Irwin St. John Tucker papers

Biography/Profile

Irwin St. John Tucker was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1886, and began his career as a reporter for the New Orleans Daily Picayune. After several years of newspaper experience he entered the General Theological Seminary (Episcopal) where he worked as both priest and journalist, while maintaining an active interest in political and cultural affairs.

Tucker joined the Socialist Party in 1912, the same year he was ordained. Believing strongly that the Church should become involved in the social issues of the day, he organized the Socialist Pulpit at St. Mark’s Church in the Bouwerie, N.Y., as a forum for radical spokesmen of all creeds. In 1914, Tucker came to Chicago as managing editor of The Christian Socialist. His vocal opposition to America’s entry into the first World War cost him that position, and he worked for a short time as a literature director of the National Office of the Socialist Party (Chicago) in the summer of 1917. Tucker not only distributed Socialist material, he also wrote such pieces as “Have We Made Good After 141 Years of Democracy?” and “Why You Should Fight,” in which he explained: “Fight, sons of the people, for the piges of Serbia. For the Pigs of Serbia, being shut out of the Austrian markets, desired to gain exit to the markets of the world through the port of Durazzo. Hence, the beginning of this war.”

The National Office was raided by the Post Office Department in September 1917, and Tucker, Victor Berger, Adolph Germer, William F. Kruse and J. Louis Engdahl were indicted the following February for violation of the Espionage Act. The government contended that the defendants had conspired to obstruct the draft and encourage insubordination in the armed forces, and that they were “hiding disloyalty to the United States behind a screen of specious and evasive phrases.” Convicted and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, the defendants appealed and won a reversal in the Supreme Court in 1921. The trial made Tucker something of a national celebrity, and he made a number of lecture tours, including a trip with Lincoln Steffens on behalf of the Red Star league for aid to Russia.

Tucker was a member of the Illinois delegation to the Socialist Party Congress of 1920 which nominated Eugene V. Debs for President. Led by J. Louis Engdahl, the Illinois delegation fought unsuccessfully for a more radical party platform endorsing the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, Tucker himself broke with the left wing of the party about 1922 and withdrew from active political involvement. Nonetheless, in 1934 Elizabeth Dilling listed him, together with such persons as Jane Addams and Paul Douglas, as part of The Red Network, and in 1953 the House Un-American Activities Committee named Tucker as an example of the “Communist infiltration of the clergy,” a charge he flatly denied.

Tucker’s association with Jane Addams began with his arrest in the “Hull-House Riot” of January 18, 1915. On his way to a meeting of the IWW in Bowen Hall, Tucker joined a hunger march of the unemployed on Halsted Street, led by Lucy Parsons. The marchers were charged by mounted police and in the melee twenty-one persons were arrested and numerous others injured. Jane Addams and Sophonisba Breckinridge came to the defense of the prisoners, and the city chargers were eventually dropped. Tucker also worked with James Eads How, the “millionaire hobo,” in establishing the Hobo College in Chicago. There the unemployed, migrant laborers and homeless were offered lectures, classes and cultural activities. The college also served as a meeting place for many of the prominent radicals of the Midwest, such as Ben Reitman, Jack Jones and Nina Van Zandt Spies.

In 1927, after serving as temporary priest for a number of mission congregations, Tucker took charge of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, 3533 N. Albany Ave., Chicago. While maintaining his position as copy editor of the Chicago Herald-American, Tucker built St. Stephen’s into a shrine to writers and artists, popularly known as “The Little Church at the End of the Road.” A sculptor and poet himself, Tucker believed that the Church should foster and encourage the arts: “To be intelligible, art must be the expression of a profound conviction shared by many. Any such conviction, deeply held by a number of people, is religious. Our faith is that anything God made has a right to representation in the Church.”

Tucker also organized a series of Native American festivals at St. Stephen’s where legends were dramatized and Native American forms of worship were incorporated into the service. His own appreciation for religious drama inspired a number of performances by the Cathedral Players of an original work, “The Sangreal,” a reinterpretation of the Arthurian romances. The Order of the Sangreal was created at St. Stephen’s to honor those who were giving heroic service to the cause of God and humanity, and an attempt was made to start a community in the South based on the principles of this order.

An Aramaic scholar and student of the Near Eastern origins of Christianity, Tucker was a member of the Patriarchal Council of the Nestorian Church. He organized the Aramaic Institute, later changed to the Friends of the Language of Jesus, to promote more accurate Biblical translations. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1954, he became a member of the Society for Vernacular Liturgy and edited its publication, “Amen.” He published his works in a variety of religious magazine, later writing a newsletter regarding religious and social commentary entitled, “Sunrise.”

Tucker was married in 1914 to Ellen Dorothy O’Reilly, an illustrator for the Daily Socialist, and sister of Mary O’Reilly, one of the founders of the Chicago Teachers Federation. Ellen also wrote poetry published in various Chicago newspapers, collaborated with Tucker on many of his dramatic works, and produced a play, “The Hunger Striker,” at Hull-House in 1924. Upon her death in 1954, Tucker and one of their sons took up residence in Evanston. Tucker died in Chicago on January 8, 1982.