Time chortled that the political tide of history had been turned and that the Democrats would be out of power for the foreseeable future. The Daily News announced the “End of the Machine” in headlines that would be repeated many times over the next forty years.
In fact, 1946 was the only time in the last sixty years that the Republicans won both houses of Congress. They are not likely ever to do it again.
And the report of the machine’s demise was premature, as it was many times later.
The media, particularly the Luce journals, discovered that they could not control the outcome of elections save perhaps in reenforcing the way people already felt two years later, when “Fighting Tom” Dewey was turned back by Harry Truman, who also swept back in a Democratic Congress.
Two events had taken place: the final lifting of price controls and the conversion to peacetime economy had opened the cornucopia of consumer goods, and people discovered, without knowing it yet, the concepts of “real wages,” or “lifestyle”—prices went up but income went up more.
And Truman earned for himself the reputation of being a tough, feisty man, especially by fighting the unions, and especially later that winter by fighting the universally despised John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, who was trying to improve the “real wages” of the miners and of other union members so they could deal themselves into the prosperity that was emerging. It was only common sense that, if the industrial workers were going to buy the consumer goods necessary to sustain prosperity, their wages had to go up.
But that common sense was not evident to a President who desperately needed a victory over someone and a press and public who needed someone to blame for the “slowness” of the postwar recovery—anything short of instant conversion from planes to automobiles, refrigerators, radios, and homes was too slow.
Everyone seemed to be on strike—bus drivers for fifty days in Chicago, airplane pilots, construction workers, copper miners—but no strike was a better target than the coal strike, welcomed by management, which saw a chance to let the government break the union. Truman sought an injunction against the strike on the grounds of a national emergency because the country was still technically in a state of war. Brownouts were ordered in the cities to conserve coal, railroad schedules were cut to the bone, someone banned Christmas-tree lights, headlines told of seventy thousand jobs being lost in Chicago and that the recovery might be delayed or permanently impaired.
Every frustration in the country was turned on the miners and their dark, foreboding president.
Few blamed the mine owners, who would not negotiate in good faith; or the government, which by interfering in the collective bargaining process excused the owners from negotiation.
The courts sustained the injunction. The union was fined heavily. The strike ended. We had lights on the Christmas trees. Truman had proved he was a bigger man than John L. Lewis. And the nation, having done in the miners, reveled in its victory over men who, as my dad said, had the toughest and nastiest job in the world.
Most historians on that era will tell you today that there was no justification for the injunction, that the Supreme Court, as always following the election returns, had violated the Constitution, and that, in a crowning irony, the mine owners the following year, riding the boom then like most everyone else, gave Lewis and the miners virtually everything they wanted.
The coal strike of 1946 revealed the dark, peevish underside of what my generation now calls the postwar world, just as the McCarthy (Joseph, not Eugene, I have to say to the younger generation) episode would emphasize it again a few years later. Having clawed our way, as we thought, with our fingernails to the beginnings of a better world than we had thought possible during the Depression, we resented those who might share it with us and those who seemed to challenge it ever so slightly. If the unions had been destroyed by the anger of 1946 or by the subsequent Taft-Hartley labor law, a largely ineffectual attempt to repeal the Wagner Act (my father called T-H hell for unions, purgatory for management, and heaven for lawyers), working men and women would not have had the money to join the rest of us in the demand for more consumer goods, the boom would have busted and the depression would have returned.
I was giving some of my attention to politics. I was wondering about Kate, worrying about Maggie, pondering what I should do with my life. Still, it was hard to live in our house and not learn a lot about politics from listening to my father talk to—”lecture” might be a better word—my mother, and from his occasional conversations with a much younger lawyer, Ned Ryan. In later years when I began to study seriously, more or less, that period, I was pleased to find that the instincts and prejudices that I had picked up at home were fundamentally good ones.
You must not judge the postwar era by the ‘46 election or the coal strike or the McCarthy witch hunts. Truman was reelected. McCarthy was swept from power in 1954 when the Republicans, having won the Senate back in 1950, lost it again to the Democrats. He never had, not even at the height of his popularity, the support of a majority of the American people. The unions did survive. Higher education for women and for blacks did win almost unchallenged approval.
The expansiveness, the optimism, no, I’ll use the right word, the hope of 1946 was too thin to permit many of us to be tolerant.
That would take another quarter century.
Ned Ryan was a West Sider who had committed the unpardonable crime of moving to the South Side when he came home from the war with the Medal of Honor for fighting off a Japanese battleship at Leyte Gulf with a broken-down DE squadron.
“While you and your friend Bill Halsey”—he would wink at me—”were way up north chasing carriers without any planes on them.”
Ned was short and my father was tall. He was thin and my father was hefty and solid. His hair was black, turning silver already, my father’s was silver turning white. But they were both Irish political lawyers of the old school (a school to which I belong, I am happy to say, and my own son after me): shrewd in the ways of street politics, heavy with political clout, impeccably honest, and politically liberal.
They both were especially unhappy about Daley’s loss.
“Has anyone ever said he took a thing?” my father demanded.
“And how many state senators courted their wives by attending the opera?” Ned asked.
“What would you say of a navy flyer who takes a girl to the opera?”
“Would it be a sign of true love?”
I ignored their winks. The family loved Kate.
“And how many politicians read Dickens to their children at night and history books to themselves after the kids fall asleep?”
“How many know that Dickens is anything but the name of a street on the North Side?”
“And who Goethe is?”
They both laughed. They pronounced the German poet’s name as it is to this day by the Chicago Irish, “Gay-thee.”
“Well, don’t they say he’ll not die in the State Senate anyway?”
“Is that what they’re saying?”
The “they” in these conversations were never specified.
There was a pause while Dad refilled both their glasses and went into the kitchen to fetch me another beer.
That’s right, he got it for me. I do the same for my sons. And daughters.
Sometimes, anyway.
“They say Russell Root”—Ned sipped his small glass of Jameson’s, straight up—”will run against Ed Kelly next April, now that the machine is dead.”
“Do they now.” My father preferred single malt Scotch. “Well, I hope so. But do they say that it will be Ed again? Hasn’t he had his turn?”
“Don’t you hear that?”
“Why should I be hearing that?”
I was playing with Ned’s two-year-old son Johnny, a cute, wide-eyed little punk with a fey smile.
“Well, would you be hearing,” Ned went on, “I wonder, that Jake Arvey is thinking of running Marty Kennelly on a good-government ticket?”
“Don’t they say that Major Douglas is our good-government man?”
“But wouldn’t he make a grand senator?”
“Is that what they’re saying?
“And what do you think of Marty Kennelly?”
“Doesn’t everyone say he’s an honest man? And wouldn’t an honest man make a fine mayor?”
“Even if he’s so honest that he doesn’t know all the ways to be dishonest?”
“And would leave the city to the gray wolves?
“And isn’t that what the gray wolves want?”
I made a paper airplane for Johnny and threw it into the air with a great roar, not at all like a Pratt & Whitney, if the truth be told.
“And who will he be facing in 1948 with Major Douglas running for the Senate?”
“Would we be so lucky to get that little fella from New York again?”
My father sighed. “Do you think we could ever be that lucky? Would the American people ever vote for a man with a mustache who looks like a doll on a wedding cake?”
“They never would,” Ned Ryan ended the conversation as Johnny threw the plane back to me with a roar that did sound remarkably like a Pratt & Whitney.
My father was never more right in a prediction.
Ned is still alive. And his son, Father Blackie to all, is the rector of Holy Name Cathedral. He still throws paper airplanes at me. My wife and I have an apartment in his parish (in addition to our house in River Forest. “Why go home when you’re downtown at nights?” she asks not unreasonably; besides, apartments in the Near North are useful for orgies). When he sees us coming he makes an airplane out of the first Catholic publication on which he can lay his hands and whooshes it at us with a sound still very much like a slightly asthmatic P & W.
You may think I made up the question-laden dialogue between Dad and Ned Ryan, as my son the priest (Jamie) says Saint John made up most of the great lines Jesus has in the Fourth Gospel. But I did not.
I wrote it down that night. I’d begun to write stories.
She will haunt me the rest of my life if I don’t.
And if I do.
It was Maggie haunting me, I’m sure, that forced me to ride on the El with Packy that night to find out what the Catholic Workers were up to.
We had three cars at the house—Dad’s old Lasalle, a twin of Ned Ryan’s, Mom’s new white Olds convertible (in which with her perfectly groomed silver hair and well-maintained figure she attracted considerable attention, which flustered and pleased her), and my Roxinante. Still, in those days we routinely used public transportation. The El was a quick and convenient way to ride downtown or to Loyola and Quigley. Who needed a car? On an elaborate date with Kate, I’d clean up Roxinante and pick her up in the car; but neither she nor any other girl would complain about an El- or streetcar-ride to a movie or a nightclub.
Cars were nice, particularly on weekends, but you didn’t need them yet.
My memory of the El rides in 1946 are shaped by two images—darkness and worried faces.
The whole year indeed is “dark” in my recollection. Perhaps I was used to the relatively equal length of day and night in the tropics or to year-round daylight savings time during the war, with yet an extra hour of “war” time added during the summer. Or maybe I had been spoiled in sunny San Diego and had forgotten about the dreary Chicago winters.
Or possibly my life was dark because a light had gone out of it.
And the faces on the El—so many grim, anxious, worried faces of working men and women—some black, mostly white, faces worn out permanently by the anxieties of the Great Depression, faces in which the budding national optimism had yet to make an impact, faces that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
You don’t see such faces anymore except in the housing projects and in the first-class sections of jets on Monday morning and Friday afternoon, the faces of salesmen and executives for whom the rats in the rat race are running too fast.
On the El during those dark late afternoon rides, I vowed I’d fight poverty and fear in the life that was still ahead of me. I don’t know whether I’ve won any of those battles, but I didn’t quit either.
Beyond River Forest there were only two suburbs that mattered—Maywood, a working-class community to the southwest, and Melrose Park, an Italian-American town to the northwest. Farther west there was only forest preserve, farmland, and an occasional town, and eventually the string of small municipalities strung along the Fox River Valley.
There was, I thought that night as I read Dorothy Day’s memoir From Union Square to Rome, a lot of land out there that could be filled up with houses. Maybe I could invest in the future and in homes for vets like Dana Andrews by buying some of that farmland and making it available for construction.
The next day, on a pay phone from Loyola, I called the trust officer who handled my money and told him to put it all in land west of Chicago, “where homes can be built.”
He congratulated me on my wisdom and assured me that I would make a lot of money.
I thought about his remark when I had hung up. I didn’t want money. I wanted to cooperate in the building of houses in which families could live in decent comfort.
It was the best investment decision I ever made, even with my insistence that we would only sell to developers who would build “good homes.” And I had been reading a Catholic Worker book when I made it.
There were a lot of ironies in the fire in 1946.
In the meantime I went a couple of nights a week to the Catholic Worker “house of hospitality,” helped in their soup kitchen, read their paper, argued their positions, and learned firsthand about poverty, incurable, helpless poverty.
It meant I missed Fred Allen and Bing Crosby and Bob Hope (not Jack Benny, because he was on the radio for Jell-O on Sunday night), but I didn’t miss them very much.
Kate came with me sometimes and was even better at kindness to the poorest of the poor than I was.
“I’m learning more from you, Jerry Keenan,” she said as she hugged me fiercely one night, “than from all my professors in college put together.”
She didn’t pull away from my hand on her breast—outside her dress, of course.
I am falling in love with this lovely girl, I told myself, and it isn’t fair to her. She’s willing to take the risk of competing with a haunt, but she’ll lose.
Until I get the damn haunt out of my head.
I was confident that the damn haunt was not in hell and would never go there. Purgatory? What had she done to deserve that?
So what was left?
Can’t you leave me alone? I demanded.
The vets, a few years older than I was, who had founded the Chicago Catholic Worker house, were not pacifists like Dorothy Day. They hated war as I did, maybe not as much because I was the only one of them who had seen combat. Politically they were liberal Democrats, as I was—and surprised to find that someone from River Forest might, on a few issues, like unions, be more liberal than they were. Religiously they were disenchanted Catholics, the two leaders former seminarians who had attended Quigley before the war and had been active in a Catholic Action movement called CISCA in the thirties. One of them went on to edit a pervasively snide and snobbish Catholic (mildly) left-wing journal. The other later worked for The New York Times, wrote Kennedy’s Houston speech on religious liberty to Protestant ministers, which probably won the election for him, was active at the Second Vatican Council, and left the Church to become an Anglican after the birth-control encyclical in 1968. He still wanted to be a priest, it was said, and the Anglicans would ordain him. He died a deacon, just before his ordination to the priesthood.
In 1946 I would not have imagined such an event. At that time, I could have seen him becoming a Communist or an atheistic socialist like Michael Harrington (also a product of the Catholic Worker movement), but an Anglican?
As Packy put it, “Will he become a Republican?”
I learned a lot from the Catholic Workers in the post
war years, most notably the connection between my religion, to which I was returning as slowly as possible, and my political instincts.
Was Maggie Ward really responsible for awakening this social concern, which remains with me to this day? After all, she had never discussed social problems with me, and she might even have been, God forbid, a Republican.
Loving Maggie, even if only for a day or two, had opened up my soul to the world and made me sensitive to emotions of which I had never been aware before she squirmed her way into my life. I would never be the same.
CIC or the seraph or whoever was right. She would be part of my life forever, even if I could never again take her to bed with me.
Eventually, I told myself, she will be only a pleasant and inspiring memory, not a sexual obsession. In the long run.
As Lord Keynes had said, though I didn’t know it then, in the long run we’ll all be dead.
I also met Dorothy Day, who was, as the Catholic Worker people insisted, a saint. The only other person like her that I have ever encountered is Mother Teresa, and the only way I can describe both experiences is to say that they were encounters with radiant goodness. Humans qualitatively different from the rest of us.
I expected to be pushed toward agreement with her own vision of the movement. In fact, we hardly discussed the Catholic Worker. And I did not have to defend my affluent background, as I did with some of the Chicago movement members. I don’t remember much of what we did talk about, except that it was about God and service to others. Miss Day led by example and inspiration, not by indoctrination. It is the way with saints.
One sentence does stand out, and I didn’t have to write it in my journal or in the pile of little dialogues I was recording: “It does not matter where we come from or who we are. It only matters who we become by the ways we love others.”
I quote that dictum often to my kids, even today. I ask my wife if I am boring them. “Certainly not,” she replies, hugging me passionately, which she is apt to do at odd times, even when we’re fighting. “They’re telling it to their kids too. And if it does bore them, too bad for them. They should hear it anyway.”
The Search for Maggie Ward Page 32
