We participated in the strikes that were going on. I remember a brewery strike. Why we picketed a brewery I don’t know. (Laughs.) I’m practically a Carrie Nation about liquor. You see so much misery on the Bowery, you just have to carry on…. There was a department store strike. I guess we were the first Catholics policemen had ever seen on a picket line. They thought we were all Communists boring from within.
There was the Chinese-Japanese War going on that we started in 1932 or 1933. Then there was the Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War. Nonviolence had to be the role of the Church. How else could any one speak of the teachings of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount, the whole question of the Beatitudes … ?
Plenty of students came down and joined us, ’cause there were no jobs to be gotten. They came directly from college, with no experience. Mostly young men. That’s what really began building up the Worker. We had thirty-two hospitality houses in the country before we were many years old.
There’s a wide difference in point of view of the students then and young people today. State universities were cheap in those days. You could go to a state university and get yourself a degree easily enough. But there were no jobs. Now there are plenty of jobs and most young people are wondering what’s worth doing. They don’t want to be part of the system. The war hangs over their heads, the Bomb. They have a sense of constant crisis.
In the Thirties, bread and butter issues …
Yes. They didn’t consider the whole social order as students are doing today. Or the whole peace issue …
In 1933, 1934, there were so many evictions on the East Side, you couldn’t walk down the streets without seeing furniture on the sidewalk. We used to go ahead and try to find other empty apartments and force the relief stations to pay those first months’ rent. We used to help people move into the apartments and get settled. And give them a hand.
Did you, like the Unemployed Councils, try to put people back in the apartments from which they were evicted?
No. We felt we couldn’t use people in this way, to make a point. We tried to forestall the marshal, and get them moved out, so they wouldn’t be ashamed and humiliated and debased. They had enough suffering without having this suffering piled on them, being made part of a demonstration.
What was the attitude of the Communist Party toward The Catholic Worker?
There were a few articles in
The Daily
Worker
trying to combat our ideas. They considered it false mysticism. There was no contact between us, except that some were friends of mine…. When it came to a certain kind of strike or to a demonstration, such as the one in front of the German Embassy, there was a common cause.
We were never militantly anti-Communist. But we saw so many liberals going over in the Thirties, we had to put out the very strong differences in point of view. In a way, they were not to be depended upon. They could change their party line, it was the style, sort of. At the same time I can see what Cuba’s accomplishing. I think every single Latin-American country will have another brand of Communism. The Church could be a Communist organization.
The Communists contributed plenty in the Thirties. Absolutely. They were the ones that led the heroic struggles and risked beatings and imprisonment and death itself to organize in the South, for instance, in textiles. They tried to organize the unorganized, wherever they were.
That hunger march down in Washington emphasized the need for all the things we have now. They were marching on Washington, three thousand of them, for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, aid to dependent children. Every type of social security that we have now was on the Communist program at that time. But this was the philosophy of the State taking over.
Did you campaign for Social Security at the time?
No, we were on the other side. The whole program of unemployment insurance, Social Security, was a confession of the failure of our whole social order. And confession of failure of Christian principles: that man, in fact, did not look after his brother. That he had to go to the State …
There’s a terrific conflict here. The Federal Government again and again has to protect people against injustices—in the South, for instance. And yet, ideally, it should not be the business of the State. Popes and anarchists have emphasized the principle: subsidiarity. The State should never take over the functions that could be performed by a smaller body. The State should only enter when there are grave abuses. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a good case in point. It concerns the welfare of a great many people in a great many states. And begins a new social order right there—a communal order, to a great extent, autonomous.
The relation of The Catholic Worker to the New Deal … ?
We were against it. On the one hand, we had to go ahead. It was a time of crisis, as a flood would be. So we did try to get the people on welfare.
Did try to get their rent taken care of. But what you had to do first of all is to do everything you could.
You were not opposed to the reform measures of the New Deal, per se?
No. But if it could be done by a smaller group, it would be better. We see the evils of gigantic associations. Their abuse of power. There must be decentralization. It’s a tremendous problem. Autonomy as against immediate need. We emphasize our anarchism.
What do
I
do? That’s how our houses of hospitality started during the Depression. A girl came in. She had read a letter we sent to the bishops about the Church’s tradition. She had been evicted from her furnished room. She had a couple of shopping bags and was sleeping in the subway. We didn’t have any room, we were all filled up. We didn’t know of any place that could take her. The girl looks at us and says: “Why do you write about things like that when you can’t do anything about it?” It shamed us, you know? We went and rented another apartment. Then we got a whole house. We were pushed into it. Everything we’ve done, we’ve been pushed into.
We never started a bread line. We didn’t intend to have a bread line or a soup line come to the door. During the Seamen’s Strike of 1937, six of them showed up. They said: “We’re on strike, we have no place to stay, we have no food. We’re sleeping in a loft on the waterfront.” We took in about ten seamen. We rented a storefront, while the strike lasted for three months. We had big tubs of cottage cheese and peanut butter, and bread by the ton brought in. They could make sandwiches all day and there was coffee on the stove.
While we were doing that for the seamen, one of the fellows on the Bowery said, “What the hell are you doing down there feeding the seamen ? What about the men on the Bowery? Nobody’s feeding them.” So when the men would come in for clothes or a pair of shoes or socks or a coat and we didn’t have any left, we’d say, “Sit down anyway and have a cup of coffee. And a sandwich.” We kept making more and more coffee. We brought out everything we had in the house to eat. That’s how the first bread line started. Pretty soon we had a thousand men coming in a day, during the Depression. It started simply because that Bowery guy got mad.
Our good Italian neighbors recognized poverty. They’d bring all their leftovers to add to the soup. Storekeepers and neighbors. They’d bring over pots of spaghetti and their leftover furniture and clothing and things like that. The very ones who were poor themselves. We lived in their neighborhood and they accepted us.
They were also the ones who had little statues of Mussolini in their windows and gave him their wedding rings.
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So you can’t go ahead and
say these are the bad guys and these are the good guys. You can’t ever say it. They talk about the Left and the Right, yet all men are brothers. The Communists have a better understanding of this, but they want to bring it about through the use of force. Isn’t it a shame? They do have the vision. Would they wipe out these people with Mussolini in the window?
When we moved into a more respectable type neighborhood, they used to throw things at us when we passed by, saying we were degrading the neighborhood. As soon as people get a little more comfortable, this is what happens….
The attitude is much worse today. In the Thirties, everybody was in the same boat. It was a general disaster. Ignazio Silone once said, “Everybody’s disaster is nobody’s disaster.” The individual did not suffer as he does suffer now. Those on welfare today are despised as they were never despised before.
Another Depression might be a relief to many people. They know our prosperity is built on war. It might be so much better than war. People won’t have to keep up a front any longer. They wouldn’t have to keep up the payments any more. There would have to be a moratorium. The threat of Depression is nothing to worry about. I wish to goodness the stock market would collapse for good and for all. I’d like to see a nonviolent revolution take place and an end to this Holy War….
Fred Thompson
“I’m just as old as the century.” He is a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the Wobblies). He joined in 1922.
In his younger days, he had been a construction worker: tunnels, irrigation ditches, dams, quarries, laying track. “We always boxcared from one job to another, never paid any fare. I had heard of the Wobblies … weird stories, that they were a bunch of nuts trying to change the world by burning haystacks and stuff like that.
“I found a tremendous difference between this myth and the reality. They were a very serious bunch of men with understanding: even if we do win our immediate demands, the boss and I will still have a fight. Let’s run the works for our own good, so we won’t have to fight any more. They had this notion: someday … But, right now, let’s clean up these camps, let’s raise the wages.
“There’s a belief that the IWW was killed by the repression following World War I, when a lot of us, including myself, were arrested for criminal
syndicalism. The facts don’t correspond. Our membership was at its peak in the summer of 1923.
“In 1924, we had a catastrophe, when an internal factional fight split us in two. But we built up again, following the Colorado Coal Strike of ’27.”
IN THE THIRTIES, our biggest growth was in Cleveland. As soon as this Depression got going, we hammered away at one theme: people who didn’t have a job would do far more for themselves by going to every worker who still had a job, and saying, “If you strike, we won’t take your job away from you. We’ll come there and beef up your picket line.” We put out a leaflet, I remember writing it myself: Bread lines, Picket lines. The theme was that bread lines lead to despair and picket lines lead to hope.
I was on a soapbox circuit. I used to go from Duluth down to Minneapolis, over to Milwaukee, down to Chicago. We’d usually hit places like the iron country in Michigan and Minnesota. In Chicago, we’d hit Swede-town, around the North Side. They’d be mostly men. The home guard. The fellows who weren’t migratory workers, who didn’t ramble around, who had a stationary job.
Henry Ford changed things for the IWW. We used to be rather strong with people who worked the wheat harvest. They went there in boxcars. But the combines
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shut out the demand for extra harvest labor. Plus the fact that people became “rubber tramps,” in broken-down tin flivvers. This meant our organizing technique was no longer workable. We had to go to the flivver jungles.
In ’22, at the construction camps, you didn’t see any females around unless they were visiting with their business agent (laughs), for short durations. You didn’t see men and wives.
In ’27, I had a little holiday that the State of California gave me for criminal syndicalism. When I came back, two years later, I found the whole industry had changed. Every camp had provision for married couples, but their children had to be working.
Quite a few people were living in nearby towns, if there were decent roads between town and job. The automobile made it possible for a man to live a fairly settled life and fill these out-of-town jobs. The migratory worker had practically disappeared in ’26. You didn’t hear much about him again until the Dust Bowl days. And a new kind of mobility arose.
Did the Communists or Socialists try to win away your members to their causes during these years … ?
The radical movement waxes and wanes. They jostle each other. We like to grab each other’s members and things like that, sure. But the over-all
anti-capitalist movement grows and declines together. They all get bigger at the same time, they all get smaller at the same time. (Laughs.)
In general, there was cooperation—not entirely so. The IWW has always tried to avoid being dogmatic, doctrinaire. We don’t ask a guy: what are your political beliefs? We ask ’em: what kind of work do you do? What industry are you in? We have never prevented any person joining because of his beliefs.
The Communists wanted us to join them in 1920. They had a misapprehension over in Moscow, where they got their orders, that we were a secret underground. Heywood
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went over and tried to explain to Lenin that we had a great big printing plant in Chicago, where we put out twelve different weeklies and a bunch of magazines and so forth. We had trouble with the Government, but we were certainly not hiding. They knew we were doing these things. (Laughs.)
The IWW did not engage in internecine warfare, say, the way the other groups did … ?
We were forced into a certain amount of it. By 1923, the Communist Party had decided that we should be allowed to exist in agriculture and in the woods, but should not be allowed into any other industry. And if their members did join us, they should do what they could to disrupt us. Naturally, that gave us some concern. But even at that, we tried to get them to see the common sense, is all.