The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  While holding down her various jobs, Miss Day was writing on the side, and in 1923 A. & C. Boni published her first novel. It was about Village life (the hero and heroine lived in a loft they made habitable by painting everything orange and black), and it was neither a popular nor a critical success. But the Bonis had titled it The Eleventh Virgin, and they sold it to Hollywood on the strength of the name. When the movie people got around to reading it, they found the sex—or pay dirt—was all in the title, so they had a completely new story written; then they changed the title. However, the author got twenty-five hundred dollars out of it, which she used to buy a cottage on the shore of Raritan Bay, at Huguenot, Staten Island, where there was a colony that included, as residents or regular visitors, the Kenneth Burkes, the Malcolm Cowleys, Hart Crane, and Mike Gold. Miss Day had just met and fallen in love with a young biology instructor named Forster Batterham, and in 1925 they began living together, in a common-law marriage, in her cottage. The following year, she finished a second novel, about two sisters who were in love with the same man, which was bought by the Bell Syndicate people for newspaper serialization under their title, What Price Love?

  In March, 1927, Miss Day had a baby, whom she named Teresa. In her autobiography she tells how the birth of her child led her—indeed, compelled her—to become a Catholic. “Forster had made the physical world come alive for me and had awakened in my heart a flood of gratitude,” she writes. “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. I had heard many say they wanted to worship God in their own way and did not need a Church in which to praise Him.… But my very experience as a radical, my whole make-up, led me to want to associate myself with others, with the masses, in praising and adoring God. Without even looking into the claims of the Catholic Church, I was willing to admit that for me she was the one true Church.” Batterham felt differently. He was deeply irreligious, his temperament being as naturalistic as hers was spiritual. He shared her sympathy for the oppressed, just as she had come to share his passion for observing and studying nature, but his morality, unlike hers, was firmly grounded on this earth; he felt no need to justify or explain the natural world in terms of religion. Since, as a principled atheist, he would have nothing to do with marriage, she had to choose between leaving him and living in mortal sin. “To become a Catholic meant for me to give up a mate with whom I was much in love,” she writes. “It was a simple question of whether I chose God or man. I had known enough of love to know that a good healthy family life was as near to Heaven as one could get.… It was not because I was tired of sex, satiated, disillusioned, that I turned toward God. Radical friends used to insinuate this. It was because through a whole love, both physical and spiritual, I came to know God.” On December 28, 1927, Miss Day was baptized a Catholic in the Church of Our Lady, Help of Christians, in Tottenville, Staten Island. A year later, she was confirmed and after the ceremony she was invited to tea in the rectory parlor, where an earnest nun with whom she had struck up a friendship was one of the guests. Presently, Miss Day told her friend that she must be getting home to her baby. “Oh, I didn’t know you were married!” exclaimed the nun. “I’m not,” Miss Day said. The nun hurriedly poured herself another cup of tea.

  This momentous step of Miss Day’s came as a surprise to most of her friends—there was not a Catholic among them—although a few had been conscious of a streak of piety in her. All through her Village days, she had occasionally gone to Mass, and she had chosen the Bible as her reading during the hunger strike in prison that followed the Washington picketing. Cowley remembers that once she suddenly pulled him into a Catholic church in the Village while Vespers was going on, and that at one point during the service he saw tears running down her face. “Many a time, after sitting in taverns all night, or coming at dawn from a ball at Webster Hall, I went to an early-morning Mass at St. Joseph’s Church, on Sixth Avenue,” Miss Day herself recalls.

  Miss Day’s conversion made little immediate change in her external life—aside, of course, from her break with Batterham. She worked with the Anti-Imperialist League, and in 1929 she wrote a play dealing with the conflict between Communism and Christianity. An agent sold it to Pathé Films, and, with her daughter, Miss Day spent three months in Hollywood at a hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. In accordance with the local custom, she was given nothing to do; not in accordance with the local custom, she went to no parties, lived cheaply in the Los Angeles slums, and drove around in a second-hand Model T Ford. When her contract was not renewed, she took her baby and a thousand dollars she had saved from her salary and went to Mexico, where she lived for six months, writing a few pieces for the Commonweal but mostly getting accustomed to her new life as a mother and a Catholic. In the summer of 1930, she returned, with Teresa, to her cottage in Staten Island, where she earned a little money by interviewing garden owners for the Staten Island Advance. She also tried, fruitlessly, to sell short stories to slick-paper magazines. In the fall of 1932, she and Teresa moved into an East Side tenement. There, on the evening of December 10, 1932, Maurin, a stocky, unkempt man, came to call on her with a letter of introduction from a friend of hers.

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  Intellectually, Miss Day and Maurin hit it off right from the start. Maurin had a program—“a Utopian Christian communism”—all thought out; Miss Day had the journalistic experience, the practical approach, and the talent for leadership needed to give reality to his vision. It is possible that without that vision, she would never have been stimulated to put her energies behind the Catholic Worker movement; it is certain that without her practical turn of mind, Maurin would have remained an ineffectual eccentric. And it is unlikely that without her journalistic experience, his message would ever have reached many people. One of Maurin’s dreams was the setting up of Houses of Hospitality in cities all over the country, in which the needy could be fed, clothed, and lodged without regard to race or creed. Today, the Catholic Workers maintain such a house at 223 Chrystie Street, and keep a benevolent eye on the operation of fourteen similar houses in twelve other cities. Maurin also advocated a back-to-the-land movement, and while if he were alive he would doubtless feel that the organization still has a long way to go in this respect, the Workers do have eight farms in various parts of the country—including one on Staten Island (Peter Maurin Farm) and another near Newburgh, New York (Maryfarm)—where indigent wayfarers are given shelter and city dwellers who are down on their luck are sent for rehabilitation. Neither of these objectives, rural or urban, would ever have materialized had it not been for Miss Day’s gifts as an organizer and her ability to get on with people; it is she who, through the years, has recruited the staffs of young Catholic volunteers who run the houses and farms, living in common poverty with the people they help, and it is she who has raised the funds that keep the Workers going.

  Under Miss Day’s guidance, the Catholic Workers have devised an inexpensive and effective technique of fund-raising: they pray to Saint Joseph, their patron saint. “We appealed to him for help last month,” the editors wrote in the second issue of the Catholic Worker, “and within two weeks not only our current printing bill was paid but money was there for the February bill, also.” Their creditors pray, too. “The printer called us up this morning wanting to know, affably, when we were going to pay our bill,” another editorial reads. “We told him he’d better get busy and pray for it hard.” Later, the Worker reported, “Enough money has come in to pay $300 to our very forbearing printer, and he says he is still praying.” Things get behind sometimes—their grocery bill for the Chrystie Street house has run as high as six thousand dollars, and last fall they discovered that they owed two thousand dollars for flour alone—but sooner or later Saint Joseph is always good for the money. Their credit is solid, and their business relations—with their printer (Rogowski, on Pearl Street), their butcher (Kantor Broth
ers, on Essex Street), and their grocer (Di Falco, at Mott and Hester)—are friendly to the point of sentimentality; the fact that the first two are Jewish firms doesn’t seem to make any difference to Saint Joseph. At the very mention of money, Miss Day grows impatient. “That is all in the hands of Saint Joseph,” she once wrote in the Catholic Worker, apropos of a particularly huge avalanche of debts that was threatening to engulf the organization. “He is our patron and it is up to him. I haven’t any doubt about it. I’ve seen him perform daily miracles around here.”

  Some of the miracles are chronic. Twice a year, the Workers print an appeal in their paper, and twice a year they get enough donations, all in small sums, to cover their ordinary running expenses. Others are special, as when the Workers wanted to buy the Newburgh farm. “Miraculously, we were given ten thousand dollars by friends, all the money coming in within a month from half a dozen of our readers,” Miss Day recalls. Again, when they were wondering whether they could afford to buy the Staten Island farm, Miss Day asked the Lord for a sign by eleven o’clock one morning, and, sure enough, at ten-thirty someone phoned in offering to lend them three thousand dollars. There was also the time in 1950 when, after months of unsuccessful searching for a new headquarters, they sat down and undertook a novena (a kind of prayer marathon), which led them right to 223 Chrystie Street. Sometimes prayer doesn’t get results, but then the remedy is clear. “When things go wrong, we know we are not praying enough,” Miss Day says. And sometimes Heaven doesn’t respond as expected, or, indeed, as wished—a common failing of supernatural agencies, as Macbeth, for one, discovered. Once, needing a thousand dollars in a hurry, Miss Day prayed for it, and got it when her Staten Island cottage, insured for precisely that amount, promptly burned down. Her gratitude was tempered by her affection for the place, and by the fact that it was worth a lot more than a thousand dollars. “Sometimes I wish God weren’t quite so literal,” she said later.

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  Owing in part to the vast changes that have come over the social scene in the last few years, the Catholic Workers are no longer quite as active in public affairs as they once were, and the circulation of their paper has shown a corresponding slump. It is nevertheless still fairly high—fifty-eight thousand, which is about equal to the combined circulations of the Nation and the New Republic. It is true that the Catholic Worker costs only one cent a copy (and twenty-five cents a year, which gives it the perhaps unique distinction of costing more than twice as much to subscribe to as to buy on the newsstands), and it is also true that “bundle orders,” which often end up as throwaways, account for many of the copies, and that the business department is dilatory about culling out lapsed subscriptions. But even if only half the copies get into the hands of interested readers, this is quite an achievement for an uncompromisingly high-brow and extremist paper. It has another distinction that is almost unique among crusading periodicals: It just about breaks even.

  The Catholic Worker is an eight-page tabloid of approximately the same size as the Daily News, which it does not otherwise resemble. Typical front-page banner headlines have included “CHRIST THE KING CAN ALONE RECONSTRUCT THE WORLD,” “THE PROBLEM OF WAR AND THE OLD TESTAMENT,” “THE COMING COLLAPSE OF MODERN INDUSTRIALISM,” “THE NATURE OF MAN,” and (in an especially gnomic mood) “SEAMEN GO EVERYWHERE.” In its coverage of world events the paper’s forte is clearly not spot news, except possibly when it gets hold of something like the Holy Father’s Christmas Message. Another difference between it and the News is that the Worker’s staff is unpaid and unprofessional. (Maurin once got to talking with three enthusiastic young men on Columbus Circle, and brought them down to the Chrystie Street house. One became the paper’s bookkeeper, another became its circulation manager, and the third married the assistant editor.)

  The Worker’s contents are schizoid, accurately reflecting the two aspects of the movement—works of mercy and a concern with ultimate philosophical questions. About half its densely printed columns are given over to reports of happenings in the Catholic Worker “family”—a newborn calf at the Newburgh farm, an interesting new face on the bread line, a chat with Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher and theologian—and to columnists of the chatty, rather than the thoughtful, kind. One of the columnists is Ammon Hennacy, a self-styled “one-man revolution.” Hennacy is a lean, elderly Ohioan who operates out of Phoenix, Arizona. A Christian anarchist, he rejects all churches, including the Catholic, which doesn’t bother the Worker in the least. He supports himself and his family by odd jobs and stoop labor in the fields (he has sent two daughters through college), but, in line with the policy of the paper, his real work is bearing witness against war. He stopped paying a federal income tax after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and every year on the anniversary of that event he does penance by embarking upon a six-day fast. His column chronicles in lively detail his efforts to get his fellow-citizens to picket the tax collector’s office with the demand that the government put an end to all military expenditures. The result, to date, is a draw, but the authorities know they’ve been in a fight. There is nothing personal about it, though, for, unlike many crusaders, Hennacy is a man of gentle good will. Some of his best friends are F.B.I. agents, and on his most recent birthday the wife of one of them baked him a cake.

  The other half of the Catholic Worker is devoted to philosophical discussions of such topics as original sin, the supernatural basis of values, the evolution of capitalism, and the relevance of Freud, Marx, and Kierkegaard to Catholic doctrine. The juxtapositions of these with the homey items are at times dramatic. In one issue, for instance, Miss Day wrote, “Downstairs the baby is crying while Rita gets her breakfast ready: mashed prunes, baby cereal, and milk, all mixed together deliciously,” while in an adjoining column Robert Ludlow, one of her fellow-editors, was ruminating along these lines: “And so it is with war, which cannot be said to be absolutely opposed to natural morality during certain periods of history, but which of its nature is contrary to the full realization of a natural morality that is based upon the full potentialities of man’s nature.” Most readers prefer the prunes to the polemics, and Ludlow’s cerebrations sometimes bother even Miss Day. “I stand personally behind everything Bob Ludlow writes, though his way of expressing himself is at times peculiar, to say the least,” she told a friend not long ago. “I don’t think the majority of our readers know what he is talking about when he says, ‘The compulsion to revolt can be explained as a manifestation of the libido.’ ” This kind of frank criticism is frequent among the members of the Catholic Worker staff, and extends even to self-criticism. “I dislike writing, due to my lack of talent,” wrote one of its columnists a year ago this month. “It kills you when you haven’t got it. Right now, I feel cheated by having to meet a deadline with this tripe when I could be listening to the first game of the World Series.”

  One characteristic common to the two halves of the paper is length. Whether the contributors are writing about petunias or existentialism, they share a magnificent unconcern about space; it takes them a thousand words just to get warmed up. Another is Miss Day’s column, called “On Pilgrimage,” which is easily the paper’s most popular feature—an odd composite of Pascal’s Pensées and Eleanor Roosevelt’s “My Day.” A good hostess on the printed page as well as off, Miss Day in “On Pilgrimage” is constantly introducing the sublime if not to the ridiculous at least to the commonplace. In one installment, after quoting at length from Newman and Saint Teresa of Avila, she continued, “Every time I am making what I consider a thorough confession—that is, telling tendencies that I wish I could overcome, like eating between meals, indulging in the nibbling that women do around a kitchen—and mention it as a venial sin not only in regard to myself but also to my neighbor who is starving all over the world, the confessor makes no attempt to understand but speaks of scruples.… These are tendencies to gluttony, and gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins.” Only a person who is deeply thoughtful about religion would be li
kely to see a connection between nibbling in the kitchen and the seven deadly sins, and it is one of Miss Day’s outstanding achievements that she has revived the linking of the serious and the trivial that saints and prophets once did so effectively but that long ago went out of fashion. The union of the everyday and the ultimate is the essence of the Catholic Worker movement; even the paper’s routine announcements express it, as in this item: “Saturday Work Days and Discussions at Peter Maurin Farm. April 14: Build up low corner of ploughed field and dig cesspool drainage ditch. Discussion: ‘No one ever stayed on the land when he could have gone to the city, without a supernatural motive.’ ”

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  Back in the days when the Catholic Workers were playing a conspicuous part in the labor movement, the fight for racial justice, and in the political struggle with the Communists, their paper was full of news and opinion about such matters. Today, when the Workers are less active in these fields, the paper reflects the change. “Many a priest who became famous for his interest in labor,” Miss Day says in her autobiography, “felt we had deserted the cause of the union man…had departed from our original intention and undertaken work in the philosophical and theological fields that might have been better left to the clergy.… Labor leaders felt that in our judgment of war, we judged them also for working in the gigantic armaments race, as indeed we did. Ours is, indeed, an unpopular front.” Miss Day might have gone on to point out that, strictly speaking, the Workers did not desert the union man so much as the union man deserted them, partly because he no longer needed their help, partly because in a period of war and disillusionment their radical purity at best bored and at worst shocked him. Their pacifism, for example, was no embarrassment in the thirties, when liberals and Leftists thought in terms of “merchants of death,” but in the decade after Pearl Harbor, when “arsenals of democracy” became a more popular phrase, the Catholic Worker’s circulation declined slowly but steadily from a hundred thousand in 1939 to its present fifty-eight thousand. The number of Houses of Hospitality has also dwindled, from thirty in 1940 to fifteen today, largely because with the full employment that is the consequence of a chronic state of war, the need for them has become less acute.