.” This standard cannot be applied “to all possible human needs,” 
but to those basic needs the satisfaction of which safeguards a 
reasonable life as measured by the faculties of self-improvement that 
all human beings share (making them equal in their right of basic 
sustenance). So defined, “the validity of needs as a partial rule of 
wage justice” rests ultimately on the foundational principle that “God 
created the earth for the sustenance of all His children; therefore, 
that all persons are equal in their inherent claims upon the bounty of 
nature.” The subsistence wage of modern business theory did not meet 
this standard. Only a living wage met this standard, supporting the 
person, not just the labor; supporting the person in his faculties of 
self-development, not just in his service to capital.

In his major ethical work Distributive Justice (1916), Ryan argued that 
when a worker “accepts a wage insufficient for his needs under the 
compulsion of avoiding the worse evil of starvation,” his contract is 
“no more free than the contract by which the helpless wayfarer gives up 
his purse to escape the pistol of the robber . . . Like the wayfarer, he 
merely submits to superior force. The fact that the force imposed on him 
is economic does not affect the morality of the transaction.”

Ryan’s growing influence reflected a broader shift in Catholic teaching, 
reaching from Leo XIII to the more radical views of Pius XI. At the 
heart of this shift was an evolution in Catholic natural-law thinking, a 
tradition revived in the wake of the French Revolution. Essentially, 
Catholic natural-law thinking was pushed beyond a conventional focus on 
political liberalism (with its “tyrannical” governmental encroachments 
on religious institutions and authority) toward a more communitarian 
critique of the economic domination at the core of the liberal state. 
Drawing on this deeper intellectual transformation, Ryan constructed an 
explicit moral defense of state intervention in the economy, as well as 
a specific legislative framework in support of workers and their 
families—one that, in many respects, would ultimately be ratified under 
the New Deal.

At the center of the natural-law revival that fueled Ryan’s thinking 
stood the great 13th-century moral theologian Thomas Aquinas. Thomas had 
defined natural law as “the rational creature’s participation in the 
eternal law,” the eternal law being God’s law as it directs the whole 
universe to its appointed end. As applied to political order, Thomistic 
natural law is the grounding or set of principles that orient human laws 
to what is right and good. Thomas said that the fundamental objective of 
natural law is that the good be done, and evil avoided. Thus, the law of 
a people is “nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common 
good, made by him who has care of the community.” The fundamental 
orientation of natural law in the construction of human law is the 
preservation of life, out of love for God’s creation and out of the 
unique responsibility God gave us regarding its care.

In its economic dimensions, this approach is guided by the biblical 
understanding that God gave the earth to all human beings in common. The 
law codes of the Hebrew Bible, defended by the prophets, established a 
comprehensive system of economic security and restoration based on the 
principle of the earth being a common gift. This included provisions for 
the control and remission of debt, the release of slaves, and the 
periodic return of alienated lands in order to restore family stability 
and prevent concentrated wealth. Thomas viewed the latter policy of the 
“Old Law” as especially significant and compared it favorably with 
Aristotle’s views of property. For Thomas, private property was notably 
an integral feature of the common good, but it had a twofold nature of 
private possession and common use. “Man may fully possess [material 
goods] as his own.” But “as regard their use . . . a man ought not to 
look upon them as his own, but as common, so that he may readily 
minister to the needs of others.”

In Catholic thought, these mandates are encapsulated by a principle 
termed “the universal destination of goods,” which is deemed 
“primordial” in the church’s Catechism. Leo XIII established the modern 
template for Catholic teaching from this principle in Rerum Novarum. 
Although seemingly a bold departure from the dominant laissez-faire 
ethos of the period, the interventionist thrust of Rerum Novarum was in 
fact deeply rooted in Catholic thought. The 16th-century Jesuit 
philosopher Francisco Suárez argued plainly, for example, that “the 
object of civil legislation is the natural welfare of the community and 
of its individual members, in order that they may live in peace and 
justice, with a sufficiency of those goods that are necessary for 
physical conservation and comfort, and with those moral conditions which 
are required for private well-being and public prosperity.”

While Leo vigorously condemned political liberalism for its 
philosophical individualism and its vesting of sovereignty in the people 
or its representatives rather than God, it is important to understand 
how Catholic thought in this period, as noted earlier, became 
increasingly concerned with economic liberalism (more consistently so 
than today’s “communitarian” critics of liberalism). As Ryan’s work 
illustrates, in the wake of Rerum Novarum, with its defense of “isolated 
and helpless” workers against the “hardheartedness of employers and the 
greed of unchecked competition,” the dangers of economic liberalism, 
anchored in the unencumbered reign of “freedom of contract,” became much 
more pronounced in Catholic teaching.

On the path opened up by Ryan’s ethical works, the decisive turning 
point for Catholic progressivism in the United States came in 1919, with 
the release of the Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction, written 
by Ryan himself. Here, the “American Catholic search for social justice” 
truly began, writes McShane, growing out of earlier institutional 
efforts to mobilize support behind the U.S. entry into World War I.

The National Catholic War Council had been formed in 1917, and when the 
Council received accreditation as an official government war agency in 
1918, many Catholics began to see the importance of having a national 
organization to represent their views in the corridors of power. There 
was a growing sense that Catholic teaching was convergent with American 
ideals, and, even as President Wilson signed the armistice ending the 
war, conversations had begun about how to continue the work of the war 
council in another form.

The Bishops’ Program for Social Reconstruction was released on Abraham 
Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1919. As McShane stresses, this 
connection was meant to align the new age of social reconstruction with 
the spirit of the great emancipator. The program contained a set of 
immediate reforms, including the establishment of a legal minimum wage, 
public housing for workers, labor participation in industrial 
management, and social insurance for illness, disability, unemployment, 
and old age, funded by a levy on industry. It also contained a set of 
“fundamental” reforms for the future, including worker ownership of 
capital, universal living wages, and abolition and control of 
monopolies. Citing Leo XIII’s view that “society can be healed in no 
other way than by a return to Christian life and Christian 
institutions,” the Program ended with a strong admonition to the 
"capitalist":

     He needs to learn the long-forgotten truth that wealth is 
stewardship, that profit-making is not the basic justification of 
business enterprise, and that there are such things as fair profits, 
fair interest and fair prices. Above and before all, he must cultivate 
and strengthen within his mind the truth which many of his class have 
begun to grasp for the first time during the present war; namely, that 
the laborer is a human being, not merely an instrument of production; 
and that the laborer’s right to a decent livelihood is the first moral 
charge upon industry. The employer has a right to get a reasonable 
living out of his business, but he has no right to interest on his 
investment until his employees have obtained at least living wages. This 
is the human and Christian, in contrast to the purely commercial and 
pagan, ethics of industry.

As McShane notes, conservative bishops did not publicly voice their 
dissent when the program was released; it seemed like a foregone 
conclusion that Catholic progressives had captured the church and 
“charted a new course for her.” The program (and its widespread 
promotion) was the most important official act of the American Church in 
its history to that point, and in the years to come it would remain a 
major touchstone both in the development of social policy and in the 
rebirth of Catholic loyalty to the Democratic Party in the pivotal years 
of 1928–1936.

As author of the Bishops’ Program, Ryan recounted his “great comfort” 
when, on May 15, 1931, he listened to a radio transmission of Pope Pius 
XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno in the offices of The New York Times. 
His long effort to integrate Leonine natural-law teaching with concrete 
social policy had been “vindicated,” as one colleague put it. That 
summer he published a commentary on Quadragesimo Anno in the American 
Ecclesiastical Review, highlighting its important contributions. Among 
the most important was the idea that the distribution of income and 
wealth “must be brought into conformity with the demands of the common 
good and social justice”; that the worker has a right to a wage of 
“ample sufficiency” for himself and his family (what was called a 
“family wage” in social policy of the 1920s, something widely debated in 
Europe); and that the worker has a right to accumulate a “modest 
fortune” by sharing ownership of capital with employers.

Quadragesimo Anno (issued in the “fortieth year” after Rerum Novarum) 
was subtitled “On Reconstruction of the Social Order.” It was arguably 
the most radical and controversial church-wide statement in all of 
Catholic history to that point and the political culmination of the 
natural-law revival in Catholic thought that began under Leo XIII. As 
Pius XI explained, Rerum Novarum “completely overthrew” the tenets of 
economic liberalism, “which had long hampered effective interference by 
the government,” and had a galvanizing effect on Catholic social reform:

     Rerum Novarum . . . prevailed upon the peoples themselves to 
develop their social policy more intensely and on truer lines, and 
encouraged the elite among Catholics to give such efficacious help and 
assistance to rulers of the state that in legislative assemblies they 
were not infrequently the foremost advocates of the new policy. 
Furthermore, not a few recent laws dealing with social questions were 
originally proposed to the suffrages of the people’s representatives by 
ecclesiastics thoroughly imbued with Leo’s teaching, who afterwards with 
watchful care promoted and fostered their execution. . . . As a result 
of these steady and tireless efforts, there has arisen a new branch of 
jurisprudence unknown to earlier times, whose aim is the energetic 
defense of those sacred rights of the workingman which proceed from his 
dignity as a man and as a Christian.

Most controversially, Quadragesimo Anno proposed (in a section 
specifically designated “Reconstruction of the Social Order”) the 
establishment of a corporatist industrial order built around 
occupational councils comprising industry, labor, and government 
representatives. Charged with negotiating fair wages, hours, prices, and 
business practices, the councils would replace pure market forces with 
mandatory bargaining. This was to “bind men together not according to 
the position which they occupy in the labor market but according to the 
diverse functions which they exercise in society.”

The development of Catholic thought over the decades before Quadragesimo 
Anno was dramatic. As Ryan later wrote, the Leonine interpretation of 
the rights of labor, “as demanding a living wage regardless of free 
contract, or the law of supply and demand, or any other false philosophy 
has proved the most revolutionary idea that has been injected into 
modern economic life.”

The radicalization of Catholic thought in the early decades of the 20th 
century converged closely with Bryanism’s attack on concentrated 
economic power (indeed, explicitly so in Ryan’s case), and it also 
shared with the Settlement House movement and other social-reform 
movements a focus on winning practical legislation to protect workers 
and their families. Yet without the transcendental perspective of 
Catholic teaching, the natural-right defense of business domination 
would not have been so dramatically weakened during the Progressive Age, 
as Franklin D. Roosevelt would implicitly acknowledge in an important 
speech toward the end of his first presidential campaign.

In October 1932 Roosevelt went to Detroit to give a speech sponsored by 
a key Catholic ally, Mayor Frank Murphy. The speech was titled, “The 
Philosophy of Social Justice through Social Action.” True to the title, 
Roosevelt happily ignored politics, focusing instead on the 
“fundamentals that antedate parties, and antedate republics and 
empires.” In the culmination of the speech, Roosevelt called for “social 
justice, through social action,” and quoted at length from the source of 
this idea, Quadragesimo Anno:

     It is patent in our days that not alone is wealth accumulated, but 
immense power and despotic economic domination are concentrated in the 
hands of a few, and that those few are frequently not the owners but 
only the trustees and directors of invested funds which they administer 
at their good pleasure . . . This accumulation of power, the 
characteristic note of the modern economic order, is a natural result of 
limitless free competition, which permits the survival of those only who 
are the strongest, which often means those who fight most relentlessly, 
who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience . . . This 
concentration of power has led to a three-fold struggle for domination: 
First, there is the struggle for dictatorship in the economic sphere 
itself; then the fierce battle to acquire control of the Government, so 
that its resources and authority may be abused in the economic struggle, 
and, finally, the clash between the Governments themselves.

After Roosevelt’s victory in 1932, Catholic institutions mobilized what 
The New York Times called a “crusade for social justice.” The National 
Catholic Alumni Federation held regional conferences to promote a 
radical transformation of the capitalist system, based on the tenets of 
Leo XIII and Pius XI. “The immediate goal of the crusade,” said the 
Times, “is the education of industrialists and workmen to the 
realization that capitalism, in its present form, ‘has failed and must 
continue to fail.’” Ryan, who was a prominent speaker at one of the 
regional conferences (held at Fordham University), argued at the time 
that an “occupational group system,” creating a new balance of power 
between capital and labor, could spur a recovery from the Great 
Depression in some sectors of the economy. In Roosevelt’s first major 
New Deal program, under the National Industrial Recovery Act, Ryan saw a 
partial embodiment of the corporative vision put forward by Pius XI. 
Title I of the act created government powers to establish and enforce 
sectoral business codes for setting wages, hours, bargaining rules, and 
fair business practices (the act was thrown out by the Supreme Court in 
1935). Ryan was appointed to a three-person advisory panel of the 
National Recovery Administration, the agency that implemented the law, 
and he was subsequently a fixture in other counsels of the New Deal, 
serving on numerous committees and also publicly defending Roosevelt on 
many fronts. After watching the Supreme Court throw out labor reforms 
for three decades, Ryan defended the “court-packing” plan of 1937 in 
Commonweal. Then, famously, in a national radio speech late in the 1936 
presidential campaign, he defended the president against charges of 
communism issuing from the Union Party campaign of William Lemke. The 
populist radio priest Charles Coughlin formed the Union Party to 
challenge Roosevelt in 1936, and it was feared that he would succeed in 
his goal of engineering a massive diversion of Catholic votes from the 
Democratic ticket, throwing the election to the Republican Alf Landon. 
Although reluctant at first to make the speech, Ryan later said it was 
“one of the most effective and beneficial acts that I have ever 
performed in the interest of my religion and my country.”

Ryan gave the invocation at Roosevelt’s second inauguration in 1937, the 
first time that honor was given to a Catholic priest. And in April 1939 
he was formally honored on the occasion of his 70th birthday (and his 
retirement from the Catholic University in Washington) with a banquet at 
the Willard Hotel attended by 600 people, including members of 
Roosevelt’s cabinet, several Supreme Court justices, and dozens of 
members of the House and Senate. Secretary of Labor Francis Perkins 
toasted Ryan eloquently on his contributions to the New Deal:

     We have still not caught up with Father Ryan’s thinking, . . . but 
we are coming closer to it. Only lately has business begun to realize 
that economic policies are subject to ethics, and that a moral 
obligation to pay a good wage falls on the employer of labor as a 
consequence of his position of power over the fruits of the earth . . . 
There is no greater tribute I can give his persistent influence on 
American thought and action than to quote his own words. “Never before 
in our history,” he says, “have Government policies been so deliberately 
and consciously based on the conception of moral right and social justice.”

President Roosevelt sent a message to the banquet: “With voice and pen, 
you have pleaded the cause of social justice and the right of the 
individual to happiness through economic security, a living wage, and an 
opportunity to share in the things that enrich and ennoble human life.” 
Here was a rough draft of the famous “Second Bill of Rights” he would 
propose five years later in his State of the Union Address.

Catholic social teaching had revolutionized the moral landscape of 
capitalism, not only by reinforcing the progressive critique of 
laissez-faire constitutionalism but, more importantly, by stealing the 
thunder of higher-law reasoning and restoring its communal roots. It was 
a turning point that made the welfare state morally necessary and, 
because of that, politically possible.

The contrast Tomasky seems to draw between the common good and today’s 
more familiar discourse of “justice, equality, and rights” only makes 
sense—and ultimately does make sense—because his “justice, equality, and 
rights” refer to the liberal social agenda of the 1960s, which, in fact, 
he believes we must transcend. Crucially, however, he obscures what 
actually happened to the common good in that era. Sexual freedom, 
extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism did 
not merely replace the common good as a normative framework. It shifted 
the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and 
community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached 
individual of liberal philosophy, regardless of economic position or 
need. Essentially, the common good was supplanted by individual 
liberation, and what remained of it in public discourse was little more 
than empty rhetoric (think “compassionate conservatism”).

New Deal liberalism’s common-good ideal gave workers and their families 
a new (yet very old) moral ground for claiming resources and power 
necessary for their self-preservation. In fact, the primary objective 
listed in the Democratic platform of 1936 was “The Protection of the 
Family and the Home,” in defense of which it specified, “We shall 
continue to use the powers of government to end the activities of the 
malefactors of great wealth who defraud and exploit the people.” As the 
historian Allan Carlson emphasizes in his book The “American Way”: 
Family and Community in the Shaping of the American Identity, New Deal 
social-assistance programs such as Aid to Dependent Children were 
designed to “reconstruct” the home or, as the Roosevelt appointee Grace 
Abbott testified, “to give some security in the home.” The Home Owners 
Loan Act of 1933 provided over one million long-term, low-interest loans 
to prevent foreclosures. The 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act, 
which created dependent and survivor benefits, were particularly 
emblematic of this philosophy, extending the policy focus from the 
individual worker to “the economic security of the family unit.”

The individualistic social liberalism that came to dominate decades 
later clearly weakened, and in some ways fundamentally attacked, the 
familial and communal understanding of rights that shaped New Deal 
social policy. The protection of the family and the home from economic 
tyranny was no longer a certain or even desirable policy objective in an 
era of individual liberation marshaled against the traditional culture 
of family and community. Not coincidentally, as the common good 
disappeared from the discourse of rights in the 1960s, big business 
re-established its dominance in American politics, and families and 
communities received no new protection from the government even as older 
protections came under attack. The family living wage paid by a 
substantial majority of U.S. businesses literally vanished from the 
country by the late 1970s. Although many mothers initially went into the 
work force willingly and happily, in search of more variety and 
accomplishment in their lives, today a majority of working mothers do 
not view employment positively. According to survey data reported by 
Public Agenda in 2000, 80 percent of mothers would prefer to stay at 
home with their children if they could. Of course, the profound lack of 
employer and government support for working mothers in the United States 
contributes to this attitude; how much so is a central point of 
contention between conservatives and feminists. Clearly, however, many 
working mothers take jobs out of necessity, not choice, and to ignore 
this coercive reality, as both conservatives and feminists generally do, 
is morally incoherent at best in a country boasting high regard for 
“family values.” The problem is ultimately a question of wage 
distribution within the private economy—something no American government 
has challenged or even seriously contemplated since the early days of 
the New Deal.

The resulting extraordinary changes in family life have gone almost 
completely unaccounted for in American economic policy. Instead of 
helping families, government power helped big business extort more hours 
for less pay and less security, and it did so without any interference 
from the discourse of rights. Indeed, the much remarked political 
convergence of corporate power and religious backlash in the 1980s was 
arguably a collateral result of social liberalism’s diminishment of the 
common good, exposing the religious roots of this ideal in a distorted 
way. Reviving a secular version of the common good does not make it a 
strong defense. It will not guide us from chaos to community.

The common good commands objective change in the balance of economic 
power. It is not a unifying force but one that divides right from wrong 
by a unifying standard. It is a faith with poor friends and wealthy 
enemies. To deny responsibility for the common good, asking “Am I my 
brother’s keeper?,” is the same thing as murder, the Bible teaches. In 
medieval Christianity, “ordering what is personal to what is common” is 
the beginning of justice, and the tyrant, simply, is one who destroys 
the common good for private gain. For Roosevelt, it was necessary to 
wage a “struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the 
liberty of the individual.” Martin Luther King Jr. described a “single 
garment of destiny,” by which “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice 
everywhere.” Freedom came not from autonomy or anarchy but from one’s 
membership and birthright in the “beloved community.”

Within the last 30 years, the struggle between the common good and 
competing principles of property right and economic efficiency was 
enjoined again, by a resurgent ruling class. While they cannot succeed 
in returning to the good old days of laissez-faire constitutionalism, 
they have succeeded in stalling and, in some respects, rolling back the 
legislative progress secured in the 1930s.

Catholic teaching recognized the evil that arose from releasing 
individuals from the moral law. In the background to the New Deal, its 
whole thrust was to replenish that moral law in binding force against 
destructive economic power. Father Ryan inscribed this in our public 
history when he dedicated the new building of the Department of Labor in 
1935, beseeching public authorities to fulfill their solemn obligation 
to the common good, so that God’s justice will “dominate and permeate 
all the relations of industry and labor.” In King’s “Letter from 
Birmingham Jail,” the moral evil of segregation aborted the same natural 
law. It was aborted again as the spirit of Lochner was reborn in the 
Reagan-Bush era. Ryan and King and the millions they helped had little 
doubt of what was at stake. Has abandoning their faith profited justice 
in the decades since? <

Lew Daly studied Christian ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New 
York City, and he did pastoral work in a federal prison. Since 2002 he 
has worked as a research consultant for public-policy organizations. He 
is the author of the Boston Review Book God and the Welfare State, and 
he is currently writing Godless Economy: Faith-Based Welfare and the 
Limited State.

Originally published in the May/June 2007 issue of Boston Review.

http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/daly.html