Dorothy Day’s Little Way - Part One
Remembering the Patron Saint of the Politicised
Early one morning in 1920, two women stood on a Chicago street corner with police officers and waited to head to jail. The city was dark and the two were lit by street lights, visible to anyone passing by.
They had planned to spend the night at a boarding house run by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – a syndicalist trade union co-founded by Eugene Debs – but officers barged into their room and arrested them. That night, the Palmer Raids, Woodrow Wilson’s campaign to jail or deport thousands of American leftists, reached Chicago.
One of the women, Mae, was severely depressed and had attempted suicide days earlier. The other was Dorothy Day, a young radical journalist, now on the path to canonisation in the Catholic Church.
Day, who worked as a nurse in New York City during the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, had turned up at the IWW house to support Mae, but decided to stay the night after seeing her, she later recalled in her 1952 memoir, The Long Loneliness.
Police officers held the pair at a local station for days, denied them access to lawyers, and then transferred them to a city jail after a brief court hearing, where they were charged with being “inmates of a disorderly house,” a euphemism for prostitutes.
In the city jail, Day bore witness to the horrors of the prison system. A woman in the cell next door spent hours beating her head against metal bars, only to be placed in a straitjacket and denied medical help, she recounted.
Day had been arrested before, and would be arrested dozens more times before her death in 1980. She was jailed and went on hunger strike for 10 days in 1917, following a suffragette protest outside the White House. But Chicago, more than her previous arrest, changed her.
“I had the moral support in [Washington DC] of sixty or seventy women who were arrested with me, and it was some technical charge, such as obstructing traffic, that was made against us. Now we were alone,” she wrote in her 1938 memoir From Union Square to Rome.
Where she had felt a sense of radical solidarity during the suffragette movement, she partly, rather unjustifiably, blamed herself for her arrest in Chicago. “I was a victim, yes, of the red hysteria of the time, but I was also a victim of my own imprudence, of my carelessness of convention [by spending a night at the IWW house],” she wrote decades later, in The Long Loneliness.
But she did not let her jailers off the hook. In her cell, she remembered Debs – then himself imprisoned by Wilson for delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio – and his insistence that “while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Despite her self-blame, she understood her arrest as a reflection of a repugnant social structure.
At the time of her arrest, Day was a secular radical with an affinity for Communism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism. In January 1917, months before the Russian Revolution, she had interviewed Leon Trotsky for Call magazine in New York City, printing his prediction of wartime unrest. In March, she joined a rally in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the end of the Russian Empire.
But after the arrest in Chicago, Day took a break from activism. Over the next decade, she focused on writing novels, short stories, and gardening columns. She chose to limit her involvement in radical politics to writing occasional socialist articles and hosting weekly parties with activist friends.
She also fell in love. Soon after moving to New York City in the early 1920s, she met Forster Batterham, an anarchist and factory worker, through one of her comrades in the suffragette movement. The pair’s relationship was passionate and loving, defined by long days spent at Day’s beachside cottage on Staten Island, fishing, exploring, and simply spending time together.
Those years – away from politics and absorbed in literature and love – were some of the happiest in her life, she would later say. They were also the years when she found the Catholic Church.
Day had always felt a connection to God. She had been baptised into the Episcopalian Church as a child in Chicago and studied the Bible, but drifted away from religion over time.
From the mid-1910s until the mid-1920s, she largely viewed religion through a Marxist lens, as a distraction from the work of material liberation; as “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions … The opium of the people,” to quote Marx’s 1843 essay.
In her Washington prison cell in 1917, suffering during her hunger strike, she briefly turned back to Christianity for a few days, soothed by the Bible. In her darkest moment, “[her] heart swelled with joy and thankfulness for the Psalms,” she said. “The man that sang these songs knew sorrow and expected joy,” she added.
But a prison cell was not her Road to Damascus. Within days of her release, she turned back away from faith, viewing her experience as personal failure, above all else. Day had, from a Marxist perspective, applied the balm of religion to a material wound.
“I was too weak to stand alone, too weak to face the darkness of the punishment cell without crying out, and I was ashamed,” she later wrote.
Day’s re-engagement with Christianity eventually came from a sense of joy at her life on Staten Island. She began to pray and attend Mass services as a way of expressing her gratitude, without seeking to involve herself in organised religion.
Her affinity for the Bible also came from the same place as her radical politics and her absolute willingness to rush headfirst into picket lines and a pandemic. It was Christ’s commands – most explicitly outlined in Matthew 25 – to serve the afflicted that drew her back to religion.
“Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me,” Christ said.
But what differentiated Day from traditional advocates of religious charity was her political edge. Even as she drifted towards Christianity, she remained a radical. She saw the class war as an analytical fact, rather than a political imperative, a reality that shapes political possibility.
Long before her re-engagement, Day had been disappointed by the Catholic Church’s focus on individual actions, rather than systemic change. “Where were the saints to try to change the social order,” she asked herself at university.
And it is a question she never stopped grappling with. At her first communion, she felt like she was betraying her old commitments. “I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition … The church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction,” she recounted in her 1952 memoir.
Even in the memoir, she confessed that “this I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.”
During her re-engagement with Christianity, she remained a radical but lurched decisively towards the anarchist end of the political spectrum. And it is not too hard to see why. By 1929, just years after her conversion, Trotsky had been exiled to Turkey and the Soviet Union had suppressed Russian Cossacks and anarchists alike.
By the early 1930s, Day was a mutualist, supporting the community ownership of productive assets, while allowing artisans, individuals, and collectives to own their own property.
Under mutualism, mezzanine finance becomes the weapon of a revolution, wielded by a vanguard of credit union clerks and craftspeople, producing an anti-capitalism that abandons the centralised state.
But Day’s discomfort with the Church’s role in politics was far from the highest price she paid for converting. Forster – her lover – had little regard for either marriage or religion. When Day gave birth to her daughter, insisted on baptising the child, and then entered the Catholic Church herself, their relationship fell apart.
Between 1927, when they broke up, and 1932, they exchanged dozens of heart-wrenching letters, unable to reconcile their fundamental difference.
It was too painful for her to even remain in New York. Day and her daughter, Tamar, eventually left the city and spent most of 1929 in Hollywood and Mexico, where Day worked as a writer. Over the next three decades, she would only meet Forster once, according to a 1957 diary entry from Day’s friend Judith Malina, a prominent anarchist theatre director.
But it is not clear that they ever stopped loving each other. Malina, in her diary entry, recounted a jail stint they served together in 1957 – when Day was around 60 years old – after resisting nuclear war drills.
“When [Day] talks of [Forster], her voice grows warm with admiration … She has been faithful to him and chaste, though many men have loved her,” Malina wrote. “And if he were to come to me and say, even now, after all these years, let us recommence our life together, I do not know what I would say,” she recalled Day saying.
And it was not entirely one-sided either. Less than a week after Day expressed her continued love and admiration for Forster, a man she had hardly met in decades, he turned up outside the prison, picketing for her and Malina’s release.
Forster and Day never rekindled their relationship. They only began to regularly exchange letters in 1959, a few years after the prison incident, according to Robert Ellsberg, the editor of Day’s posthumous letters and diaries.
But Day had a bit more luck reconciling her leftism with her faith, largely because of Peter Maurin, a French émigré she met in December 1932, during the Great Depression. She met Maurin in front of her house when she returned from a reporting trip to Washington DC.
On the trip, she had covered strikes organised by newly formed, Communist-aligned Unemployed Councils and scores of tenant farmers, but was dismayed at the lack of Catholic solidarity for the marchers.
“I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership … for the actual works of mercy that the [Communist] comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching workers?” she asked herself.
In Maurin, she found her answer. The French intellectual – though he would have hated to be called that – educated her on the social program of the Catholic Church and urged her to publicise it.
A year and a half before Maurin turned up at Day’s home, Pope Pius XI published Quadragesimo anno, a papal encyclical on the reconstruction of the social order.
Pius took a position against both free market capitalism and socialism. He affirmed the Church’s explicit support for private property, outlined in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum decades earlier.
But he also backed a degree of workplace democracy and firm-level collectives. “We consider it more advisable … that, so far as is possible, the work-contract be somewhat modified by a partnership-contract … Workers and other employees thus become sharers in ownership or management or participate in some fashion in the profits received,” Pius wrote.
Pius similarly backed a decentralised state, arguing that they should delegate non-essential powers to smaller agencies – describing it as the ‘principle of subsidiary function.’
He was not exactly on board with everything Day supported. Both Pius and Leo explicitly argued in favour of limiting strikes and lock-outs, in favour of public interventions during labour disputes.
But Day still eventually came to view distributism, the Catholic economic philosophy stemming from Pius and Leo’s encyclicals, as not just consistent but synonymous with mutualism.
“Distributism is the English term for the society whereby man has sufficient of this world’s goods to enable them to lead a good life. Other words [to describe it are] mutualism, federal, pluralism, regionalism; but anarchism … best brings to mind the tension [between authority and freedom],” she wrote in 1956.
Over months, Maurin eventually won Day over. And in May 1933, years into the Great Depression, the pair published the first edition of the Catholic Worker newspaper from the back of a New York tenement.
In their inaugural issue, the pair wrote “[The Catholic Worker] is printed to call [people’s] attention to the fact that the Catholic Church has a social programme… The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its readers to Radicalism and Atheism… Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist? Is it not possible to protest to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?”
The paper, in their view, existed to promote papal encyclicals on social justice, generally, and Quadragesimo anno, specifically. And it continues to do that, to this day, despite the passing of both Day and Maurin.
But Maurin and, to a lesser extent, Day, were not prepared for the Catholic Worker to simply stand as a publication. Instead, they would go on to build a movement based on voluntary poverty and small, daily actions to, in the words of Maurin, build the foundations for a new society with the old one.
To be continued
By Avinash Govind