"Christian Values” and the De-radicalization of Irish-Catholic America, 1892–1919: The Case of Patrick Ford

In the 1880s Irish-Catholics stood at the vanguard of labor radicalism in America.  Irish-Catholic leaders held key positions in the country’s premier labor organizations. Irish-Catholic workers participated in many of the era’s most violent confrontations between labor and capital. And in 1886 Irish-Catholic voters came out in droves to support Henry George, the radical economist, as candidate for Mayor of New York City—an episode that horrified the Catholic hierarchy at home and abroad. By the onset of the First World War, however, the Irish-Catholic working-class had all but relinquished its radical politics, embracing instead a steadfast conservatism that regarded “socialists” and “anarchists” as threats to the moral order of God, country, and family. This paper examines the roots of this ideological shift in Irish-American Catholicism at the turn of the century. In particular, it takes as its subject the life and writings of Patrick Ford, a former abolitionist and labor radical who edited the Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, the country’s most popular Irish-American weekly, from 1870 until his death in 1913. Like many of his Irish-Catholic contemporaries, Ford had strongly supported labor militancy in the 1870s and 1880s, even campaigning heavily for Henry George in 1886. But in the following two decades he would grow disillusioned with radical politics, alienated by the American Left’s assault on Victorian-era assumptions about sexuality, marriage, and the family. Using Ford as a case study, this paper will examine how such support for “Christian values” at the turn of the century helped transform Irish-Catholics from Gilded Age radicals to apostles of “true Americanism” by 1919.