Day’s Impact
Principles and ideas are among the other loves, and Dorothy Day describes even her feeling for the books of Dostoyevsky, DeQuincy, and Dickens as a great passion and an important part of her life. Day believed that “people have so great a need to reverence, to worship, to adore; it is a psychological necessity of human nature that must be taken into account. We do not like to admit how people fail us.” And thus we need something more. In her view, this includes love of God and religious practice. And so, after long anguish and indecision, she left her lover and partner so that she could baptize her daughter and become a member of the Catholic Church. Afterward, her long loneliness left her, but another dilemma arose, since she had left her life among radicals behind as well. “How little, how puny my work had been since becoming a Catholic, I thought. How self-centered, how ingrown, how lacking in sense of community!” She moved back to New York City and worked again as a journalist, covering a march of the poor on Washington—the Great Depression had spread desperation over the land a year after her conversion—but she felt isolated and disengaged, until 1932, when she met Peter Maurin, the French peasant who was as radical as he was devout. He changed her life.
He was waiting for her in her own apartment, and the two of them together founded a mission neither of them could have carried out independently. Day called him a “genius, a saint, an agitator, a writer, a lecturer, a poor man, and a shabby tramp, all in one.” Not everyone was so enthused about Maurin, an autodidact who happily lectured anyone under any circumstances, but his unshakable self-confidence in their vision made it possible for her to throw her considerable energies into realizing it. On May Day, 1933, they began. They had launched a penny newspaper—twenty-five hundred copies of the first issue were already printed—that would preach their mix of pacifism, solidarity with the poor, social reform, and works of kindness as acts of faith. It was called the Catholic Worker, a name that was a riposte to the popular Communist Daily Worker but also an insistence on work and workers as central to its vision. Day and Maurin were regular contributors, and a motley crew of writers, illustrators, and newspaper sellers began to gather round. Some of them were homeless, many of them were otherwise unemployed, and it was a logical next step to turn the Catholic Worker from a newspaper into a movement by opening “houses of hospitality” to lodge these and other destitute and displaced people. After attempting to locate in several parts of New York City, they settled in the Bowery, famed for its skid-row atmosphere and tough citizens.
By 1939, the Catholic Worker was no longer entirely under their direction; they had formed a template that begat twenty-three sister Houses of Hospitality, two farms, and study groups around the country. The newspaper’s circulation exploded; two years after its founding it had reached 110,000; by 1939 it would reach nearly 200,000. Day and Maurin were not enthusiasts for the New Deal that arose from the radical politics and radical needs of Depression America; they believed that “the works of mercy could be practiced to combat the taking over by the state of all those services which could be built up by mutual aid.” They wanted the needs of the poor to be met personally and the poor to become participants in their own care and thereby members of the community. The state removed that obligation—Day never really ceased to be an anarchist, a person who believed in as much autonomy for the individual and as little role for the state as possible. She and Maurin were much influenced by the French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier’s idea of “personalism”—of addressing people as individuals rather than members of a class and of taking personal responsibility for social problems. She was also a pacifist who saw the grand gestures of war as only myriad unjustifiable acts of killing individuals. During the Second World War, this led to a decline in support for the movement, but the same position led to a resurgence of support and interest during the Vietnam War.
Day deplored Catholics who claimed to love God but did not love him in the form of the poor and the needy, and she saw her two loves as one. She spoke of the “sense of solidarity which made me gradually understand the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, whereby we are the members one of another.” The Catholic Church preaches the “Corporal Works of Mercy” that include feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, harboring the homeless, visiting the sick, and burying the dead, and the Catholic Worker, both radical and devout, attempted to practice all these, along with the Spiritual Works of Mercy, which include instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, admonishing sinners, comforting the afflicted, and praying for all. These works of mercy had been much more integral parts of medieval society, when huge religious orders ran hospitals and charity was considered a part of everyone’s religious duty. There is something medieval about Day, with her stark face, fierce will, and simplifying approach to complex problems. Her devoutness often appeased the church officials who looked askance at the radical rhetoric and practice of the Catholic Worker.
The idea of community was central to Day’s work. And the houses of hospitality were communes of a sort, in which the poor were taken in and the core workers ministered to the residents and others in need. The phrase the poor sounds far more pleasant than the actuality of people in crisis, alcoholics, drug addicts, and the mentally ill, then and now—though one Catholic Worker house near San Francisco now ministers largely to immigrant farmworkers. Maurin had been raised on a farm and dreamed that the poor could be returned to the countryside, where they could produce their food communally, outside the cash economy. Though the Catholic Worker maintained two farms, the farming activities were often comic—the characters they sent out to the farms were not always enthused about the simple diet or motivated to undertake hard work without bosses. Day and Maurin were trying to avoid what had happened to the food relief in the 1906 earthquake—the institutionaliza tion that reduced the hungry to passive consumers rather than participants in their own survival. With this empowerment, of course, came a degree of chaos and uncertainty—but they were always clear that what the poor needed was much more than food, and power and possibility were also shared.
Even disasters that don’t beget broad social change often beget transformed individuals who impact their society. The Great Depression triggered vast economic and social reforms, from changes in the banking system and the economy to the social services of the New Deal. It also served as the long disaster to which Dorothy Day was able to work out a lasting equivalent to the brief moment of disaster solidarity and generosity she had experienced at age eight. The Catholic Worker was her answer to how to extend that engagement, a wedding of her radical commitments and her spiritual desires. More than a century after the earthquake moved a little girl in Oakland, it is still going, still benefiting the bereft, the marginal, the incapacitated. Few would choose a life lived so exclusively and intensively for the other loves. And yet, Dorothy Day’s life is only an extreme and enduring version of the altruism that arises in disasters.
When I was a child we used to play a game in any big open space on summer evenings. One of us would stand at the far end of an expanse and shout out “green light,” and everyone else would surge forward from the starting line, then freeze when “red light” was heard. A disaster is a little like a game of red light/green light in which everyone is suddenly freed to rush in their own direction, faster and harder than in ordinary times. The people in San Francisco in 1906 did not become something other than what they always were. General Funston loosed his fears and his belief in the legitimacy of violence and dispatched an army to act on them. The city fathers rushed forward with their schemes for improving their own situations as regards money and power, and sometimes also carried out their duties to serve the public interest as they saw it. The wealthy were sometimes cowed by the idea of an unregulated public and sometimes a part of that public. Ordinary citizens had less impact individually but collectively did much to shape the disaster’s aftermath. Pauline Jacobson dashed forward with her gregariousness and her reinforced positiv ity about human nature, as did Jack L
ondon, Mary Austin, and William James. Anna Amelia Holshouser, like Thomas Burns, Officer Schmitt and his wife and daughters, and countless others, showed up with generosity and resourcefulness. Some people sprinted toward opportunities to help themselvs to unsecured goods, but what theft took place was dwarfed by the gifts and gestures of altruism in the aftermath of the ruin of the city. Many fear that in disaster we become something other than we normally are—helpless or bestial and savage in the most common myths—or that is who we really are when the superstructure of society crumbles. We remain ourselves for the most part, but freed to act on, most often, not the worst but the best within. The ruts and routines of ordinary life hide more beauty than brutality.
II
HALIFAX TO HOLLYWOOD: THE GREAT DEBATE
A TALE OF TWO PRINCES: THE HALIFAX EXPLOSION AND AFTER
The Explosion
A little after 9:00 a.m. on December 6, 1917, Gertrude Pettipas was leaning out an open window watching the cargo ship on fire in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, harbor below. Then it exploded. “A great black ball of smoke rose up to about four or five hundred feet and out of this came lurid cardinal colored flames. It was a magnificent though terrifying sight. . . . I saw a blinding sheet of fire shoot a mile high in the air. It seemed to me to cover the whole sky. It blinded me, and immediately the concussion struck me in the face throwing me with terrific force across the room. I struck the wall and fell. The house swayed and rocked, and the doors and windows were blown to pieces.” The First World War had come home to this quiet Canadian port town already bustling with soldiers and supplies for the front in Europe. Many thought the Germans had invaded, but it was a harbor accident involving a tremendous quantity of explosives bound for the European front. It created the largest man-made explosion in history before nuclear weapons.
That morning, a Norwegian ship, the Imo, draped with a “Belgian Relief ” banner, had taken an unorthodox course, as if to pass the munitions ship the Mont Blanc on the wrong side in the long narrow channel of the sheltered Halifax harbor. The Mont Blanc signaled frantically, but the two ships were unable to agree upon a safe passage past each other. The Imo steamed on fast and plowed into the side of the Mont Blanc, tearing into the side of the ship. The latter ship was loaded with nearly three thousand tons of explosive powder, along with highly flammable oil, gun cotton, benzol, and picric acid. It was intended to join a convoy headed for France. The impact ignited some of the cargo, and the fire spread to the most volatile material. Some precautions had been taken when the ship was loaded in New York; the iron hull was lined with wood nailed in with copper nails to prevent sparks, and the crew was forbidden to smoke almost anywhere on the ship, including the deck laden with barrels of fuel. But the load was still a reckless one. The collision started a fire that began to spread, but only the crew on board knew how deadly it would be. Unable to warn anyone, they evacuated. The ship drifted toward the shore, hundred-foot flames clawing the sky, and then the nearly three thousand tons of explosives detonated.
The explosion lifted the entire six million pounds of the Mont Blanc a thousand feet into the air, vaporized much of it, and dropped a shower of white-hot shrapnel over Halifax and Dartmouth, the city across the strait. The ship’s anchor shank, weighing half a ton, was thrown two miles, and the barrel of a large ship-mounted gun nearly three and a half. Water was sucked up into a column and then dropped again into the torrential wave that overswept the surroundings, rising nearly sixty feet beyond the high-water level. A cloud of white smoke rose twenty thousand feet into the sky. What remained of the benzol mixed with a cloud of water to form a sticky black rain that fell on both sides of the harbor for several minutes. A sound wave shot out, and the sound was audible more than two hundred miles away. An air blast rolled over the city, knocking down buildings, tearing through doors, windows, and walls, crushing the bodies of those who were hit head-on nearby, exploding eardrums and lungs, lifting people and hurling them into whatever was nearby or carrying them away, snapping trees and telegraph poles like twigs, reducing whole neighborhoods to splinters and rubble. A fireball followed, igniting much of what was within a mile or so surrounding what had been the Mont Blanc. Every building within a mile was destroyed, and many farther away were shattered or ignited. Then the fire began to spread: 325 acres were totally destroyed, 1,630 buildings annihilated, and 12,000 damaged. More than 1,500 people were killed, leaving behind widows, widowers, orphans, and bereaved parents. Nearly 9,000 people were injured, families torn apart, and ultimately 41 adults and children were blinded and 249 lost one eye or the sight in it.
After they despaired of doing anything about the conflagration, the crew of the Mont Blanc rushed to the lifeboats, rowed frantically ashore, and then ran. They landed near the Mi’kmaq village of Turtle Grove on the Dartmouth coast opposite Halifax. A native woman, Aggie March, stood with a baby in her arms, watching the spectacular, oddly colored flames. A sailor ran past her, grabbed the infant, and continued running into a thicket. When she caught up with him he knocked her down and jumped atop her and the infant. They survived, though nine in Turtle Grove were killed, and the explosion brought an end to the indigenous settlement that had existed since the eighteenth century. The blast shattered tens of thousands of windows into clusters of glass daggers that flew into walls, into wood, into flesh, and into eyes—into the many eyes of those who had been watching the drama in the harbor through windows that winter day. Windows shattered fifty miles away. One girl sitting at her desk in Halifax’s Catholic school saw the windows bend toward her like sails just in time to duck the shower of shards that followed. Houses were smashed into piles of splinters, and people were trapped or crushed underneath. The rain of black grease covered many of the people out of doors, making them almost unrecognizable to family members who met them on the streets, or in the hospitals, or went looking for them in the impromptu morgues.
Six-year-old Dorothy Lloyd was walking to St. Joseph’s Catholic School with her three sisters when a woman ran toward them, hair flying back, shouting, “Go back! Go back!” They saw a mountain of smoke in the sky, stopped in their tracks, and were thrown to the ground by the force of the explosion. Smoke filled the air.
“Dolly, look at the stovepipes flying in the air,” Dorothy said.
Her sister corrected her. “Those aren’t stovepipes. They’re sailors.” The men were streaming by, and the blast then picked up the two school-girls and separated them from their other sisters. They came to earth in a vacant lot surrounded by fallen birds. The blast tore the clothes off some of the people that December morning, even tight-laced boots and buttoned coats, depositing them naked or partially clothed as far as a mile from where they had been walking or standing and watching the ship on fire in the harbor. The steep slope of the city rising up from the water prevented many from falling any great distance when the blast was done carrying them, and several people survived extraordinary airborne journeys. Fireman Billy Wells had been racing toward the harbor on the fire engine Patricia. The next thing he knew was that he was standing naked far above where he had been, and his arm was hacked to the bone. A wave full of debris from the harbor followed him uphill and washed him into a field. Wells recovered, but not everyone was so lucky. The other seven members of the fire crew were killed, and when Wells walked away from where he had landed he saw corpses hanging out windows and draped over telegraph wires.
Many of the injuries were grotesque. Twelve-year-old Irene Duggan had been thrown into the air and impaled through the flesh of her arm on a metal stake that left her dangling above the ground. A soldier got her down, and the Duggan brothers and sisters who had not been buried under the partially collapsed house dug out their severely injured mother and sister. A soldier just back from the battlefields of the First World War said the event “affected me far worse than anything I saw in France. Over there you don’t see women and children all broken to pieces.” Though he’d been sent back to recuperate from a punctured lung, he made twenty-three trips to
a hospital carrying the wounded.
One of Dorothy Lloyd’s sisters had been trapped under a school gate until a soldier freed her; the other was entirely unharmed. The four girls went back to a home whose windows had been blown out, but the family stayed there waiting for an older child until a soldier drove them out at gunpoint. They walked to the Halifax Commons with their neighbors, and on the way the missing boy pulled up alongside them driving a wagon. The stunning scenes were not over for Lloyd, though. She went to see a ring of nuns holding their habits out from their sides and found they were screening a woman giving birth on the grass on that cold day.
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 9