New York in the '50s (13 page)

The
Catholic Worker
's message of help and hope for the poor struck a deep response in Depression America, and circulation of the paper soared to 150,000 by 1936. But Dorothy would never compromise her pacifist principles, so she condemned both sides in the Spanish civil war and managed to alienate most politically conscious readers. As Dorothy put it in her autobiography
The Long Loneliness
, “Ours is indeed an unpopular front.” A pacifist position in the patriotic tide that swept the country during World War II was even more unpopular, and circulation plummeted to a low of 30,000.

When I first saw the paper in the mid-fifties, it had climbed back to 65,000, despite its opposition to the war in Korea, which was vigorously supported by New York's Cardinal Spellman, who sprinkled holy water on the guns of the troops at Christmas. There were new controversial currents rising to the surface in the fifties that the
Worker
had caught, and it attracted a small but growing audience who found their own feelings expressed in the words and the woodcuts that illustrated them in this personal-sounding, radical paper that still cost only a penny a copy.

One of the paper's associate editors I met at the hospitality house was twenty-three-year-old Bob Steed, who had discovered the
Worker
when he saw the issue with a front-page illustration of Jesus
embracing a Negro and a white worker, who are shaking hands. Steed sold copies of the
Catholic Worker
throughout the South before coming to live at Chrystie Street. When I first saw the paper that summer of 1955, it was (like Dorothy and Ammon and their friends) campaigning against nuclear testing, and protesting the “sham” of civil defense air-raid drills.

What drew me to the Catholic Worker movement, first as a journalist and then as a friend and sympathizer—a sort of idealistic fellow traveler—wasn't just the colorful personality of Ammon Hennacy, or Dorothy Day's bohemian-literary past, or even her eloquence or daily dedication to the poor. It was all those things perhaps, but more, a real mystique that called to young people of the fifties and drew them from all across the country, offering in the midst of the grim poverty of the Bowery something that all the glittering affluence around us lacked—a spirit, a purpose, a way of transcending self through service that those who came still vividly remember.

A young student from Boston, dissatisfied with his studies at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, made his way to Chrystie Street in the spring of 1952 to look for Dorothy Day. He found her in a crowded room, enmeshed in a conversation with an obviously drunken woman, yet treating her as if she were a person of dignity and worth. When Dorothy saw the young man, she looked up and said, “Are you waiting to talk with one of us?”

Robert Coles became a volunteer and continued to see and listen to Dorothy Day for the rest of her life, after he became a doctor, psychiatrist, writer, and teacher. He recorded many conversations with her, which he used as a source for his memoir-biography
Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion
, one of a growing number of books about her life and work that continue to stir interest decades after her death (a play was written about her too, and a movie on her life is now in the works).

When a young intellectual and writer from St. Louis named Michael Harrington found his way to Chrystie Street in 1951, he was told he could work there but couldn't be paid anything. He stayed for two years. In his later memoir,
Fragments of the Century
, he described Dorothy Day as severe yet serene, and thought she looked like a mystic out of a Dostoevsky novel. She was a presence, he
wrote, the sort of person a stranger who had never heard of her would know was significant as soon as she entered a room. He counted himself as “one of hundreds of thousands who were influenced by her life.”

An aspiring poet read a copy of the
Catholic Worker
while he was going to college at St. Michael's in Vermont, and he came down on a vacation in 1954, to seek out the hospitality house and volunteer. Ned O'Gorman, now the headmaster of the Storefront School in Harlem, which he founded in 1965, recalls his first visit to the hospitality house in the fifties: “I walked in wearing this expensive tweed jacket with my wallet in it, took off the jacket and threw it on a chair. The next thing I heard was Dorothy's voice: ‘Who put this jacket on the chair? What a stupid thing to do, it'll be robbed.' I'd had these romantic notions, thinking, Oh, the poor, they go around with babushkas on, being noble. Dorothy and the Worker cured me of those illusions.”

When he came to live in New York in 1955, to get a master's degree in English at Columbia, Ned became a regular at Chrystie Street, volunteering at the house and coming to Friday night sessions to join the discussions and sometimes read his own poetry.

Betty Bartelme, a young woman from Iowa who was beginning her career in New York in the early fifties by working on a Frick Collection catalogue, first heard about the Catholic Worker in a book she was reading. “It was a coming-of-age novel by Harry Sylvester, and there was a scene, a sort of set piece, that portrayed the Worker very romantically. I decided to go down and volunteer, but it wasn't at all romantic. I was greeted at the door by a rough-looking man named Smoky Joe, who I later learned had been a burglar, who lived there. He said, ‘Whaddaya want?' It's a wonder I didn't turn right around and walk away.

“They were putting out the paper,” Betty adds, “and I helped stuff envelopes with Dorothy Day and one of the editors, Tom Sullivan, and they asked me to come back.”

Mary Ann McCoy worked for the telephone company and went to Ascension Church in Elmhurst, Queens, where the priest regularly sent her uncle with leftover food from the parish to the Catholic Worker house. One night her uncle came back from delivering
the food with a copy of another autobiographical work by Dorothy Day,
From Union Square to Rome
, which he gave to his niece.

“It was just what I was looking for,” Mary Ann recalls. “I was already a union steward in the telephone company. I was making $28 a week, and we went on strike for three months, and after that I was making $34 a week. My mother was a working-class girl and a staunch liberal Democrat who had empathy for the workers, and we were Catholics, so the Catholic Worker movement and what Dorothy Day was doing sounded just right.” Mary Ann's eyes seem to get larger, as they always do when she makes an important point (I remember being struck by this forty years ago), and she adds, “And I wanted to have an interesting life!”

Mary Ann went to the Worker the first time she had a day off, and asked for Dorothy Day.

“She isn't here now,” a man named Tony said.

Mary Ann felt like crying. “Oh, I came all the way here for nothing!” she said.

“Would you like to do some bookbinding?” Tony asked.

He brought some unbound copies of a book of Peter Maurin's essays and showed Mary Ann how to bind them. She spent several hours at the work, and when she finished, Tony said she could meet Dorothy Day if she came back on Friday night—Dorothy was going to speak on the Chinese revolution. Mary Ann took her friend Eileen, who also lived in Queens and worked at the telephone company, to the talk on Friday. A bunch of students from Columbia attacked Dorothy's views that night, and she stood her ground in an exciting debate.

“That was the beginning of the wonderful Friday nights at the Worker,” Mary Ann says. “I heard Dorothy Day, there was Ned O'Gorman and other young poets who read from their work, Bayard Rustin and Dave Dellinger spoke on politics, there were talks on philosophy and literature, a whole series once on Paul Claudel. I was in heaven. To find out there were intellectuals, and discovering ideas—there was an exotic quality to that.”

Yes. I knew.

Like any other newcomers who visited the place, Sam Astrachan and I were invited to attend a Friday night lecture, and we went,
and returned again and again, sitting in an audience made up not only of people from the Bowery streets—they were no longer “bums,” simply other people beside you listening to the same speaker—but also of eager young writers and intellectuals. After the lectures everyone filed down the squeaky, narrow stairs to the kitchen for coffee and conversation at long wooden tables. There were old and young, men and women, graduate students and Bowery denizens, eager to talk about the night's speech, whether it was given by a priest or a politician, a migrant worker or a Yeats scholar, and no one was squelched or snubbed or shushed; anyone could have a say.

There wasn't any magic that suddenly transformed skid row winos into intellectuals, but they listened, or pretended to listen, perhaps just appreciative of being included in the week's main social event and entertainment. Michael Harrington, whose young days at the Worker would later inform his landmark book
The Other America
, which inspired Lyndon Johnson's antipoverty program, recalled that the first talk he gave in the regular Friday night series was about Martin Buber's essays on communitarian socialism, to an audience that included “the somewhat perplexed refugees from the Bowery” as well as intellectual “adepts.”

Some of the former winos and other “refugees” from the Bowery genuinely got caught up in the infectious intellectual excitement at the Worker. Tony, the tough guy who greeted Mary Ann McCoy at the door when she first came to Chrystie Street, had once sold pints of his blood for money to buy wine, a common practice of men in the Bowery. After a few years of living at the Worker, he sold a pint of blood to buy theater tickets for a play by García Lorca.

It was on Friday evenings that fall, after the talks at the Worker, that I met Mike Harrington, the wide-grinning guy from St. Louis who spoke of socialism with a midwestern twang, and Ned O'Gorman, a big, broad-shouldered graduate student who was bursting with poetry he loved to recite, whether it was Yeats's or his own. He would soon have his first book of verse published,
Night of the Hammer
. To my added surprise and delight I also met girls there, like Mary Ann McCoy, a vitally attractive Irish blonde from Queens, and Helen Russell, a tall, dark-haired former novice of a convent in California. The Mother Superior had discovered her playing
Ravel's
Bolero
over and over, and said, “I know where you belong.” She gave Helen the latest issue of the
Catholic Worker
. Helen read it and soon left the convent, took a bus to New York, and volunteered to work for Dorothy Day.

I was flattered to be asked to speak myself at one of the Friday night lectures, a few months after I first went there. I had just come back from the Emmet Till trial in Mississippi, and describing it to that very mixed audience in the backyard of the Chrystie Street house on a warm September evening was my first experience of public speaking, except for school and college. I could not have found a more polite and appreciative crowd, and it made me love the place all the more.

After the coffee session in the kitchen following the lectures, a group would usually gather to go to the White Horse Tavern. There the talk continued over pints of ale or beer, or the favored combination of arf 'n' arf, and soon everyone broke into songs of Irish rebellion, or love, or protest, folk songs joined and swelled by the Clancy Brothers or long-haired, blond Mary Travers, who also hung out in the back room of the Horse.

The radical spirit of the Catholic Worker did not just dissipate in talk and beer and folk songs, though. “I wanted to spread the word, so I took big stacks of the Catholic Worker back to my parish in Queens,” Mary Ann McCoy recalls. “I'd stand outside the church after mass with the paper, but nobody would buy it, even for the price of a penny. This was the Cold War, remember—Senator McCarthy was hunting Reds, people were afraid. The little newsboys selling the
Brooklyn Tablet
, the paper of the diocese, took pity on me and slipped my copies of the
Catholic Worker
inside the
Tablet
, which was an archconservative paper.”

The Catholic Worker caused controversy throughout the ranks of the faithful. Even though the pope sent a special blessing to all who were concerned with the movement, and some bishops and priests personally contributed to it, others forbade the paper from being sold at their churches. Catholics who were shocked at the pacifist-anarchist sentiments of the paper had even attacked people who sold it in the street.

“Our priest asked me to invite Tom Sullivan, one of the editors of the
Worker
, to speak at our parish,” Mary Ann says, “but when I
asked, Tom couldn't or didn't want to come to a conservative parish in Queens. Dorothy Day was listening and she said, ‘I'll come.' She felt it was her duty to speak to everyone who asked, to spread the gospel message of the Catholic Worker.”

“Well, the parish came out in droves to hear her. She spoke in defense of anarchism—she said you didn't need laws to be good. She said you should have a guest room in your house to take in someone who has no home, everyone who has a house should have this kind of hospitality room. Some people were impressed, others objected to her coming, thought she was a Red. Later there was a big argument about it at a meeting of the parish board. There was a man on the board who was a butcher in the neighborhood who once had been down and out on the Bowery, and he'd been fed by Dorothy and the Catholic Worker. He defended Dorothy, and when one of the other men objected to her coming to the parish, calling her a Red, the butcher wrestled the man to the floor.”

Mary Ann was one of the group from Chrystie Street who had gone with Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day to City Hall Park to protest the air-raid drills, and all of them were thrown in jail. Betty Bartelme and some of the other Catholic Worker volunteers heard that the group had been arrested and went down to try to help get them out. “We couldn't get in to see them,” Betty remembers, “but we could hear their voices call out to us. They said they were hungry, so we went to the Muni [the Municipal Cafeteria] on Canal Street and got sandwiches for them. Mary Ann McCoy was yelling out telephone numbers of friends to call to help raise bail. Another woman volunteer and I made phone calls from the jail, until one of the jailers said if we didn't get out he'd run us in as a couple of prostitutes. That night we ran all over town to try to raise money for bail. We managed to get enough together to get Dorothy out that day, but the others had to spend the night in jail.”