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A Curious History of America

The Yardstick

By Msgr. George Higgins

March 6, 1998

    Paul Johnson, a distinguished British Catholic journalist and popular historian, just published a mammoth 1,088-page ``History of the American People" (Harper Collins). It is easy, almost too easy, to read, but let the reader be on guard. ``I do not seek, as some historians do, to conceal my opinions," Johnson says. 
    There is something rather engaging about that kind of up-front honesty, but Johnson might have added that his opinions, for the most part, are at the spectrum's extreme, ultraconservative end. The America he loves is a place where, especially in the 19th century, ``the spirit of laissez-faire libertarianism ... pervaded every aspect of life."
    Johnson, to his credit, urges readers to comment on opinions of his which they find "insupportable." I can think of at least a dozen such opinions, but I will limit my comments here to Johnson's superficial treatment of the U.S. labor problem in the 19th century.
    As one reviewer pointed out, there are no robber barons in Johnson's book and no real victims, since "the facts" demonstrate "a panorama of general progress in which all classes shared." To be sure, some shared more than others -- notably Andrew Carnegie, in his day the nation's wealthiest man. Johnson finds Carnegie, in his own way, the most effective economic and political philosopher of the age.
    Johnson notes the Homestead strike at Carnegie's main steelworks in western Pennsylvania, but artfully explains it away. In this respect he is completely outside the mainstream of American historiography. Almost without exception, American labor historians agree that the brutal breaking of that strike by Pennsylvania militiamen in callous collusion with Carnegie's company was one of U.S. labor history's most disgraceful events.
    The strike was a catastrophe for American labor. As Johnson notes, Carnegie's biographer wrote 40 years later: "Not a single union man has since entered the Carnegie works."
    That doesn't seem to bother Johnson. He makes clear that he really does not believe in unions in his eccentric defense of the infamous Pinkerton detective agency which, in the 19th century, specialized in breaking strikes by fair means or foul.
    "Pinkerton, it should be noted," he writes, "was not anti- working class.... But he hated bullying of the weak from whatever quarter, he upheld the rule of law against all comers and he believed passionately in the right of the working man to sell his labor in the open market as he pleased.
    "Trade unionism as practiced in 19th-century America went against all these convictions as Pinkerton willingly used his organization to beat undemocratic strikes."
    There you have Johnson's view of unions in a nutshell. Like Pinkerton, he believes passionately in the right of the working man to sell his labor in the open market as he pleases. If Johnson was ever told at the prestigious Catholic prep school he once attended, he has completely forgotten that this is totally incompatible with Catholic social teaching, starting with Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum."
    On wage justice, Pope Leo famously wrote as follows: "Let workers and employer ... make any bargain they like, and in particular agree freely about wages; neverless there underlies a requirement of natural justice higher and older than any bargain voluntarily struck: The wage ought not to be in any way insufficient for the bodily needs of a temperate and well-behaved worker."
    Johnson, throughout his book, stresses the central, fundamental influence of Christian belief in American history.
    Not so fast.
    I don't know about Christianity in general, but surely laissez-faire libertarianism, so dear to Johnson's heart, cannot be blamed on Roman Catholic Christianity. Quite the contrary.