CALLAHAN, PATRICK HENRY

Industrialist, Catholic lay leader; b. Cleveland, Ohio, Oct. 15, 1865; d. Louisville, Ky., Feb. 4, 1940. He was the son of John Cormic and Mary Anna (Connolly) Callahan. After attending St. John's High School and the Spencerian Business College in Cleveland, he had a brief career in professional baseball as a member of the Chicago White Stockings (now White Sox) organization. After leaving baseball in 1888, he worked for the Glidden Varnish Company in Cleveland and Chicago, and on Jan. 20, 1891, he married Julia Cahill of Fremont, Ohio. The couple moved the following year to Louisville, where Callahan became manager, and later president, of the Louisville Varnish Company. In 1915 he and Rev. John A. Ryan formulated a profit-sharing plan for the company, under which surplus revenues were divided between stockholders and workers. Callahan lectured and wrote extensively on behalf of this plan. He was also active as chairman (1914–16) of the Knights of Columbus Commission on Religious Prejudices, founder (1916) of the Catholic Laymen's Association of Georgia, chairman (1917–18) of the Knights of Columbus Committee on War Activities, and helped to organize (1926–27) the Catholic Association for International Peace. After World War I he became one of the directors of the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems (1923) and an ardent champion of prohibition, serving as general secretary of the Association of Catholics Favoring Prohibition and chairman of the Central Prohibition Commission. In 1925 he came to the aid of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes evolution trial. He favored New Deal legislation, which he helped to administer in Kentucky, and served as a trustee of the National Child Labor Commission and vice president of the Kentucky Interracial Commission. Callahan was named to the Order of St. Gregory the Great in 1922 and awarded the Illinois Newman Foundation's honorary medal in 1931.

Bibliography: Archives, The Catholic University of America.

[r. j. bartman]