Interview with Dorothy Day

Jim: You converted from communism to Catholicism. How does Marxism differ from Christianity on questions of power and violence and how change comes? In your life you've always been on the side of the poor.

Dorothy: Oh, I've always certainly been on the side of social change. But I think so much can be done with nonviolence.

My hard-line communist friends used to say, "Dorothy's never going to be a good communist. She's too religious." They take religion far more seriously than most religious people do.

The Catholic Worker movement has always believed in nonviolence. But we have stood for the idea of the possibility of social change that comes of study, direct action, and, as Peter Maurin said, building up the new society within the shell of the old.

I do think that there are possibilities for a nonviolent revolution, but most people are impatient. It's more romantic to pick up a gun and go off and be a guerrilla. But in this case, the noble person is that man who has just received a 10-year sentence for sheltering guerrillas who were wounded and giving them medicine.

Wes: Peter Maurin talked about anarchism as personalism. How does this relate to the development of alternatives for social change?

Dorothy: The personalist and the communitarian go together. The community can act together so much more effectively that the person can.

I think that United Farm Workers is a very good example of people who are trying to put these things into effect. Caesar Chavez is interested in communities which have common industries and free clinics. He is interested in being engaged, you might say, in a decentralized way. I think these things are very practical and immediate.

Personalism is also the "small is beautiful" idea. I see Schumacher's book alluded to over and over, wherever I am -- it's all over the country.

We must study the development of Africa now. All the papers begin alluding to Zambia and Tanzania as the leaders there and to Kenneth Kuanda and Nyerere as the moral leaders.

The whole story of Nyerere is really interesting. He was educated by the Maryknoll sisters and didn't know whether he ought to become a Marxist or a Catholic. One White father swayed him. Nyerere went to Glasgow to get a degree of some kind and the White father followed him over there -- while he was more detached from the immediate, you see. The priest brought him to the confession that he should be a Catholic. So he is a Catholic, and he has, you might say, a real world view.

His ideas, certainly a lot of them, have been derived from Marxism, and his inspiration. The government has taken over all the profit, including Maryknoll, with Maryknoll's consent. Then the government said to them, "Please leave your teachers here until we have teachers of our own," and the order willingly did. They invited Nyerere to come over and speak to them.

The other thing is, he's had a policy of operating Ujamaa villages. [Editor's note: The Ujamaa villages constitute a decentralized rural economy in which the village is the basic social unit.]

But the two leaders whom Africans respect are Nyerere and Kuanda. Kuanda is a Protestant, and Nyerere's a Catholic. And they're both very interesting men.

There is a magazine in England called Resurgence; Schumacher began writing for it. Zambia invited the editor of Resurgence to come over and be an advisor to Kenneth Kuanda. So he and Schumacher both said that they didn't think anything could be accomplished without Christianity, without that basic ideal of being ready to lay down your life.

But nonviolently, you don't take up the gun. Go ahead and be ready: If they take your coat, give them your cloak too. If they take your house, well go ahead and camp out someplace else. The teachings of Christianity are certainly drastic enough.

Wes: It seems that Small is Beautiful, the book, and Nyerere's Ujamaa, the villages, really seem the best capturing of anything I know now of some of Peter Maurin's original vision. Do you sense that too?

Dorothy: I think so too.

I think China is fascinating, also. It always has been. China seems to me to be one country where there's no hunger, there's no unemployment, and there can be planning for a different social order. I have the greatest admiration for the Chinese.

Thomas Merton says we need to pay more attention to these Marxist revolutions that are going on in the world. I was in Cuba in September of '62, right after the Castro revolution. It was after the Bay of Pigs. The Cubans told me to go back to America and tell them how good it was in Cuba. There was a feeling about the whole place -- the real good feeling of cleaning it up.

I think the communists spend much more time in the serious study of ideas, of how change can be brought about. They work on changing people's attitudes, changing people's ideas of the possible.

Those were some of the attractions of communism for me. The party had that sense of a disciplined group. But as for me, I never could see the violence, the obliterating of a whole class.

Unfortunately, in the 1940s the whole liberal crowd were all so pro-Soviet that they wouldn't believe any of the stories that came out about the transferral of the whole Ukrainian population to Siberia. Now we read the account in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. I mean, a liberal crowd will sort of go with the fashion.

The style was for everybody to be a communist -- Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, and all the rest of them spoke in Cooper Union. There was a united front -- Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill all grinning like apes together ... Honest to goodness, I become so anti-capitalist at the thought of that kind of coalition.

Jim: There are a lot of people who were involved in movements in the '60s who now feel hopeless.

Dorothy: Oh, I don't feel hopeless.

Jim: Could you say where your hope is?

Dorothy: Well, you're supposed to imbibe faith, hope, and charity. I feel that it is a spiritual armament. I do think that in a way you're losing faith in people. And I think we must use the spiritual weapons we have.

I think that the turn in the movement has been for the better, as a matter of fact. There are so many who are really thinking in terms of the land and housing and doing manual labor.

Peter used to talk about a philosophy of work. We have to do useful work, not do advertising on Madison Avenue, that type of thing. A lot of people have to begin to think of what kind of work they're doing, the morality of it, and how much it contributes to the common good.

Solzhenitsyn said in Gulag Archipelago, "If a man didn't have some sense of the value of work itself, how could he endure? How could he survive the hardships he was going through?"

That's the way Peter felt about work. And about the holiness, you might say, of the material a man works with. That's again, you see, part of culture and cultivation. It all goes together: your religion, your work, and your faith.

Wes: Don't you think that the question of the students from the '60s and what's happened now is also a question of recovering spiritual resources and being able to discover the spiritual foundation of social change?

Dorothy: I think there is a great deal of spiritual foundation for change. But there should also be an attempt at a more disciplined life.

We do have to study constantly; Peter talked about that. There can be no activity without a great deal of study. He said, "There can be no revolution without a theory of revolution." I think that a lot of people haven't taken time to think.

Of course, you should be what you want the other fellow to be.

On the other hand, some intellectuals lack a sense of social responsibility. When we lived on Christian Street, some of the writers in our group thought it was the most romantic thing in the world to go hang around the White Horse Tavern every single night. That was the time that the drunken poet came over -- he died of drink in St. Vincent's, and his wife came and mourned and screamed over his dead body. Was it Dylan Thomas? A famous poet, a marvelous poet from Wales. Anyway, he used to hang around the White Horse, and so this literary crowd all hung around. Well, they weren't thinking about revolution; they weren't thinking about a new social order. They were thinking about the romantic life of the scholar and the theorist and the artist.

Wes: Do you think that the government of the United States has really changed very much in the time that you've acted for social change?

Dorothy: No, that's why we speak about it. I don't see any sense in registering to vote. If things were localized there would be much more chance of participating in that kind of political action.

But I don't know anything about politics -- I've never voted in my life.

Wes: Do you feel any safer now than, say, when you first began to be concerned?

Dorothy: From the bomb?

Wes: No, from the government, really.

Dorothy: As a matter of fact, not to have the government pay any attention to you is almost a sign that you're not doing anything.

Wes: Do you feel the same way today about the government and its potential effects, as when you first went down with the suffragettes to demonstrate and were jailed with them in 1917?

Dorothy: I think I'm more realistic. People have a very romantic attitude towards government. We all have. Remember Mr. Smith Goes to Washington? It's a lovely movie. I'd love to have a lot of Mr. Smiths. Movies like that are really the kind of thing that moves you. A lot of people do feel that way about policy.

Jim: So what's your advice to young Christians who want to relate to politics and government?

Dorothy: I can't see working in Washington. But I can't judge.

I think projects like the demonstrations in Washington are lots of fun -- planting flowers in the Pentagon and so on. It's a springlike gesture, but at the same time it goes together with the rest. It's part of the synthesis of study, of cultivating culture, of action, and of personal responsibility.

Jim: What is your relationship with Catholic congressmen who want to work through the system?

Dorothy: I don't know any congressmen.

Jim: But how do you feel about Catholics who say they believe in the things you believe in but want to try to work through the system?

Dorothy: People who say that don't try to work through the system. That's where the personalist revolution comes in. One person.

Did you read Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine? In that book, this man is a communist who comes back. The communists in Italy are always religious; he's disguised as a priest and he's hiding up in the mountains. When Mussolini declares war on Ethiopia, he runs out and chalks up "No!" on all the buildings.

A girl, the loose woman of the town, is trying to take care of him. She says, "What did you do a foolish thing like that for?" He replies, "One person shouting 'No' is enough to break the unanimity."

I thought that was the most beautiful thing to say. That's the personalist approach.

I think these ideas are growing everywhere. It's quite different from the '60s. I think we have to be selective; we have to be careful to use our time to study more. I think there has to be a sound conviction about ways of doing, before we go into action.

Jim: What should we study?

Dorothy: The little things Peter told us to read. I think that when you have a very firm spiritual life, ways constantly open up for you. You encounter people, or you come across books. Somebody recommends this, somebody has that idea. But that process comes from a very steady spiritual life.

Wes: Do you mean particularly daily prayer and the Eucharist?

Dorothy: I wake up every morning at five. From six to eight I read scripture -- the psalms, followed by the gospel and epistle for the day. I think that giving of your time is pursuing the call to culture and cultivation.

Various reading and discussion all has its place. I wouldn't exclude anything -- music, drama -- irresponsible things (laughter). I get a great deal out of Chekov.

Above all, take care of the poor. That's our obligation. That's the 25th chapter of St. Matthew: "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these." There's going to be no profit in it for you. There's going to be no enlightenment in it. You're not going to get any inspiration out of it. It would seem to be a waste of time to be always taking care of someone. And yet the spiritual results are there. And the strengthening is there.

It's a life work. But it has to have a spiritual foundation; otherwise you get too discouraged.

Everything seems to be always opening up. And miracles are happening. You write one line in the paper about the shopping bag women, who live out of paper sacks and sleep in doorways. Then somebody writes in and says, "Find a house; I'll pay for it." So we found a house -- an old music school on 3rd Street. It was made up of three buildings, with an auditorium for meetings.

I had a chance twice to talk to the bishops. I said ,"The first thing I would advise all bishops to do is to get rid of all their worldly advisers." I said, "This whole business of investing. It's usury, it's condemned in the catechism, in the same class as the seven deadly sins, as sodomy -- money doesn't breed money." I said, "Don't invest money, except in the poor -- there you might expect a return."

We learn these things in the New Testament. There's a constant tension at the spiritual foundations; it's a matter of faith. The Lord will send you. If they want your coat, give up your coat.

I mean, it just works. If it fails, well, that's because it should fail. It wouldn't matter.

Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared. Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.