Comics Grinder

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion.  By Jeffry Odell Korgen and Christopher Cardinale, with Friar Mike Lasky. New York/Mahwah: The Paulist Press, 2024. 106pp. $16.95.

Guest review by Paul Buhle

A most unusual comic! These days, meaning the last fifty years, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) has slipped out of the news but also into an official Church process,  now a decade old, of literally making her a Saint. Jeffry Korgen, the principal (and official) activist to push for her sainthood, is also the moving force here. Seen in this light, it would appear  a daunting responsibility for a comic. But Korgen and artist Christopher Cardinale measure up to the task.

The beautifully written and drawn story takes us back to her youth,  where as a child, she survives the Bay Area earthquake and what became known as the Great Fire. The comic passes over her time in my own hometown of Urbana, Illinois (she also seems to have found the place dull, and left after two years of college), to arrive in Manhattan in 1916 as a would-be journalist. She “discovers” poverty and makes her own first effort to provide a sympathetic, empathetic journalism of support. In her way, she will always be a muckraker, in the honored tradition of going and talking to the impoverished and exploited about their lives, and honestly reporting what she learns. Soon she will invite them into her life.

For many of her devotees beyond the Church or any religion, however, her days in Greenwich Village have always stood out. Never again a place like this in the 1910s, never a crowd like this, with bold art, theatrical experiments, modern dance and radical politics mixed together with low rents. Young Dorothy supported both the egalitarian Industrial Workers of the World and the Socialist Party (working for a while for its Daily Call). A staffer for the brilliant artistic Masses magazine, she tries to keep it going as the ostensibly liberal Woodrow Wilson administration, launching the Red Scare, prosecutes the editors for opposing US entry into the First World War.

Many of the readers of The Eleventh Pregnancy (1924), her famed semi-fictional novel and of lively writings about her life dwell upon her time with Eugene O’Neill. Then the nation’s greatest social-minded playwright (Arthur Miller and Tony Kushner among others follow him and receive the same conservative outrage), O’Neill attracts her to the Provincetown Players. She could have been an actress! That is, if modesty had not set her on another road.

Several gripping pages show Dorothy in another campaign of the 1910s, for Woman Suffrage. In this one, the federal government really does jail her. In sharing the poverty of fellow up close inmates, she ponders the power of religion. It will take her a while yet to get to her calling. The Wilson administration, even amidst a fury of jailing thousands of union members, is successfully pressured to let the suffrage protesters go.

I could wish that the comic gave more time and space to the adventures that found her shortly after marrying money, traveling to Europe and writing her  novel, among the handful from the times still read as a guide to the Bohemians of the day. This follows a love affair, an abortion (purportedly by none less than Dr. Ben Reitman, Emma Goldman’s lover) and a failed attempt to suicide. A new lover, a baby and her insistence upon a baptism—against the father’s arguments— finds her convincingly alone, without the institutional connection that will soon enough be decisive for the rest of her life.

We learn, but only at the end of the book, that she remained, until the end of her time on earth, an intimate friend to leading Communist novelist and literary critic Mike Gold and of leading Communist Party official Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “girl Wobbly” of the 1910s who goes on to embrace Moscow. These friendships seem to me a decisive clue to the psychological mysteries of her character that have, in the face of considerable scholarship, remained somehow elusive. She takes part in the great Unemployed March of 1932 and seeks out one of the most curious and contradictory characters of the day, Peter Maurin. An fervent and, it must be considered, largely reactionary opponent of the mass strikes leading to the CIO, Maurin has another plan. Voluntary poverty, voluntary cooperation based on manual labor of a mostly agricultural character, all this looks something like an ecological, democratic vision. Or maybe not, depending on one’s view of mass life in the Middle Ages.

The Communists’ Daily Worker and its many counterparts in non-English languages of ethnic working class communities might not have possibly existed without the illusion of the USSR. The Catholic Worker, a weekly with an astonishing circulation that sometimes reached almost 200,000, based itself on another illusion, the voluntary cooperation that would, somehow, displace capitalist power.

The Catholic Worker, for those who now remember its thriving days, was lively and well-written, with appealing stories and quite wonderful illustrations. Peter Maurin did not even like it! But the Hospitality Houses of his inspiration had a great appeal. The “CW” brought in the most progressive figures of the Church, a remarkable thing for a historical moment when antiSemitism had a powerful influence, far beyond the considerable reach of famed radio evangelist Father Coughlin. That the CW would support the Sit Down Strikes and even help lead a reform movement of seamen against their typically corrupt (but avowedly Catholic) AFL bosses testified to her determination and savvy.

Indeed, somehow, with friends on high, she managed it, as she supported the the Spanish Republic when most of the Church, including the Pope, openly favored Franco and his anticommunist partners, the Fascists. She managed an antiwar sentiment, then ardent advocacy of Conscientious Objectors, even as the Second World War embraced the nation and the world.

Pacifism and antiwar sentiment of the Cold War years, even more than the existence of the Hospitality Houses, the civil rights movement and the continuing struggle against poverty, defined Day in the public eye through most of the following decades. The New Yorker took her up as a “personality” as the Cold War deepened. The FBI pursued her, albeit without the harassment and public “investigations” that hounded members and former members of the Left, emphatically including unionists.

Hitting the fifty year age mark in 1956, Day built the Catholic Worker movement as a writer and a public personality, perpetually on tour. Today’s “Nuns on a Bus” owes a lot to her historical inspiration, as does the wide embrace of Liberation Theology during the last decades of the twentieth century. City officials in Manhattan in the 1950s plotted to shut down the movement by shuttering the Hospitality Houses for code violations. She was put on trial very much like her contemporaries…the publishers of comic books.

Her civil rights activity and her opposition to the Vietnam War would offer the last, grand moments of her public life. She would not back down in her opposition, even her support of fellow Catholics who burned draft center documents, and met verbal assaults verbally by the all-powerful Cardinal Spellman.

The Pope, the newest Pope, was more or less on her side. She gained a powerful new ally in Cesar Chavez and his farm workers’ movement. There, in the religious faith of the mostly Chicano workers, she may have found the radicalism lacking in the Church’s own anticommunist Labor Schools and the notorious collaboration with the FBI and Chamber of Commerce to take down unwanted union leaders.

Day was, finally, more than an icon, and as we near the end of the comic, we are reminded that hers is very much a story with many twists and turns—but less in her than in the worlds around her. Someone told me an anecdote about the “sainting” process that would have surely made Dorothy laugh.  One of the big bishops, probably one advanced by the dark knight of reaction, Pope Benedict, wanted to halt the sainthood process because Dorothy was a “harlot,” that is a bohemian, in her young days.   If not a free lover, she was at least someone who did not marry the father. How dare the Church honor her! The elderly bishop was reminded that if she DID become a saint, it would seriously endanger his celestial status, more or less forever: a very convincing argument indeed. Dorothy passed muster, even with him.

In the wonderful, final pages of Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, we find her at death’s door and beyond, her wake attended by the likes of I.F. Stone and Abbie Hoffman. She had become the counterpart, perhaps, of Woody Guthrie, saints needed for the continuing guidance of their example, words and deeds. From the (continuing) Hospitality Houses to the fiercely persecuted Keystone Pipeline protesters, her story goes on and on.

Paul Buhle