Dorothy Day had a rather idiosyncratic life. She started out as a reporter on one of the many issue oriented papers in the early part of the twentieth century and that in New York managed to associate with a mix of the bohemian and left wing crowds of the day. She was involved with several different men, having first an abortion for a pregnancy and then giving birth out of wed-lock on what may have been the second. After that she converted to Catholicism and aggressively pursued the Social Justice movement popular at the time. This included a focus on seeking better conditions for labor and immigrants.
The book by Hennessy, her granddaughter, is a well written
and somewhat balanced presentation of her life. Now for Day there have been a multiplicity
of biographies as well as autobiographies so that one approaching Hennessy from
that perspective will see a great deal of repetition of events. But Hennessy
presents them in a fresh and readily readable manner.
One may ask why Day still plays an interesting role. First,
it is the movement amongst Social Justice activists in the Catholic Church to
seek Sainthood for her. Support is coming from many directions, such as Dolan in
New York and Francis in Rome. This book by Hennessy is not a plea for Sainthood
but a balanced presentation of her life. The second reason is that Day was a
Social Justice advocate and as such one can examine her life and through it try
to obtain a better understanding of just what that entails.
Now from my personal perspective I approached Day
tangentially. In writing about my grandmother, Hattie Kruger, a Socialist in
New York, a Suffragette, a woman who rand for Congress in 1918 and for New York
State Office with Eugene Debs in 1920, I found that Hattie was arrested with
Day and the two were in the first batch of women arrested in November 1917 by order
of President Wilson and sent to Occoquan Prison where they were brutalized and
force fed, again by orders of Wilson. Thus my grandmother spent time with Day
and thus I wondered what type of person she was. Furthermore Day lived three
blocks from my Grandmother on State Island and my parents are buried a few
grave sites from Day in the same Cemetery. So much for coincidences!
I was writing a piece on my Grandmother and her time as a
Suffragette. I especially was focused on her time being arrested under the
direct orders of Woodrow Wilson, that misogynistic, racist, anti-Semite, anti-Catholic,
all around good guy. And we worry about Robert E. Lee, but I digress. Wilson
hated these women walking around with signs asking for the right to vote. After
all, he was a Virginian, a man, and more importantly the President. So off with
their heads, or the next best thing was to arrest them and ship them off to
prison. Get them past a friendly judge, and then to Occoquan Prison, now
Lorton. Throw them in cells, host then down, let them starve! Yes indeed a real
nice fellow Wilson was. After all he had just gotten us into WW I, sent a few
hundred thousand to France, no uniforms though, but what the heck, let them
figure out how to deal with the French snows.
My Grandmother was in the first batch of women on that cold
November day thrown into the back of the Black Marias, the police wagons. There
were no Paddy Wagons in DC, not enough Irish. Along with her was a young lady
called Dorothy Day. I had originally thought Day was there as a Suffragette. Not
really. She was sent down as a reporter to cover the protest for her New York
newspaper. She just happened to "be on the corner when the bus went
by" so to speak. She became an "accidental Suffragette". Now Day
recalls but one of the people with her and Day recalls that they joyfully discussed
literature in the prison. Day at this time seems to have been more interested
in the "adventure" of the moment and somewhat apart from the
underlying cause, the right to vote for
women. That surprised me, at least until I discovered a bit more about Day.
Days life during the teens and twenties was somewhat that of
a libertine. In Day's writing and in that of Hennessy there are no holds barred
regarding this period. One could surmise that this period is a bit like that of
Augustine of Hippo, who took his concubine to Italy to study, abandoned her,
then let his child loose, and then his son died. Augustine then returned to
Hippo and had a career writing against the likes of the Donatists and
Pelagians. The theme may have some parallel.
What did this "accidental Suffragette" do after
her exposure to this world? It seems that she found God in the Catholic Church.
Like many converts I have known, my mother having been one, they often move aggressively
into their new found faith, and accept it in all its deepest dimensions. For
Day is was a move which led to the founding of the Catholic Worker, a rather
left wing but "Catholic" weekly. It focused on helping the oppressed,
especially during the Depression period. Day indicates that the naming was in
contradistinction to that of the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist
Party.
She then was accompanied by a French intellect and wanderer
who convinced her to leverage this paper into a full blown mission, a mission
to the poor and homeless, for which there were many in the 1930s. She soon
found herself at the center of a movement, dedicated to this new found faith
and its focus on human equality and justice.
By the 1940s she had also become an avowed pacifist and was
strongly opposed the US entry into WW II, especially after Pearl Harbor. In the
1950s, she vehemently opposed the use of nuclear weapons and the execution of
the Rosenbergs. By the 1960s she had a multiplicity of "farms" and
similar places where people assembled and had what we called
"Retreats", which were week-long "spiritual" get-togethers where
they contemplated and listened to religious lectures. During this period she strongly
opposed the Vietnam War, was pro-integration, and supported the farm workers actions
and other similar equal rights movements.
She developed a wide cadre of admirers and fellow movement
supporters ranging from labor leaders to religious figures such as Thomas
Merton, the Trappist monk. By the 1970s, in her later years, she saw a slow reduction
of many of these ventures, especially as she aged and was in poor health.
There is often comparison of Day to such figures as Francis
of Assisi and others yet one can see Francis as the founder of a sustained
Order of Friars who had a substantial impact on Catholic teaching. It is not
clear what the sustained influence of Day will be. But it is worth the while to
see through the eyes of her grand daughter what Day did, why, and to examine
the consequences of her efforts.
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