The Politics of Faith: Grace Carlson, Trotskyism, and Catholicism

During the momentous strikes of Minneapolis teamsters in 1934, a young lecturer in psychology at the University of Minnesota was drawn to the nightly mass meetings at the headquarters of the combative truck drivers. Grace Holmes, brought up in a Catholic working-class family in St. Paul, recalled, almost forty yeas later, “what a great impact the Drivers’ Strike of 1934 had on all Minnesotans ... . You were either on the workers’ side or the bosses.” (60) Grace was most definitely on the side of the workers. Educated by Catholic priests and, perhaps most influentially, by the Sisters of St. Joseph’s Academy, Grace imbibed the lessons of a Catholicism concerned with social justice issues and dedicated to serving those in need. When her mother pressured a 15-year old Grace to accompany her boilermaker father back into the struck shops of the Great Northern Railway in the fall of 1922, thinking that the presence of a young girl would shield a strike-breaker from physical attack, the teenager was distressed. She went to confession, telling the bewildered (and likely somewhat bemused) cleric that she had “helped deprive the laborer of his wages.” (9) Granted God’s forgiveness in 1922, Grace went on to graduate from High School, enrolling as an undergraduate in the all-female, Josephite-instructed, College of St. Catherine, where she majored in English with a minor in Chemistry. Her broad liberal arts education interrupted for a year as nineteen-year old Grace looked after her dying mother, graduation was postponed until 1929. The young woman then went on to do a Masters and PhD at the University of Minnesota, her area of expertise educational psychology and mental assessment techniques. University experience introduced Grace Holmes to more secular philosophical concerns. Most of her instructors were logical positivists inclined toward atheism. Focusing on the scientific method, Grace began to question some of her religious faith. Upon completion of her doctorate in 1933 and a subsequent short-term teaching stint, she was increasingly active in campus mobilizations. Her participation in the Social Problems Club, testing of the waters of class struggle in the 1934 teamsters’ strikes, and participation in student anti-war protests in 1935 signaled a drifting away from religion that would culminate in Grace turning toward secular radicalism and securing a Minnesota Department of Education position as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. Politically, Grace first aligned with the Farmer-Labor Party (FLP) and she was attracted to Communist Party-led agitations of the unemployed. But the defining moment of her political coming of age was 1934 and the Local Drivers’ Union’s battles with employers, various levels of the state (including that of FLP governor, Floyd Olson), and the notorious antilabor, business association, the Citizens Alliance.