Quotes from James T. Fisher

waterfront gospel of Father John M. Corridan preached with all the courage of his soldierly progenitor, Francis Xavier, goes right to the heart of our waterfront problem.

The spirit of the Catholic Church's modern social teachings was never rendered so forcefully as in those five minutes of On the Waterfront

Catholics who dominated both industry and labor on the waterfront counted on priests' minding their own business when it came to the conduct of their livelihoods.

Each year a cadre of recent Jesuit high school graduates—among them Philip Carey of the Regis class of 1925—proceeded directly to a Jesuit novitiate to launch their arduous training for the priesthood.

While he remained "steadfast in refusing to take part in Catholic services during the next four decades," Tobin's "intellectual development showed clear marks of his Jesuit training," Doig suggests, especially in his intense rationalism, appreciation of debate, and devotion to the classics.

When he was unexpectedly elevated to the executive director's position in 1942, Tobin quickly instilled at the Port Authority a disciplined, hierarchical, but deeply communitarian ethos designed to serve not power but a higher moral purpose.

Together they would shift the focus of Catholic activism in the city from militant anticommunism to a much more perilous internal critique of the Irish waterfront and its powerful code of silence.

Budd Schulberg was a social democrat; his discovery through Pete Corridan of the labor-friendly papal social encyclicals transformed his outlook, as it did that of many others—including Catholics—who were unaware that the church possessed a semi-progressive social teaching.

Historian Garry Wills later captured the 1950s liberal Catholic's affinity for "steel and glass fish-shaped churches, and driftwood-swirl Madonnas, and wrought-iron abstract tracery for the stations of the cross (artily photographed in Jubilee)."31

By the late nineteenth century the dazzlingly multiethnic character of the now great metropolis echoed the diverse origins of its earliest European explorers, but only one group knew the port as their place. For if the port made New York, the Irish made the port.

The three-and-a-half-week walkout "had little effect on Britain's decision to grant Ireland independence," wrote Bruce Nelson, but it did lead to the integration—if short-lived—of African Americans into the Chelsea Piers workforce, the experience of diaspora and oppression briefly uniting black and Irish dockworkers "who had long regarded each other with suspicion and even hatred.

As a veteran journalist who covered both sides of the waterfront once remarked, had a path been paved across the Hudson, Chelsea and Hoboken would have made one neighborhood.

The lords of the waterfront evinced little or no interest in their ancestral homeland, though their story makes for a meaningful chapter in the saga of the Irish diaspora.

In 1936 the New York Jesuits opened Xavier Labor School in Chelsea—the West Side's preeminent waterfront neighborhood—designed to combat the infiltration of local unions by communists, the ultimate outsiders.

Between Hell's Kitchen and Greenwich Village lay Chelsea, the heart and soul of the Irish waterfront.

Jersey City's railroads were built by Irish immigrants, men from Con-naught and Munster who dug a crucial tunnel through the Palisades in the late 1850s, linking waterfront rail terminals with tracks laid in the meadow-lands to the west and the vast continent that lay beyond.

The claim staked on the world's richest piers by a vast cadre of Irish American longshoremen was akin to a hereditary birthright.

He was left to find his way again, working through the anger he felt over his church's willingness to protect criminal enterprises presided over by prominent communicants and his despondence at the unwillingness

In the 1890s the reform journalist E. L. Godkin alleged that Tammany leaders feared biography more than the penitentiary.

1940s Jersey City childhood, "I grew up thinking America was an Italian country governed by the

The ubiquity of alcoholism in Chelsea and neighboring Irish waterfront communities can scarcely be overstated:

A "skinny kid from Hoboken" named Frank Sinatra helped bring an end to the Irish waterfront's golden age.

Corridan rarely elaborated in detail on his church's social teachings. His approach was grounded in part in a Catholic understanding of natural law as universally operative and not dependent for its validation on the claims of any particular theological tradition.

In late 1953 Corridan would tell actor Karl Malden, who was visiting Chelsea in preparation for his role as the Corridan-inspired priest in the film On the Waterfront: "I was born in this neighborhood [the West Side]. When I was growing up there were two ways to go. Become a priest or a hood.