Janine Giordano Drake, Indiana University, has published What Rerum Novarum Did and Did Not Do for the American Labor Movement, 1891-1935 Revisiting Religion in the Struggle for Workplace Justice in the St. Louis University Law Journal:
The papal encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891), a statement which defended workers' human rights, has been celebrated by both leftwing and rightwing Christians as a central document in the history of the Church. To trade union leaders of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was a powerful tool for reminding workers that the Holy Father supported fair wages and healthy working conditions for all God's people. Just the same, for business leaders of the several Red Scares (especially 1917-1920 and 1945-1955), it became a powerful tool in discrediting socialist demands as both “materialistic” and “atheistic.” This piece illustrates that while Rerum Novarum has been very helpful in catalyzing the public recognition of trade unions in the United States, its rejection of “socialism” is also partially responsible for the challenges workers have faced in expanding the power of labor to set the terms of industrial justice outside the workplace.
Pope Leo XIII (LC)
--Dan Ernst
