Autobiography of a Campaigner for Christ (signed), and Campaigners for Christ Handbook (also signed)

Boston: Catholic Campaigners for Christ, 1938. Hardcover. Very Good/very good. The Autobiography is a first edition from 1936, signed, in dust jacket. The Handbook is a 5th printing from 1938, also signed. The Autobiography is a near fine copy in a very good dust jacket with light edgewear, soil and minor loss to spine ends and corners. The Handbook is a good plus copy, light wear and soil to covers, including a dark streak below the author's name on cover, and Goldstein's signature inside is a little smudged and blurry. Goldstein (1870-1958) was a picturesque character: born to Dutch Jewish parents, who moved to Boston in the 1870s and who were poor all their lives, living on the meager wages of the father, a cigar maker. The young Goldstein embraced socialism and became an activist, but by the turn of the century, he had grown disillusioned with the movement and its emphasis on the individual and the state over the bonds of family and religion, and along with another Bostonian, Martha Moore Avery, authored a popular anti-socialist book in 1903, "A Nation of Fatherless Children." Both Goldstein and Avery, who was a Unitarian, converted to Catholicism and became part of Father Dietz's Militia of Christ. To those who saw Goldstein's conversion as a denunciation of his Jewish roots, as Goldstein himself put it, accepting Christ simply meant "passing from the caterpillar to the butterfly stage of Judaism, as Catholic Christianity is Judaism full blossomed." Goldstein and Avery, as evangelists, drew huge crowds, and with the support of the church, purchased a huge Ford autobus which they painted in papal colors and covered with evangelical slogans, and drove all around New England in 1917 and then acrosss the country in 1918 to do a west coast tour, preaching to hundreds of thousands over the course of those two years alone, standing on the roof of the autobus with bullhorns.