The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right

Whole Earth, Summer, 2000 by Bill Kauffman

"The Catholic Worker does not adhere to an isolationist policy," editorialized the paper in February 1939, though in fact its position, and often its phraseology, was within the American isolationist grain. The editorial sought to distinguish the paper from the bogeymen "isolationists" by urging "that the doors of the United States be thrown open to all political and religious refugees"--a position also taken by many isolationists, for instance H.L. Mencken, who wanted our country to be a haven for the persecuted Jews of Europe.

Day and the Workers dug in for a tooth-and-nail fight against conscription--"the most important issue of these times," as they saw it. Day replied to those who noted that Joseph and Mary went to Bethlehem to register with the census, that "it was not so that St. Joseph could be drafted into the Roman Army, and so that the Blessed Mother could put the Holy Child into a day nursery and go to work in an ammunition plant."

Or as Peter Maurin put it:

   The child does not belong to the state; it belongs to the parents. The
   child was given by God to the parents; he was not given by God to the
   state.

This was by now a quaintly reactionary notion. What were children, if not apprentice soldiers? Like their isolationist allies, the Catholic Workers suffered years of "decline, suspicion, and hatred" during the Good War. Circulation of the Catholic Worker plummeted from 190,000 in May 1938 to 50,500 in November 1944. By 1944, only nine of thirty-two Houses of Hospitality were operating.

The Cold War transmogrified the American right: anticommunism became its warping doctrine, yet a remnant of cantankerous, libertarian, largely Midwestern isolationists held on, though the invigorating air of the 1930s, when left and right might talk, ally, even merge, was long gone. The fault lies on both sides.

The unwillingness of the Catholic Worker's editors to explore avenues of cooperation with the Old Right led them, at times, to misrepresent the sole popular anti-militarist force of the late 1940s. In denouncing the North Atlantic Treaty, which created NATO, the Catholic Worker claimed that "the only serious opposition in the Senate is from a group of the old isolationist school, and their argument is that it costs too much." This is flatly untrue--the isolationist case was far more sophisticated and powerful, and it rested on the same hatred of war and aggression that underlay the Catholic Workers--but to have been honest and fair would have placed the Catholic Worker on Elm Street and Oak Street, whose denizens might have taught the boys in the Bowery a thing or two.

Postwar Catholic isolationists would be condescended to as parochial morons by the Cold War liberal likes of James O'Gara, managing editor of Commonweal, who snickered at those mossbacks who refused to recognize that "American power is a fact" and that "modern science has devoured distance and made neighbors of us all." What good is personalism in a world of atomic bombs? What mattered the small? Father John C. Rawe's experimental school of rural knowledge, Omar Farm, near Omaha, was shattered when all but two of its students were drafted to fight in World War II. Liberal Catholics continued to support the conscription against which pacifists and right-wingers railed, although, as Patricia McNeal has written of the League of Nations debate, "the majority of American Catholics supported the popular movement towards isolationism and rejected any idea of collective security." But the League aside, we all know which side won. The state side. The liberals who do not know us but, as they so unctuously assure us, have our best interests at heart.