IV. Dorothy Day's Lessons for Labor ⁴³⁹

Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin and the members of the Catholic Worker practiced what they preached. Day consistently emphasized the dignity and the importance of work while encouraging the solidarity of labor with the unemployed, and ever-present poor; an approach reflecting both Depression-era realities, and perhaps even more compelling, the Catholic Church's preferential option for the poor. Dorothy's writing was eloquent and her personal commitment to, and solidarity with, workers was magnificent. In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, ⁴⁴⁰ Day recounts how her awareness of labor issues first emerged during her college years:

There was Eugene Debs. There were the Haymarket martyrs who had been "framed" and put to death in Chicago in 1887. They were martyrs! They had died for a cause. . . .

There had been in the past the so-called "Molly Maguires" in the coal fields, a terrorist organization, and the Knights of Labor, made up of union men working for the eight-hour day and the co-operative system. My heart thrilled at those unknown women in New England who led the first strike to liberate women and children from the cotton mills.

. . . .

Already in this year 1915 great strides had been taken. In some places the ten-hour day and increased wages had been won. But still only about 8 per cent of the workers were organized, and the great mass of workers throughout the country were ground down by poverty and insecurity. What work there was to be done! ⁴⁴¹

In recounting her first experiences as a journalist with the socialist paper, The Call, ⁴⁴² Dorothy noted her ever-increasing awareness of the labor union movement and the major players within it, including the American Federation of Labor, the Industrial Workers of the World, ⁴⁴³ and the newly formed Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.), whose members were said to be the remainder of the larger group which had signed up with the "reds." ⁴⁴⁴ Dorothy Day's first signs of a maturing labor consciousness, thus, were initially formed far from the contours of Catholic teaching or the influence of the Catholic Church. In her autobiography she summarized these early social influences on her thought:

I wavered between my allegiance to socialism, syndicalism (the I.W.W.'s) and anarchism. When I read Tolstoi, I was an anarchist. Ferrer with his schools, Kropotkin with his farming communes, the I.W.W.'s with their solidarity, their unions, these all appealed to me. . . . The I.W.W. had an immediate program for America so I signed up with them.

I do not remember any antireligious articles in the Call. . . . [ ]I was surprised to find many quotations from Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII and a very fair exposition of the Church's social teachings. I paid no attention to it at the time. Catholics were a world apart, a people within a people, making little impression on the tremendous non-Catholic population of the country.

There was no attack on religion because people were generally indifferent to religion. They were neither hot nor cold. They were the tepid, the materialistic, who hoped that by Sunday churchgoing they would be taking care of the afterlife, if there were an afterlife. Meanwhile they would get everything they could in this.

On the other hand, the Marxists, the I.W.W.'s who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion-they were the ones who were eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world which they were fighting to obtain for their brothers. It was then, and still is, a paradox that confounds me. ⁴⁴⁵

Shortly after becoming a Catholic, she began working as a reporter for The Commonweal, a progressive periodical founded in 1924 and the first Catholic publication for which she would write as a journalist. ⁴⁴⁶ Dorothy's work could often be found in more than one journal. In 1932, a piece Day wrote about regarding a Washington D.C. convention of protesting small tenant farmers from around the nation, the first article she ever was compensated for, appeared in both America and Commonweal magazines. ⁴⁴⁷ In it, Dorothy Day recounts the experience of seeing the caravan of cars and trucks which had traveled to the nation's capital, the poverty of the demonstrators, the willingness of the participants to share food, and the comraderie which blossomed between the farmers, the poor, and the unemployed. ⁴⁴⁸ Here she recounts their demonstration:

On a bright sunny day the ragged horde triumphantly with banners flying, with lettered slogans mounted on sticks, paraded three thousand strong through the tree-flanked streets of Washington. I stood on the curb and watched them, joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women mounting in my heart, and with it a bitterness too that since I was now a Catholic, with fundamental philosophical differences, I could not be out there with them. I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?

. . . .

The demands of the marchers were for social legislation, for unemployment insurance, for old-age pensions, for relief for mothers and children, [and] for work. I remember seeing one banner on which was inscribed, "Work, not wages," a mysterious slogan having to do with man's dignity, his ownership of and responsibility for the means of production. ⁴⁴⁹

Years later, in reflecting on her early work, Dorothy experienced shame and remorse over her abstraction, her absence of solidarity, and her detachment from workers:

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! My summer of quiet reading and prayer, my self-absorption seemed sinful as I watched my brothers in their struggle, not for themselves but for others. How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself. They were His friends, His comrades, and who knows how close to His heart in their attempt to work for justice. ⁴⁵⁰

It was in that galvanizing epiphany experience that Dorothy Day's labor and social consciousness as a Catholic was fused, rejuvenated, and revivified in a new, different, transforming way. She poignantly recounts in her autobiography:

When the demonstration was over and I had finished writing my story, I went to the national shrine at the Catholic University on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.

As I knelt there, I realized that after three years of Catholicism my only contact with active Catholics had been through articles I had written for one of the Catholic magazines. Those contacts had been brief, causal. I still did not know personally one Catholic layman. ⁴⁵¹

The first issue of the Catholic Worker newspaper, printed on May 1, 1933, ⁴⁵² gave Day the opportunity she desired. Dorothy described the solidarity of the Catholic Worker as follows: " The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited." ⁴⁵³ This posture was evident from the start. One of the articles appearing in the first edition addressed the exploitation of African- American labor in the South. ⁴⁵⁴ The second issue focused on farmer strikes in the Midwest and the poor working conditions of restaurant workers in urban areas. ⁴⁵⁵ The third issue dealt with textile strikes, and child labor in the textile industry. ⁴⁵⁶ The fourth issue dealt with strikes in the coal and milk industries. ⁴⁵⁷

The Catholic Worker also gave Day the opportunity to really become an integral part of the stories she and her colleagues had been writing. Throughout the volatile period of labor organizing which accompanied the Great Depression, Dorothy Day constantly supplemented her journalistic efforts in the Catholic Worker by physically joining workers at job sites and on picket lines. ⁴⁵⁸ In 1934, Dorothy and other employees of the Catholic Worker directly practiced the labor solidarity which the paper urged by picketing the Ohrbach Department Store in Manhattan, side by side with the store's own striking employees. ⁴⁵⁹ Day recalled,

[T]here was mass picketing every Saturday afternoon during the Ohrbach strike, and every Saturday the police drove up with patrol wagons and loaded the pickets into them with their banners and took them to jail. When we entered the dispute with our slogans drawn from the writings of the popes regarding the condition of labor, the police around Union Square were taken aback and did not know what to do. It was as though they were arresting the Holy Father himself, one of them said, were they to load our pickets and their signs into their patrol wagons. The police contented themselves with giving us all injunctions. One seminarian who stood on the side lines and cheered was given an injunction too, which he cherished a souvenir.⁴⁶⁰

"The most spectacular help" Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker gave to assist a strike was through providing housing and food to strikers during the formation of the National Maritime Workers Union in May, 1936: ⁴⁶¹

The seamen came and went and most of them we never saw again . . . . For the duration of the strike we rented a store on Tenth Avenue and used it as a reading room and a soup kitchen where no soup was served, but coffee and peanut butter and apple butter sandwiches. The men came in from picket lines and helped themselves to what they needed. They read, they talked, and they had time to think. ⁴⁶²

Day and others went to Pittsburgh "to write about the work in the steel districts," and to cover the organizing drives by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. ⁴⁶³ On another occasion, the group directly supported a dairy workers strike. ⁴⁶⁴ According to Day, "when the Borden Milk Company attempted to force a company union on their workers, The Catholic Worker took up their cause, called public attention to the use of gangsters and thugs to intimidate the drivers and urged our readers to boycott the company's products while unfair conditions prevailed." ⁴⁶⁵ Day also reported that she "spoke to meetings of the unemployed in California, to migrant workers, tenant farmers, steelworkers, stockyard workers, [and] auto workers." ⁴⁶⁶

With the support of the Archbishop of Detroit, who urged her to "go to them, to write about them," Dorothy travelled to Flint, Michigan to cover a sit-down strike being staged in a number of General Motors' factories there. ⁴⁶⁷ Speaking of the Archbishop, Day wrote, "[h]e had one of his priests reserve and pay for a Pullman berth for me so I would be fresh the next day for my work." ⁴⁶⁸ "I visited strike headquarters during the Little Steel strike and talked with the men." ⁴⁶⁹ For more than two decades, beginning in 1937, the Catholic Worker was the intellectual home for the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists. ⁴⁷⁰ At its zenith, the Association maintained fourteen chapters and one hundred labor schools, most of which were concentrated in New York and Detroit. ⁴⁷¹ Perhaps Dorothy's most direct advocacy on behalf of labor was her challenge to Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York. In 1949, the unionized "grave diggers of Calvary Cemetery, [represented by] Local 293 of the International Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers Union, went on strike against their employer, the trustees of St. Patrick Cathedral, principal among whom was Cardinal Spellman." ⁴⁷² The strike continued for over a month, until it was crushed by the Cardinal, who personally ordered and led his seminarians into the cemetery as replacement workers. ⁴⁷³ Cardinal Spellman stated that the strike was "communist inspired," [and] that he was 'proud and happy to be a strike breaker."' ⁴⁷⁴ He said "his resistance to the strike was 'the most important thing I have done in my ten years in New York."' ⁴⁷⁵ While he eventually broke the strike, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker bore profound and direct witness to his egregious repudiation of Catholic social teaching on the rights of workers. Dorothy Day had decided that "the strike was justified," and members of the Catholic Worker joined striking workers on the picket line at the cemetery. ⁴⁷⁶ Cardinal Spellman and Dorothy Day, in spite of, or perhaps because of this confrontation, had deep respect for one another, strengthened by Dorothy Day's manifest practices as a Catholic in impeccably good theological standing. ⁴⁷⁷ She was theologically and liturgically traditional, while radical in her social justice activism. She once stated, "[w]hen it comes to labor and politics, . . . I am inclined to be sympathetic to the left, but when it comes to the Catholic Church, then I am far to the right." ⁴⁷⁸

Dorothy, called to witness, confronted the Cardinal directly and she made real and living the Catholic Church's powerful and eloquent social teaching on the rights of workers. She later said of the strike,

[It] "could have been headed off in the very beginning. The trustees could have shown the books to the workers if justice was on their side, proven in black and white that they were incapable of paying of what the strikers asked. . . ." [I]t was "all yesterday's news now, those strikers who had to drop their life insurance because they couldn't meet payments." [T]he "terrible significance" of the strike was that "here in our present peaceful New York, a Cardinal, ill-advised, exercised so overwhelming a show of force against a handful of poor working men". ⁴⁷⁹

Day wrote a very eloquent letter to Cardinal Spellman on March 4, 1949.

I am deeply grieved to see the reports . . . of your leading Dunwoodie seminarians [sic] into Calvary cemetery, past picket lines, to "break the strike.". . . Of course you know that a group of our associates at the Catholic Worker office in New York, have beenhelping [sic] the strikers, both in providing food for their families, and in picketing . . . . [Y]ou have been misinformed. I am writing to you, because this strike, though small, is a terribly significant one in a way. Instead of people being able to say of us "see how they love one another," and "behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity" now "we have become a reproach to our neighbors an object of derision and mockery to those about us." It is not just the issue of wages and hours as I can see from the conversations which our workers have had with the men. It is a question of their dignity as men, their dignity as workers, and the right to have a union of their own, and a right to talk over their grievances. It is no use going into the wages, or the offers that you have made for a higher wage (but the same work week). A wage such as the Holy Fathers have talke[d] of which would enable the workers to raise and educate their families of six, seven and eight children, a wage which would enable them to buy homes, to save for such ownership, to put by for the education of the children,-certainly the wage which they have in these days of high price prices [sic] and exhorbitant [sic] rents, is not the wage for which they are working. Regardless of what the board of trustees can afford to pay, the wage is small compared to the wealth of the men represented on the board of trustees[.] The way the workers live is in contrast to the way of living of the board of trustees. . . . Regardless of rich and poor, the class antagonisms which exist between the well-to-do, those who live on Park [A]venue and Madison [A]venue and those who dig the graves in the cemetery,--regardless of these contrasts, which are most assuredly there, the issue is always one of the dignity of the workers. It is a world issue. ⁴⁸⁰

Even near the end of her life, Dorothy Day continued her commitment of physical presence with the organization of workers.

Her last major adventure came in August, 1973, when she went to the San Joaquin Valley in California to join Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers in its demonstration against the Teamsters Union. In her support of Chavez and the Mexican itinerant workers, she, along with a thousand-or-so others, was arrested and briefly jailed. " 'If it weren't a prison, it would be a nice place to rest,' she commented." ⁴⁸¹

With her lifetime of fifty years of direct and immediate solidarity with workers and with the poor, Dorothy Day wrote of the absolute imperative of the fusion of labor practice and labor theory.

Going around and seeing such sights is not enough. To help the organizers, to give what you have for relief, to pledge yourself to voluntary poverty for life so that you can share with your brothers is not enough. One must live with them, share with them their suffering too. Give up one's privacy, and mental and spiritual comforts as well as physical.

. . . .

We have lived with the unemployed, the sick, the unemployables. The contrast between the worker who is organized and has his union, the fellowship of his own trade to give him strength, and those who have no organization and come in to us on a breadline is pitiable.

. . . .

Going to the people is the purest and best act in Christian tradition and revolutionary tradition and is the beginning of world brotherhood. ⁴⁸²

The struggle for workers' dignity must be perpetual and incessant. Although the poor will always be with us, Dorothy Day reminds us, by her personal witness, to struggle valiantly to improve the status of workers everywhere.

In the labor movement every strike is considered a failure, a loss of wages and man power, and no one is ever convinced that understanding between employer and worker is any clearer or that gains have been made on either side; and yet in the long history of labor, certainly there has been a slow and steady bettering of conditions. Women no longer go down into the mines, little children are not fed into the mills. In the long view the efforts of the workers have achieved much. ⁴⁸³

Throughout her half century of direct personal commitment to workers, throughout a half century of participation in labor strikes and solidarity on picket lines, Dorothy Day always kept in mind the dignity of all persons— including the employees, with an emphasis on peace and conciliation, and the imperative of charity, decency, and kindness to all.

Her March 4, 1949 letter to Cardinal Spellman, urging him to negotiate with the graveyard workers, rather than break their strike, perhaps best, and certainly most poignantly, summarizes her practice and her theory.

You are a Prince in the Church, and a great man in the eyes of the world, and these your opponents are all little men, hard working, day laborers, hard handed and hard headed men, filled with their grievances, an accumulation of their grievances. They have wanted to talk to you, they have wanted to appeal to you. The[y] felt that surely their Cardinal would not be against them. And oh, I do beg you so, with all my heart, to go to them, as a father to his children; do not go to a court, do not perpetuate a fight, for ages and ages. Go to them, conciliate them. It is easier for the great to give in than the poor. They are hungry men, their only weapon has been their labor, which they have sold for a means of livelihood, to feed themselves and their families. They have indeed labored with the sweat of their brows, not lived off the sweat of anyone else. They have trully [sic] worked, they have been poor, they are suffering now. Any union organizer will tell you that it is not easy to get men out on strike and it is not easy to keep them out on strike. But the grievance has grown, the anger has grown here. If there were only some way to reach peace. I am sure that the only way is for you to go to them. You have been known to walk the streets among your people, and to call on the poor parishes in person, alone and unattended. Why cannot you go to the union, ask for the leaders, tell them that as members of the mystical body, all members are needed and useful and that we should not quarrel together, that you will meet their demands, be their servant as Christ was the servant of [H]is disciples, washing their feet. ⁴⁸⁴

Because of her personal witness, commitment and solidarity with workers everywhere, whether expressed on picket lines or in her newspaper, Dorothy Day's lessons for labor have profound practical and theoretical significance. It is to her theory of labor that the article will now turn.

Because of her unequivocal and courageous personal commitment to literally walk the picket lines with striking workers and to be a member of the labor community in this most real and dramatic way, Dorothy Day's theory of labor has special resonance and genuine meaning. Like her personal philosophies regarding the role and rights of workers, Day's conceptualization of labor theory is best articulated and appreciated through her articles appearing in the Catholic Worker newspaper, which she edited from its founding on May 1, 1933. ⁴⁸⁵ When the Catholic Worker was founded, the United States was in the depths of the Great Depression. ⁴⁸⁶ Dorothy's statements on labor throughout the period reflect a rich, complex and sophisticated mind. They also reflect, at least equally, and perhaps in an even more compelling way, her deep, personal and lifelong commitment to workers as human beings. Day's essays and columns in the Catholic Worker from 1933 until the immediate post-World War II period of the late 1940s best reflect her fused praxis and theory.

From its inception, the Catholic Worker focused upon the universal world of work. Of the view of one of its co-founders, Day noted, "[I]n Peter's [Maurin] vision, work is a gift. Given for the common good,--And the reason why one works is to share gifts and talents, in common with others, to help create a better kind of society." ⁴⁸⁷ Emphasizing the "catholicity" of the paper, in both the religious and universal sense of that word, the Catholic Worker sought the unity of workers. ⁴⁸⁸ In a direct, working class language, the newspaper promulgated to workers the social teaching of the Catholic Church, a social justice language that is thoroughly integrative and truly universal: "We try to stress the duty of the workers towards God and himself first of all. And the Catholic neglects those duties when he does not work for social justice." ⁴⁸⁹ The Catholic Worker unsparing criticized the aristocracy of organized labor, repudiated the influences of atheistic communism within labor, and thoroughly condemned the materialism of the capitalist ownership elites:

One of the difficulties of the labor movement in the United States is that there has been an aristocracy of labor, union men getting high wages in various trades, and ignoring their poorer comrades who have not had the benefits of unionization such as in the textile and mining fields. There is graft and racketeering in labor organizations which has justly prejudiced not only the employer but the poorer worker against them so that they are more willing very often to accept the radical trade unions than they are the old established ones. There is always a rank and file fight going on against existing trade unions and their technique. ⁴⁹⁰

Throughout the Catholic Worker essays is an ongoing call for pride and care in work on the part of each individual worker:

I agree too that the attitude of the worker towards his labor is not correct. There is a loss of pride in craftsmanship which is due to the mechanization of industry. Pride in doing to the best of one's ability the work that God has given him to do, is a lesson which the American worker will have to relearn. ⁴⁹¹

The organized labor union was a major focus of Day's attention throughout the years of her advocacy. The labor union is the greatest tool in a system of fallible alternatives and mediating social structures available to the working individual. ⁴⁹² The labor union is not an end in itself, but, rather, a means towards the achievement of human dignity, the central theme of the papal encyclicals on the rights of workers. ⁴⁹³ Wherever possible, Dorothy Day urged Catholic employees to strengthen the Catholic solidarity between one another by seeking each other out both within the union structure and outside of it, in the non-unionized workplace. She pointed to a third and better path, transcending both atheistic Marxism and capitalist materialism, which members of labor unions in a capitalist political economy could look to attempt to solve the problems of society. In her February, 1936 Catholic Worker column, she stated:

The Catholic Worker does not believe that unions, as they exist today in the United States, are an ideal solution for the social problem, or for any part of it.

We do believe that they are the only efficient weapon which workers have to defend their rights as individuals and Christians against a system which makes the Christ-life practically impossible for large numbers of workers. We believe that Catholic workers must use unions in their efforts to heed the exhortations of the Popes to "de-proletarianize" the workers. (For we too are working toward a classless society, one in which all may become owners, instead of none as the Marxian would have it, or only the ruthless few as capitalism decrees.)

In this measure unions are a form of propaganda for more constructive measures toward a truly Catholic social order. As Pius XI has said in speaking of the work of Catholic unions and of Catholics in unions: "Thus they prepare the way for a Christian renewal of the whole social life." ⁴⁹⁴

Unions must be autonomous and independent, with each individual constituent member contributing to the collective common good. ⁴⁹⁵ In language eerily prescient of the contemporary debate regarding whether to repeal section 8(a)(2) of the National Labor Relations Act, ⁴⁹⁶ Dorothy stated:

It seems obvious that a union instigated and controlled by the company, whose officers are paid for their "union work" by the company, is not likely to meet with success in gaining these benefits for the workers. . . .

It should be obvious, too, that a union cannot function effectively in an "open shop"--a plant where the union represents only some of the men, and where the company is at liberty to hire non-union men. Such a condition means that the presence of men who will have no protection in the event of wage- cutting or any form of exploitation will act as an obstacle to union efforts and will tend to lower the general wage level. ⁴⁹⁷

She particularly emphasized the critical importance of a collective consciousness:

There must . . . be a sacrifice of individual freedom for the common good. We regret that, in the present instance of the Borden [milk company strike] dispute, we have found some Catholics both too short sighted to see the advantages of organization to the workers as a whole, and unwilling to make the sacrifices or take the risks involved in fulfilling their duty of charity.

We believe it is the duty of every Catholic worker to inform himself of the Church's teaching on labor, and to strive for the common good of himself and his fellow workers by applying them to labor situations in which he may be involved.

. . . .

We believe that strikes are a grave danger to the common good, and that we as Catholics have a duty to use every means in our power to prevent them. ⁴⁹⁸

The Catholic Worker always focused on the international human rights dimension of unionization. In a September, 1937, page one article, the Catholic Worker emphasized:

The Catholic Worker is a workingman's paper which is published to bring Catholic social principles to the workers in industry, to men and women and young people in mills, in factories, in mines and lumber camps, on ships that sail all over the world, and on docks where men unload those ships. The Catholic Worker is not a local paper. It doesn't just go to the workers in New York, where it is published, but goes all over the United States and Canada and even all over the world.

. . . .

Our paper is addressed especially to Catholics, because we are Catholics, and because a great number of the workers of this country, those who have come from the other side as well as those whose families have been here for generations, are Catholics. We are all Catholics first of all, whether we are French or Irish, Lithuanian or Italian. Nationalities make no difference. Catholic principles remain the same. And the Church has a great deal to say about these principles in regard to the rights and duties of labor.

Your right and your duty to organize, to join a union, is an elementary right, a natural right, but it is also a duty. As long ago as 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote a great letter to labor in which he told the workers of the world that the only way to better their position was to organize into unions so that they could achieve better wages and hours of labor, better working conditions, and the right to be recognized as men, creatures of body and soul, temples of the Holy Ghost.

Pope Pius XI followed that great letter on labor by another one in 1931 when he repeated all Leo XIII had said and pointed out again in even stronger terms the duty as well as the right of labor to organize. He wanted the workers to have such good salaries that they could save enough to buy homes, to educate their children, and to put by for their old age. He wanted them to have enough even so that they could buy a share in industry, so that they could become part owners and share in the responsibilities of industry. ⁴⁹⁹

The Catholic Worker emphasized the imperative of collective action, not for its own sake, but for the ultimate enhancement of human dignity.

We all know that by himself, the worker can do very little. He has to join into association with his fellows in order to have the strength to meet with his employer and to bargain collectively.

As Catholics we do not like especially that word "bargain." It assumes that labor is a community [sic] to be sold by the worker at the highest possible price, and to be bought by the employer at the lowest possible price. It degrades labor and takes away from it the dignity it has as a vocation as well as a task by which we earn our daily bread.

. . . .

We would rather say that labor must organize so that they will have the strength to make their voice heard, not only by the employer but by the public. So that they can bring pressure to bear, if needs be on the employer, to force him by this moral pressure to give better conditions to the workers.

Without this combined strength the worker can get nowhere. He must join with others to form a union to better his condition. ⁵⁰⁰

Thus, the labor union is more than a means of organizing the workplace and benefitting those who return to the job site each day; it has the additional imperative of seeking broader social justice. ⁵⁰¹ Day elaborated on this point:

[I]f you have a strong union and good conditions in one town, you would have to help another town achieve those same conditions, by both moral and physical support. And only a national organization can do this.

As Catholics you certainly ought to realize the necessity to work as a body. You are all members of the Mystical Body of Christ and St. Paul's saying was that when one member suffers, the health of the whole body is lowered. If some of you, in other words, are satisfied with your wages and hours, you have no right to sit back and be comfortable while great masses of workers are suffering under deplorable conditions—poor wages that are not sufficient to maintain a family and keep them in decent health, let alone afford them education and other needs. As long as the great mass of workers have to live in unsanitary, unheated tenements, no one has a right to his comfort while his brother is in misery. ⁵⁰²

Throughout, the Catholic Worker continually emphasized the example of Christ as worker and his solidarity with, and position as liaison to, the poor: ⁵⁰³

Christ was a worker Himself, and He set an example to us all. He was a worker and He loved the workers. The last words He said to His disciples, the last commandment He gave them, which comprised all the rest, was that we were to love one another. We cannot, in other words, love God unless we love our neighbor. And if we love our neighbor, we have to show our love by trying to help him. Of ourselves we can do nothing. We must band together, and with God's help, fight for better conditions for the workers throughout the country, not only in one town. If we are not working together, we are denying Christ and His poor. And He said, "inasmuch as you have not done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have not done it unto me." He was talking then of ministering to others, and seeing to it that they have food and drink, and visitors when they were in prison or sick in the hospital. An association of workers can do these things for each other. ⁵⁰⁴

Perhaps Dorothy Day's greatest synthesis of her labor theory was set forth in the June 1939 issue of the Catholic Worker, in an essay entitled The Catholic Worker and Labor. The emphasis throughout was on the example of Christ, and the teaching of the Church through the great social and labor encyclicals of 1891 and 1931.

[W]e are not only urging the necessity for organization to all workers . . . but [are] also stressing over and over again the dignity of labor, the dignity of the person--a creature composed of body and soul made in the image and likeness of God, and a Temple of the Holy Ghost. It is on these grounds that we fight the speed-up system in the factory, it is on these grounds that we work toward de-proletarianizing the worker, working toward a share in the ownership and responsibility.

. . . .

We pointed out again and again that the issue is not just one of wages and hours, but of ownership and of the dignity of man. It is not State ownership toward which we are working, although we believe that some industries should be run by the government for the common good, it is a more widespread ownership through cooperative ownership. ⁵⁰⁵

The immediate post-World War II era saw an increasing sophistication and awareness of the corroding effects of industrial production on the human psyche. These trends became increasingly evident to the Catholic Worker as did the themes which drove them. However, no attempt to commercialize the newspaper was made. The Catholic Worker continued to be sold for a penny and Dorothy Day's theory of labor never became idealized or romanticized beyond the hard lessons of the Christian gospel. In fact, Day took great pains to expose the false romanticism that upper middle class, distanced intellectuals often attached to organized labor.

I wish to fling down the challenge at once, that what is the great disaster is that priests and laity alike have lost the concept of work, they have lost a philosophy of labor, as Peter Maurin has always said. They have lost the concept of work, and those who do not know what work in the factory is, have romanticized both it and the workers . . . . ⁵⁰⁶

Mass production de-emphasized the role of the individual, and compelled one to submit oneself to a dehumanizing work process of " 'work without end,' which chains workers to machines and especially to the authority of those who own and control them--capital and its managerial retainers." ⁵⁰⁷ This was the reality of the industrial assembly line era and the newspaper worked to warn its readers against the growing false consciousness:

In the great clean shining factories, with good lights and air and the most sanitary conditions, an eight-hour day, five-day week, with the worker chained to the belt, to the machine, there is no opportunity for sinning as the outsider thinks of sin. No, it is far more subtle than that, it is submitting oneself to a process which degrades, dehumanizes. To be an efficient factory worker, one must become a hand, and the more efficient one is, the less one thinks. Take typewriting, for instance, as an example . . . or driving a car, or a sewing machine. These machines may be considered good tools, an extension of the hand of man. We are not chained to them as to a belt, but even so, we all know that as soon as one starts to think of what one is doing, we slip and make mistakes. One IS NOT SUPPOSED TO THINK. TO THINK is dangerous at a machine. One is liable to lose a finger or a hand, and then go on the scrap heap and spend the rest of one's life fighting for compensation for one's own carelessness, as the factory owners say, for not using the safety devices invented and so plentiful . . . .

. . . .

AND HERE IS THE DANGEROUS PART, it is not so much the loss of the hand or the arm, but the loss of one's soul. When one gives one's self up to one's work, when one ceases to think and becomes a machine himself, the devil enters in. We cannot lose ourselves in our work without grave danger. ⁵⁰⁸

Dorothy Day shattered romanticism; she urged reality, and professed that, in reforming reality, ideals can be envisioned and perhaps might even be achieved: ⁵⁰⁹

[ ]I accuse the leaders, the teachers, the intellectuals, the clergy, of having a romantic attitude towards the workers. They write with fervor and glowing words—they dramatize the struggle, they are walking on picket lines, they love the man in the dungarees and the blue or plaid shirt, they write glowingly of his calloused hands—they take these leaves from the communist notebook—they are glorifying the proletariat, the dispossessed, the propertyless, the homeless, and the workers can hang a holy medal on their machine, or over their bunk in the fo'castle and pray as they begin and finish their work and go home to their two-room or three-room apartment and surrounded by children and an exhausted wife, sanctify their surroundings—or forget them in the nearest tavern with polluted beer, adulterated wine or hard liquor.

. . . .

In 1939, in an address to the International Congress of Catholic Women's League, the Holy Father said: "In this age of mechanization the human person becomes merely a more perfect tool in industrial production and how sad it is to say it, a perfected tool for mechanized warfare. And at the same time material and ready-made amusement is the only thing which stirs and sets the limits to the aspirations of the masses . . . . In this disintegration of human personality efforts are being made to restore unity. But the plans proposed are vitiated from the start because they set out from the self same principle as the evil they intend to cure. The wounds and bruises of individualistic and materialistic mankind cannot be healed by a system which is materialistic in its own principles and mechanistic in the application of its principles . . . ." ⁵¹⁰

Day quoted letters to the Catholic Worker written by Eric Gill in 1940 in which he decried the use and abuse of mechanization. ⁵¹¹

"I should like to say simply that fundamentally the problem of the machine is one which should be dealt with by those who actually use machines. . . . [I]n a broad way it may be said that the first thing to be done (first in the sense of most important) is for the workers to recapture control of industry.["]

. . . .

This, of course, is the communist idea but, unfortunately, the communists couple this [their] very crude materialist philosophy and their equally crude idolatry of the machine.

. . . .

[T]he worker is a man and not simply a "hand." Work done by a man is human work to be valued and thought of as such and not merely as a "cost in the account books."

"To labor is to pray["]--that is the central point of the Christian doctrine of work. . . . Communism and Christianity are moved by "compassion for the multitude," the object of communism is to make the poor richer but the object of Christianity is to make the rich poor and the poor holy.

. . . .

"This supernaturalized ideal of labor must needs be accompanied by a supernaturalized ETHIC of labor, by a proper morality in working conditions. Such influences as self interest, hatred and violence have no place in it. Catholic teaching on this point is in direct opposition to that of the atheist, the agnostic, and the materialist, and it is these who have the ear of the laboring classes in the matter of work." ⁵¹²

Dorothy was not nearsighted by any means and saw her lessons as enduring ones. In an analysis eerily prescient of the high technology computer age, Dorothy Day concludes her September 1946 article on labor by stating:

Cities have fallen in the past and they will fall again. Perhaps that will be the judgment of God on the machine which has turned man into a hand, a part of a machine. He who lives by the sword will fall by the sword and he who lives by the machine will fall by the machine. ⁵¹³

These continuing themes powerfully resonate in the express mission of the Catholic Worker, as set forth in the annual mission statement in each May issue of the Catholic Worker:

In labor, human need is no longer the reason for human work. Instead, the unbridled expansion of technology, necessary to capitalism and viewed as "progress," holds sway. Jobs are concentrated in productivity and administration for a "high-tech," war-related, consumer society of disposable goods, so that laborers are trapped in work that does not contribute to human welfare. Furthermore, as jobs become more specialized, many people are excluded from meaningful work or are alienated from the products of their labor. ⁵¹⁴

Previous / Next

NOTES

439. For copies of these early Catholic Worker newspaper articles by Dorothy Day on the rights of workers, I am especially indebted to the Marquette University Library's Catholic Worker Archives.

440. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness (1959).

441. Id. at 44-45.

442. The Call was a Socialist daily paper. See id. at 48.

443. See generally David M. Rabban, The IWW Free Speech Fights and Popular Conception of Free Expression Before World War I, 80 Va. L. Rev. 1055 (1994) (discussing the Wobblies); David Ray Papke, Eugene Debs As Legal Heretic: The Law-Related Conversion, Catechism and Evangelism of an American Socialist, 63 U. Cin. L. Rev. 339 (1994).

444. "Those IWW workers who did not go over to the Communists were organized into the great industrial unions of the CIO, the Congress of Industrial Organizations." Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness 52 (1959).

445. Id. at 60-61.

446. See id. at 158.

447. See id.

448. See id. at 160.

449. Id. at 160-61.

450. Id. at 161.

451. Id. at 161-62.

452. See William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography 254 (1982).

453. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness 199-200 (1959).

454. See id. at 201.

455. See id.

456. See id.

457. See Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness 201 (1959).

458. See id.

459. See id.

460. Id. at 201-02.

461. Id. at 203.

462. Id. at 204.

463. Id. at 205.

464. See id.

465. Id. at 205.

466. Id. at 208.

467. Id. at 213.

468. Id. at 213-14.

469. Id. at 214.

470. See Voices from the Catholic Worker 12-13 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993).

471. See id. at 13.

472. William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography 404 (1982).

473. See William D. Miller, A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement 223 (1982).

474. William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography 404 (1982).

475. Id.

476. Id.

477. See id. at 405.

478. For example, the Catholic Worker has never concentrated significant attention to issues of abortion or homosexuality. See Voices from the Catholic Worker 63 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993). "That was a very funny thing about Dorothy. For all her radicalism politically, Dorothy had a profoundly conservative streak in her makeup. She was a very conservative Catholic, theologically ...." Id. at 75. "Dorothy was an extremely orthodox Catholic, not at all theologically a dissident. She certainly would not at all favor abortion. She would, I think take a very dim view of homosexual behavior." Id. at 80; see also Alden Whitman, Dorothy Day, Outspoken Catholic Activist, Dies at 83, N.Y. Times, Nov. 30, 1980, at 45.

479. Miller, supra note 474, at 405.

480. Letter from Dorothy Day to Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York (Mar. 4, 1949) (on file with author, courtesy of the Marquette University Library's Catholic Worker Archives) [hereinafter Spellman letter].

481. Miller, supra note 474, at 500.

482. Dorothy Day: The Long Loneliness 210-11 (1959).

483. Id. at 212.

484. Spellman letter, supra note 480.

485. See William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography 252-55 (1982).

486. See Nancy L. Roberts, Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker 1 (1984).

487. Voices from the Catholic Worker 104 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993).

488. See id. at 104-05.

489. Dorothy Day, The Dignity of Labor, Cath. Worker, Nov. 1934, at 4.

490. Id.

491. Id.

492. See David L. Gregory, The Right to Organize as a Fundamental Human & Civil Right, 9 Miss. C. L. Rev. 135, 143 (1988).

493. See Gregory Baum, The Priority of Labor (1982); Co-Creation and Capitalism: John Paul II's Laborem Exercens (John W. Houck & Oliver F. Williams eds., 1983) ; George G. Higgins, Organized Labor and the Church: Reflections of a 'Labor Priest' (1993); Pope John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981); Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, in Proclaiming Justice & Peace 15 (Michael Walsh & Brian Davies eds., 1991); Pope Pius XI, Quadregesimo Anno, in Proclaiming Justice & Peace 41 (Michael Walsh & Brian Davies eds., 1991). Catholic social teaching is an evolving body of ecclesiastical documents and a rich tradition of particular, heterogeneous applications. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII commended workers' associations. See Pope Leo XIII, supra. Forty years later, Pope Pius XI recommended associations of workers, managers, and owners, which via the corporatism of national councils, would direct national economies. See Pope Pius XI, supra. Critics of this corporatism regard it as ultra-conservative. Pope John Paul II was a powerful champion of the Solidarity movement, a labor union political initiative which brought down the Communist government of Poland. See Pope John Paul II, supra.

The Canadian and United States Bishops also have been eloquent spokepersons for the rights of workers. Perhaps the most influential early work on Catholic social teaching on labor in the United States was that of Monsignor John A. Ryan, one of Father Higgins' intellectual mentors at the Catholic University of America. See John A. Ryan, A Living Wage (1906); John A. Ryan, Distributive Justice: The Right and Wrong of our Present Distribution of Wealth (1916) (discussing the moral aspects of the distribution of wealth).

I extensively discuss Catholic social teaching on labor in David L. Gregory, Catholic Labor Theory and the Transformation of Work, 45 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 119 (1988); David L. Gregory, The Right to Unionize as a Fundamental Human and Civil Right, 9 Miss. C. L. Rev. 135 (1988). Catholic social teaching on the rights of workers became popularized in the Academy-Award winning film, On the Waterfront (1953), inspired by Jesuit priest John "Pete" Corridan's work against labor racketeering on the New York City shipping docks.

494. Dorothy Day, Catholics in Unions, Cath. Worker, Feb. 1936, at 4.

495. See id. at 7.

496. 29 U.S.C s 158(a)(2) (1994).

497. Day, supra note 494, at 7.

498. Day, supra note 494, at 7.

499. Join The Union! Natural And Supernatural Duty, Cath. Worker, Sept. 1937, at 1.

500. Id.

501. See id.

502. Id. at 2.

503. See id. Solidarity with, liaisons to, and preferential options for the poor have long been essential elements of Catholic social teaching. Jesus Christ is the source of these teachings, through His life and many parables on themes of wealth and poverty, for example: the Sermon on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" Matthew 5:3 (Revised Standard); the blessed widow giving her last coins to the Temple:

And [Jesus] sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the multitude putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came, and put in two copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him, and said to them, "Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For they all contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, her whole living."

Mark 12:41-44 (Revised Standard); see also Matthew 21:12 (Revised Standard) (driving the money-changers from the Temple); Matthew 19:24 (Revised Standard) ("[I]t is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.").

In the social justice encyclicals of the modern Papacy, the fetishisms and pathologies of gross materialism are uniformly and severely criticized, and solidarity with the poor is powerfully urged. Pope John Paul II's consistent exhortations against materialism and for the poor are grounded in the first great social encyclical of Pope Leo XIII in 1891, Rerum Novarum, who wrote, "the poor and unfortunate seem to be especially favored by God." Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, in Proclaiming Justice & Peace 16 (Michael Walsh & Brian Davies eds., 1991). The 1971 Synod of Bishops echoed this theme in their document, Justice In The World: "Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of preaching the Gospel." Id. at 270. A theme repeatedly articulated and affirmed by the Catholic Bishops of the United States in 1986 in their pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All. See National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice For All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (1986). Pope John Paul II powerfully continues to articulate these themes in his social encyclicals, Laborem Exercens (1981) and Centesimus Annus (1991). I examine these themes in an earlier law review article. See David L. Gregory, Catholic Labor Theory and the Transformation of Work, 45 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 119 (1988). In addition to Papal encyclicals and Bishops' Pastoral Letters, there is a huge body of supporting commentary and analysis of these social justice themes of poverty. See, e.g., Jean-Yves Calvez & Jacques Perrin, The Church and Social Justice: The Social Teachings of the Popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII (1878-1958) (J.R. Kirwin trans., 1961); Richard L. Camp, The Papal Ideology of Social Reform: A Study in Historical Development, 1878-1967 (1969); John F. Cronin, Catholic Social Principles: The Social Teaching of the Catholic Church Applied to American Economic Life (1950); Donal Dorr, Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching (1983); Paul Misner, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (1991); Franz H. Mueller, The Church and the Social Question (1984); Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism (1993); Catholic Social Thought and The New World Order: Building on One Hundred Years (Oliver F. Williams & John W. Houck eds., 1993).

504. Join the Union! Natural and Supernatural Duty, supra note 499, at 2.

505. The Catholic Worker and Labor, Cath. Worker, June 1939, at 1.

506. Dorothy Day, The Church And Work, Cath. Worker, Sept. 1946, at 1.

507. Stanley Aronowitz & William Difazio, The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work 357 (1994).

508. Day, supra note 506, at 1.

509. See Day, supra note 506, at 1.

510. Day, supra note 506, at 1.

511. See Day, supra note 506, at 1.

512. Day, supra note 506, at 1.

513. Day, supra note 506, at 1.

514. Voices from the Catholic Worker 577-78 (Rosalie Riegle Troester ed., 1993).