South Street by Dorothy Day

In the summer of 1917, Dorothy Day was working for The Masses and spending a lot of time with Mike Gold who, besides working as a copy editor for The New York Call and writing for The Masses, drove a horse-drawn truck for the Acme Express Freight Company to support his mother. Dorothy, Mike, and their friends would wander through lower Manhattan talking, often ending up at one of the rivers.

The opening sentence rivals Henry James for its scene painting.

South Street

By Dorothy Day

The Masses, Nov.-Dec., 1917, page 26

Drawing by John Barber

South street, where the truckmen and dockmen sit around on loads of boxes and wait for a boat to come in, where men idle in the September sunlight and dream and yawn and smoke, where the horses clatter along the cobbles dragging huge heavy trucks with a noise resembling a mob of people aroused after long repression, and where the kids sit on the edge of the dock and look with wishful eyes at the water below that swirls with refuse and driftwood. Occasionally there’s a lull in the huge noise of the place and other sensations drift in waves over you until another truck wipes them out. There is a wave of soft silence, golden in the September sunlight with its autumn smell. The smells change too, with everything else, and the mellowness is replaced with a heavy foul odor from God knows what storehouse, and from the river that gulps and gulps at the docks all day long. Then there is a tiny wave of laughter from one of the many ragged boys scurrying about the edges of things, as he succeeds in fishing out a bit of driftwood. Little waves of imagination make the urchin’s every sense more poignant. There’s always the possibility of another fellow coming up behind him and pushing him into the thick water below. And there are wild chances of a bottle drifting in from the sea with a message in it from a shipwrecked crew or a submarine or something. And sunken treasure!

And perhaps waves of imagination drift over the loafers too, as they slouch and droop and rest.

Dorothy Catches a Flu

The following is mere speculation, almost an amusement. Ferreting facts from Dorothy Day’s pseudo-autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, can be a disappointing experience. 

Nevertheless, in the novel June (Dorothy) has left her room in the East Side tenement and moved to a room in an Episcopal rectory. There she catches a flu and is visited by Ivan (perhaps Irwin Granich) which scandalizes the wife of the rector who calls Dorothy’s mother.

There are three lapses in Dorothy’s writings in The Call which might account for a flu: December 25 to December 30, December 31 to January 14, and March 5 to March 30.

Of these three, the third is least likely. It is more probably due to the absence of a managing director. Chester Wright resigns on March 9 and the staff may have been in disarray until the appointment of Charles Ervin as managing director on March 30. Dorothy admits to attending the rally at Madison Square Garden on March 21 and accompanying Columbia students at anti-draft activities throughout the month.

Although no argument can be made for or against the second lapse, the first one seems most likely. Under this theory, Dorothy worked on December 23 and 24 and filed two articles without her by-line but definitely with her style that appeared on the 25th and 26th, then caught the flu on Christmas, 1916 or the night before.

The evidence supporting this is that in The Eleventh Virgin Ivan brings her a piece by Maxim Gorky. An essay by Maxim Gorky appears in The Call’s Sunday Supplement of December 24. Further, the Diet Squad series should have run through the beginning of January but is terminated abruptly on December 27 with a piece perhaps prepared with the help of Ivan. If this theory is correct, Dorothy recovered in time to enjoy The Guillotine’s feast on December 30 (see the chapter Holiday Cheer).

There are not enough facts here to warrant inclusion in my upcoming book, Unwavering Protest, A Teenage Dorothy Day writes for The New York Call, which I hope you will purchase when it is published in November.

Dorothy Day Meets Margaret Sanger

While the special features writer for The New York Call, 19 year-old Dorothy Day covered the imprisonment and release of Margaret Sanger’s sister, Ethel Byrne [January-February, 1917]. Dorothy’s interviews were with Margaret Sanger, rather than Ethel who was kept away from the press. Dorothy’s complicity in promoting these two “Birth Control Martyrs” at the behest of her employer, her distortion of the truth, was a painful memory for years to come.

Seven years after covering the story, still years before her conversion, in her autobiographical novel, The Eleventh Virgin, Dorothy gives a candid look at these events using the thinly-veiled Mrs. Edith Burns as the birth control martyr being covered by June Henreddy of The Clarion.

***

Then came those thrilling days after Mrs. Edith Burns had been taken to Blackwell’s Island and started her hunger and thirst strike. The first prisoner in America, the Clarion pointed out, to hunger strike for a cause… Even the capitalist press was aroused and printed headlines on the condition of Edith Burns. One afternoon she was dying. The next afternoon the jail doctors vehemently denied the report. As a matter of fact, they said, it was all bluff and the prisoner had probably secreted cakes of chocolate on her person when entering the jail with the intention to strike. Five days and there were rumors of brutal treatment. Four men, the papers reported, had held the frail little woman to the bed while nourishment was being poured down her throat through a tube. They clamored for the governor to take action and pardon her. Birth control as an issue was disregarded. The important fact was that an American woman was being brutally treated by jail authorities and it was up to the chivalric American press to object…

The Tact of Margaret Sanger

Mike Gold, Dorothy Day and Louis Weitzenkorn all worked together at The New York Call and were friends. On June 5, 1917 all young single men were required to register for the draft. Weitzenkorn registered and was drafted. Gold chose not register and eventually had to flee to Mexico.

It’s entirely possible that Dorothy was at the party that Gold describes below since she was a friend of Weitzenkorn. Further, she admits to spending a lot of time with Mike Gold that summer and fall and Dorothy was also well known by Margaret Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne.

There was always people, our friends coming or going, drafted, assigned to some place they had to report, some fort… I remember one night at the home of the fellow named Louis Weitzenkorn. He was the editor of a column, a literary column in the Daily Call, the socialist newspaper, and he wrote poetry. He had a good, warm, living feeling for literature and all of us used to write in his column. I wrote poems and one of my brothers contributed poems. We were up in his house,… he had just been drafted and he was going into the army. He did not choose to resist or to run away, or do any of the usual things to get out of the horrible chore of killing half the world to save your exploiters.

He was going and one of his guests that night was Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, and her sister Ethel, a trained nurse and we were having a few drinks and talking and discussing the war and in the course of our discussions I suddenly saw that Louis Weitzenkorn had become very serious and Margaret Sanger was sitting there and she was holding his hand and looking into his eyes and she was very serious and we all stopped and asked what was happening and Margaret Sanger … who evidently believed in spiritualism and all that stuff, the return of people from the grave, and she had just asked Louis to promise her that if he was killed in the war, he would come back and tell her about it. And this poor guy, he turned a little pale for a minute but it was not a very pleasant thought on the eve of his going into the army. But he laughed and took another drink and promised her faithfully that he would come back.

Copied from transcripts of tapes made in preparation for a unpublished biography of Mike Gold which I found among the Mike Gold Papers at the University of Michigan.

Yes! A Halo for Dorothy Day

Colman McCarthy’s commitment to peace and justice is unquestionable. His writings have often shaken me from my complacency. Now, his argument against the canonization of Dorothy Day, Putting a halo on Dorothy Day shows her no love, has shaken me to write a reply.

McCarthy is concerned that her radical adoption of Jesus’s message – her pacifism, her objection to the “system,” her criticism of hypocritical clergy – will be defanged, transformed into a placid plaster statue; her legacy reduced to a bowl of soup. Emotion reigns. God is made small.

The long-term ramifications of Dorothy Day’s canonization will be a tremendous boost for Catholicism in the United States, lifting millions out of lethargy and lukewarmness, encouraging millions to re-examine pacifism, our industrial society and the formation of the clergy. Dorothy Day teaches us that these objectives will not be achieved through the personal efforts of even great numbers of people if these efforts are not done in union with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.

Last month, Archbishop José Gomez referred to Dorothy Day as one of the finest spiritual writers. Her canonization will make her writings more widely read; and who can read her writings without being drawn into her worldview which comes down to a radical acceptance of the entire gospel message. Profoundly needed today is her emphasis on the virtue of Christian poverty.

Archbishop Gomez added “She makes me want to be a saint.” She needs to be held up on a pedestal so that young Catholics and non-Catholics can see what she did not see in her young and non-Catholic years: a person fully-committed to Jesus and the gospel values.

Most of us are not called by God to activism and jail time. Suffice the ordinary things of life to provide fodder for our constant contact with God and our ordering human affairs according to His will.

Dorothy Day should not be locked up in a closet. That would make God small. We need her to shake up Catholics in our country, now and permanently.

Canonization? Bring it on! 

A Philosophy of Work

“The root of our evil is the lack of a philosophy of work.” Peter Maurin

St. John Paul II has left us a philosophy of work within the framework of his Christian Anthropology: the human person is made in the image of the Trinitarian God. An important element of this anthropology is WORK, particularly the “subjective dimension” of work. “Through work the worker becomes more a human being."

Human work is the fundamental and decisive key to solving – gradually solving - the social question which is ultimately a matter of “making life more human,” or, in the language of Peter Maurin, making it “easier to be good.”

Jesus, God and man, “devoted most of the years of His life on earth to manual work at the carpenter’s bench” demonstrating that “the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person.” (Laborem Exercens, n.6).

Dorothy Day As An Example of Character

New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing and lecturing on character in recent months, finding inspiration in, among others, Dorothy Day. Here is an excerpt from his most recent article, The Moral Bucket List:

ENERGIZING LOVE Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”

She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

NY Times Sunday Review, April 11, 2015 

The whole article may be found here.