Peter C Yorke (1864 – 1925), who was born in Galway but died in San Francisco 100 years ago this month, was the proverbial turbulent priest of whom many people wished themselves rid.
Those may have included for a time his own ecclesiastical superiors. As a young priest in 1890s California, Yorke used his editorship of the archdiocesan newspaper to wage war against the American Protective Association (APA), an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant movement of the period, and other enemies.
But his acerbically humorous journalism and feisty public oratory made more than Protestant bigots nervous. The Catholic archbishop of San Francisco, Patrick Riordan, got cold feet too.
As the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) puts it: “Dismayed by his freewheeling diatribes and attacks upon leading Irish-American politicians, Riordan in 1899 removed Yorke from his editorial and administrative offices. For the remainder of his career he was assigned to parish work.”
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Some of the Irish-American politicians had climbed to power on Yorke’s back. A fellow Catholic, James D Phelan, for example, became mayor of San Francisco in 1896 partly thanks to the popularity of Riordan’s campaign against the APA.
Addressing a 1901 rally by striking Teamsters, he warned the Employers’ Association: “The employer who turns his back on one man will think twice before he offends 500″.
— Fr Peter Yorke
The anti-Catholic propaganda had included a forged papal document of 1893 which supposedly urged American Catholics to rise and “exterminate all heretics” on that year’s feast of St Ignatius Loyola, whereupon a Catholic congress in Chicago would arrange to hand over the country to the pope.
But Yorke had concluded that anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant rhetoric was fundamentally “anti-labour” as well. He vehemently supported workers’ rights to form trade unions and, addressing a 1901 rally by striking Teamsters, warned the Employers’ Association: “The employer who turns his back on one man will think twice before he offends 500″.
Mayor Phelan, by contrast, backed the bosses. The Berkeley law school-educated son of Irish emigrants – who would later run for the US senate on a “Keep California White” slogan – defended police violence against the strikers, saying: “If they don’t want to be clubbed, let them go back to work.”
Yorke called him “Clubber Phelan” and won another victory, by securing intervention in the dispute by the state governor.
The priest was less successful in 1907 when, months after an earthquake destroyed much of San Francisco, he supported streetcar workers in a dispute against the privately owned United Railroads.
He made the case for such actions in pragmatic terms: “Strikes follow labour organisation as logically and inevitably as battles follow military organizations ... Organized labour and organized capital are two great armies. When the leaders of both disagree war is declared by either, and a strike is on.
“This is a bad method, perhaps, but on the side of labour at least it is the only method that has so far been effective.”
This time, however, the lengthy and violent dispute ended badly for the “Carmen”. After many deaths and injuries, the strike petered out. Strong support from Fr Yorke and the public had not been enough. As San Francisco historian Chris Carlsson summarises: “By March 1908, the Carmen turned in their charter and dissolved their union.”
Yorke’s other great causes included the Irish language, in which he had a native fluency since his days growing up in Galway’s Claddagh district. He founded a Californian branch of the Gaelic League in 1899 and visited Dublin that year to address a league meeting attended by Patrick Pearse, Michael Davitt and others.
In later years he was a national vice-president of Sinn Féin in the US, helped organise Éamon de Valera’s1919 visit, argued against American ratification of the Versailles Treaty (for denying Irish self-determination) and opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.
His archbishop’s attempts to mute him, meanwhile, were not a success. In 1902, he launched his own weekly newspaper, the Leader and although he stepped down as editor in 1909 – again under Riordan’s orders – he continued to write for it regularly.
Of his polemical style, the DIB says this: “Largely incapable of conceding sincerity to an opponent, his attacks were rife with ad hominem ridicule. Transgression over a single symbolic issue might consign an erstwhile ally to anathema, subject to the full force of his vitriol.”
An example of such bombast was his castigation of one enemy as “an uneducated, fat-witted, bigoted block of beefy conceit”.
On the plus side, the DIB adds, he was noted for “insisting on equality of opportunity and debunking academic pomposity and privilege”. On the minus, “he contributed to a profoundly anti-intellectual bias within American Catholicism and propagated a purely careerist attitude to educational attainment”.
Yorke died on Palm Sunday, April 5th, 1925. Since when, his anniversaries have been commemorated by San Francisco’s United Irish Societies and local labour organisations. The centenary will be marked this coming Palm Sunday, April 13th, with a memorial mass and procession to his grave at the city’s Holy Cross cemetery.
