Women and Rhetoric between the Wars

7. Dorothy Day: Personalizing (to) the Masses

114 X 7 Dorothy Day: Personalizing (to) the Masses M. Elizabeth Weiser “Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist?” Hearing that question today, social activists can think of “radical” Christian Americans like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., or Sr. Helen Prejean, groups like Witness for Peace or Bread for the World or, indeed , their own church’s likely participation with homeless shelters or refugee resettlement or green projects or anti-war demonstrations. In 1933, however, when social activists asked that question at a crowded May Day rally in Union Square, the circle of American religious radicals was much smaller. Among Roman Catholics, the circle was smaller still: some bishops inspired by a late-nineteenth-century papal encyclical , and Dorothy Day, radical journalist, recent convert, and founder that May Day of a newspaper and a lay movement, both named the Catholic Worker. Within a few years her message would reach hundreds of thousands, and by now, eight decades later, her work has changed millions of lives around the world. Day’s brother-in-law Kenneth Burke1 would have called her “radical nonatheist” stance a falling on the bias across dichotomous beliefs, uniting what seemed to her to be the best of both religious conservative and liberal progressive ideals. And she brought her readers along with her: Seventeen years before Burke theorized identification as the prerequisite to persuasion in A Rhetoric of Motives, Day urged middle-class Americans toward a Dorothy Day 115 rhetorical identification with radical movements, foreign ideologies, and immigrant others through structured, personalized reflection that translated abstractions into everyday concrete experiences. RhetoricianssuchasSharonCrowleyaretodaylegitimatelyconcerned that the liberal foundation of American public life is being eroded by an antagonistic religious value set. In her award-winning book Toward a Civil Discourse, Crowley labels this stance fundamentalism, which she defines broadly as belief in any nonnaturalistic explanation for creedal doctrines (the virgin birth, the resurrection) (Crowley 9). Fundamentalists may hold liberal political beliefs, she concedes, but most do not because (as she quotes Jason Bivens) liberalism “is associated with representative democracy, has tended to privilege individual over collective rights, favors negative liberty (freedom from coercion) over positive liberty (freedom to participate in politics in active, constructive ways), and seeks to protect moral and religious pluralism by separating public from private realms of society” (10). By implication, most Christian activists would have difficulties with democracy, individualism, freedom from coercion, and privacy—and this ideology not surprisingly “seems bizarre when measured by the standards of secular politics” (11). Crowley ’s aim, as she states in her book’s title, is to forge dialogue between academicians and religious activists. I applaud her effort and share her concern for an erosion of the value of civil discourse, but I question her stark categorization of “fundamentalist” Christians and their “seemingly bizarre” beliefs. Dorothy Day, I believe, provides both a helpful bridge between religious and activist beliefs and a complicating alternative to Crowley’s liberal secular/conservative fundamentalist dichotomy. In this chapter, I examine Day’s newspaper columns and books from the 1930s to demonstrate how Day articulated two key strategies of Burkean rhetorics—falling on the bias and identification—to produce shifts in perspective among her middle-class audience. These shifts toward radical ideas Burke theorized but could not, without a mass movement such as Day’s, put into practice. In addition, my analysis shows that Day’s bias-falling stance complicates the view of today’s academic rhetoricians toward religious activists, while her personalized approach offers opportunities for dialogue among these often antagonistic communities. Day’s Rhetorical Stance In some ways, Day’s rhetoric followed an established path: Like many women engaged in social service during the Depression, she carried M. Elizabeth Weiser 116 the pathos of the poor across a social divide to middle- and upperclass donor/volunteers upon whom the success of her work depended. Like many political activists, she carried Marxist ideas of capitalist inequities across an ideological divide to the masses of poor workers who might be prolabor but were not pro-Communist Party. Like many social reformers in immigrant communities, she carried “foreigner” stories from her Bowery neighborhood across the geographic divide to white Anglo middle America. But Day’s brand of Catholicism also posed unique challenges: Her belief in the dignity of the individual above all made her antagonistic to radical communism as well as to mainstream capitalism. “The Catholic Worker stands opposed to Communism , Socialism...