Dorothy
Day, the daughter of a journalist, was born in Brooklyn, New York,
on 8th November, 1897. Educated at the University of Illinois, Day
was influenced by the novels of Upton Sinclair.
After two years she left the university to work as a reporter for
the socialist journal,
the New York Call. In 1917 Day began
working for The Masses, a radical
journal edited by Floyd Dell and Max
Eastman.
Day was also a supporter of women's suffrage
and worked closely with Alice Paul and Lucy
Burns of the Congressional Union for Women
Suffrage (CUWS). The CUWS and attempted to introduce the militant
methods used by the Women's Social and Political
Union in Britain. This included organizing huge demonstrations
and the daily picketing of the White House. In November 1917, Day
was one of the 168 women arrested and jailed for "obstructing
traffic". The women went on hunger strike
and afraid that martyrs would be created, Woodrow
Wilson ordered their release.
Like most of the people working for The
Masses, Day believed that the First World
War had been caused by the imperialist competitive system and
that the USA should remain neutral. When the USA declared war on the
Central Powers in 1917, The
Masses came under government pressure to change its policy.
When it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.
In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that cartoons by
Art Young, Boardman
Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp
and articles by Eastman and Floyd Dell had
violated the Espionage Act. Under this
act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war
effort. The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication.
Day now decided to leave journalism and she signed up for a nurse's
training program in Brooklyn. She also began attending services at
St. Joseph's Catholic Church. Day later explained that she saw the
Catholic Church as the "church of
the poor". Religion also helped her deal with the psychological
problems caused by an abortion that she had during a love affair with
a journalist. This experience provided the material for her autobiographical
novel,
The Eleventh Virgin (1924).
Day lived with the anarchist, Forster
Batterham, for three years. When Day gave birth to Tamar Batterham,
in 1927, she had her daughter baptized in the Catholic
Church. This ended her relationship with Batterham, who was completely
opposed to all forms of religion.
In December 1932 Day met Peter Maurin, a Christian Brother. They
decided to establish the Catholic Worker,
a newspaper to publicize Catholic social teaching. The first edition
appeared on 1st May, 1933. The newspaper criticised the economic system
and supported organisation such as trade unions
that were attempting to create a more equal society. It also argued
that the Catholic Church should be a
pacifist organization. Day and Maurin believed the nonviolent way
of life was at the heart of the Gospel.
The Catholic Worker became a
vehicle for creating a national movement. By 1936 there were 33 Catholic
Worker Houses spread out across the country.
These were charitable, self-help communities for people suffering
the effects of the Depression. Today
there are 130 of these houses in 32 states and eight foreign countries.
The Catholic Worker encountered
problems during the Spanish Civil War.
Most Catholics in the United States supported the fascists and saw
Franco as the defender of the Catholic faith. As pacifists,
Day and Maurin refused to support either side. As a result the newspaper
lost two-thirds of its readers.
Day also maintained her pacifism during the Second
World War. This was an unpopular stance to take and over the next
few months fifteen Catholic Worker Houses
were forced to close as volunteer workers withdrew
their support from the organization.
After
the war Day joined with David
Dillinger and
Abraham Muste to establish the Direct
Action magazine in 1945. Dellinger once again upset the
political establishment when he criticised the use of atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1950s Day became involved in the campaign against nuclear weapons.
This led to Day being arrested several times for civil disobedience
and was imprisoned four times between 1955 and 1959. Day was also
involved in the campaign for black civil rights and an end to the
Vietnam War. In 1973, aged 75, Day was
imprisoned again after taking part in a banned picket line in support
of the United Farm Workers in California.
As well as writing over
1,000 articles for the Catholic Worker,
Day wrote several books including, Houses
of Hospitality (1939), an account of the Catholic Worker
movement, an autobiography, The Long Loneliness
(1952) and On Pilgrimage: the Sixties
(1972). Dorothy Day died on 29th November, 1980.
(1) Floyd
Dell wrote about Dorothy Day working at The
Masses in his autobiography, Homecoming (1933)
For a while my assistant on The Masses was Dorothy Day, an
awkward and charming young enthusiast, with beautiful slanting eyes,
who had been a reporter and subsequently was one of the militant suffragists
who were imprisoned in Washington and went on a successful hunger
strike to get themselves accorded the rights of political prisoners.
(2) Dorothy Day, The Catholic
Worker (December 1950)
There are two billion people
in the world and if we believed all we read in the paper everyone
must line up on the side of Communism or Americanism, Catholicism,
Capitalism, which the most Catholic newspapers would have us believe
are synonymous. Of course, there are bad Americans, bad Catholics
and bad capitalists, but still, they say, you can't print such holy
pictures as you have in this Christmas issue in Russia, and you can't
oppose war and the draft and taxes, as you do, without being thrown
into concentration camps, if you are in Russia or a satellite country.
In our eulogies of poverty which we have printed again and again in
The Catholic Worker, one of which is running in this issue of the
paper, we write with the recognition that we stand as Americans, representing
in the eyes of the world the richest nation on earth. What does it
matter that we live with the poor, with those of the skid rows, and
that those in our other houses throughout the country are living with
poverty which is so great a scandal in a land of plenty. We know that
we can never attain to the poverty of the destitute around us. We
awake with it in our ears in the morning, listening to the bread line
forming under our window, and we see it lined up even on such a day
as the gale of last Saturday when glass and tin and bricks were flying
down the street. The only way we can make up for it
is by giving of our time, our strength, our cheerfulness, our loving
kindness, our gentleness to all.
(3) Dorothy Day, speech in Memphis, Tennessee (1954)
We need always to remember that it is atheistic Communism which we
oppose, but as for economic Communism - it is a system which has worked
admirably in religious orders for two thousand years. The bishops
once stated that many of the social aims of the Communist are Christian
aims and must be worked for by Catholics. In our parishes and communities
we should have credit unions, maternity guilds, and insurance benefit
societies which would reach God's poorest. If we are trying to see
Christ in our neighbor, we must see to his dignity, his worth, his
position as a son of God. And to do this, it is not enough just to
help out in an emergency. It is necessary to build a society where
people are able by their work to sustain themselves, but also by mutual
aid, to bear one another's burdens, when by sickness or accident men
are unable to work.
(4)
The actress Judith Malinia went to prison with Dorothy Day in 1955
(June, 1955)
Dorothy became very quickly a legend in the prison. There was a lot
of press at the time and a picket line outside. Everybody was aware
of it, and we were certainly celebrities of a sort inside the prison.
Most of the guards were Catholic, and they came to her and had their
Bibles blessed and their rosaries kissed.
Dorothy
Day Library
Dorothy
Day Catholic Worker Collection
Available from Amazon Books
