Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day: Friends

Peter Maurin and Dorothy DayFriends Thomas W. Jodziewicz (bio) In December 1932 an American could be forgiven for taking a short view of things. The Great Depression that had begun three years earlier had deepened and then deepened again. At least 25 percent of workers were unemployed, over one-third of the nation's banks had failed, and the gross national product was one-half of what it had been just three years before. As the nation awaited recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal"—a massive governmental effort at relief, recovery, and reform—the circumstances of millions of Americans were clearly desperate: what about jobs? food? shelter? What of hope in the land of opportunity and freedom? The nation had suffered through other depressions in its history, especially in the generation after the Civil War, but this one would come to be called the Great Depression due to the severity of its assault on national and personal well-being over ten years' time. All in all, it was easy to connect with a severely contracted view of things when everyday life was so tenuous, the social order so fragile. There were, of course, those who did have a wider perspective about the economic and social catastrophe. Systemic solutions [End Page 164] were bobbing about in the roiled national waters: various forms of socialism, communism, and statist initiatives were advertised; even a few native fascists offered their ideas as to how best to bail out the imperiled American ark. What had seemed so good, so promising in America's self-conscious voyage beyond humanity's historic scarcities and into the ever more visible land of material plenty had instead foundered. Just a generation earlier, for example, an exuberant Andrew Carnegie had taken America's new prosperity for granted and offered well-intended solutions regarding its actual distribution. But now all about was the wreckage of the American economic system. And so the system had to be rescued and reformed. What Roosevelt would accomplish would be a social welfare state built upon capitalism. It was a curious feat that would disappoint many of the would-be systemic ideologues, all armed with their own blueprints detailing mandatory political or social or economic alterations in order to save the American experiment. Critics of the American system, political as well as social and economic, however, did offer many thoughtful comments as to the problems of modernity. Late nineteenth-century industrialization had helped to create an astounding abundance and accordingly America was a preferred destination for a good two-thirds of the world's migrants in the century ending with the Great War (1914–18). It was the most attractive location to seek liberty and the freedom to achieve. This, of course, was not an automatic result of leaving one's native land. The periodic depressions highlighted the miseries of unemployment, urban overcrowding, and health and education issues, while in its turn an enduring American nativism or anti-immigrant attitude assaulted these new strangers in the land. Technology and science were producing wonders, but the perceived anonymity of modern life was worrisome, as was the alienation and secularization seemingly woven into the new corporate and bureaucratic modern state and economy. While newly minted pragmatists championed the practical ethic of "it is good if it works to achieve what it is you wish to achieve," other American observers [End Page 165] wondered aloud about the apparent loss of a capacity not only to see things whole, but also to embrace a life so marked with the blessings of this perceived wholeness. As the expatriate T. S. Eliot phrased it: "Where is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"1 In The Education of Henry Adams (1918), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, the grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents struggled with the issue. To Henry Adams, it appeared that all of the energies let loose in post–Civil War America, from the creating of economic abundance to startling discoveries in science and technology, all of this multiplicity, had...