Dorothy Day, Girl Reporter for The New York Call 1916-1917

Tom McDonough, An Eye For Others, Dorothy Day Journalist: 1916-1917 (Washington, DC: Clemency Press, 2016).

Ryan Walker, New Adventures of Henry Dubb (Chicago, IL: 1915).

Dorothy Day 1920s

Dorothy Day (1897-1980) is known as the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement (CW) with Peter Maurin in 1933, and for her selfless service to the homeless and downtrodden. Her legacy lives on. According to the CW website, today there are 240 CW communities mostly in the US providing hospitality to the homeless and other social services. The Catholic Church is formally considering Dorothy for Sainthood, although Dorothy might object. She often said,“Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily." She sometimes called herself a Christian Anarchist. The best statement of her views is The Aims and Means of The Catholic Worker, which is periodically reprinted in the Catholic Worker newspaper. Her philosophy was a unique and odd mix of left and right. In some ways she founded the Catholic Left in the US. She supported Republican Spain in the 1930s, championed the labor movement and civil rights, opposed war, criticized capitalism. On the other hand, she was an observant Catholic (including Church teaching on abortion and divorce), and a proponent of Distributism, an economic doctrine that had a brief life in the 1920s and 1930s, and then disappeared. Like Duke Ellington, Dorothy is "beyond category."

The Dorothy Day I find most appealing is her bohemian youth. Author Tom McDonough has collected excerpts from her published articles in the socialist The New York Call newspaper and The Masses in An Eye For Others, Dorothy Day, Journalist: 1916-1917, with commentary about her life and New York bohemia of the day. McDonough is a Catholic blogger and scholar. His two blogs on his Dorothy Day research and liberation theology are worth a visit: Precursorsof the Spirit of Pope Francis, and The Shire With WIFI. 


Dorothy was born in Brooklyn Heights NYC in 1897 to a middle class family. Her father John Day, and later her two brothers and Dorothy, were journalists - the family business. John moved the family to Oakland CA in 1904 for a newspaper job, until the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 destroyed his paper. In The Long Loneliness (1952), Dorothy Day recounts the mutual aid and self-sacrifice of neighbors responding to the disaster. The family relocated to Chicago, where Dorothy grew up. She was an constant reader- no internet, radio, TV, computer games. Her expansive reading is evident in everything she writes. She loved the great Russian novelists Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gorky, and the socialist novels of Upton Sinclair and Jack London in her teens. She was also influenced by her  older brother Donald, who wrote for the working-class Scripps-Howard newspaper The Day Book. She read Carl Sandburg, Eugene Debs, Peter Kropotkin, and accounts of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). From 1914-16 she attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on scholarship, then moved to NYC where her father had a new job at New York Morning Telegraph.

Very quickly Dorothy landed a reporter job at the socialist daily The New York Call in autumn 1916. She said later in From Union Square to Rome (1938), "I was only eighteen, so I wavered between my allegiance to Socialism, Syndicalism (the IWW's), and Anarchism. When I read Tolstoy I was an Anarchist. My allegiance to The Call kept me a socialist, although a left-wing one, and my Americanism inclined me to the IWW movement." I still have the same problem. She graduated to "Special Features Writer" in January 1918. One of her first assignments was "the Diet Squad"- reporting on living on $5/week on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side, which coincidentally was also her starting salary. She itemized her weekly rent for one room, food budget, cooking gas, clothing, laundry, transportation, recreation, and sundries. She also documented the daily struggles of the working poor who were her neighbors. She lived in the same tenements and shared their poverty.

Cartoonist Ryan Walker in the Appeal to Reason

The New York Call was still an ecumenical socialist daily in the days before the Russian Revolution. It was one of only three English-language socialist dailies in the US, with a circulation of 15,000 copies per issue in 1916. This was dwarfed by the foreign language socialist dailies. The Yiddish-language Forverts had circulation of 200,000, and the German-language New Yorker Volkszeitung had 25,000+. The staff of The Call during Dorothy's tenure included Rose Pastor Stokes, editor of the "Woman's Department"; regular cartoons by Ryan Walker with his New Adventures of Henry Dubb; and Dorothy's romantic interest, copy editor Itzok Isaac Granich (aka Mike Gold - author of Jews Without Money). During six months at The Call, Dorothy had 39 articles with her byline, and probably some more unattributed. The complete text of those articles are archived at the Catholic Worker Movement website. She also freelanced at The Liberator and The Masses. She was an accomplished journalist. 

Michael Gold columnist
Daily Worker

This was a protean moment for the American Left. The US entered WWI after Woodrow Wilson's election. The Russian Revolutions broke out. The Federal Government repressed dissent and expelled foreign radicals. The American Socialist Party and IWW fragmented into many competing communist and social democratic parties. The New York Call reported all of it. Dorothy Day interviewed Leon Trotsky during his 3 month exile in NYC, and Margaret Sanger and Ethel Byrne after their imprisonment for dispensing birth control information. Dorothy wrote five articles in April 1917 chronicling the peace pilgrimage of Columbia University students from NYC to Washington DC. The students opposed  the draft and opposed entering the European war. Six months later Dorothy picketed the White House for women's suffrage, was arrested and served 15 days in jail with Alice Paul from the National Women's Party. Her young friends and comrades became leaders in the post-WWI left: Eugene O'Neil, Michael Gold, John Reed, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Anna Louise Strong, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Mary Heaton Vorse. Revolution was in the air, like the 1960s. There was vigorous debate in the Left, conflict and sectarian disputes. 

Ultimately, Dorothy took a different path. She told biographer Robert Coles, "I was very caught up in socialist convictions. I've always believed that people should share with each other, and that for a few to be rich and many to be poor is wrong, dead wrong." But she did not see the Left bringing forth brotherhood, cooperation, peace and justice. She rejected the brutality of Bolshevik rule and the dogmas of the left. Dorothy gradually returned to her childhood passion for Christianity. This period of her life is recounted in her novel The Eleventh Virgin (1924). She converted to Catholicism in 1927, and founded the Catholic Worker with the Christian Brother Peter Maurin in 1932. Her program was no longer socialism, but Catholic social teaching and the Gospel.

She said, "The biggest challenge of the day is how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution that has to start with each one of us." She remained true to this mission all her life.

A Rogue Gallery of 20th Century American Anarchists

Andrew Cornell. Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).

_____. “For a World Without Oppressors:” U.S. Anarchism from the Palmer Raids to the Sixties. Diss. New York University, 2011. 

The planet may find a way to survive the terrible insults it receives and humans may yet learn to live in societies that are equitable and just. But the fight to save the planet and find a just society must continue. Change can often come unexpectedly and rapidly (Diva Agostinelli Wieck, 2006).

Ammon Hennesy and Dorothy Day, Catholic Workerr

These are my people. I appreciate the attention Andrew Cornell has devoted to a manifestly minor current on the US left in his new history Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century. Cornell shows the significant influence anarchists had on the early civil rights movement, the antiwar and student New Left in the 60s, and the green left and social ecology inspired by Murray Bookchin in recent years. Anarchists were also first on the Left to criticize one-party Bolshevik rule after the Russian Revolution in the 20s.

Dave Dellinger, Liberation

The last time anarchism had mass numbers was before WWI when
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) may have had 100,000 members. The IWW was never narrowly anarchist. It was ecumenical in an anarchist way, embracing agrarian populists, Christian socialists, syndicalists, freethinkers, social democrats, and anarchists. After WWI the IWW faded. The federal government imprisoned the top leadership of the IWW for opposing the war, and many members dropped out, or became communist in the wake of the Russian Revolution. The IWW was reborn in the late 60s with New Left converts and continues its mission to build "One Big Union" to this day. Cornell does not really cover the IWW. Either he feels its history has been well documented elsewhere, or considers it moribund after WWI.

Peter Maurin, Catholic Worker

Cornell identifies three distinct currents of anarchist activity in the 20s and 30s: (1) anarcho-syndicalism, characterized by the IWW and participation in various mainstream AFL unions; (2) insurrectionists, like the Italian partisans of anarchist Luigi Galleani; and (3) bohemians who formed rural colonies, housing cooperatives, libertarian schools, theaters, and other cultural ventures. There was overlap and conflict between these tendencies, but let me describe them separately.

Sam Dolgoff, IWW

(1) The labor movement working-class anarchists were largely first generation European immigrants who brought their political affiliations with them from the Old World. Some joined the IWW, some the vigorous Jewish textile unions, some the foreign language federations. Rose Pesotta began her anarchist career in the 20s as a shop delegate in the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the secretary of the Road to Freedom Group, a member of the Anarchist Red Cross, and rose to Vice President of the ILGWU by 1934, which was disdained by doctrinaire anarchists. Italian immigrant Carlo Tresca was another ecumenical anarcho-syndicalist labor organizer during this period. He was an IWW organizer at the 1912 Lawrence MA textile strike, the 1913 Paterson NJ silk strike, and the 1916 Mesabi Range MN miners' strike.  He was editor or publisher of a string of Italian-language labor newspapers in the US. He was an outspoken anti-Fascist and anti-Stalinist in the 30s. He was assassinated in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue, NYC in 1943, perhaps by the Mafia.

Dwight and Nancy MacDonald, politics

During the 30s these class-struggle anarchists largely abstained from the popular/united front organizing during the Great Depression. The Immigration Act of 1924 had cut off the stream of Italian, Jewish, and East European radicals to the US that fed the anarchist unions and organizations. Those immigrant factory jobs were now filled by African American migrants from the South. Anarchists (also the Socialist Party) were slow to fight for civil rights and racial justice. The Communist Party (CPUSA) became the leading civil rights advocate on the Left. 

Juanita and Wally Nelson, Peacemakers

In 1932 various anarchists veterans- Sam Dolgoff, Abe and Selma Bluestein, Sidney and Clara Soloman, and others- launched an anarchist publication Vanguard: A Libertarian Communist Journal in NYC. It was a small group, but played an important role in reprinting anarchist classics and rethinking principles after the Russian Revolution. Andrew Cornell notes "the revolution in Russia fundamentally divided and reordered the American Left." The Vanguard Group gave voice to the Left critics of the Bolshevik rule. They organized study groups and forums in NYC, aided anarchist exiles and prisoners in Europe and Russia, and examined the New Deal in their journal. Soon the consuming issue for anarcho-syndicalists worldwide became the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Many of the same comrades published the Spanish Revolution newspaper during the Spanish Civil War reporting the confusing politics of the war to US readers. They also raised money for the CNT-FAI, the anarcho-syndicalist union in Spain. These groups disbanded after the defeat of Spanish Republic and the onset of WW2.

Judith Malina and Julian Beck,
Living Theatre

(2) After WW1 there remained a diehard group of revolutionary anarchists committed to the 19th century idea of propaganda of the deed, ie assassinations, bombings, insurrection, banditry, social revolution. Their inspiration was the Paris Commune in 1871. Anything short of libertarian communism was reformist and inadequate. The primary leader of this tendency was Luigi Galleani (1861-1931), an Italian immigrant and publisher. Galleani's followers (known as i Galleanisti) advocated the use of violence to eliminate tyrants and to overthrow the government. They also opposed formal political organizations and trade unions as hierarchical institutions of the old order. Among his disciples were Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were probably innocent of the crime they were hung for, but guilty of revolutionary violence on other occasions. Historian Paul Avrich investigated this history in Sacco and Vanzetti: the Anarchist Background (1990).

Murray Bookchin

The insurrectionary school of anarchism finally collapsed in the 30s. Many militants were deported, and new immigration laws restricted new migrants from southern and eastern Europe. These ideas were disastrous for anarchism. The anarchist bombings and assassinations from 1880-1920 in Europe and the US discredited all varieties of anarchism, and contributed to its decline after WW1. Anarchism has never recovered from its association with the bomb throwers in the popular mind. 

David Wieck and Diva Agostinelli

(3) Emma Goldman is an example of the bohemian or cultural strain of US anarchism. She was often criticized by trade unionists for her lecture tours of salon society on topics like theater and sexuality. But she was ahead of her time addressing birth control, homosexuality, popular culture, literature, and free speech. Her publication Mother Earth was a forerunner for many political and literary journals that followed later. She was deported to Russia in 1919 during the Red Scare following WW1. She was exiled the rest of her life, except for a brief lecture tour of the US in 1934.

Bill Sutherland, Peacemakers

Anarchists also founded alternative institutions, which Cornell calls prefigurative counterinstitutions. This has always been popular among anarchists. Cornell describes several ventures: the Ferrer Modern School at Stelton NJ (1915-1953), which was a free school and colony; the Mohegan Modern School, which was a spinoff from Stelton in upstate NY; and the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community in Alecia MI (1933-1936) which was a short-lived American Kibbutz. Joseph Cohen wrote a history of Sunrise entitled In Quest of Heaven: The Story of the Sunrise Co-operative Farm Community (1957). They should have learned from their comrades in Palestine who were more successful cooperators. Anarchists were also active in the Housing Co-op Movement in the 1920s and 1930s in NYC which was initiated by unions, Workmen's Circle, CPUSA, and SP. These buildings were pioneers of racial integration and the nascent Civil Rights movement.

Carlo Tresca and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,
Paterson NJ Silkworkers Strike

The most enduring anarchist creation from this era was the Catholic Worker Movement. It was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day, a 35 year old radical journalist and recent Catholic convert, and Peter Maurin, a 55 year old French personalist. He was inspired by French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier (1905- 1950) who advocated a communitarian alternative to liberalism and Marxism. The Catholic Workers were philosophically guided by the Christian Gospels and Peter Kropotkin's vision of a decentralized anarchist communist order. Their program was direct action: opening houses of hospitality to care for the destitute, establishing farms to encourage self-sufficiency, and promoting radical education through "roundtable discussions" and their Catholic Worker newspaper. At the height of the Depression their monthly newspaper had over 100,000 circulation. Cornell says "the Catholic Worker experiment generated more interest than all the traditional schools of anarchism combined, and it pointed the direction the movement would develop in the coming decades." The Catholic Worker Movement is still healthy today with 100 Houses of Hospitality worldwide and its lively monthly Catholic Worker newspaper (a penny a copy). I've been a reader and subscriber since the 1960s.

Russell Blackwell, IWW

With the arrival of WW2, Cornell describes the confluence of radical pacifism and anarchism. Some anarchists and Trotskyists opposed the war as imperialist, and were imprisoned. Some pacifists refused civilian service and were imprisoned as well. These political prisoners at Danbury Federal Penitentiary and others collaborated to oppose and ultimately defeat Jim Crow segregation in the Federal prisons in 1944. Outside prison pacifists and young anarchists collaborated in new literary and political journals, and new organizations. This was the birth of a new contemporary anarchism. Dwight and Nancy MacDonald's politics journal (1944-1949) published many of the future luminaries of the New Left to come, like Camus, C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin, Byard Rustin, and Paul Goodman. The Committee on Racial Equality was founded in 1942 by civil rights activists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Later it was renamed Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). After WW2 war resisters Dave Dellinger, A. J. Muste,  David Wieck, and others formed the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution (CNVR) and later the Peacemakers in 1948 as militant direct action civil rights organizations. Fellowship for Reconciliation organized the first freedom ride in 1947 to challenge segregation on buses and trains in interstate travel. This was the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Rose Pesotta, ILGWU

The Peacemakers were my introduction to radical politics. I read Dave Dellinger's magazine Liberation (published 1956-1977) at college, and learned about a week-long workshop on nonviolence in the Missouri Ozark Mountains held by the Peacemakers in 1968. I attended and met war resisters from WW2 and the Vietnam war, as well as veteran civil rights activists. It was very inspiring, although ultimately I couldn't embrace pacifism. I did learn about the Catholic Worker Movement, Prince Peter Kropotkin, and the libertarian socialist tradition which was more to my taste. I volunteered at the CW St. Joseph House on East First Street whenever I visited friends in NYC and met other anarchist denizens of the neighborhood- the NYC IWW, the Living Theatre troupe, local Yippies and hippies. This counterpoised an appealing alternative for me to the stern Marxist-Leninist politics that was captivating the New Left in the late 60s.

Clara Solomon, Vanguard Group

There is lots of detail in Andrew Cornell's history which I enjoyed as a fellow traveler. Sometimes I am astounded by the massive literature on the history of the Left in the US. Oftentimes the subject of study are sects and groupscules of a few hundred or thousand people, or less. Nonetheless, some of these groups have had profound influence on US culture and history. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker supported the Republic during the Spanish Civil War in opposition to Rome and help create the Catholic Left. The Harlem Ashram, a multiracial intentional community formed by Union Theological Seminarians in 1940, introduced Dave Dellinger, George Hauser (FOR), and James Farmer (CORE) to Gandhi's philosophy of nonviolence, later adopted by modern Civil Rights movement. The San Francisco Bay area bohemians and anarchists were also central players in the counterculture that fomented the New Left in the 50s and 60s.

As to what is next, Cornell proposes a pluralist Left including many tendencies- Marxist, anarchist, revolutionary nationalist, feminist, pacifist. This sounds right to me. Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century presents a faithful account of our anarchist forebears. It is a rich tradition that needs further development.

Fellow Worker Sam Dolgoff (1902-1990)

Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.

Andrew Cornell, "A History of Vanguard". libcom.org.


But we have a glowing dream
Of how fair the world will seem
When each man can live his life secure and free;
When the earth is owned by labor
and there's joy and peace for all
In the Commonwealth of Toil that is to be.

the chorus of Ralph Chaplin's song "Commonwealth of Toil", 1923

Sam Dolgoff was an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) lifer. He discovered anarchism after being expelled from the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL, aka Yipsels) as a teen. He joined the IWW in 1922 and was an active member until his death in 1990. His son Anatole Durruti Dolgoff has written a loving portrait of Sam and the small vibrant anarchist milieu in the US during the 20th century, which also provided my political education. The title Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff is taken from Paul Berman's obituary for Sam in the Village Voice on November 13, 1990. He quotes Sam: "You always need a left. And within the left, you need a left. And within the left of the left, you need a left. And in that left, you need a left. And that left is me!" Sam was a little tipsy, but that was Sam Dolgoff. Sam remained faithful to the classic anarcho-syndicalist principles of IWW and the IWA (International Worker Association, the anarcho-syndicalist international) all his life despite the changing fashions on the left.

Sam Dolgoff was born in the shtetl of Ostrovno in present-day Belarus in 1902. His family immigrated to NYC in 1905, where he lived in the Bronx and the Manhattan Lower East Side most his life. Sam was apprenticed to a house painter at age 11, a profession he remained in his entire life ("a doctor of smearology" in Sam's words). He hated school, and in those days of child labor, had to support his family. The IWW and anarchist movement became his university, like so many working-class intellectuals on the left. He could have become professional organizer or union bureaucrat for District 9 of the Painter's Union, but instead chose to be a common worker and IWW evangelist. He would not become a boss, nor reconcile himself with AFL business unionism. Anatole Dolgoff reports that the IWW reached a maximum membership of 100,000 in 1923; by 1930 its numbers had declined to 10,000. Its last stronghold was the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTW-IWW) which represented seamen throughout the Americas 1913-1950.

Sam contributed to an unending string of anarchist publications and organizations over his lifetime: the Road to Freedom journal in NYC and the Chicago Free Society Group in the 1920s; the Vanguard group and journal in NYC in the 1930s; the Spanish Revolution monthly 1936-38; the Libertarian League and its journal Views and Comments in the 1950s; the Libertarian Book Club 1946-present; and the Libertarian Labor Review later renamed Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 1986-present.

As an independent scholar, after a long day of physical labor, he produced four well regarded books: Bakunin on Anarchy (1971), The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974) ; The Cuban Revolution: A Critical Perspective (1974); and Fragments: A Memoir (1986). His Cuba book criticizes Castro's repression of Cuban anarchists and dissidents, displeasing the New Left and some of his old comrades, like Dave Dellinger and David Wieck. His Spain book documents the grassroots social revolution during the Spanish Civil War. It also recounts the role of Russian GPU agents in murdering POUM leader Andres Nin, anti-Stalinist Marxists, and anarchist militants. These were Sam's comrades and friends, and he wanted the facts known. Consequently he was not romantic about the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, which was largely a Communist Party outfit. This may disturb some leftish readers.

I met Sam and his wife Esther Dolgoff in the 1970s. Our group Philadelphia Solidarity, and later Wooden Shoe Bookstore, was friendly with the NYC IWW, which included Sam and Esther, the Living Theatre troupe, and journalist Mel Most who became a good friend. We hosted a performance of the Living Theatre at the Christian Association on Penn campus in the early 1970s. 

In 1980 Esther translated Joseph J. Cohen's The Jewish Anarchist Movement in the United States: A Historical Review and Personal Reminiscence (Philadelphia: Radical Library, 1945) from Yiddish. Cohen lived in Philadelphia and was the editor of the anarchist newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme. The book included lots of Philadelphia radical history. We made an unsuccessful effort to publish her translation, which was a great disappointment to Esther. We were too disorganized and too broke. I sent her manuscript to the Joseph A. Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan a few years ago. We did reprint a couple chapters which I'm trying to recover. 

I always enjoyed visiting them at their cozy coop apartment on East Broadway overlooking the Williamsburg Bridge on the East River. They were always entertaining young radicals, their habit of a lifetime.

As an older person myself now, I appreciated Anatole's human account of Sam and Esther's last years. It is a dilemma we all face. Anatole and his friends organized an around-the-clock cadre to care for his parents in their last few years. When Esther died, Sam would not move, and Anatole did not want to disrupt Sam's life unnecessarily.  At this moment, an old friend of the Dolgoff's and long-time activist with the Catholic Worker, Roger O'Neill, volunteered to move in and care for Sam. There is something poetic about this. Sam was an old bohemian friend of Dorothy Day, often spoke at the Friday Night Meetings at the Catholic Worker House, and occasionally sparred with her about the authoritarian, hierarchical Catholic Church. So, the last year of his life, he was cared for by a Catholic anarchist from the Catholic Worker, who didn't care that Sam was a principled atheist. This was the informal anarchist community that surrounded Sam and Esther all their lives. The IWW and the Catholic Worker still exist; that anarchist community probably does not.

Thank you Anotole Dolgoff for this beautiful homage to your parents. Yours for OBU (One Big Union), Frank Gerould.

Scranton PA Radical Book Fair 2016

Last Saturday April 9 my wife Tess and I attended the Scranton Radical Book Fair at the student center of Marywood University in Scranton, PA. I noticed comrade John Dodds, Director of Philadelphia Unemployment Project, was presenting, and well as local activists. Also, I never need an excuse to book shop. There were about a dozen vendors, mostly anarchist or environmental. We attended three presentations.

The first was “Grassroots Environmental Activism on the Frontlines of Fracking” by the Shalefield Organizing Committee. Pennsylvania coal country was was the site of extractive mining for 75 years (now abandoned), and now the site of a new extractive industry--natural gas. Both industries have seriously damaged the ecosystem. Community organizers Casey Pegg and Sierra Shumer noted there are still 30 active mine fires in PA left over from the age of coal. Neither industry has uplifted local employment or produced a sustainable economy. The Shalefield Organizing Committee is opposing the proposed Atlantic Sunrise Pipeline that would connect the Marcellus Shale wells in northern PA to East Coast ports for gas export to international markets. It is all about profits for oil companies.

Second, we heard John Dodds talk about Raise the Wage PA coalition, the campaign to lift the minimum wage to $10.10/hour. His organization Philadelphia Unemployment Project was instrumental in the last successful effort to raise the minimum wage in PA ten years ago. Hard to believe- the last time the minimum wage was raised in PA was 2006! Given the weakness of labor unions in the US, the most effective way to raise the wage floor for low income workers is minimum wage legislation. One in four workers in northeast PA and 1.3 million workers statewide would get a raise with $10.10/ hour minimum wage. Of course, some cities and states have passed $15.00/hour minimums. Call Sen. Lisa Baker (R-NE PA) at 570-675-3931 and ask her to report the $10.10/hour minimum wage bill out of the Labor and Industry Committee.

Tess Gerould, John Dodds, Frank Gerould

Last, we heard Mitch Troutman's stories about the PA Anthracite Coal Region. He blogs with the byline Nixnootz at his website Coal, Corn, and Country. He has a great story about “bootleg mining” in the Depression 1930s. The coal operators closed most of the mines in the region. Most miners were out of work, so they reopened the mines themselves and set up contraband mines. They sold coal to local churches and businesses, contracted truckers, sized the coal. It was dangerous but supported the local economy, and persisted for many years. Like bootleg whiskey during Prohibition.

It was a cold day with snow showers Saturday morning. My wife and I wandered around the tidy redbrick Marywood University campus before the book fair opened. There is lots of Catholic iconography spread around the campus indoors and out. An incongruous message at the anarchist book fair.

Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg 1923-2010

Tuli was a poet, anarchist pacifist, cartoonist, denizen of the East Village, and co-founder of the rock band The Fugs. This cartoon is from Was It Good For You Too? (copyleft 1983). In one of his last interviews he said, "Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the 60's could've existed. So there's always hope."