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PUL's meager budget, along with philanthropist A.E.O. Munsell (who in 1934 held
the office of Counselor in the PUL), the eminent Johns Hopkins Hospital physician
Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly, and the Christian Social Justice Fund (which provided
the PUL with its truck).46
Social liberal aid to the PUL was apparent in other ways as well. The links
of Socialists like Elisabeth Gilman and of liberal friends of the party with business
and administrative circles helped PUL get its self-help programs off the ground
through the acquisition of vacant houses from the Pennsylvania Railroad a
warehouse from Johns Hopkins, plumbing fixtures for the repair of the houses from
local hardware merchants, soap for distribution to the unemployed from the Ivory
Soap, and bread from a major bread manufacturer. But perhaps the most
important result of PUL's association with the liberal community was the resulting
linkages with white churches throughout the city (a similar linkage was made to
Black churches as we will see below). As Frank Trager put it, The preachers were
very much for us, we had wide acceptance from churches." In neighborhood after
neighborhood, the endorsement of local ministers gave the unknown league an
initial legitimacy it could have received no other way. Throughout Baltimore,
locals of the PUL met in the basements and meeting rooms of churches, and, to
varying degrees, could count on churches for material support. Furthermore, the
PUL was able to involve ministers in organizational tasks. Young Socialist
Naomi Riches, who was PUL's "money raiser from start to finish" later recalled that:
The locals had their own dues, and we soon found that the handling of dues
was too great a temptation. So we made a rule that the treasurers of all
locals must be clergymen, and we found that various churches supplied this
need.
Without the aid of the churches, PUL's neighborhood-based organizing strategy, in
which, to quote Riches again, locals were organized "so no one would have to spend
carfare," would have been very difficult to implement. And without this strategy,
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