But by the time she died, in 1980, Day had become one of the most prominent thinkers of the left and doers of the right. That dichotomy seems especially stark today, when most people’s beliefs come more neatly packaged by partisan affiliation. Under her guidance, it would also develop a curiously dichotomous political agenda, taking prophetic stands against racial segregation, nuclear warfare, the draft, and armed conflict around the world, while opposing abortion, birth control, and the welfare state. In the years that followed, she started a radical newspaper and began opening what she called “houses of hospitality” for those who needed something to eat and somewhere to stay.Įventually, Day’s Catholic Worker Movement would serve the poor in more than two hundred communities.

Even before the Great Depression, Day had been sensitive to the plight of the poor, a sensitivity that ultimately shaped her calling. She first encountered it in the slums of Chicago, where she lived as a teen-ager, and she saw it all around her in New York City, where she moved after dropping out of college, and lived for more than six decades. The emergency was poverty, and Day had been alarmed by it her whole life. Day would have disagreed with them: not because she felt she was dangerous but because she knew that the nation was already in an emergency, and had been for some time. decided that the subject of Bureau File 100-2403-1 would not need to be detained in the event of a national emergency.

After months of investigating-interviewing her known associates, obtaining her driving record and vital statistics, collecting her clips from newspaper morgues, and reviewing the first of her autobiographies, “From Union Square to Rome” (“an interesting, running account of the life of the authoress”)-the F.B.I. It was 1941, and Director J. Edgar Hoover was concerned about Day’s onetime communism, sometime socialism, and all-the-time anarchism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation didn’t know what to do about Dorothy Day.

Dorothy Day by Robert Coles