From Union Square to Rome
Published in 1938, five years after Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker, this is a book-length letter written to her younger brother John, then working for a Communist newspaper. Day had spent her twenties among socialists, anarchists, and Communists in New York — writing for The Call and The Masses, keeping company with Eugene O'Neill and Mike Gold, jailed with suffragists at Occoquan. Her baptism in 1927 struck many of those friends as desertion. The question kept coming: how could someone who had given her life to the working class join an institution they regarded as the chaplain of the ruling order? This book is her answer, addressed to one radical she loved and, through him, to all of them.
Day's central move is to refuse the choice she is being offered. She does not recant her politics. She restates her judgment on industrial capitalism in terms her brother would recognize, credits the Communists with taking the suffering of the poor seriously when almost no one else did, and says plainly that she learned solidarity from them. What she rejects is the materialism underneath — the conviction that human beings are only their economic conditions and that the world contains nothing to be grateful to. Gratitude is the book's hinge. She traces a religious instinct running through her whole life before there was any doctrine attached to it: the Psalms read in a strange house as a girl, a neighbor found kneeling in prayer, the sense on Chicago streets and in a Manhattan jail cell that she was praying to someone. The birth of her daughter Tamar made that instinct unbearable to keep private, and she had the child baptized before herself, knowing it would end her union with Forster Batterham. She also insists on distinguishing the Church from its officials — the institution that failed the poor in practice remained, in her account, the actual church of the poor, the one the immigrants and the longshoremen belonged to.
The book has lasted because it names a division that keeps reappearing and declines to accept it. Day writes as someone who never treated conversion as a change of side, and her refusal has been formative for readers on both edges of the split. Her fuller and more famous autobiography, The Long Loneliness, came fourteen years later; this earlier account is rawer, more argumentative, more clearly aimed at a particular unconvinced reader.
Who should read this: anyone who suspects that serious faith and serious politics require choosing one, and anyone drawn to the Catholic Worker who wants Day's own reasoning rather than the legend. Not for readers wanting a complete life — Day is deliberately reticent here about her marriage to Berkeley Tobey and about the abortion she had written into her novel The Eleventh Virgin — nor for those seeking a systematic theology or a program.