Wild tale of Dorothy Day: drinker, activist, defender of the oppressed
FEW candidates for Catholic sainthood have traveled the unorthodox path of native Brooklynite Dorothy Day. In the 1920s, she had an illegal abortion and an out-of-wedlock baby. The daughter of a journalist, she wrote for socialist newspapers and was Eugene O’Neill’s drinking buddy.
And yet, Pope Francis singled her out in his Sept. 24, 2015, speech to Congress as a “great American,” along with only three other people: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton. “A nation can be considered great when . . . it strives for justice and the cause of the oppressed, as Dorothy Day did by her tireless work,” the pontiff said.
Incredibly, her road-to-Damascus moment would happen on Staten Island. In 1927, Day shocked everyone she knew — including her common-law husband — when she embarked on a life of prayer and activism, helping to create the Catholic Worker movement and living in voluntary poverty for decades. But until she found her calling, Day would devote her life to the pursuit of politics — and pleasure — according to a new book, “Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty,” by her granddaughter Kate Hennessy.
Dropping out of the University of Illinois in 1916 after just two years, she moved back with her family in New York and became a journalist. Day had joined the Socialist Party while in college and found work with a series of publications sympathetic to its message, including the New York Call. She covered striking ironworkers and interviewed Leon Trotsky in his apartment. A 1952 New Yorker profile by Dwight McDonald revealed that Day’s father, John, who did not approve of his daughter’s politics or career aspirations, tried unsuccessfully “to persuade the editor [of the Call] to fire her.”
Her response was to rent a room on the Lower East Side and embrace the left-wing culture of Greenwich Village. Day went to dances at Webster Hall and met a series of men who would change her life and shape her thinking. Communist Mike Gold, author of the novel “Jews Without Money,” was a lover she met when she wrote for another socialist newspaper, the Masses. Eugene O’Neill was a fixture at the Golden Swan, a Village saloon that served as inspiration for the setting of “The Iceman Cometh.” He and Day drank in the back room.
She fell in love with journalist Lionel Moise and became pregnant at 22, following him to Chicago, where she had a traumatic abortion. A quickie marriage, to Berkeley Tobey, managing editor of the Masses, followed in 1920. “I married Berkeley on the rebound,” Day told her mother, Grace, sometime after April 1921. “I married him for his money.” As Hennessy writes, “The marriage was dissolved, and she rarely spoke of Berkeley again.”
IF anyone was primed for a spiritual rebirth after all this turmoil, it was Day. In 1924, she published a novel, “The Eleventh Virgin,” which was optioned by a Hollywood studio for $2,500, a sum that allowed her to buy a cottage on Staten Island’s rural Raritan Bay. There she lived with Forster Batterham, a biology instructor and atheist, who fathered her only child, Tamar Teresa, who was born in March 1926.
The impact motherhood had on Day cannot be overstated. “Forster had made the physical world come alive for me and had awakened in my heart a flood of gratitude,” she wrote in her 1952 autobiography, “The Long Loneliness.”
“The final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”
The decision to baptize Tamar in July 1927 was Step One in her conversion. Following her own baptism, at age 30, on Dec. 28, 1927, she and Batterham ended their relationship. “It was a simple question of whether I chose God or man,” Day said.
Of all the men in her life, one helped Day chart her greatest work. His name was Peter Maurin. She met the French immigrant and former Christian Brother in 1932, and he impressed upon her the need to connect Catholicism to social activism. They created the Catholic Worker, a newspaper that promoted church teachings and pacifist causes. The first edition, published on May 1, 1933, cost one penny.
The Catholic Worker movement also gave aid to the poor and homeless, and Day and Maurin opened houses of hospitality in downtown Manhattan. One of the first, a tenement in Little Italy, opened at 115 Mott St. in April 1936. According to Hennessy, it was “five stories of 20 rat-ridden rooms ... with garbage filling the halls and courtyard, and permeated with the smell of urine from the alley behind the building.”
In the morning, “up to a thousand men showed up for coffee and bread,” Hennessy writes. “They were striking seamen from the waterfronts who had been all over the world, longshoremen, Teamsters, gaudy dancers, sandhogs, restaurant workers, sailors, coal heavers, dock workers and bricklayers.” By 1937, the house was serving 150 loaves of bread and 75 gallons of coffee a day, along with 20 pounds of sugar and 20 cans of evaporated milk.
“We don’t ask any questions when people come in. We don’t keep records,” Day told Bennett Schiff in The Post in 1958. “It is a question of giving what we have: food, a bed, a sense of companionship.”
As news of Day’s works spread, she received requests for paid engagements, which offset the costs of feeding the poor. In 1936, she traveled to Detroit to support the sitdown strikes from which was born the United Automobile Workers union. She also served as an activist for the textile workers in Lowell, Mass., and the steelworkers in Birmingham, Ala. Over the course of her life, she was arrested multiple times, the last with labor leader Cesar Chavez in 1973.
The circulation of the Catholic Worker, which surged to 100,000 during the Great Depression, is just 27,000 today. It is based at Maryhouse, one of two remaining houses of hospitality in Manhattan.
Located at 55 E. Third St., Maryhouse serves a hot lunch from Tuesday to Friday to “any woman who comes to the door,” says Catholic Worker managing editor Joanne Kennedy. It also offers some permanent housing to women who would “otherwise be homeless,” and Day’s room there is still kept. The corresponding male house, St. Joseph’s on East First Street, offers similar accommodations and services for men. D AY, who died on Nov. 29, 1980, was considered a saint during her lifetime, and the journalists of the day paid heartfelt tribute. Besides McDonald’s New Yorker piece, there were editorials by Pete Hamill in The Post in 1973 (“She is in jail while the Haldemans and Ehrlichmans are free . . .”) and Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice in 1987.
She also has a following in academia. Anne Klepchen, a history professor at St. Thomas University of St. Paul, Minn., is part of the Dorothy Day Guild, a lobby campaigning for Day’s sainthood. “Dorothy Day, more than any 20th century American Catholic, gives me a sense of what faith is,” says Klepchen.
But the drive to make her a real saint kicked into high gear in 2000, when John Cardinal O’Connor opened her cause up for canonization.
There are many steps, and Day is currently ranked as a Servant of God, the second of five requisites. Some of her supporters hope that Pope Francis’ public praise will help speed along the process, which can take decades. “It seems like the pope is already on her side, having linked her with Martin Luther King and Lincoln,” says Klepchen.
Still, Day never wanted to be called a saint and, for Hennessy, she will always be her grandmother. Readers that she meets tell her something different, though.
“They’ll say, ‘I met your grandmother. She changed my life,’ ” Hennessy tells The Post. “Or: ‘ My life has never been the same since meeting her.’ She had an extraordinary ability to connect with people.”