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Dorothy Day's Distributism and Her Vision for Catholic Politics

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Dorothy Day's Distributism and Her Vision for Catholic Politics Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2017 Dorothy Day's Distributism and Her Vision for Catholic Politics William Patric Schulz Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Schulz, William Patric, "Dorothy Day's Distributism and Her Vision for Catholic Politics" (2017). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 4347. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/4347 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. DOROTHY DAY’S DISTRIBUTISM AND HER VISION FOR CATHOLIC POLITICS A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of Political Science by William Patric Schulz, Jr. B.G.S., Louisiana State University at Shreveport, 2007 M.A., Southeastern Louisiana University, 2009 M.A., Louisiana State University, 2011 J.D., Louisiana State University, Paul M. Hebert Law Center, 2016 August 2017 Table of Contents ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................1 2 HISTORICAL EVOLUTION AND FOUNDATIONS OF DISTRIBUTISM ................17 3 THE INTELLECTUAL CLIMATE OF THE INTER-WAR ERA ..................................87 4 DAY’S POLITICAL BELIEFS AND THE CATHOLIC WORKER ............................132 5 DISTRIBUTISM AND THE CATHOLIC WORKER MOVEMENT AFTER DOROTHY DAY ...........................................................................................................190 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................................................216 VITA ...............................................................................................................................230 ii Abstract This dissertation is a study of Dorothy Day’s political ideas, her creation of the Catholic Worker movement, and her relationship with Distributism, the official socio-economic teaching of the Catholic Church. In order to fully understand Day’s views, it is necessary to review her intellectual development, and the foundational ideas and documents of Distributism. As is noted in the introduction, precious little scholarship has been done on Distributism, and few outside of Catholic academic circles are even aware of its existence. Beyond that, Day, herself, is not especially well-known, as existing scholarship tends to focus on either her early, Socialist activities and radicalism, or her later life at the Catholic Worker. Neither emphasis includes a sustained evaluation of her political and economic beliefs vis-à-vis Distributism. After review of her writings over the course of six decades of journalism and activism, it can be shown that Day’s Catholicism, her founding of the Catholic Worker, and her political vision centered around Distributism. This conclusion, alone, warrants a significant scholarly re-evaluation of Dorothy Day as a political thinker. iii Chapter 1 Introduction Dorothy Day The central character in my dissertation is Dorothy Day. I want to examine Day’s life and thought as a Distributist and as the author of a particular vision of Catholic politics. Day consistently stresses throughout her work during the Catholic Worker years that her political program is that of Distributism, and that she is attempting to wake Americans to the realities of crushing poverty, racism, and war that have dominated much of their own and world politics from the early Twentieth Century on. From her early experiences with community activism in the wake of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, Day always had a unique vision of what American society should be. This vision, although unknown to her at the time of its initial formation, is that of the socio-economic teaching of the Catholic Church, which she joined in 1927. Any work dealing with the larger than life Dorothy Day is bound, simply by the demands of space limitations if nothing else, to omit certain aspects of her life and work. Day was an enormously complex woman, whose journey from solidly middle class, college educated Communist activist to voluntarily impoverished Catholic laborer represents in many ways an ideological odyssey that touches many shores of the Twentieth Century. Certainly, Day encountered and addressed socialism and its many variants including Marxism, Marxist-Leninist Communism, and Trotskyism, atheism, fascism, nationalism, liberal democratic capitalism, pacifism, anarchism, and classical liberalism (libertarianism).1 That her experiences led her from atheism and socialism to Catholicism is nothing short of incredible. To capture the whole of her 1 In fact, as will be discussed later, Day personally knew, debated, and interviewed Leon Trotsky during his time in New York. 1 intellectual journey would demand a work twice, perhaps three times the size of this one. To also incorporate her biography, her journalism, and her teaching and writing would require ten more volumes. In this limited exploration of Day, I will sketch a brief biography, lingering on the intellectual milieu that informed her socialism and journey to Catholicism, then move along to her practical political beliefs and their Catholic foundations. Where does this project fall within the realm of established scholarship, however? There is no shortage of books and journal articles dealing with the topics raised in this work: Distributism, Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, the Inter-War Era and its intellectual currents. I shall briefly discuss the existing literature for each of the major themes, noting its content and where my own work falls in relation to it – be it a partial overlap, a new approach, or a wholly different concept. While this chapter is intended as an introduction and overview of the rest of the work, it will also serve as a brief literature review, highlighting the overall paucity of scholarship in this field. To begin, I note that excellent biographies exist of Day, including Jim Forest’s All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, Robert Coles’ Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, and William D. Miller’s Dorothy Day: A Biography.2 Much work has also been done on the Catholic Worker movement, including Nancy L. Roberts’ Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, Rosalie Riegle Troester’s compilation, Voices from the Catholic Worker, and Marc Ellis’ A Year at the Catholic Worker.3 Another approach, sometimes seen in Catholic political scholarship, is to tie 2 Jim Forest, All is Grace: A Biography of Dorothy Day, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011); Robert Coles, Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1987); William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers, 1982). 3 Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, (Albany, NY: State University of New Press, 1984); Voices from the Catholic Worker, Rosalie Riegle Troester (ed.), (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993); Marc Ellis, A Year at the Catholic Worker, (New York: The Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle in the State of New York, 1978). 2 the Catholic Worker to the larger lay Catholic political movements of the 1960’s and beyond; such a work as Francis J. Sicius’ The Word Made Flesh: the Chicago Catholic Worker and the Emergence of Lay Activism in the Church is an example.4 Occasionally, authors will focus on one aspect of Day’s life, retelling it with a particular narrative focus: June O’Connor’s The Moral Vision of Dorothy Day: A Feminist Perspective is a superbly done biography of Day, albeit one told through the lens of second-wave feminism.5 My work is not a biography of Day. Granted, much of the above was published in the 1980’s, shortly after her death, and recent scholarship on Day and the move to literally canonize her are certainly fertile grounds for an updated biography; that is a task for an American historian, however. Of course, my work does draw on the existing biographies, and on Day’s own autobiographies (of which she wrote three, each addressing her life story in a different way), yet it is not an attempt at a retelling of Day’s life. It is also not a retelling of the story of the Catholic Worker movement, although aspects of that story are central to my work. Instead, my approach resembles in method, if not content or format, June O’Connor’s work. None of Day’s biographers or any of those who wrote about their experience with the Catholic worker such as Marc Ellis or Mark and Louise Zwick discuss in any kind of detail Day’s Distributist program.6 Of course, many note her Franciscan leanings, or discuss, however briefly, her dedication to lay spiritual devotion as an oblate of Saint Benedict. These things, while important to understanding Day’s thought, run too far afield of a direct examination of the istributist program and Day’s attempt to advance it in the American cultural-political landscape. 4 Francis
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