#anticommunism

Just received the most low-rent HUAC investigation ever in my inbox.

Fulton John Sheen was an American Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of Rochester from 1966 to 1969. He was known for his preaching, especially on television and radio.

Born: 8 May 1895, El Paso, Illinois, United States

Died: 9 December 1979 (age 84 years), Upper East Side, New York, United States

Five facts about Fulton John Sheen.

Born in 1895 in Illinois, Fulton J. Sheen became one of the most famous Catholic bishops of the 20th century. Not famous in the influencer sense. Famous because people listened when he spoke.

He hosted the television programme Life Is Worth Living in the 1950s, pulling in tens of millions of viewers a week. He won an Emmy. A bishop beating Hollywood at its own game still stings, even now.

He held doctorates from the Catholic University of America and the University of Louvain in Belgium. In other words, he was intellectually armed, not just spiritually enthusiastic.

Sheen was a fierce critic of communism and moral relativism, arguing that societies collapse when they abandon objective truth. This was before it became fashionable to pretend truth is a personal hobby.

As the IWW undertook its own organizing activities, it also began to lend moral support to all activities of other organizations attempting to undermine conventional trade unionism. An example of this emphasis was the formation of the Amalgamated Mine Workers of Nova Scotia (AMW of NS) under the leadership of Michael McNeil in 1932. The CEB viewed the AMW of NS campaign as inspirational: it had “all the ear marks of the kind of tactics used by the IWW.” Such support for the formation of the AMW of NS provided some indication of the IWW’s plan for Canada. The CEB was quick to assert that the formation of the AMW of NS demonstrated that “the day is not far distant when the coal miners of Nova Scotia and all Canada are organized into the same Union with our brother miners in the United States, who are fast signifying their choice of organization by joining the IWW.” The Organizer called on Nova Scotia miners “to study the structure of the IWW and how it is so built that out of its industrial units is built the model ONE BIG UNION.”

On 12 September 1932, members of the IWW met in the Finnish Labour Temple in Port Arthur to officially establish the Canadian Administration. H.J. Lindholm presided over the meeting of seventeen delegates representing branches and industrial unions from across Canada. Besides delegates from the Port Arthur Branch and General Recruiting Union (GRU), representatives from Kingston, Ontario and the Vancouver and Merritt branches of British Columbia attended the conference. Several other localities also sent resolutions, minutes, and correspondence even though their delegates could not attend. The goal of the meeting, according to the Organizer, was to “put the Industrial Workers of the World on the map in Canada,” and to lay the foundation for the First Annual Convention of the Canadian Administration, which was to be held in June 1933.

Although the minutes of the September 1932 convention lack any reference to the Canadian IWW’s struggle against Communists, the pages of the IWW’s official organ reveal a deep mistrust of CPC activities in Northwestern Ontario and of their alleged “dirty lies.” The CEB contended, for instance, that “the Definition of a Bigot ... [was] the Canadian Communist.” Often going beyond the Canadian experience for fodder, it attempted to create a rift between the Finnish members and the leaders of the CPC. It sought to draw in some of those lumber workers who had elected to join the recently renamed Communist Lumber Workers Industrial Union of Canada (LWIUC). Frequently, contemporary and historical events in Europe were invoked to suggest that Communists in Canada were now colluding in the camps with the hated nationalist “White Finns” who had killed thousands of Finnish socialists during the Finnish civil war in 1918. The perceived failure of the American Communist party in Michigan was also used as an example of the growing lack of revolutionary policies and tactics within the North American Communist movement. How, the CEB wondered, could Communists consider themselves revolutionary, when it was in fact the Wobblies, not the Communists, who were demanding that workers possess the complete value of their labour, whereas the Communists were content to fiddle with such reforms as unemployment insurance?

Despite attempts to portray itself as moderate, principled, and revolutionary, the CEB, like its prewar manifestation, still advocated the general strike. “Nothing less than the thunder-bolt of the General Strike,” argued the CEB, “can uproot the profit system and destroy it, branch and limb.” Using the short-lived socialist republic in Chile during the summer of 1932 as inspiration, in October that year the CEB renewed calls for a general strike and industrial unionism. It argued that the events in Chile were just another example showing that “the dream of a Socialist Commonwealth is – but a dream, without the strength of Industrial organization.” Moreover, the CEB argued, “no armed insurrection or revolution has yet changed the social system.”

Although the CEB acknowledged that both the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution had changed material conditions, it considered that “both of them were failures insofar as freedom from slavery was the objective.” The French, the article continued, were “still slaves of capitalism” and the Russians were “slaves of State Capitalism.” Revolutionary Industrialism, “with its well developed plan for control of the state through control of industries, is the only logical answer to our prayers or salvation. Make your laws in the Union Hall.” The CEB also took issue with what it perceived to be the CPC’s manipulation of the plight of the unemployed, especially recent immigrants. When the unemployed in Hearst, Ontario, facing starvation, took action into their own hands and “served several ultimatums” to local authorities, the CPC took credit despite its lack of involvement. Outraged, Wobblies claimed that this was merely another example of Communists throughout Northern Ontario taking credit for the successes of others. The CEB also attacked the Communists for their lack of internationalism. “Real revolutionary labour movements,” the Organizer wrote, “are international, but really Communism is falling in line with the R.B. Bennett regime in Canada: ‘Run those dam [sic] foreign agitators out of the country.’"