1938 Fifty Years Ago

Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850 – 1917) became the first American citizen to be beatified by the Catholic Church on November 13. Mother Cabrini, who was canonized in 1946, founded schools, orphanages, and hospitals throughout the United States, South America, and Europe.

The Congress of Industrial Organizations held its first convention in Pittsburgh on November 15. The ClO, representing the interests of laborers in mass-production industries, had split from the craftsman-oriented American Federation of Labor in 1935. John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers was unanimously elected the CIO’s first president.

The novelist Pearl S. Buck, who wrote of peasant life in China in such novels as The Good Earth , received the Nobel Prize for literature in November.