In this era of political name-calling and seemingly unbridgeable political gaps, it is appropriate to consider the views of this woman who could merit such favorable mention from such divergent sources. And indeed depending on which of her writings you read, you might be puzzled and ask, “Is she on the Right or Left?”
“The Right,” you say? True, she stated in 1972 that “birth control and abortion are genocide.” Years earlier, she quoted approvingly the man who co-founded the Catholic Worker organization with her in 1933: “People go to Washington, asking the Federal Government to solve their economic problems. But the Federal Government was never meant to solve men’s economic problems. Thomas Jefferson says, ‘The less government there is the better it is.’” In February 1945 she wrote, “We believe that social security legislation, now balled [sic] as a great victory for the poor and for the worker, is a great defeat for Christianity. . . . We in our generation have more and more come to consider the state as bountiful Uncle Sam. ‘Uncle Sam will take care of it all. The race question, the labor question, the unemployment question.’ We will all be registered and tabulated and employed or put on a dole, and shunted from clinic to birth control clinic. . . . It is the city and the state and the federal government that is robbing them [the people] and pilfering them, too. They are taxed for every bite they eat, every shoddy rag they put on. They are taxed on their jobs, there are deductions for this and that. . . . The first unit of society is the family. The family should look after its own.”
“The Left,” you say? True, she was a pacifist and about as anti-war as one could be, and this was true long before the Vietnam War, which she vigorously opposed. In June 1940, the month that Hitler’s armies had completed taking over parts of Western Europe, including France, Day told the readers of her newspaper (The Catholic Worker):“‘And if we are invaded’ is another question asked. We say again that we are opposed to all but the use of non-violent means to resist such an invader.” Given such a position it is hardly surprising that she opposed the U.S. entry into World War II, even after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.
She was also a self-proclaimed anarchist, but following Tolstoy’s example in favoring a non-violent anarchism that retained the essential elements of how the term is defined—opposition to a centralized government and the desire to set up “a new order based on free and spontaneous co-operation among individuals, groups, regions and nations.” In May 1974, after attending an anarchist conference at New York’s Hunter College, she wrote, “Because I have been behind bars in police stations, houses of detention, jails and prison farms, whatsoever they are called, eleven times, and have refused to pay Federal income taxes and have never voted, they accept me as an anarchist. And I in turn, can see Christ in them even though they deny Him, because they are giving themselves to working for a better social order for the wretched of the earth.” The following year Eunice Shriver (nee Kennedy), an admirer of Day, called her to tell her that her husband, Sargent (first head of the Peace Corps), was going to seek the Democratic nomination for president and asked if Dorothy could support him. Day’s comment in her diary was, “I, an anarchist. But ‘Pray for him.’”
Like many anarchists, she was critical of capitalism. In 1954 she agreed with the statement of the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano when it wrote:
Capitalism seizes, confiscates, and dries up wealth, i.e. reduces the numbers of those who may enjoy riches, holds up distribution and defies Divine Providence who has given good things for the use of all men. St. Thomas Aquinas says that man must not consider riches as his own property but as common good. This means that communism itself, as an economic system, apart from its philosophy—is not in contradiction with the nature of Christianity as is capitalism.
Capitalism is intrinsically atheistic. Capitalism is godless, not by nature of a philosophy which it does not profess, but in practice (which is its only philosophy), by its insatiable greed and avarice, its mighty power, its dominion.
The previous year, she summed up her feelings on the U.S. capitalist consumer culture and what she would like in its place.
The poor want what they are persuaded to want by advertisements, radio, television. They want radio and television, cars, clothes, cosmetics, cigarettes, good food and drink. They don’t want to take over the factories, land, in any decentralist or distributist movement. They don’t think it possible. They are more intent on preserving the status quo of our industrial capitalist system. So what they get is capitalism or communism, and we don’t want either. We would like to see a country made up of farming communes, agronomic universities, hospices, unions, cooperatives, small units of all those necessary institutions to be preserved, and a doing away with luxury in order to have the essential which is ownership of house and field and job, and the responsibility which goes with that ownership. We wish to abolish the proletariat state, rather than establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, abolish the wage system which provides men with luxuries but not the essentials.
