From the first decade of the twentieth century to his death in 1945, John Augustine Ryan was the Catholic Church in America's leading expert on social and economic questions and one of its strongest advocates for improving the living and working conditions of American workers. Ryan was born in Minnesota in 1869, was educated and ordained there in the 1890s, and earned a doctorate in Sacred Theology from Catholic University in 1906. He taught in the seminary at St. Paul, Minnesota from 1902 until 1913 and then at Catholic University and Trinity College in Washington until his death. Ryan helped found the Catholic Association for International Peace in 1927 and served in a number of federal government posts during the New Deal era of the 1930s. From 1920 until 1945, he headed the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Ryan wrote sixteen books and hundreds of articles and spoke frequently to audiences around the nation and on radio. His books include: Living Wage (1906), Distributive Justice (1916), and A Better Economic Order (1935). In 1919, he wrote the advanced draft of the Bishop's Program for Social Reconstruction, which advocated national health and old age insurance, a minimum wage, factory safety legislation, and labor's right to organize. His papers consist of personal diaries and journals from Ryan's seminary days; correspondence from 1925 to 1945, including letters written to him after his attack on Coughlin; drafts and copies of many of his writings; outlines and lecture notes from his courses; reference files; and scrapbooks. The papers digitized here focus heavily on the last twenty years of his life, 1925 to 1945. Ryan's correspondence is the largest portion of materials, occupying over half of the collection. There are also articles, sermons, clippings, reports, pamphlets, lecture notes, scrapbooks, a personal journal, a small number of photos, and some audio recordings.
