Narrating crisis: World War I, American labour and Ammon Hennacy’s conversion to Christianity, 1914–1940

This article examines the intellectual legacy of the social activist Ammon Hennacy (1893–1970). Widely remembered for his anti-war activism with the Catholic Worker group in the 1950s, Hennacy had embraced several standpoints before his Christian-inspired anarchism of the Catholic Worker period. Throughout his life, Hennacy frequently referred to his experience of incarceration during World War I for anti-war activity as the central pivot which informed his activism. Yet, on closer inspection, Hennacy in fact wrestled with several conflicting political and religious viewpoints which were at loggerheads with each other, including Christianity and communism. This article zooms in on the period of Hennacy’s life where a plurality of interlocking crises were at play (1914–1924) and compares those ideas with the more unified picture which he formulated in his unpublished prison memoir, “God’s Coward”, written in 1939–1940. In comparing Hennacy’s memoirs with other texts written in the immediate aftermath of World War I, this article argues that Hennacy offers a useful case study for considering how the conversion narrative can be an important context for the formulation of political theory.