Between God and Marx - The Catholic Worker under the Era of FDR and the Enigma of Socialism in the United States

Beside their prevailing capitalistic system, the United States have been known for their two-party system which is ruled by the republicans on one side and the democrats on the other side. Their overarching prevalence presented a grand difficulty for third-party members to gain a significant political share.1 Socialism is therefore not the first notion one would associate with America. As scholars like Werner Sombart started to publish theories about a failing socialist movement in the United States, debates and discussions regarding this topic have been conducted for over a century. This thesis concludes that the two main reasons why the assumption of a failing socialism prevails is firstly, that the two-party system obstructed the socialist political success, and the fact that socialism was often automatically equalized with communism and thus inherited a bad reputation within the United States. This thesis furthermore detected that socialism was not absent in the United States. To demonstrate the socialist impact on the U.S.A., the thesis introduces various scholarly works as well as the socialist journal, called The Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker’s peculiarity was its combination of socialist ideas and its Catholic convictions. It was founded in 1933 and therefore established during the Great Depression and the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The research goal is to present The Catholic Worker as an individual socialist stream and to examine views of The Catholic Worker on Roosevelt’s legislations, and its stance on the situation of African-Americans in the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal was initially well received but its implementations were soon criticized by the journal. Contrary to other opinions, the movement did not see the legislations as socialist. Regarding the Civil Rights Movement, The Catholic Worker was in full support of providing equal rights to African- Americans, opposed racism and campaigned against the rising lynchings in the 1930’s. Because of the journal’s distinctive direction in the socialist realm, its effort to join catholic and socialist philosophies and its nation- wide recognition in publications and newspapers, The Catholic Worker sets itself apart from other socialist movements and can be regarded as its own stream.