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THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY Walter G. Moss Copyright © 2011 by Walter G. Moss THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY TABLE OF CONTENTS (with links) The Long Life of Dorothy Day, 1897-1980 ............................................................................... 3 Childhood and Pre-College Years .............................................................................. 4 University of Illinois, 1914-1916................................................................................ 8 Back in New York, 1916-1920 ................................................................................... 9 Chicago, New Orleans, Staten Island, a Daughter, and Conversion, 1921-1927 ..... 14 Tamar, Forester, and the Searching Catholic, 1928-1932 ........................................ 18 Peter Maurin and the Origin of the Catholic Worker Movement, 1933 ................... 22 Foundations of the CW Movement: The French, the Saints, and the Popes ........... 24 Foundations of the CW Movement: The Distributists and Russian Writers ........... 30 From Depression to War........................................................................................... 33 The Cold War Years ................................................................................................. 36 Dorothy Day’s Wisdom............................................................................................................44 Wisdom, Religion, and Catholicism ......................................................................... 45 Wisdom, Love, and Other Values............................................................................. 46 Personality and Gender............................................................................................. 51 Beauty, Nature, Music, Literature, and Transcendence............................................ 55 Pacifism, Society, and Politics.................................................................................. 60 Conclusion and Legacy............................................................................................................. 68 2 THE WISDOM OF DOROTHY DAY In his Audacity of Hope (2006) future President Barack Obama wrote, “Surely, secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square; Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.—indeed the majority of great reformers in American history—not only were motivated by faith but repeatedly used religious language to argue their causes.”1 In an important speech before religious leaders in June 2006, he again named these five “great reformers”—four men and Dorothy Day—who were motivated by faith. More surprisingly, five years earlier President George W. Bush had quoted Dorothy Day. The National Catholic Reporter commented as follows: Now that George W. Bush is quoting pacifist-anarchist-jailbird-agitator-nonvoter-Karl Marx sympathizer Dorothy Day –“Any effective war on poverty must deploy what Dorothy Day called ‘the weapons of spirit,’” the president said at Notre Dame's May 20 commencement—he might want to invite to the White House some followers of the Catholic Worker co-founder. These troublemakers shouldn't be hard to find. No other religious group has a service ministry closer to the Oval Office. Members of Washington's Dorothy Day Catholic Worker house of hospitality regularly pull up a van at Lafayette Park facing the White House to distribute sandwiches to the hungry. Instead of a war on poverty, they think there's a war on poor people.2 Shortly before President Bush’s remarks, New York’s Cardinal John O’Conner wrote in a column of March 16, 2000 that the Vatican in Rome had approved his request “to open the Cause for the Beatification and Canonization of Dorothy Day”—that is, to consider whether or not to declare her a Catholic saint.3 In a 1993 an essay on gender and wisdom, two researchers exploring their subject selected only one person to examine in detail—Dorothy Day, as “an extraordinary 20th-century political reformer and religious figure, whose life demonstrates both her wisdom and the gender- specific struggles that shaped its development.”4 The relationship of religion to wisdom is complex, and both believers and non-believers can be wise or foolish, but faith can certainly affect wisdom.5 In the present essay, after surveying Day’s life, we shall look more closely at her developing wisdom and how it was influenced by her being a woman and a Catholic. The Long Life of Dorothy Day, 1897­1980 1 Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Random House, Inc., 2006). 2 Colman McCarthy, “New Fan of Dorothy Day Neglects Her Values—Catholic Worker Movement and George W. Bush,” National Catholic Reporter, June 15, 2001, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_32_37/ai_75892794/ (All web sites referred to in this essay were accessed in July-August 2011). 3 For the column, see http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/canonizationtext.cfm?Number=82. On her possible sainthood, see http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/canonization.cfm. 4 Lucinda Orwoll and W. Andrew Achenbaum, “Gender and the Development of Wisdom,” Human Development 36, no. 5 (1993): 274-96. 5 For profiles of both wise believers (e.g. E. F. Schumacher) and non-believers (e.g. Anton Chekhov and Andrei Sakharov), as well as a few essays dealing with the relationship of wisdom and faith, see the links to essays at http://www.wisdompage.com/profileswis00.html. 3 Childhood and Pre­College Years Dorothy Day was born on November 8, 1897 in Brooklyn.6 Her home was just a few blocks from the famed Brooklyn Bridge, then still an engineering marvel and the world’s longest suspension bridge. It was appropriate that it connected Brooklyn with Manhattan because it was in the latter area that much of Dorothy’s young adulthood was spent and where she first began the work that would mark her most important legacy. Her parents were John and Grace Day. He was tall, as was Dorothy in adulthood, and was born in Cleveland, Tennessee of Scotch-Irish blood. His work was primarily as a sports writer, and his passion was horse racing. He liked his alcohol and claimed to be an atheist, and Dorothy was never close to him. She was much closer to her mother, who was of English descent and came from upstate New York. Dorothy was the third child of the couple in less than three years, being preceded by her brothers Donald and Sam, both of whom, like their father, became journalists. Two years after Dorothy’s birth, the couple had another child, Della, with whom Dorothy shared a close sisterly bond throughout their lives. More than a decade later, after some miscarriages, the final Day child, John, was born. By that time, 1912, the Day family was living in Chicago. Previous to the Chicago move, the family had spent two years in and around Oakland California. But then the earthquake of April 1906, which destroyed much of San Francisco, caused enough damage in Oakland to provoke Dorothy’s father to seek employment elsewhere. For many months after moving to Chicago he was unable to find a job, and he often sat in the living room of their drab tenement apartment writing—mainly a novel (never published and perhaps never even completed), but also some shorter pieces that earned the family a little money. In Dorothy’s autobiographical From Union Square to Rome (1938) she described their tenement: “[It] stretched away down the block and there were back porches and paved courtyards with never a touch of green anywhere.”7 This unemployed period brought the Day family its greatest hardship and poverty, but Dorothy’s mother’s resourcefulness and good spirits mitigated the adversity of the family’s condition. She later lovingly described her mother. My mother had great natural virtues and a delightful temperament that helped her through much hardship and uncertainty. She refused to worry when things were going badly, or when the family had its periods of poverty. There were days when she had to do the family washing, the sheets, blankets, and all, and after a day in the basement laundry, she used to bathe and dress as though she were going out to a dinner party. She reigned over the supper table as a queen, powdered, perfumed, daintily clothed, all for the benefit of us children. She is still a woman who loves people and uses her charm to please them. She loves life and all the gayeties and frivolities of life; but when through poverty she was deprived of “good times” she made them for herself and got enjoyment from little things. When she felt low she used to go downtown and squander a little money, shopping for a bargain in a hat or a new blouse, never forgetting to bring home some little gift for us all.8 6 Although I have made use of several biographies, plus Day’s own autobiographical remembrances, William Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography (San Francisco: Harpercollins, 1984) is the chief biography upon which I have relied. Like Miller and most others who have written about her at some length, I have taken the liberty of generally referring to her simply as Dorothy. 7 Links to the whole book are available at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=2. The quoted portion above is from Ch. 2, at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=202. These materials and many more quoted on subsequent pages are located at the Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/, where a search

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