The Way of Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day, 1968

THE WAY OF DOROTHY DAY

Original text is from Thomas Bokenkotter, Church and Revolution: Catholics in the Struggle for Democracy and Social Justice (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1998), pages 403-452.

Chapter 13. Dorothy Day (1897-1980): The Personalist Revolution, American Style

Dorothy Day was born November 8, 1897, in Brooklyn Heights, the third of five children of John and Grace Slaterlee Day. John was a newspaperman, a religious skeptic, fond of horse-racing and whiskey. “We children did not know him very well,” Dorothy recounted in her autobiography, “so stood in awe of him, only learning to talk to him after we had left home and he began to treat us as friends—casual friends, it is true, since he was always impatient with our ideas and hated the radical movement which both my sister and I were involved in later…But he was a good man and a happy man in his own circle and he enjoyed life greatly.” Dorothy’s mother “had a temperament which helped her through much hardship and uncertainty. She refused to worry when things were going badly and when the family had its periods of poverty…Whenever mother had extra troubles or a specially hard day’s work behind her, she used to bathe and dress with particular care as though she were going to a dinner party. She reigned over the supper table as a queen and had as much interest in entertaining her…children as if we were all adult friends in for a party.”

…The great earthquake struck in 1906, devastating nearby San Francisco and badly damaging Oakland. The young Dorothy awakened from sleep to feel her bed rolling back and forth on the polished floor while from her window she could see water splashing out of a water tank nearby. John Day’s place of work was destroyed in the earthquake and the family left Oakland as soon as possible, moving to Chicago where they lived in a dingy tenement flat.

Unable now to afford household help, and in poor health because of a series of miscarriages, Dorothy’s mother need the help of her daughters. Both Dorothy and her sister felt very important to be taking on the home responsibilities and knowing that their mother counted on them. The work grew tiresome after a while, but Dorothy had become accustomed to “doing her share.”

…Once again the family moved, this time back to New York. Dorothy was eighteen and unable to stand her father’s opinions so she decided to find a job and an apartment of her own. She rented a squalid little apartment in a neighborhood where mothers hung over fire escapes and crowds of children played in the gutters. No ordinary newspaper would hire a woman reporter but she was able to twist the arm of the editor of the Socialist daily The Call, and got hired. These were heady days. She covered a speech by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—later a leader of the American Communist Party—and was so impressed by her description of the misery of the mineworkers in Minnesota that she emptied her purse when a collection was taken and had to skip lunch for some days afterward. She also interviewed Leon Trotsky who later helped launch the Russian Revolution. One of her closest friends and a co-worker at the time was the socialist writer Mike Gold, who shared her radical opinions but not her bed, in spite of gossip to the contrary. Another friend more liberal in her sexual habits was Peggy Baird, an artist who managed to sketch Dorothy in the nude but was unable to get her to doff her stricter sexual ethic. (Fifty years later Peggy became a Catholic and ended up with Dorothy at the Catholic Worker.)

On March 21, 1917 at Madison Square Garden, in the words of William Miller, Dorothy joined with thousands in reliving the first days of the revolt in Russia. “I felt the exultation, the joyous sense of victory of the masses as they sang…the workers’ hymn of Russia,” described in The Call as a “mystic, gripping melody of struggle, a cry for world peace and human brotherhood.”

…Beginning to feel the emptiness of the bohemian life, Dorothy sought a new way to serve the poor and the suffering. She took a job as a hospital orderly cleaning bedpans, giving baths and rubs, and changing bedsheets and dressings. The flu epidemic of 1919 was raging and the hospital was crowded with dying patients. An orderly named Lionel Moise worked with her, undressing longshoremen and helping to cart dead bodies down to the morgue. Moise was a macho, a drifter who had seen a lot of the world while working in all sorts of jobs—deckhand on a freighter, movie cameraman in Latin America. Currently he was working off a hospital bill he had incurred after being mugged and brought in unconscious. Dorothy fell insanely in love with him, moved into his apartment, and waited on him like a slave. When they quarreled and broke up she apparently tried suicide but survived and resumed the affair. Dorothy then discovered she was pregnant. Fearful that Moise would leave her if she had the child, she made the agonized decision to have an abortion. Moise took off anyway, leaving some money and a farewell note.

Her next move was “marriage on the rebound’ to Barkeley Tobey, a wealthy man twenty years her senior. During a trip abroad she spent six months on the isle of Capri and forever associated it with the smell of spaghetti and red wine. The marriage lasted only a year but it gave her the leisure to write a novel, The Eleventh Virgin. After leaving Tobey she headed for Chicago hoping to resume her affair with Moise. She ended up in jail after being arrested in the famous Palmer raids on the pretext that the rooming house she stayed at was in fact a brothel….

Upon her release she once more got a job as a reporter and rented a room owned by three Catholic women….

Finally managing to disconnect from Moise, and after a stint down South as a reporter for the New Orleans Item, Dorothy’s fortunes changed dramatically when she received a windfall from the sale of The Eleventh Virgin to Hollywood….

Realizing that she needed peace and quiet if she was to write, Dorothy bought a beach house on Staten Island. Thus began the four most joy-filled years of her life. Once again she fell in love, this time with a marine biologist, anarchist, and gifted fisherman, Forster Batterham. They agreed to live together on weekends and Dorothy had the rest of the time to herself to enjoy the sounds of the sea, the cries of the gulls, and the noise of children at play. She loved Forster madly “in every way, as a wife, as a mother even. I loved his lean and cold body as he got into bed smelling of the sea and I loved his integrity and stubborn pride.” It pained her that he was so against marriage and had no desire to bring children into what he saw as a heartless and cruel world. Nor could she understand how he could deny God’s existence when the world was so full of beauty. She found herself praying more frequently, the rosary especially, and took special delight in praying before a statue of Mary.

Having long assumed that she was unable to have a child because of her abortion, she was stupefied one day to find she was pregnant. It was bad news to Forster, but Dorothy was delirious with joy. Tamar Theresa was born on March 3, 1927. Dorothy had to record her experience on paper; her article “On Having a Baby” was printed in The New Masses and was highly praised in the radical press around the world.

The overwhelming joy she felt turned her even closer to God. “No human creature,” she said, “could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore. I heard many say they did not need a Church to praise Him but my very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to associate myself with others, with the masses, in praising and adoring God.” The only way Dorothy could really express the depth of her feeling at the birth of the child was to have Tamar baptized….

Forster reacted predictably and tension began to build. In spite of his first reaction, however, Forster was delighted with his little daughter, and Dorothy began to hope that he might change his mind about marriage too. But it was not to be. At this time, too, the immigrant Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for murder after a trial that riveted the attention of the nation and the world. Forster and Dorothy were both griefstricken at what they saw as a horrible miscarriage of justice. Forster saw it also as an indictment of the Church, which had stood by unprotesting. The differences between the two finally exploded and Forster left, slamming the door. For Dorothy, it was the moment of truth. She called the parish priest and made arrangements to be received into the Church. Later she recalled how little joy she had felt on the day of her baptism and how divided were her thoughts. Was she betraying the victims of injustice and oppression by entering a Church whose priests so often ignored the poor and said nary a word about social justice? As Dorothy later remembered, “I felt that charity was a word to choke over.”

…Publishing a Penny Paper and Doling Out Soup

Peter was far readier to embrace Dorothy as a new St. Catherine of Siena—“who would move mountains and have influence on governments, temporal and spiritual”—than Dorothy was to embrace Peter’s program, however compelling, as a workable plan for a movement. But Peter had a concrete notion of how to begin that couldn’t fail to grab Dorothy’s attention: “We were to popularize this program…by publishing a paper for the man in the street.”

Peter peppered Dorothy with examples from the lives of the saints: “St. Francis de Sales scattered leaflets like any radical. St. John of God sold newspapers on the streets. We didn’t have to do things on a big scale, Peter made it clear.” But printing even a small newspaper required money: Where would the funding come from? Peter replied with confidence: “In the history of the saints, capital was raised by prayer. God sends you what you need when you need it. You will be able to pay the printer. Just read the lives of the saints.”

Dorothy was persuaded. Using her kitchen for an office and the Paulist Press as her printer, she dashed off articles on labor, strikes, and unemployment for the first issue. Peter contributed the first of his Easy Essays. The Catholic Worker came out in time to hand out to the workers and radicals celebrating May Day on Union Square. Most could afford the price: one cent.

The growth of the paper was phenomenal. Within a few months the circulation had increased from 2,500 to 75,000 and by the mid-1930s it had passed the 100,000 mark, exerting much influence on young and old alike who yearned for a dynamic Catholicism. Orate Fratres, the progressive Catholic journal, called it a “veritable godsend in our time of social disintegration and unrest.” Priests were putting stacks of it in the rear of their churches and sisters were buying it for their schools.

…Tackling the Tough Issues

At first Catholics saw the Catholic Worker movement as the front-line force against the Communist threat. But the Worker soon disabused people of this idea. As Dorothy wrote, “A Communist beaten and kicked reminds us of Jesus as he fell beneath the weight of his cross.” For American Catholics just beginning to move into the mainstream, the Worker’s personalism was a strange world. They saw its manner and its sharp critique of bourgeois values as un-American. Even more unsettling, the Catholic Worker’s neutral stance on the Spanish Civil War and its outspokenness against Catholic anti-Semitism had many critics charging the movement with enmity to the Church itself.

…Absolutely No to War

The outbreak of World War II opened up a whole new chapter in Catholic Worker history. From the start the Worker espoused a pacifist position which it had already outlined in 1936 when it organized Pax, an association of Catholic conscientious objectors. Pax’s declaration of principles included the following: the belief that no war was justifiable in modern times; the right to judge for oneself the morality of war; support for a strong international body to settle disputes between nations; determination to expose the acts of munitions-makers, warmongers, and military supporters; and finally a commitment to prefer love to the technique of a class war.

…For most Americans, Pearl Harbor was absolute proof that the Japanese were a perfidious race and had to be stopped. Would Dorothy now admit the error of her ways? people wondered. Her answer was not long in forthcoming. The headline of the January, 1942 issue of the Worker read, “We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand”:

“We are still pacifist. Our manifesto is the Sermon on the Mount, which means we will try to be peacemakers. Speaking for many of our conscientious objectors, we will not participate in armed warfare or in making munitions, or by buying government bonds to prosecute the war, or in urging others in these efforts…But neither will we be carping in our criticism…We have been the only country in the world where men of all nations have taken refuge from oppression.”

When told that the war was a battle for decent human values, Dorothy stated that the Worker had been fighting this battle for many years. How, she asked, can we talk about going abroad to fight for human values when right in our own backyard we let pass the most horrible assaults on human dignity? She reminded her readers of a recent incident when a white mob shot a black man and dragged him through the streets behind a car. While he was still alive they poured kerosene on him and burned him to death, then left his body lying in the street.

The Worker lost a hundred thousand in circulation as a direct result of Dorothy’s staunch pacifist stand, and the movement itself faltered as many of the members could not agree with Worker pacifism. Sixteen houses closed, one half the total. Among those who walked away was Father Charles Rice, who took his Catholic Radical Alliance with him. Another was John Cogley, a prominent journalist. Dorothy nevertheless continued to build the case for a Catholic pacifism.

…One of the mysteries of Dorothy’s career was how she survived in a diocese headed by Cardinal Spellman. He stood worlds apart from her on most social issues and was especially irritated by her complacent (if not worse) attitude toward the “Red Menace.” From time to time rumors would fly of a coming suppression but it never materialized. Many thought the hour had finally come in 1949 when she took on the cardinal over the strike of gravediggers at Calvary cemetery. Since the workers belonged to the CIO, Spellman apparently believed the strike was Communist-inspired and refused even to meet with the men. Dorothy joined the picket line in front of the cardinal’s palatial office behind St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She later remembered the shamefaced look of the seminarians who were hauled in to break the strike. Dorothy’s plea to the cardinal to meet with the men met with no response.

This was undoubtedly the first picket line of lay Catholics in front of any bishop’s office, and her part in it pushed the cardinal’s patience to the limit. Dorothy was invited to the chancery, where she met with one of the cardinal’s staff who told her she would have to either take the “Catholic” off the paper’s name or cease publication. Since she had often spoke of her readiness to cease publication if ordered to do so by Church authority, her compliance was assumed. She responded instead with a masterpiece of a letter in which she spoke of her willingness personally to change the paper’s name, but the unwillingness of all the others involved. She called for dialogue instead of the suppression of a paper with a circulation of 63,000. This would create an enormous scandal and put a formidable weapon in the hands of the Church’s enemies. She also reminded the cardinal that the Church had never blessed capitalism, and that in advocating a society built on neither capitalist nor communist premises the Worker was in line with the thrust of papal teaching. Finally she promised in the future to make the paper “less dogmatic, more persuasive, less irritating, more winning.”

The archdiocesan order was dropped. The cardinal won the strike, however, and the workers were compelled to join an American Federation of Labor union. In this as in other encounters, Dorothy said, the cardinal was always personally gracious and pleasant—and, as one of the workers said, would even buy their paper when he saw it for sale.

…Always ready to admit her own failings, she was much embarrassed by the increasing number of accolades that came her way in her later years. The Jesuit magazine America devoted a special issue to her as an individual who best symbolized “the aspiration and action of the American Church community during the past forty years.” In bestowing on her the Laetare medal, Notre Dame University lauded her as one “who comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable.” And when Cardinal Cooke came to visit her, bringing a message from the pope, she was “overwhelmed.”

As she neared eighty she more and more felt captive to her frail body and “sick, weak heart” and was often confined to her room, where from her window she could see “a sycamore tree with a few little seed balls hanging from it, the pigeons flying and squirrels on the roof edge, the sky a cloudless blue.” At Easter 1979 Cesar Chavez came for a visit, and in June, Mother Teresa.

Except for an occasional visitor, her day was broken up by recitation of the divine office and Psalms, times of silent prayer, reading, meals, radio and television….

The column she continued to write for the Catholic Worker began to make only sporadic appearances and by 1980 was reduced to one- to two-sentence diary notes. She heard of the Workers’ week-long vigil at the Pentagon and longed for one more time on the picket line. Her final written words spoke of the “beautiful statue of the Madonna behind the altar in the Maryhouse chapel” carved by her sister-in-law. On November 29 Tamar came to see her late in the afternoon. Dorothy asked her for a cup of tea. As she sipped the tea she remarked how good life can be at certain times and held Tamar’s hand. At 5:30 P.M., with Tamar at her bedside, Dorothy’s great heart simply stopped beating and death came gently and peacefully.

…Legacy

“The first hippie.”—Abbie Hoffman

“The Catholic Worker is not just a journal but a revolution.”—Peter Maurin

“A spiritual revolution is upon us…It is a permanent revolution, this Catholic Worker movement.”—Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker, December, 1933

Describing the sort of revolution she meant by “permanent revolution,” Dorothy stated: “The greatest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us. When we begin to take the lowest place, to wash the feet of others, to love our brothers with that burning love, that passion, which led to the Cross, then we can truly say, ‘Now I have begun.’”

“As a Catholic Worker she considered herself one of a community of revolutionaries who are encouraged in trying to build a new social order, marked by anarchism, pacifism and the works of mercy.” [1]

Selected Citations

[1] June O’Connor, The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day (New York: Crossroad, 1991), p. 67.

Only one citation has been included among the many in the original text.

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Dorothy Day is an icon of lay spirituality at one end of the lay-religious spectrum, that is, her spirituality is more “religious” than “lay.” Although Thomas Bokenkotter does not mention in her biography that she was a Benedictine oblate, it is apparent that the inspiration of Benedictine spirituality significantly entered her life, so that, for example, there were periods, especially toward the end of her life, in which she was drawn to contemplation, spellbound by the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours. In her lifestyle of evangelical poverty and apostolic work, she most resembles the active religious without, however, being a religious. The manner in which she began the Catholic Worker—and it is by her founding of this publication that she probably will be most remembered as an exemplary Christian—recalls the trust in Providence and zeal for Christian witness that marks the lives of active religious.

The archetype of the sinner who becomes a saint is often repeated in history, so that her vagabond life before her conversion, a life to which she was already susceptible in part because of her economically disadvantaged background, is not unusual in the history of Roman Catholicism.

What is unusual is her leftist politics, which she successfully reinterpreted in the context of the Roman Catholic tradition and, moreover, authenticated by her witness by a life spent in evangelical poverty and Christian activism. As a saint of the Roman Catholic left—assuming she is ever canonized—Dorothy Day will be elevated not only as a counter-cultural but also a counter-clerical witness, having lived, in the spirit of a very select coterie of outstanding historical personalities in the Roman Catholic Church, on the margins of a clerical society that ambivalently seeks to claim her as its own.