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workers could reach them, rouse them and startle them by reports of bad conditions - were the ones who inaugurated and promoted all of the social legislation. That was true in those days.
I've already discussed Johnny O'Hanlon, who was the Legislative Representative of the State Federation of Labor. He was one of those who really had in his heart a humanitarian impulse. He heard Mrs. Florence Kelley make a speech too and he could see that a lot of these poor girls, in a lot of these degraded industries where they didn't have any union, really had to have some law. He had some humanitarian impulses, but he was a super-devout Roman Catholic. He had picked up a lot from the Quadragesimal Encyclical.
It was in those years too that I was going around the state with Father Wilfrid Parsons and others explaining the Quadragesimal Encyclical. I don't know how Father Parsons got the audiences together, but he did and they were very interested. I went on a good many of those toots with him. I was not a Roman Catholic and he was very anxious to make it not a totally Roman Catholic enterprise, but to instruct the people generally as to the meaning. They wanted labor people to come. They wanted employers to come. They wanted social workers, reformers and a cross section of the public. It was a very interesting experience.
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