Ammon Hennacy: Prophet Without Honor

by Dorothy Day

This tribute to Ammon Hennacy was written in 1956 and is reproduced from Dorothy Day: Selected Writings, edited by Robert Ellsberg (Orbis Books, 1992) with permission of the publisher. Hennacy was baptized in 1952 into the Catholic Church with Dorothy Day as his godmother and given the baptismal name of John the Baptist.

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It is easier to write about those who are dead than those who are alive. I have never tired of writing about Peter Maurin and Father Pacifique Roy, and shall probably write more about them before I die. They are unique and I can never do them justice. Other people will write about them too, and will in a way do a better job, but I must write as I have seen them, so there will always be a great deal of "I" in such writing.

And now I want to write about Ammon, knowing that he will not object. He is considered self-centered and egotistical and vain by many, and so he is in a way, enough so that he will rather appreciate my writing about him than not. There is an old American saying, "Every knock a boost," and certainly Ammon would rather people talk of him adversely than not talk of him at all. Hatred or love, but never indifference.

Ammon wanted to be paid attention to, because he has a message, because he is a prophet. His sense of mission leads him constantly to talk about what he is doing. Yet this is combined with a kind of humility, as though to say, "If I can do it, you can too. See what one small man of reasonable strength and intelligence can do. I did this, I did that, this is the way I meet a crisis, and if we all did it together we would ride out the gale and come through safely."

Undoubtedly he is right, irritatingly right. So he has become a prophet without honor in his own country. And it must be admitted that he is often hard to take. Someone said last year that a little of Ammon goes a long way. No one else I know, however, seems capable of the sustained effort, the perseverance so needed at this time of crisis. Most of us are inclined to shrug and say with St. Teresa of Avila, "All times are dangerous times," and then settle down to our daily affairs, trusting God to take care of everything. So long as we say a few prayers each day, get to Mass, and go on living our comfortable lives, we feel secure because we have "the faith." To Ammon, this whole lifetime is a time of crisis. "And none recognizes that there is a crisis," he says sadly.

As I write now about Ammon, it is two days before he begins his yearly fast -- that is, his yearly long fast. (Every Friday he fasts for the sake of health and discipline.) His long fast begins on the Feast of the Transfiguration, August 6, which is also the anniversary of the first dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. There had been obliteration bombings before -- entire cities had been set aflame -- but this work of one bomb surpassed them all in horror. Since then, Ammon has fasted a day for each year since the bomb was dropped. This year his fast will last eleven days. During this period he will picket the income tax office, giving out literature and carrying a sign as a protest against the payment of income tax, 80 percent of which is for war purposes. "If we pay taxes," he says simply, "we pay for the bomb."

He has presented us all with a problem. What kind of work can we do for which we need not pay federal income tax? Even if we do not pay it directly, there is a withholding from pay, and the hidden federal taxes on tobacco, liquor, the theater.

Ammon solved the problem for himself by working by the day, at hard labor, in the Southwest. He irrigated, picked cotton, worked in the fields all around Phoenix, Arizona, and took home his daily pay. He lived like the early fathers of the desert on vegetables and bread and sent his money to his two daughters so they could finish their education at Northwestern University. When he had fulfilled this obligation, he came to New York and joined our staff. Here he works for board and room, as the rest of us do, and so does not have to pay federal income tax here, either.

The men in the kitchen all like Ammon -- for one reason, because he has been in prison, because he feels that all men who have been in prison are most especially his comrades. Many a man who has worked with us, dishwashing, waiting on tables, and cooking, has seen the inside of our jails. It is easy enough to go to jail if you are poor. You can be sentenced for vagrancy, for sleeping on a park bench or in the subway, for begging, for selling neckties without a license, even for walking through the park after midnight. Ammon served his sentence, his long sentence as a conscientious objector, during the First World War, when he spent nine months in solitary confinement, and another year besides.

Ammon is a vegetarian, but he doesn't "make a religion of it." He sees to it that he gets enough to eat: fruit in the morning, soup at noon, and a goodly meal of cheese, eggs, vegetables, and salads at night. Betweentimes he doesn't scorn a wedge of pie, hot chocolate or tea, either. But he does without coffee, as one other of the unnecessary things of life. Put him out on the desert and he would find some way of living, even if it meant chopping mesquite and selling the wood from door to door in the nearest town. He has subsisted on the gleanings from the immense vegetable fields of the Southwest. Working in date orchards, he has lived on dates.

We like to call Ammon our American peasant, just as Peter Maurin was our French peasant. He was born in southern Ohio (pronounced "O-hi-a") near the Pennsylvania and West Virginia borders. His grandfather was a farmer, and he worked on the farm as a young boy.

He lived in a tiny mining town and once drove Mother Jones in a horse and buggy to a meeting of miners in Cannelton, West Virginia, only a few miles away. It was one of his earliest encounters with a radical. Despite a Baptist background, Ammon very early became an atheist and socialist. Eugene Debs and Mother Jones were his heroes, and he believed in trade unions and political action. It was while he was in Atlanta Penitentiary, in solitary confinement with only a Bible to read, that he became a religious pacifist. Reading all of Tolstoy later confirmed him in his pacifism and anarchism. From then on, guided by the Sermon on the Mount, he wanted to lead a life of poverty, loving-kindness, and peacefulness.

Besides being a "peasant" and so possessed of great endurance and vitality, Ammon is also a great salesman. In my bitter moments I have called him a Babbitt. He enjoys getting out on the street to sell, whether it be the paper, his book, or his ideas. This is his way of meeting the crisis.

I speak of "bitter moments," and I mean that it is irksome to live with someone who is always right, who points out that he knows how to work, that he knows how to eat, to fast, to sleep, to meet each and every problem of the day. He would like to have followers, disciples, but Americans do not make good followers -- they each want to go their own way. But living in community is saving Ammon. He is learning not to give the ready answer to every problem, not to be surprised at criticism, at the nagging that goes with community life. He is learning to recognize that all men have their various talents, physical, mental, and spiritual. That the vocation of one is not the vocation of all.

His too-hasty judgments of others and his inability to see that he himself is ever wrong -- these are his most obvious faults. (We all have them, but we hide them more.) His faults seem to be faults of speech rather than action. "Do what he does and pay no attention to what he says," I often feel like declaring when he is guilty of some evident heresy or lack of charity. With most of us, it is just the opposite -- we are so much better in our speech than in our actions. But in all that he does Ammon is charity itself. When an extra bed has been needed, he has given up his own over and over again.

It is Ammon who will meet visitors at the railroad station and stay up nights to entertain them. He is always faithful in getting the mail and answering the telephone. He likes to have every moment accounted for, and spend from eleven to three each day on the street -- on Wall Street, at Forty-third and Lexington, at Fordham University (where he loves meeting priests and nuns), at Union Square, or in front of Cooper Union or the New School.

How many thousands has he contacted personally, face to face, with his good news of the Kingdom of God, where the lion may lie down with the lamb, where no man calls his cloak his own, where there is a companion for every weary mile. Ammon believes and acts on the belief that here and now is the time to begin.

It would take too long to explain his "anarchism," which is an individual brand. What he is really fighting is the modern state and war, which is "the health of the state." But he loosely bandies about the words "government" and "law" as though he would throw them all out the window. Peter Maurin used to do very much the same sort of thing. "It makes to think," he used to say. "It is good to shock people into thinking."

Yet if all men were like Ammon, caring for others, washing the feet of others, taking the least place, there would be no need for courts, judges, or police. How strange it is that all the anarchists I have met have been the most disciplined of men, lawful and orderly, while those who insist that discipline and order must prevail are those who out of plain contrariness would refuse to obey and are most unable to regulate themselves. But perhaps these are generalizations.

The fact remains that Ammon is a prophet, and will walk the streets fasting and calling on man to awaken to the crisis of the time and the part he could play in averting it.

On the night before his fast he will gird himself for the ordeal, taking fruit juices and going to bed early. On Monday he will be up for seven o'clock Mass. He will go down by bus to Battery Park, where he will begin to pace the street, carrying a poster and giving out literature. With a few moments of rest every hour, he will picket this way, eight hours a day, each day except Saturday and Sunday (when the offices are closed and no one is there to see him). And as the week goes on, his voice will get weaker; when he comes home he will lie on one of the long low tables in the back office for a bit of rest, until he can regain enough strength to climb the four flights to his bed.

There are some ways in which we can cooperate with him. We can take turns picketing with him, walking up and down, giving out papers, listening to the scoffs and jeers of some of the men and women who go by, and even perhaps shield him from possible attack (as we have had to do on several occasions).

Why picket as well as fast? some will ask. In a way it is easier to move than to sit still. It is easier to keep moving slowly, up and down the streets on a warm summer day, watching the boats go down the bay, talking to passerby, even if only exchanging a word. One year Ammon announced that he was fasting until the crisis was over, but I talked him out of that, since we are perpetually in crisis. There is always one more crisis, but who knows which will be the one to precipitate war?

But Ammon Hennacy is never a victim of that dread disease of the day, futility. He is vital and alive, he reverences life and is grateful to God for the gift of life. He has his sense of mission and is convinced as an anarchist that what is going to happen depends on each one of us and the part we play. And his part is that of a John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness: "Make straight the way of the Lord."