Dates

• Existence: 1913 - 2006

Biographical Note

John Cyrus Cort was born in 1913 in New York City. Cort attended Harvard, where he developed an interest in Catholicism despite his Episcopalian upbringing. He converted after graduation in 1935. He moved back to New York where he became involved with the Catholic Worker Movement. His work eventually led him to help create and run the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) and become an agent for the Newspaper Guild Union (Boston). Cort suffered from tuberculosis at this time. He contracted the disease while living in and assisting at a Catholic Worker Movement homeless shelter. Despite the ailment, Court was still able to keep working for The Labor Leader, the International Ladies Garment Union, and the ACTU. In 1961 he moved to the Philippines with Helen and their children in order to establish a Peace Corps program. They lived there three and a half years. Upon return from the Philippines, Cort began establishing domestic volunteer programs including the Service Corps (state sponsored) and Model Cities Program. Cort moved his family to Roxbury, MA which, at the time, was one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Boston. This period caused conflict between his family and his desire to avoid hypocrisy and live amongst the disenfranchised. His family eventually left Roxbury in the early 1970s while Cort stayed and visited them intermittently. Cort became a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) during the 1970s. He worked for thirty years with the DSA as the editor of the organization's newsletter, Religious Socialism. Cort also wrote for Catholic magazines and journals, and published the book Christian Socialism: An Informal History in 1988 and an autobiography, Dreadful Conversations: the Making of a Catholic Socialist, in 2003. He died in 2006.

Found in 1 Collection or Record: