The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right, Part 2

For once, I was able to track down the second part of an essay when The ChesterBelloc Mandate published only the first part.

From Center for a Stateless Society

“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.

The greatest enemy of the church today is the state,” Dorothy Day told a Catholic audience in 1975, sounding much like the libertarian right that was her natural, if too little visited, kin.

The powerful libertarian strain in the Catholic Worker was simply not present in other postwar magazines of the “left,” excepting Politics, edited by Day admirer Dwight Macdonald. American liberals had made peace with — had made sacrifices to — Moloch on the Potomac. As Catholic Worker editor Robert Ludlow argued in 1951:

We are headed in this country towards a totalitarianism every bit as dangerous towards freedom as the other more forthright forms. We have our secret police, our thought control agencies, our overpowering bureaucracy … The American State, like every other State, is governed by those who have a compulsion to power, to centralization, to the preservation of their gains. And it is the liberals — The New Leader, New Republic, Commonweal variety — who have delivered the opiate necessary for the acceptance of this tyranny among “progressive” people. It is the fallacy of attempting social reform through the State, which builds up the power of the State to where it controls all avenues of life.

To which the New Republic-style liberals replied: welcome to the real world.

The inevitable Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Vital Center (1949), his manifesto of Cold War liberalism, wrote, “One can dally with the distributist dream of decentralization,” but “you cannot flee from science and technology into a quietist dreamworld. The state and the factory are inexorable: bad men will run them if good abdicate the job.”

Alas, most on the “right” crawled into the devitalizing center. A dispersion of property, a restoration of ownership, the reclaiming of the land, a foreign policy of peace and noninterference: these were the dreams of losers, of fleers from reality, of shirkers of responsibility, of — most damningly — amateurs. Non-experts. In 1966, in the just-as-inevitable National Review, Anthony T. Bouscaren mocked Day and other “Catholic Peaceniks” because, “sinfully, their analysis of the situation [in Vietnam] goes directly counter to that of the distinguished list of academicians … who support US defense of South Vietnam.” Grounds for excommunication, surely.

In all this worry about the other side of the world, few partisans bothered to notice the dirt under their feet. Distributism was dead. Or was it? For in 1956, long after the Agrarian dream had been purged from the American right, supplanted by the Cold War nightmare, Dorothy Day insisted that “Distributism is not dead.” It cannot “be buried, because Distributism is a system conformable to the needs of man and his nature.”

Conforming to their decentralist principles — and presaging a later strategy of “right-wing” tax resisters — the Workers refused payment of federal taxes, though, as Day wrote, we “file with our state capital, pay a small fee, and give an account of monies received and how they were spent. We always comply with this state regulation because it is local-regional,” and “because we are decentralists (in addition to being pacifists).” This resistance, she explained, was:

… much in line with common sense and with the original American ideal, that governments should never do what small bodies can accomplish: unions, credit unions, cooperatives, St. Vincent de Paul Societies. Peter Maurin’s anarchism was on one level based on this principle of subsidiarity, and on a higher level on that scene at the Last Supper where Christ washed the feet of His Apostles. He came to serve, to show the new Way, the way of the powerless. In the face of Empire, the Way of Love.

How beautiful: in the face of Empire, the Way of Love.

It is only in the local, the personal, that one can see Christ. A mob, no matter how praiseworthy its cause, is still a mob, said Day, paraphrasing Eugene Debs, and she explained, in Thoreauvian language, her dedication to the little way:

Why localism? … [F]or some of us anything else is extravagant; it’s unreal; it’s no: a life we want to live. There are plenty of others who want that life, living in corridors of power, influence, money, making big   decisions that affect big numbers of people. We don’t have to follow those people, though; they have more would be servants — slaves, I sometimes think — than they know what to do with. We don’t happen to believe that Washington, D.C., is the moral capital of America … of this country. We would like to see more small communities organizing themselves, people talking with people, people caring for people … we believe we are doing what our Founding Fathers came here to do, to worship God in the communities they settled. They were farmers. They were crafts-people. They took care of each other. They prayed to God, and they thanked Him for showing them the way — to America! A lot of people ask me about the influence on our [Catholic] Worker movement, and they are right to mention the French and the Russian and English writers, the philosophers and novelists. But some of us are just plain Americans whose ancestors were working people and who belonged to small-town or rural communities or neighborhoods in cities. We   saw more and more of that community spirit disappear, and we mourned its passing, and here we are, trying to find it again.

Dorothy Day found it. Not on the left, and not on the right, but in that place where Love resides. In the face of Empire, the Way of Love.