The One-Person Revolution of Ammon Hennacy

This excerpt from Patrick Coy's essay, "The One-Person Revolution of Ammon Hennacy", speaks of Hennacy's influence on the Catholic Worker peace tradition. The essay appears in a book edited by Coy, Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker (Temple University Press, c.1988/New Society Publishers, 1992) and the excerpt is reproduced courtesy of Temple U.P. Royalties from this book go to the St. Louis Catholic Worker House.

[Dorothy] Day told long-time Catholic Worker Stanley Vishnewski that there "were three men who had a great influence on my life, and as a result, on the Catholic Worker." They were Reverend Pacifique Roy, Peter Maurin, and Ammon Hennacy. When Hennacy took up residence at the New York Worker in 1952, peace activism was at a rather low ebb. He set about to lead the Catholic Worker movement in particular, and the U.S. peace movement in general, into another arena of activism, that of nonviolent resistance.

Besides his tax resistance, Hiroshima fasts, and picketing of the Atomic Energy Commission to stop nuclear testing, in 1955 he instituted a six-year resistance to New York City's annual air raid drills, as required by the Civil Defense Act. The two years previous, in 1953 and 1954, people were not actually required to seek "shelter" for ten minutes. Nevertheless, Hennacy characteristically took the initiative and picketed, without being arrested. But in 1955, when he realized it was compulsory, he organized a group of pacifists that included Dorothy Day and twenty-eight others from various pacifist organizations. They openly refused to take shelter when the sirens sounded their warning and were promptly arrested. Media attention was broad. It was also relatively sympathetic. As Hennacy saw it, the drills were a farce: a silly war game, based on fear, which he refused to play. The religious leaflet for the action, written by Dorothy Day and signed by her and Ammon, boldly stated that one could not have faith in God and depend on the atom bomb at the same time. Hennacy continued to play a leading role in these annual acts of civil disobedience, and in the winter of 1960 he picketed the Civil Defense office two hours daily for three long months, calling for five thousand people to resist the compulsory air raid drill of 1961. Two thousand people joined the protest that year, with the result that from 1962 onward there has been no compulsory drill.

Hennacy worked tirelessly to move his adopted church closer to the social demands of the gospel. He was forever writing letters to individual bishops imploring them to be the prophetic pastors he thought the gospel called them to be on matters of capital punishment and war. In 1958, he made a pilgrimage to Florida to protest the nuclear missiles housed at Cape Canaveral. The plan was to picket the Catholic churches in the area, attempting to prick the consciences of the "faithful." One of the pastors angrily demanded that he remove the name "Catholic" from his sign because, as he saw it, Hennacy was giving Catholics a bad name and besides, he didn't have permission from either him or the bishop! Hennacy replied:

We are laypeople and we don't need permission from the Bishop or from you to oppose missiles for murder. The Church has had a bad name long enough supporting wars. I like the name Catholic, and I am trying to make it mean something like the early Christians meant it to be when Christians couldn't go to court or kill in war. I venture that in the years to come the Church will be proud that we Catholic Workers opposed missiles and war and that we gave the Church a good name.

Hennacy was imprisoned well over thirty times for his uncompromising activism. Some arrests brought prison terms of considerable length, including a six-month stay at Sandstone Federal Penitentiary for going over the fence at the Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha in 1959. Dorothy Day wrote of the singular nature of his role in the movement during this time: "No one else I know...seems capable of putting forth the sustained effort, and of demonstrating the tenacity of purpose so needed in this time."

Hennacy knew well the role and how to play it. The unwavering rebel believed that once truth, obtained in the fiery chambers of the one-person revolution and manifested in values, beliefs, and ideals, was concretized, it had a power to move the souls of women and men: "One person...with their witness in jail...is worth a dozen surveys or a score who pray and vigil...There is that in even the most conservative person which reacts to courage rather than to timidity." And react they did. Karl Meyer says, "Ammon had a tremendous influence...If you're going to talk about the Vietnam war generation in the Catholic Worker movement...you're going to talk of people who were deeply influenced by Ammon because Ammon threw up that radical challenge."

Although many have failed to recognize it, Hennacy was substantially more complex than he first appears. His own considerable courage was rooted not simply in his well-known inflated sense of self but in a deep and abiding faith. Hennacy summarized this faith in a letter to Dave Dellinger:

The strength which builds up this moral and physical courage and Way of Life has to come from within ourselves through some deep trial which has proven to us that we work not alone but with God, the Absolute, Good, or whatever name by which we designate that which is greater than ourselves. We either choose to work in harmony with this great force or we are on our own. Thoreau has stated it by saying that "one on the side of God is a majority," and Jesus says, "Behold, the Kingdom of God is within you."

Patrick Coy is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kent State University in Ohio. He lived in the St. Louis Catholic Worker House in Missouri for seven years and is on the board of the Peace History Society. In addition to this essay and the book which contains it, his other publications include:

"Houses of Hospitality: A Pilgrimage into Nonviolence" with Angie O'Gorman in A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker (op.cit.).

"Conscription and the Catholic Conscience in World War II" in American Catholic Pacifism: The Influence of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, edited by Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts (Praeger, 1996).

"The Incarnational Spirituality of Dorothy Day", Spirituality Today, vol. 39 no.2, 1987.

"Protective Accompaniment: How Peace Brigades International Secures Political Space and Human Rights Nonviolently" in Nonviolence: Social and Psychological Issues, edited by V.K.Kool (University Press of America, 1993).

"Cooperative Accompaniment and Peace Brigades International in Sri Lanka" in Solidarity Beyond the State: The Dynamics of Transnational Social Movement Organizations, edited by Jackie Smith et al. (Syracuse University Press, 1997).