My life at the Catholic Worker
t, John C. Cor0
RECOLLECTIONS OF DOROTHY DAY & PETER MAURIN My life at the Catholic Worker JOHN C. CORT IT WAS a Sunday morning in Boston and I was coming down the steps of the French church on Isabella Street...
...THINK, looking back, that one of the things that attracted me I to Dorothy was that her New York literary credentials were solid and I was perhaps unduly impressed both by New York and literary credentials...
...We ran out and found a man bleeding to death in the street, victim of a gang war...
...Somebody had called for an ambulance and the police came along...
...I was in no hurry to intervene physically, but always a good man for questions I asked the knife man, "What's your problem...
...I am in the position of a dictator trying to legislate himself out of existence...
...The place was more accurately another House of Hospitality on the land...
...Strangely, I don't remember if Dorothy had any comment on this incident at the time, or thought that Bill and I were wrong to yield to the lure of violence and give up the idea of throwing ourselves non-violently in front of the coffee pot and the peanut butter...
...Most apropos...
...Remember that man does not live by bread alone...
...I am speaking to you as men, as creatures of body and soul...
...Fortunately, I had company...
...If by chance he did stop to breathe, he held up a finger to indicate that there was more coming, and if by some act of reckless bravado someone were to ignore the finger and interrupt before he was Commonweal: 362 ready to yield the floor, he made a face that, like Medusa, was calculated to turn the intruder to stone...
...Furthermore, she loved Dostoyevsky and Dickens and music, and Peter didn't...
...Born in Brooklyn in 1897, the daughter of a sportswriter, she took to journalism with leftwing papers, the old socialist Call and the original Communist Masses...
...A little weird but intriguing...
...In addition we had bedbugs, but bad...
...During much of my time at Mott Street I slept in a four-room apartment with nine other men, most of them guests from the Bowery...
...DePeter's bias, Dorothy realized that to ignore the unions during the mid-thirties would have made as much sense as a radical movement ignoring the black revolution during the sixties and seventies...
...That and a little oxygen...
...It was a mistake...
...We chdose to spend the salaries we might be making if we were business-like on feeding and sharing our home with the homeless and hungry...
...I figured he needed a psychiatrist...
...As the one staff member on the floor I was understood to be in charge, whatever that meant beyond doing all the cleaning up myself...
...The next day Joe Hughes showed up with nothing worse than a bad hangover...
...As she recently told me, she was uncomfortable with one of Peter's favorite plays on words—"Strikes don't strike me" — and with the non-sequitur that usually followed: "When the organizers try to organize the unorganized, then the organizers don't organize themselves...
...In the first nearly 50 seamen had stayed at the Catholic Worker, but when the second broke out the Mott Street house was full up...
...Times, told a story about him: "One night in a cheap hotel a girl knocked on his door and asked, 'Want to have a good time, honey?' `Come in, come in!' he cried, and when she did he inquired of her, 'Now, what would you say a good time means exactly...
...recently sold its farm on the Hudson River at Tivoli, the last in a growing line of failed Farming Communes, but is buying a smaller one across the river and has opened a large new House of Hospitality off the Bowery on Third Street...
...The state of the Catholic church in America, especially among the younger clergy and laity, was ripe for a publication that was willing to tackle head-on the scandal of mass unemployment and starvation in a country of immeasurable wealth, and willing to tackle it not simply in words, which are cheap at any time, but by deeds and example in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and providing a home for the homeless...
...There was Tex, for example, a young seaman who joined us during the strike of 1936 and then decided, what the hell, why go back to sea when I can get free eats and a bed right here...
...In a recent issue of the paper Dorothy, -with the sharp reporter's eye that has yielded little to age, described the scene on Third Street as she looked from the window of her room in Maryhouse: "At exactly 8:05 a.m...
...When she returned to New York she found waiting for her "a short, stocky man in his mid-fifties, as ragged and rugged as any of the marchers I had left...
...Priority went to the former...
...One of them was bleeding badly from a head wound where the other had banged him up against the wall...
...When the Great Depression struck it seemed to him a confirmation of all he believed about overorganized mankind, the evils of mass production, and the subordination of spiritual values to the demands of the machine and the lust for profit...
...It was the issue of December, 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, a phenomenon of which I was almost totally unaware...
...But in the real world of Mott Street you could throw good example at some people forever and watch it bounce off them like peanuts off a tank...
...When he got it he changed overnight into a productive citizen, a latter-day miracle...
...So do not let fear keep you from organizing...
...At the time I don't think I even argued with her, so great was her authority among us...
...It would have demonstrated that I had enough respect for them as persons to want to give them a Commonweal: 366 chance to discuss the question, and if they agreed, give their personal assent to the decision...
...Pigeons fly from the roofs...
...I think the diagnosis was "insane, but not dangerous," or something equally reassuring...
...To this day the rich aroma of roasting bedbug still lingers with me, sharp and acrid in my mind's nose...
...Matters did not reach the full flower of tension until one of our own volunteers, Joe Hughes, disappeared...
...Or put it this way, wouldn't he have agreed with the wise man who said, "Feeding the hungry is a simple imperative, but it is not a simple undertaking...
...Those were the days when freight trains rode up and down the middle of the avenue and every now and then one of them would go clanking through the storm...
...What do you suppose it's worth...
...One of the Workers said to her, "He didn't start the fight...
...Fortunately, my sense of the dramatic was not tested by another night at Mott Street during that particular heatwave...
...So what could we do to stop them...
...Not that it was entirely unpleasant...
...At one point, when the rampaging of the goon squads was at its worst and one seaman had already been found dead on the docks, a warning came from strike headquarters that we should expect a raid on our waterfront commissary...
...We spent the next few hours arguing about pacifism, which was a much more typical activity than farming on a C.W...
...Dorothy agreed with him and told me to take the rules down...
...A LOT OF hard work did get done, however, in the Mott Street house, where about 30 men and women were given shelter and food, and up to a thousand or more fed hot coffee every morning together with bread and apple butter, peanut butter or cottage cheese...
...we are willing to eat the plainest and most meager of meals and to endure cold rooms and lack of privacy . . . And we feel too that the work gains by it...
...Then in the mid-twenties he had a profound religious experience that changed his life again...
...That was where John L. Lewis and the CIO, aided and abetted by Communists, socialists, and every young radical off the college campus, were busy organizing the unorganized and raising the flag of freedom from the tyranny of the boss...
...What moved me was something else...
...She did, however, share his love for the poor and his faith in the Christian Gospel and his search for a program that would embody both...
...It was amazing how quickly I adjusted from a life of daily showers to the realization that no great harm would befall if I bathed but once a week...
...We figured they would make their attack through either the side or back doors...
...No wonder we called her the Abbess...
...So it went...
...He had even been photographed in a natty suit...
...The C.W...
...As Pat tried to restrain the more aggressive drunk, the latter pulled a knife and held it up, the point only a few inches from Pat's throat...
...The next day a group of us bounced off in an old truck to the Catholic Worker farm in Easton, Pennsylvania...
...I mentioned the incident at the Mott Street house of my posting the three rules and her ordering me to take them down, and then added, "The strange part of it is that it was not until a few months ago that the question occurred to me, 'Why didn't I call the guys together, explain the situation, and see if I could get an agreement, or at least a majority vote?' That would have been the most personalist thing I could have done, not to mention democratic...
...Four men got out...
...This was her reply: "No, because Peter said you ran it like an abbey...
...Here was a group of people, obviously of some intelligence and sensitivity, down in New York City in the twentieth century, living a life of Christian poverty like any skinny, gaunt-eyed saint out of a stained glass window, and not reluctant to admit it either...
...Bill, who died recently, had studied Thomas Aquinas and he was full of the Thomistic requirements for a just war...
...I therefore took it upon myself to post three typewritten rules as follows: "1...
...They all complain that there is no boss...
...Another guest on the farm was a handsome, cleancut young man who we later learned was using it as a hideaway after pulling the heists that he needed from time to time to support his heroin habit...
...There were workers on the farm and there were scholars, but not too many worker-scholars or scholar-workers...
...Each man is expected to take turns sweeping up...
...It was an instant success...
...She was not a forceful speaker in the usual sense of the word...
...We stayed put, crouched and waiting for another five minutes, and then went back to bed...
...Even though several months had elapsed since the purchase of the farm and it was the height of the growing season, there were not enough tools even to hoe the corn by hand, not to mention anything as sophisticated as a cultivator...
...The coat that hangs in the closet belongs to the poor," he used to say, quoting St...
...They looked like gangsters...
...A lady visitor who was introduced to him asked if she might have met him before...
...and Canada, at one point driving a team of oxen twelve abreast while standing on a three-tongued plow in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan...
...and spread on slices of bread every day about 50 pounds each of peanut butter, apple butter and cottage cheese...
...That summer of 1936 she was writing of her trip through the steel towns of Pennsylvania and of the "500,000 steel workers who have been unorganized, oppressed and enslaved for the last half century in the giant mills of the American Iron and Steel Institute...
...Few of them made their beds in the morning and fewer still ever bothered to take the broom which I left in a conspicuous spot and follow my good example by sweeping up around their beds, not to mention that wider horizon beyond their own beds which might even encompass so large and expansive an area as the entire room in which they slept...
...At one time or another we swept, washed, painted and sprayed the apartment, but we couldn't destroy the bugs, which seemed to have dug themselves into the building and pulled the covers up over their heads, like Tex...
...who went on to become executive editor of Commonweal and later religion editor of the N.Y...
...The whole west side of New York erupted in battles between seamen and what were known as "goon squads," thugs employed by the shipowners to break the strike...
...We have a big monkey wrench and a small crowbar that we use to open the cases of coffee and the other stuff...
...Creative labor is craft labor...
...It did not have its own water supply, a detail missed by Dorothy in the enthusiasm of buying it...
...Bill, do you see that...
...They didn't really think alike...
...I was late for the meeting and by the time I got there she was already speaking...
...A lot of the men on the line were not too far removed from the pride and self-respect of men who work at a steady job...
...It was generation gap, culture gap, idea gap—all kinds of gaps...
...MY FIRST 30 days on the Easton farm confirmed me in some of my opinions about agrarianism...
...Many would certainly not have been there if it had not been for the Depression...
...On November 8, 1979, she was 82 and still serving as editor, publisher and most readable contributor of what has become one of the largest and most durable journals of opinion in America...
...For the next few months we operated a kind of commissary for the striking seamen, where we kept four large coffee pots going continuously from 7 a.m...
...A lovely sight...
...Yeah, I guess this is it...
...From long practice on the debating fields of Union Square and Columbus Circle Peter had learned never to breathe between sentences...
...DURING THAT visit Dorothy and I argued a bit about pacifism and democracy, sitting in her little booklined bedroomoffice on the third floor...
...Joe was a seaman who had been staying at Mott Street and a likable guy whom I had worked with on the farm and laughed with a lot...
...Peter's formula for feeding the hungry on a more permanent basis than the breadlines and soup kitchens of Mott Street and East First Street was the Farming Commune...
...It had been the feast of St...
...It responded as follows: JOHN C. CORT, a pioneer member of the Catholic Worker Movement, has worked for labor groups and anti-poverty agencies, including the Peace Corps and model cities programs...
...Freedom—how men hate it and chafe under it, how unhappy they are with it...
...Tex hardly ever spoke to anybody and never did any work that I can recall, but he could sleep like nobody I ever met before or since...
...The ailanthus tree (maybe it's a sycamore) stirs in the cold, east wind, the sky is a cloudless blue—and now one side of the tree, reaching the third floor of those once-luxury tenements, is all gilded as the sun spreads rapidly around...
...If the abbot is wrong, then he changes his policy...
...the morning sun gilds the upper floors of the buildings across the street, creeping from the gray one to the red brick one...
...Ordinarily it was hard to get Peter to talk about that period of his life, but he did reveal that for ten of those years he was out of the church...
...To some of us this also was too simple an undertaking...
...That was a price I could afford to pay, even on my reporter's salary of $15 a week and trade ads...
...She was sent by Commonweal to cover a hunger march on Washington by the Communist-led Unemployed Councils...
...He began reading more intensively, so intensively that Wilfrid Parsons, the Jesuit editor of America, was later to describe him as the best-read man he ever met...
...was still full of drama...
...to 9 p.m...
...What was it about her that so moved me...
...The farm had a sensational view of the Delaware River winding through the wooded hills and checkered plain of New Jersey and, off to the left, parting the twin cities of Easton and Philipsburg...
...It was more fun than Pinckney Street...
...I knew he was a pacifist from his articles in the paper and our argument on the farm, but I wasn't sure how far 20 June 1980: 365 his faith in non-violence went...
...It figured that sooner or later, given my middle-class hangups, I would want to impose a minimum of order and cleanliness on my companions...
...Still later, as I walked to the subway on Houston Street, past the bodies of three drunks who lay like corpses, casualties on the battlefield of life, I stopped at a traffic light and there was the Bleeder with his bandaged head, energetically wiping the windshield of a motorist waiting for the light, cadging money for another drink...
...Full as I was of my smart-ass Harvard distinctions, I was anxious to try an essay or two myself, or at least ask a few loaded questions...
...Cogley does not record her reply, which might have been interesting, but apparently Peter was living as a Catholic should by that time...
...It was quite an operation, costing about $4,000 in 1936 money, perhaps $15,000 or more in 1980 money, which we begged from the readers...
...As we checked the locks and got ready for bed that night we were more than a little nervous...
...We figured the men lived in the tenement house...
...The dining room table where we gathered after lunch was more oval than round and what went on there was more monologue than discussion, hour after hour of Easy Essays delivered in Peter's thick French accent...
...There is ten dollars in the bank, the rent isn't paid, the printer is trusting us . . . We are quite frankly and unashamedly asking for bread...
...Peter translated Mounier's highly intellectual doctrines into simple injunctions: don't tell anybody to do anything or not do anything...
...I had the distinct feeling that I was living in a palace...
...Here was something to stir the mind and the imagination...
...The footsteps receded...
...In a word the place grew, with the passage of time, sloppy...
...Dorothy was clearly fed up with him and you could see she was particularly annoyed at the possible loss of the gingko tree, which was virtually the only tree on the block...
...I expected to spend my first day hard at work in the fields...
...a response that left me vaguely dissatisfied because July was several months away and I was afraid I might change my mind...
...Money had to be sent out regularly from Mott Street to buy food...
...He wore cast-off clothes and when one lady pupil gently complained about his appearance, he replied, "I don't want to arouse envy...
...One of his early Essays held: Industrialization is evil because it brings idleness both to the capitalist class and the working class...
...If you wanted a bath you had to walk to the public baths some distance away and then face a pretty grim prospect...
...I was doing a study of democratic process at the time and trying, with some difficulty, to figure out a relation between democracy and the C.W...
...N JULY, 1936, I reported to the C.W.'s new House of I Hospitality, a 20-room tenement in the lower East Side neighborhood known as Little Italy...
...But there was something there that held you...
...There was a squad car at the curb...
...At night they emerged to torture those of us who were delicate enough never to have learned how to sleep through a bedbug attack...
...Dorothy once asked him why and he said only, "Because I was not living as a Catholic should...
...Anti-climax...
...It was a humor and laughter that seemed to reach down to the secret, hidden places of the soul, promising at any moment to explain the mysteries of life and human striving...
...So that's what it was: an abbey without any rules...
...In any case Mott Street was a long way from the waterfront and Dorothy was determined to help in an even more substantial way, so we rented a storefront on 10th Avenue just south of 21st Street, close to strike headquarters and just around the corner from the home of Joe Ryan, the leader of the longshoremen, who was doing his bit to break the strike in the interests of his friends the shipowners and the leaders of the ISU, the corrupt old seamen's union...
...One night friends and I were eating in a restaurant on Mulberry Street when we heard shots and the screams of women...
...But in the end she had to admit that the anarchist abbey was for her the only solution, and who am Ito say that it was not the best...
...I'm sure I complained, but she was wrong about why...
...I was satisfied that Bill wasn't an absolute pacifist...
...farm...
...Creative labor is what keeps people out of mischief...
...He was particularly attracted to writers like Eric Gill, Nicholas Berdyaev, Peter Kropotkin, Arthur Penty, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Christopher Dawson—men who emphasized freedom, religion, the land, craftsmanship, and decentralized communities...
...It must have been about midnight when a big black car drove up and parked right in front of our store...
...On the last page was an appeal for funds to support the paper and a House of Hospitality at 144 Charles Street in New York City...
...Some of us could count on C. W. fellow travelers who had apartments nearby and would let you use their bathtub once a week...
...But this was not the way of Peter Maurin's "Agronomic University" where he sought "to make scholars out of workers and workers out of scholars...
...All of us were deeply concerned, figuring that Joe might well be down at the bottom of the Hudson River with his head in a bag of cement...
...It was a spooky scene, a great night for "slaughter on Tenth Avenue...
...Well, there's the stove and the food and the pots and the furniture...
...He stopped charging for the lessons and gave them for nothing or for whatever people wanted to give him...
...Having written that, I stopped to question it...
...There was a horse, and later a cow, chickens and goats, but the farm never came close to 20 June 1980: 363 being self-sufficient...
...The hungry did get fed, and the naked clothed, and the homeless were given a bed, with or without bedbugs...
...It was written by Dorothy Day, one of the editors, and started with mention of a reader's question as to "why we don't use efficient methods...
...One child started to talk, and a man behind him clamped a hand over his mouth...
...Looking up, I see squirrels on the roof edge...
...I had forgotten the rationale...
...A little later, when Dorothy and I returned from Mass, they had got the bleeder bandaged up and were feeding him supper, still there on the sidewalk, in front of an equally bandaged little gingko tree which he had broken in two in another drunken fit several weeks before...
...He had grown up on a farm and was a good worker, but he had little help...
...He was at a loss for an answer, or else and more likely, he saw something in Pat's eyes that gave him pause...
...It was certainly not physical attraction, although she was by no means an unattractive woman...
...Everybody out of bed by 9 a.m...
...There were some good laughs...
...My roommate John Griffin, a Bowery type who had absorbed more of the C. W. philosophy than most of our guests, objected to the rules and appealed to Dorothy, who was generally recognized as the court of last resort...
...Quiet dropped over the building and nothing could be heard but the wind and the rain...
...She described a rally of steel workers on the picnic grounds at Braddock, Pa., and a speech given by Father Kazincy, a legendary figure whom even the Communist leader William Z. Foster recognized as a great man...
...Most of the 28 acres was woods, hillside, and rocks...
...I bought a copy and took it home to Beacon Hill...
...The men walked past our front door and entered the door of the tenement house...
...John thought the rules violated the principles of personalism and said so...
...She was engaged to Gold briefly, but he broke it off because he thought she was too flighty to make a good wife and mother...
...If a man take your gingko tree, give him your weeping willow also...
...As I lay in bed on my first night there, sweating in the midst of a July heatwave, smarting under the siege of small vermin never dreamed of in my middle-class upbringing, engulfed in the snores of Peter Maurin and half-a-dozen other men sleeping nearby, I seemed in my mind's eye to occupy a stage set worthy of O'Casey or Gorki...
...Let's discuss it...
...He'd go to bed at eleven o'clock or so...
...At one point I slept in the abandoned pig pen, a tentlike structure with a tin roof and open ends whose floor was covered with fresh straw...
...We seemed to hear footsteps going up the stairs of the tenement...
...Up against the wall," he said, but Pat didn't move...
...And things rarely got so disorganized that you couldn't stand it...
...When the sun came up in the morning across the valley it shone on the straw and turned it to gold...
...He was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm and I absorbed an early lesson in the perils of addiction...
...She gravitated to Greenwich Village, sold a novel to Hollywood, and enjoyed the friendship of radical Bohemians like Mike Gold, Max Eastman (in his pre-Reader's Digest incarnation) John Dos Passos (ditto) and Eugene O'Neill...
...The front page featured a free verse tract headed Easy Essay and written by one of the staff, a Peter Maurin: A Bourgeois is a fellow who tries to be somebody by trying to be like everybody which makes him a nobody .. . A Leader is a fellow who refuses to be crazy the way everybody else is crazy and tries to be crazy in his own crazy way...
...Mechanized labor is not creative labor...
...We had no trouble for the rest of the strike, which wound up a month later, an immediate defeat leading to an ultimate victory for the new CIO union...
...Bill and I crouched there, one alongside each door, waiting like wound-up springs, clutching the wrench and the crowbar...
...One metal cot they assigned to me was so infested that I took it up on the roof and went over it with a blowtorch...
...I don't regret the experience, or the price, and in any case I think I needed a substantial case of TB about that time...
...We've got too much invested here...
...one morning...
...After the meeting I went up to her and said that I wanted to join the Catholic Worker and how did I go about it...
...Why not...
...Peter would have been sad to see the Tivoli farm go, but the opening of another house would have consoled him, for he would be quick to admit that even more basic than his call for Round-Table Discussions and Farming Communes was his insistence on the Works of Mercy and that passage in the 25th chapter of Matthew that reminds us, "Inasmuch as you did it unto these the least of my brethren, you did it unto me...
...As it turned out, Dorothy informed me years later, what Tex needed was an operation for carbuncles on his backside...
...You could see her hesitate, torn between her desire to get rid of him and some inner voice that said, "Give him the benefit of the doubt...
...The other guy started it...
...So it goes...
...My tree is now radiant with sun...
...Bill Callahan and Joe had been sleeping at the waterfront branch at the time he disappeared, but with Joe gone Dorothy sent me over to reinforce Bill...
...Indeed it is...
...Isidore, after all, so how could she have gone wrong...
...No chance...
...One was a former acrobat in the circus who may have landed on his head once too often...
...It was a slum with a slum's dangers, though in those days the dangers were for insiders, not outsiders like us...
...Once you looked at them it was impossible to be indifferent to such things as over-production, underconsumption, the business cycle, supply and demand, as I had been a few years before when I grew so bored with Economics A at Harvard that I quit the course at midyear...
...I made these points...
...In fact, we called her the Abbess...
...Close to a thousand men were fed daily...
...do it yourself, or don't do it, and the power of your good example will gently but surely persuade others to go and do, or not do, likewise...
...They walked down the street together, arm in arm, much as I had walked alcoholic guests away from the Mott Street house nearly forty years before...
...Bill Callahan, managing editor of the paper, was crawling down the other side...
...We had two cots set up in the back of the store, positioned so that we could see the front door...
...Suddenly, bang, without ever to that moment having given it any serious thought at all, I decided to give up my $15 a week and join the Catholic Worker...
...For the sake of your wives and children, for the sake of your homes, you need the union...
...I made concessions for the fact that the C. W. had to deal with a good many people who were more sick than sane...
...Dorothy had a socialist's commitment to the struggle of the workers and the trade union movement...
...In the next issue Dorothy wrote defiantly, "We must now have a new window—half the stone is used to bolster up our stove and the other half is used to keep the breadknife sharp, as we are slicing up 150 loaves of bread a day...
...We could use them...
...We jumped out of bed and grabbed our weapons...
...Basil...
...and his questions to those gathered around met with stony, unknowing silence...
...20 June 1980: 367...
...George Shuster, the managing editor of Commonweal, told him the same thing and gave him her address...
...Dorothy was well into her seventies by then, the figure more stooped, the face more lined, the hair whiter, but there was still the same contagious laugh, the same warmth, the same sense of indomitable will...
...As we lay on our cots, waiting for the possible raid, Bill and I began to talk...
...At that time she would have been about 39 years old, positively young as I look back now from the far side of 65 but to me then, a mere boy of 22, she was old...
...Watching the marchers, she felt a powerful impulse to do something herself for the poor, and later entered a church to pray, "with tears and anguish, that some way would open up for me...
...A few years ago I went back to the New York House of Hospitality, by then on East First Street, to visit Dorothy...
...Peter grew up in a medieval village in southern France and became a wandering loner, gravitating from school teacher in Paris to odd jobs in the U.S...
...Later I discovered she had written in her journal, back in my time, "I feel bitterly oppressed...
...If people don't like what the abbot decides, they leave...
...Peter's Program was Round Table Discussion, Houses of Hospitality, and Farming Communes...
...In 1932 a redheaded Communist in Union Square told him to get in touch with Dorothy Day because "you think alike...
...Later Peter and I became good friends...
...Commonweal: 364 In one of her books, Loaves and Fishes, Dorothy wrote that "John Cort thought that he was coming to us to study and work with the problem of labor unions and he found himself 'running a flophouse,' as he said...
...Bellevue had already refused to take the man...
...And he rarely had more than one...
...The late John Cogley, a C.W...
...One of my friends was an assistant D.A...
...No, Peter said you ran it like an abbey...
...About the same time a large paving stone was thrown through the big storefront window around 3 a.m...
...I witnessed the intervention of two young Workers' Pat Jordan and Mike Kirwan, in a fight between two guests, both quite drunk...
...We placed the wrench and the crowbar beside our cots and waited for what the night might bring...
...As much as anything it was a quality of humor and laughter, but 20 June 1980: 361 with a deeper base than you might expect from a good comedian...
...The building had no bathtubs...
...This was Peter Maurin, the French peasant and hobo philosopher who eventually persuaded her to start publishing the Catholic Worker...
...She spoke in a low, conversational tone and the content was much like the articles I had read in the paper, highly personal and anecdotal, full of people, places and events, with occasional quotes from the Gospel or a favorite saint or writer...
...Nonviolence had triumphed again...
...Michael Harrington, for one, concluded that the introduction of large quantities of democratic socialism into American life was necessary to feeding the hungry both here and abroad, and he left the Catholic Worker to become chairman of the Socialist Party...
...She let the police drive off without a word, leaving the Bleeder there on the sidewalk...
...Within a few months the circulation was 25,000...
...About six acres were planted, mainly in alfalfa, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes...
...I was further intrigued...
...John Filliger, a seaman, was the man' in charge of farming...
...With his snow white hair," she wrote, "he stood broad and straight in the broiling sun, head held high, as he told the men, 'Do not let the Carnegie Steel Company crush you...
...Our building, a pious but decidedly untidy donation to the movement, was infested with kittensized rats, lice, and bedbugs...
...Converted to religious faith by happiness over the birth of her daughter Tamar, Dorothy became a Catholic and began writing for Catholic publications...
...Something told her not to pursue the subject...
...Most of the men I lived with had long since resigned themselves to the realization that no great harm would befall if they bathed but once a month, once a year, or once a lifetime...
...Another man played the flute and seemed quite normal except that every now and then he would say something strange...
...Must be a few hundred dollars anyway, maybe a thousand...
...I did not go down to Mott Street to work with labor, but, as noted, because Dorothy convinced me that I could get more fun out of life on Mott Street, New York, than on Pinckney Street, Boston...
...Outside the wind was howling and a driving rain fell on Tenth Avenue...
...A few months later Dorothy Day gave a talk in Boston...
...Peter was abstract, all right...
...The breadline wound down Mott Street and around the corner onto Canal Street, with men lining up frequently before dawn and, in the winter, shivering in the cold...
...My interest in labor was nourished by reports like that, but what really hooked me was the seamen's strike of 1936-37, the second of two during those years in which the C.W...
...This article is an excerpt from an autobiography currently in progress...
...RECOLLECTIONS OF DOROTHY DAY & PETER MAURIN My life at the Catholic Worker JOHN C. CORT IT WAS a Sunday morning in Boston and I was coming down the steps of the French church on Isabella Street when I saw this man holding up a tabloid newspaper and crying out, "Catholic Worker—a penny a copy...
...Eleven or twelve the next day he would still be in bed, head buried under the covers, no sign of life...
...She said, "Why don't you come down to the farm in July...
...I LEFT the C. W. in 1938, having contracted a substantial case of tuberculosis...
...Life at the C.W...
...I remember sitting in that dingy hall and saying to myself, "This woman is getting a lot of fun out of life and I would like to get some of that for myself, so maybe I'd better try the same kind of life...
...Peter Maurin, who Dorothy believes was a saint, died in 1949, but she herself, weakened now by age and several heart attacks, remains the unquestioned leader of the oldest radical movement in the American Church, a movement that has shaped such other movers and shakers as the Berrigans, Cogley, Michael Harrington, America's premier socialist, James O'Gara, editor of Commonweal, and many others...
...The thought also occurred to me that we never had a staff meeting, or a house meeting, during the years I spent at the C.W...
...Even the pope has his college of cardinals, councils, and now the synod of bishops...
...Ah yes," he replied, "I recall you as a nude on a mantelpiece...
...We could hear their footsteps coming down the hallway alongside our store...
...Each man is expected to make his own bed...
...Okay," I said, "let's do that...
...In a few seconds it was over, he had put away his knife and had his arm around Pat's shoulder in a gesture of obvious affection...
...Voting and such just leads to the creation of factions and cliques...
...As time went by I came to agree more and more with Harrington, but that could never dim my sense of gratitude to Peter and Dorothy for introducing me to the harsh and dreadful things that tell you where true love is to be found...
...Would Peter have been so quick to admit any such thing...
...I could grant that Mott Street sometimes struck me as a flophouse, without the virtue of order that even a flophouse must demand from time to time...
...I was working .on a throwaway weekly in Brookline and was fresh out of Harvard, where I had been converted to Catholicism, a fact which years later moved Arthur Schlesinger's wife Marian to exclaim, "How positively bizarre...
...I joke now, but at the time I was sore as hell...
...By this time he was giving French lessons in such places as the art colony in Woodstock, N.Y...
...IT WAS Dorothy who sold me on the labor movement...
...It was an article of faith that he should rarely have more than one...
...The talk went something like this: "Bill, we can't just let them break up this place...
...I finally took him up to Bellevue for treatment...
...On nights when there was a full moon he could sometimes be seen doing cartwheels down the hill long after most people had retired...
...And so a number of useful things did not get done, and some not-so-useful things did get done, because the people setting the good example were greatly outnumbered by the people setting bad example, or, more likely, just setting...
...Labor was where the live action was...
...Young people are on their way to work, but the children are not yet on their way to school...
...As the hours and the voice singsonged on I sat there sweating in the summer heat, sphincter tight and teeth clenched in rebellion and resentment...
...What it came down to was that the Catholic Worker was an extraordinary combination of anarchy and dictatorship...
...I remember one warm afternoon crawling on my hands and knees down the long rows of alien corn, picking the weeds out with my fingers...
...We are willing to clothe ourselves in the donations of clothes that come in...
...She was tall and imposing in figure but roundshouldered and a bit stooped as though she were already feeling the weight of the burdens she had assumed...
...There was also a door in the back and one that led to the hallway of the tenement above us...
...Today I happened to read Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor...
...Remember your dignity as men...
...But even an abbey has chapter meetings where the monks are given a chance to criticize, complain, and contribute something to the decision-making process...
...THOUGH OFTEN characterized as anarchists, Peter and Dorothy preferred to call themselves "personalists," a term derived from the French Catholic writer Emmanuel Mounier, editor of Esprit and author of The Personalist Manifesto, which Peter wanted us to push as the answer to The Communist Manifesto...
...She regarded him as an abstract thinker and may have seen in that a mental power she lacked...
...Over 30 similar houses continue to operate around the country, more or less loosely affiliated with the C.W...
...There were others harder to categorize...
...In fact, the face was rather striking, the cheekbones high and the eyes large and strangely slanted...
...It continues to sell for a penny a copy and 25¢ for a year's subscription...
...With $57 out of her own pocket she paid for the printing of 2500 copies just in time for distribution on May Day, 1933, at the Communists' parade and rally in Union Square...
...By the end of the year it was 100,000 and by 1936, about the time I joined the staff, it was pushing 150,000...
...If you got him alone he was a gentle, lovable soul who would listen to you patiently and give you his last pair of pants...
...was involved...
Vol. 107 • June 1980 • No. 12
