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Book Reviews
| Harry, Tom, and Father Rice: Accusation and Betrayal in America's Cold War. By John Hoerr. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. xii, 3llp. Illustrations, notes, index. $29.95.)
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Two of the three protagonists of this triple biography, Thomas J. Quinn and Charles Owen Rice, are well-known to historians of post–World War II Pittsburgh. The third, however, was completely forgotten in both history and memory until the appearance of this book. Harry J. Davenport (l902–77) was the author's uncle. From l948 to l950 he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, having won by nearly ten thousand votes as a New Deal Democrat in a district whose boundaries were drawn up to be safely Republican. At the time, Representative Davenport may have had higher name recognition than Tom Quinn and Charles Owen Rice combined. |
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What are these three men doing between the covers of the same book? Tom Quinn was an intelligent and talented trade union activist in the United Electrical Workers, which in the late l940s was the third largest CIO union, with over five hundred thousand members nationwide, and a powerhouse in the Turtle Creek Valley, located just east of Pittsburgh and home of Westinghouse Electric and Westinghouse Air Brake. Quinn and the UE helped get Davenport elected in l948. Father Rice had already established himself as Pittsburgh's leading labor priest. Harry Davenport was exactly the kind of politician on whom liberal and prolabor Americans of the time counted to undo the handiwork of the reactionary Eightieth Congress. All three were thus key Pittsburgh players in a political and social movement to broaden and deepen the New Deal in postwar America. |
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