“Dorothy Day's writings stir deep optimism 100
years later"
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, NCR, May. 5,
2016
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/dorothy-days-writings-stir-deep-optimism-100-years-later
Dorothy Day's books are hot items these days. Ever since Pope Francis
identified her as one of four great Americans, up there with Abraham
Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Thomas Merton, popular interest
in her life and writings has burgeoned. New books on Day or the
Catholic Worker, the lay movement she and French itinerant Peter
Maurin founded, abound.
Thomas McDonough gives us one more with An Eye for Others, a slim,
invigorating work featuring articles young Day wrote for the Socialist
daily, The New York Call, between the autumn of 1916 and early 1917.
The New York Call's "girl reporter" was almost 19 when she arrived in
New York City, having left the University of Illinois after two years
of study, determined to work for social change through journalism.
Eager for employment, she convinced the editor of the struggling,
leftist newspaper to hire her as a one-woman "diet squad" reporting on
how one could live off of five dollars a week.
Day quickly proved her talent as a writer, garnering 36 bylines during
her six months with The New York Call. She covered labor strikes,
penned compelling profiles of starving tenement dwellers, reported on
the New York food riots of 1917, interviewed Leon Trotsky, followed
the fate of the country's first female hunger striker imprisoned for
advocating birth control, and wrote of opposition to the United
States' impending involvement in World War I.
McDonough provides historical context to this collection. Included
here are fascinating details about the radicals and bohemians
mentioned in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and the anti-war
activism that preceded U.S. entry into World War I.
New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century is a place of
crushing poverty, protest, and energetic literary creativity. Young
Day absorbed it all, reporting what she saw with intelligence,
sardonic humor, and a perspective that inspires faith in our ability
to work for a society where, as she would later often write, "it is
easier for people to be good."
The social issues Dorothy covered 100 years ago are astonishingly
relevant for us today. Income inequality, the scandalous lack of a
living wage, the prioritizing of national security interests (i.e.
war-making) over human need are all there, perhaps in more acute form.
According to McDonough, the cost of food for the average American
family increased 74 percent between 1914-1916, while union wages rose
only 9 percent.
Even at 19, Dorothy could articulate a fierce dissent from the
cruelties of the status quo without lapsing into despair or cynicism.
Describing the ravages of poverty unsparingly, she still noticed
beauty and human tenderness in the most desperate corners of human
existence.
Her lively dispatches for The New York Call reflect the exuberances of
the times. "Sumthin' and "gee" pepper her prose, but there is nothing
superficial about the curiosity of this young woman who, by her own
account, had a habit of stopping to look at people to "wonder and
wonder about their lives," how they "got through every day."
"The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor are Slow Starvation," reads
the headline of an article written in November 1916. Another begins:
Walk up five flights of stairs of the dirtiest and the oldest house on
2d street, past the dirty barber shop on the ground floor, where the
two barbers play, for lack of something better to do, on the mandolin
and banjo; past the first floor, where a prolific woman with no figure
sits surrounded by her brood all day and finishes pants; past the room
on the third floor where another woman sits and sews and never looks
up, because there is nothing to look at; past the room on the fourth
floor, where the little Italian woman bursts into song now and then,
forgetting herself and her sorrows when she looks at that clouds that
are tinted like the breast of a dove; and then up to the top floor,
where the rooms are cheaper.
The New York Call reporter walked up many a stinking, tenement
stairwell to listen and write as mothers described their tedious
struggle to stave off their children's hunger. Many of her accounts
read like a documentary film, the camera catching the expression of
the toddler "gone batty" from malnutrition and how the "little girl of
twelve" scrubbed the kitchen clean except for the patch beneath the
cot where her ailing father lay, so as not to disturb him.
Faith is implicit in Day's articles even though they were written
prior to her conversion to Catholicism. They bring to mind Vincent Van
Gogh's charcoal sketches of the miners of Belgium's Borinage region.
In their thoughtful rendering of the lives of the hidden and
oppressed, writer and artist remind us, "Here, too, is an image of
God." The perspective of pre-Catholic Day inclined toward Christ
Incarnate, especially as he is revealed in the poor.
"We do not love concepts or ideas; we love people," Pope Francis told
a gathering of leaders of popular movements in July 2015. Young Day
seemed to know this implicitly and avoided flattening reality to fit
an ideological lens. Numerically speaking, a person can live off $5 a
week, she concluded at the end of her "diet squad" experiment, but
life would be a "dull misery" of skimping along. To the 60,000 working
girls of New York City, whose "cheerless" existence she too
experienced, she advised squandering $1 of one's weekly wage for a
down payment on a phonograph, then savoring the company the music
provides.
It has been too long since I read Day's writings. They invariably stir
a deep optimism within me, a peculiar reaction given her focus on
life's harsh realities. Yet after reading her, I always feel working
for a just order is not only life's best option, but could be a
profoundly joyous venture. I felt similarly reading An Eye for Others,
a wonderful antidote to that culture of indifference we are
well-advised to avoid.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a freelance writer, lives and works at the Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker of Worcester, Mass.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/dorothy-days-writings-stir-deep-optimism-100-years-later
Dorothy Day's books are hot items these days. Ever since Pope Francis
identified her as one of four great Americans, up there with Abraham
Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Thomas Merton, popular interest
in her life and writings has burgeoned. New books on Day or the
Catholic Worker, the lay movement she and French itinerant Peter
Maurin founded, abound.
Thomas McDonough gives us one more with An Eye for Others, a slim,
invigorating work featuring articles young Day wrote for the Socialist
daily, The New York Call, between the autumn of 1916 and early 1917.
The New York Call's "girl reporter" was almost 19 when she arrived in
New York City, having left the University of Illinois after two years
of study, determined to work for social change through journalism.
Eager for employment, she convinced the editor of the struggling,
leftist newspaper to hire her as a one-woman "diet squad" reporting on
how one could live off of five dollars a week.
Day quickly proved her talent as a writer, garnering 36 bylines during
her six months with The New York Call. She covered labor strikes,
penned compelling profiles of starving tenement dwellers, reported on
the New York food riots of 1917, interviewed Leon Trotsky, followed
the fate of the country's first female hunger striker imprisoned for
advocating birth control, and wrote of opposition to the United
States' impending involvement in World War I.
McDonough provides historical context to this collection. Included
here are fascinating details about the radicals and bohemians
mentioned in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, and the anti-war
activism that preceded U.S. entry into World War I.
New York's Lower East Side in the early 20th century is a place of
crushing poverty, protest, and energetic literary creativity. Young
Day absorbed it all, reporting what she saw with intelligence,
sardonic humor, and a perspective that inspires faith in our ability
to work for a society where, as she would later often write, "it is
easier for people to be good."
The social issues Dorothy covered 100 years ago are astonishingly
relevant for us today. Income inequality, the scandalous lack of a
living wage, the prioritizing of national security interests (i.e.
war-making) over human need are all there, perhaps in more acute form.
According to McDonough, the cost of food for the average American
family increased 74 percent between 1914-1916, while union wages rose
only 9 percent.
Even at 19, Dorothy could articulate a fierce dissent from the
cruelties of the status quo without lapsing into despair or cynicism.
Describing the ravages of poverty unsparingly, she still noticed
beauty and human tenderness in the most desperate corners of human
existence.
Her lively dispatches for The New York Call reflect the exuberances of
the times. "Sumthin' and "gee" pepper her prose, but there is nothing
superficial about the curiosity of this young woman who, by her own
account, had a habit of stopping to look at people to "wonder and
wonder about their lives," how they "got through every day."
"The Short and Simple Annals of the Poor are Slow Starvation," reads
the headline of an article written in November 1916. Another begins:
Walk up five flights of stairs of the dirtiest and the oldest house on
2d street, past the dirty barber shop on the ground floor, where the
two barbers play, for lack of something better to do, on the mandolin
and banjo; past the first floor, where a prolific woman with no figure
sits surrounded by her brood all day and finishes pants; past the room
on the third floor where another woman sits and sews and never looks
up, because there is nothing to look at; past the room on the fourth
floor, where the little Italian woman bursts into song now and then,
forgetting herself and her sorrows when she looks at that clouds that
are tinted like the breast of a dove; and then up to the top floor,
where the rooms are cheaper.
The New York Call reporter walked up many a stinking, tenement
stairwell to listen and write as mothers described their tedious
struggle to stave off their children's hunger. Many of her accounts
read like a documentary film, the camera catching the expression of
the toddler "gone batty" from malnutrition and how the "little girl of
twelve" scrubbed the kitchen clean except for the patch beneath the
cot where her ailing father lay, so as not to disturb him.
Faith is implicit in Day's articles even though they were written
prior to her conversion to Catholicism. They bring to mind Vincent Van
Gogh's charcoal sketches of the miners of Belgium's Borinage region.
In their thoughtful rendering of the lives of the hidden and
oppressed, writer and artist remind us, "Here, too, is an image of
God." The perspective of pre-Catholic Day inclined toward Christ
Incarnate, especially as he is revealed in the poor.
"We do not love concepts or ideas; we love people," Pope Francis told
a gathering of leaders of popular movements in July 2015. Young Day
seemed to know this implicitly and avoided flattening reality to fit
an ideological lens. Numerically speaking, a person can live off $5 a
week, she concluded at the end of her "diet squad" experiment, but
life would be a "dull misery" of skimping along. To the 60,000 working
girls of New York City, whose "cheerless" existence she too
experienced, she advised squandering $1 of one's weekly wage for a
down payment on a phonograph, then savoring the company the music
provides.
It has been too long since I read Day's writings. They invariably stir
a deep optimism within me, a peculiar reaction given her focus on
life's harsh realities. Yet after reading her, I always feel working
for a just order is not only life's best option, but could be a
profoundly joyous venture. I felt similarly reading An Eye for Others,
a wonderful antidote to that culture of indifference we are
well-advised to avoid.
Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, a freelance writer, lives and works at the Sts. Francis and Therese Catholic Worker of Worcester, Mass.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment