The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Bill Kauffman

   The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by
   setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was
   aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of
   aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the
   responsibility that it entailed.

"Bigness itself in organization precludes real liberty," wrote Henry Clay Evans, Jr. in the American Review, a Distributist journal. The home--the family--was the right size for most undertakings. And so the home must be made productive once more. In the April 1945 Catholic Worker, Janet Kalven of the Graiiville Agricultural School for Women in Loveland, Ohio called for "an education that will give young women a vision of the family as the vital cell of the social organism, and that will inspire them with the great ambitions of being queens in the home." By which she did not mean a sequacious helpmeet to the Man of the House, picking up his dirty underwear and serving him Budweisers during commercials, but rather a partner in the management of a "small, diversified family firm," who is skilled in everything "from bread-making to beekeeping." For "the homestead is on a human scale"--the only scale that can really measure a person's weight.

The Agrarians and Distributists dreamed of a (voluntary, of course) dispersion of the population, and Day, despite her residence in what most decentralists regarded then and regard now as the locus of evil, agreed: "If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?" asked Day in September 1946. This revulsion against urbanism seems odd in a woman whose base was Manhattan, symbol of congestion, of concentration, of cosmopolitanism rampant. Yet she wrote of the fumes from cars stinging her eyes as she walked to Mass, of the "prison-gray walls" and parking lots of broken glass. "We only know that it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible." The Southern Agrarians would not demur.

World War II destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectnal life--just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money. Foes of America's involvement in the war, heirs to the non-interventionist legacy of George Washington, were slandered--most notably Charles Lindbergh, whom the Catholic Worker defended against the smears of the White House.

Despite Day's disavowal of the "isolationist" label, the Catholic Worker of 1939-1941 spoke the diction of the American antiwar movement, which, because it was anti-FDR, was deemed "right-wing." Sentences like "We should like to know in just what measure the British Foreign Office is dictating the foreign policy of the United States!" could have come straight from the pages of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. So could the objection to the "English and Communist Propaganda" of the New York papers, and the reverence toward the traditional "neutrality of the United States" and the keeping of "our country aloof from the European war."