Dorothy Day and the Little Way

September 2014

On June 15, 1955, a siren sounded, signaling a nuclear-attack drill. The entire population of New York City obediently sought shelter in basements and subway stations, or, in the case of schoolchildren, under their desks. According to the authorities, this first in a series of civil-defense drills was a “complete success.” Well, almost. It was marred by a middle-age, whitehaired woman and twenty-six others who refused to play this war game. Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and her companions instead sat in City Hall Park, where they were arrested and later sentenced to jail. The judge who imposed bail likened the protesters to “murderers” who had contributed to the “utter destruction of these three million theoretically killed in our city.”

Of course, three million—the theoretical casualties of a nuclear strike in New York City—would hardly have measured the potential devastation. Actual plans for nuclear war involved casualties in the hundreds of millions. Unknown at that time were the effects of “nuclear winter,” the catastrophic side effect of a nuclear exchange that might have destroyed all life in the Northern Hemisphere. As Dorothy Day saw it, the illusion that nuclear war was “survivable” and therefore “winnable” made such a war more likely. To participate in an exercise for doomsday, she believed, was an act of blasphemy. And so she went to jail. On that clear spring day in 1955, it had been more than twenty years since Dorothy Day had founded The Catholic Worker. It was first a newspaper and then a movement consisting of houses of hospitality in New York City and slum neighborhoods across the country. In such communities, the works of mercy—feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless—were combined with a commitment to social justice and Day’s vision of a society “in which it is easier to be good.”

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