CATHOLIC LABOR EDUCATION in Cleveland operated from 1939 until the early 1970s. Cleveland was one of the most prominent and long lasting centers of Catholic labor schools in the United States. The origins of the Catholic labor schools were found in the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) established in 1937 in New York City from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement. The formation of this new labor group was based on Christian principles. The founders expressed the need for an organization to teach Catholic workers about their union rights and to combat the ever growing influence of the Communists in organized labor and industry. The purpose of the organization was not to be a “union within a union” but to educate, stimulate and coordinate on a Christian basis the action of the Catholic workingmen and women in the American labor movement. Administered by lay Catholic union members membership was open to all. The most significant component of the ACTU was the worker’s school. Courses included public speaking, parliamentary law, ethics and workers legal rights under the Wagner Act. Classes were taught by qualified lay teachers and clergy.
The origins of the Cleveland ACTU dated from June 1939. Cleveland’s&Բ;Archbishop Schrembs, an advocate of labor, invited the Catholic Social Action Congress convention to the city. Here ACTU delegates from throughout the national participated in forums and discussions concerning future development and expansion of the organization. Fr. Aloysius Bartko an assistant pastor at St. Emeric’s, a Hungarian working class parish in the city, was asked to lead an ACTU forum session. Inspired by these events he formed an ACTU chapter in Cleveland. Earl Krock, a Cleveland attorney, became the chapter’s first director with Fr. Bartko as its spiritual director.
The Cleveland chapter promptly distributed flyers to parishes and work sites addressed “to our labor union brothers and sisters in the Cleveland area.” The group sponsored labor rallies and commemoration ceremonies honoring the papal social encyclicals. The members began to organize non-union shops and invited union men and women to attend chapter meetings. The Cleveland branch fully supported a newsboys’ strike and assisted them to secure a city ordinance that protected their rights. Additionally, the chapter spoke out against racism in the workplace and in society. A Catholic Labor Defense League office opened with three staff attorneys but was fundamentally inactive due to a lack of cases.
As an active affiliate of the ACTU Cleveland was selected to host the organization’s first national convention held over the Labor Day weekend of August 31-September 2, 1940. The main purpose of the convention was the formation of a national organization based on the principles of the papal social encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and to: coordinate the activities of the chapters, to adopt a constitution and plan future activities. The group’s most powerful statement was its resolution that denounced “the activities, policies and tactics of the Communist Party and of its members in the American labor movement.” The city developed an identity as a staunchly Catholic, unionized and anti-Communist community. At the CIO’s&Բ;1949 convention in Cleveland, the organization renounced the Communists and purged them from the group. Cognizant of this, the ACTU utilized that strength and conducted additional conventions in Cleveland in 1947, 1949 and 1954 as well as the ACTU’s last one in 1959.
Members of the chapter viewed labor education as pivotal to workers’ rights. In September 1941, Fr. John Lees, Fr. Leo Fenstermaker, Fr. Francis McGlynn and other priests decided to begin the first labor