The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Bill Kauffman

Mixing up Categories and Stirring up Trouble with the Catholic Workers

The title "Dorothy Day and the American Right" promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of "Commandments We Have Kept" by the Kennedy brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo.

But there is more to the "right" than a dollar bill stretching from the DuPonts to Ronald Reagan, just as the "left" is something greater than the bureau-building and bomb-dropping of Roosevelts and Kennedys. Maybe, just maybe, Dorothy Day had a home, if partially furnished and seldom occupied, on the American right.

The Catholic reactionary John Lukacs, after attending the lavish twenty-fifth anniversary bash for National Review in December 1980, held in the Plaza Hotel, hellward of the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street, wrote:

   During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted
   Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud
   Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the
   founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that
   glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or
   Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old
   and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life
   rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a
   radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the
   human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its
   commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when
   some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid
   neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around
   the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald
   Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

National Review, dreadnought of postwar American conservatism, occasionally aimed its scattershot at Day. Founder William F. Buckley, Jr. referred casually to "the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement"; of Miss Day, he chided "the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this goodhearted woman--who, did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us."

The grotesqueries he does not bother to itemize; nor does Buckley explain just what was "anti-Catholic" about a woman who told a friend, "The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel. They have given us the most precious thing of all--the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing The Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would."

If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:

   I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker.
   The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole
   program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has
   been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of
   the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid
   circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a
   copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just
   written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the
   conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country
   in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy,
   much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land!

The program that so excited Miss Day was summarized in the statement of principles drawn up at the Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists. Mocked as reactionary for their unwillingness to accept bigness as an inevitable condition, the conferees declared (inter alia):

--The condition of individual freedom and security is the wide distribution of active ownership of land and productive property.

--Population should be decentralized as well as ownership.

--Agriculture should be given its rightful recognition as the prime factor in a secure culture.