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.

Lewis Carroll (aka Charles Dodson) Social Critic 1889

Lewis Carroll, "The Mad Gardener's Song", Sylvie and Bruno. 1889.

Illustration by Harry Furniss from Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno

Poem cited today on the letters page of the Financial Times by David Jodrey, a MD reader. I was unaware of this side of Lewis Carroll. The esteemed authority Wikipedia says "the story set in Victorian Britain is a social novel, with its characters discussing various concepts and aspects of religion, society, philosophy and morality." I used to love reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass with our kids, especially the nonsense verse.

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
a Hippopotamus:
"If this should stay to dine," he said,
"There won't be much for us!"

Abolitionist Legacy in LaMott PA

Donald Scott Sr., Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania). (Charleston SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008).

Historic La Mott, Pennsyvania, http://www.historic-lamott-pa.com/content/thegrowthofthevillage/index.cfm

Recruitment poster for Camp William Penn, 1863

I live in an historic neighborhood. My township of Cheltenham PA on the northern boundary of Philadelphia was a center of abolitionist activity in the 19th century. The area was known as Chelten Hills then. It is now divided into Elkins Park, Melrose Park (my home), and LaMott. 

"Roadside" home of James and Lucretia Mott

La Mott was the site of the first and largest Union training ground for African American troops at Camp William Penn during the Civil War from 1863-1865. The land was leased to the Federal government by Edward M. Davis, who was the son-in-law of abolitionist and reformer Lucretia Mott. Lucretia and husband James retired to their son-in-law’s Chelten Hills farm in 1857 to an old farmhouse called “Roadside”. Their home was a stop on the underground railroad en route to freedom for escaped slaves. She hosted many prominent abolitionist leaders at Roadside – Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Octavius V. Catto, William Still, Robert Purvis, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison. Even Mary Brown stayed at Roadhouse while her husband John Brown awaited trial for his raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

AME Church of LaMott

Chelten Hills was also home to Lucretia’s banker friend Jay Cooke

(1821-1905), who became known as the financier of the Civil War. Between 1862 and 1865 he sold $830 million in war bonds, at a commission of .375%. It was good politics and good business. He and Edward Davis were members of the Union League of Philadelphia (ULP), formed in 1862 “to discountenance and rebuke by moral and social influence all disloyalty to the Federal Government.” The ULP raised money to recruit troops for the Union, and sponsored five black regiments of US Colored Troops (USCT) at Camp William Penn. Before the Civil War, abolitionist sentiment was weak in Philadelphia. Abraham Lincoln received only 2000 votes out of 76,000 cast in the city in the 1860 election. The ULP converted Philadelphia to the Republican cause during the war. They even endorsed Radical Reconstruction after the war, including desegregating the streetcars.

Donald Scott Sr. has written two books about Camp William Penn -

Camp William Penn (Images of America: Pennsylvania), and Camp William Penn: 1863-1865 (2012). Scott is an English Professor at Community College of Philadelphia, and a Cheltenham resident and booster. He has assembled an amazing collection of 19th century photographs of the Camp and the township. I wish more historians made an effort to include illustrations. It adds interest and sells books. Old history books and fiction always had photographs or artwork. Maybe modern publishers will revive this tradition. It would create employment for illustrators and photographers. All that remains of Camp William Penn today is the restored front gate and main entrance on Sycamore Street. A neighborhood community group, Citizens for the Restoration of Historic LaMott, has made an on-and-off effort over the years to establish a museum and park commemorating the unique history of LaMott. The old 1910 LaMott fire station on Willow Avenue is the temporary home to archives and artifacts from Camp William Penn. Tours of the museum are by appointment only.

Camp William Penn served as the training ground for 11 regiments, 10,940 men, between July 1863 and July 1865. 1056 soldiers from Camp William Penn perished during the war. It is an ugly story, but many black soldiers and their white commanders were executed if they were captured in battle by Confederate troops. The burial ground for local US Colored Troop veterans of the Civil War is Butler Cemetery in Camden NJ at Ferry Avenue and Charles Street. I have not visited the site, but it appears to be incorporated into present-day Evergreen Cemetery on Google Maps.. There is also the African American Civil War Museum in Washington DC which documents the history of the US Colored Troops. I must investigate. After the War, some USCT veterans served as Buffalo Soldiers and fought in the Indian wars in the West.

After Camp William Penn was decommissioned, Edward Davis sold off lots and became the prime real estate developer of the new working-class neighborhood called Camptown. As a devout Hicksite Quaker, Davis sold to blacks and whites. To encourage development, Davis built a schoolhouse in 1878, and donated land for a community church in 1888, now the site of the AME Church of LaMott on Cheltenham Avenue. In 1885 the village received its first US post office and changed its name officially to LaMott in honor of their revered resident Lucretia Mott (1793-1880). In the late 19th century it became one of the early interracial communities in the nation. It remains so today. The latest arrivals to the township have been Asian-Americans in the last 40 years. The 2010 census reports the population was 56.6% White, 32.8% Black or African American, 0.2% Native American, 7.7% Asian, and 2.5% were two or more races, 3.9% of the population were of Hispanic or Latino ancestry.

African American Memorial, Washington DC

I think Lucretia Mott would be pleased. She wrote her sister in 1863, “The neighboring camp seems the absorbing interest just now. Is not this change of feeling and conduct towards this oppressed class beyond all that we could have anticipated, and marvelous in our eyes?” This from a staunch pacifist. The Civil War would finally banish chattel slavery from the US, as nonviolent efforts had failed.