All the Way to Heaven is Heaven

by Dorothy Day

About a month ago, Douglas Hyde, one of the editors of the London Daily Worker, became a Catholic. In an article in the Catholic Herald of England, he wrote:

"In 1943, I libeled, in the course of my work on The Daily Worker, a Catholic paper, the Weekly Review, and a number of its contributors. In preparation for an anticipated court case, which in fact, was never heard, I read through the paper's files for the preceding year and studied each issue as it appeared.

"I had accused it of providing a platform for Fascists at a moment when Fascist bombs were raining down on Britain. I came in time to realize that not only had I libeled it in law but also in fact.

"For years my cultural interests had been in the middle ages. My favorite music was also pre-Purcell, in architecture my interest was in Norman and Gothic, in literature my favorites were Chaucer and Langland. We had a family joke which we made each year when holidays were discussed. "Let's go on a trip to the thirteenth century."

"And these were the interests of the people behind the Weekly Review. I came to look forward to the days when it appeared on my desk. A natural development was that I became increasingly interested in the writings of Chesterton and Belloc....

"A good Communist must never permit himself to think outside his Communism. I had done so and the consequences were bound to be fatal to my Communism.

"That, as it were, is the mechanics of my introduction to Catholicism."

Not long ago at a mass meeting of the workers in a Finnish factory when the question was asked which they would prefer, Communism or Capitalism, they shouted, "Neither."

Fr. Parsons in his letter in our anniversary issue said that he loved us best when we were fighting for something, so let us begin this new series of articles, similar to THE CHURCH AND WORK. We will probably slash out now and again in the fray of battle, at Fr. Higgins, for instance, who makes fun of the Distributists, and at the ACTU, the members of which are our very good friends. (We are just trying to improve their vision.) And at those who say that it is too late for anything but love, and on the one hand, just read St. John of the Cross and seek for perfection; or on the other hand just make your Easter duty and be ordinary good Catholics. The Pope and the Bishops say that secularism is the curse of our time. We cannot separate soul and body. We cannot separate the week from Sunday. A man's work, whereby he eats, is important.

In other words, it is never too late to begin. It is never too late to turn over a new leaf. In spite of the atom bomb, the jet plane, the conflict with Russia, ten just men may still save the city.

Maybe if we keep on writing and talking, there will be other conversions like Mr. Hyde's. It was reading an article that got Fr. Damien his leper at Molokai. It was reading that converted St. Augustine. So we will keep on writing.

And talking, too. They always said in England that the Distributists did nothing but talk. But one needs to talk to convey ideas. St. Paul talked so much and so long that in the crowded room one young lad, sitting on the window sill, fell out of the window and was killed, like a woman down the street from us, last week. Only she was not listening to the word of God, but washing windows on a Sunday morning. And it was sad that there was no St. Paul to bring her to life. Her life finished there. But we are still alive, though we live in a city of ten million and one can scarcely call it life, and the papers every day carry news of new weapons of death.

However, we are still here. We are still marrying and having children, and having to feed them and house them and clothe them. We don't want them to grow up and say, "This city is such hell, that perhaps war will be preferable. This working in a laundry, a brass factory, the kitchen of a restaurant, is hell on earth. At least, war will teach me new trades, which the public school system has failed to do. This coming home at night to a four-room, or a two room tenement flat and a wife and three children with whooping cough (there are usually not more than three children in the city ) is also hell. And what can be done about it? We are taught to suffer, to embrace the cross. On the other hand, St. Catherine said, "All the way to heaven is heaven, because He said I am the Way." And He was a carpenter and wandered the roadsides of Palestine and lived in the fields and plucked the grain to eat on a Sunday as he wandered with His disciples.

This morning as I went to Mass my eyes stung from the fumes of the cars on Canal street. I crossed a vacant lot, a parking lot filled with cinders and broken glass and longed for an ailanthus tree to break the prison-gray walls and ground all around. Last night all of us from Mott street were at a meeting at Friendship House to hear Leslie Green, Distributist, and the talk was good and stimulating so that in spite of the noise, the fumes, the apathy which the city brings, I was impelled this morning to begin this series. My son-in-law, David Hennessy, of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, who has a toehold on the land, has also been deluging me with pamphlets. He has one of the best libraries in the country on the subject, and deals with the books and pamphlets which discuss Distributism. He will help with this series, and send literature to those who ask for it. The address is given in an ad in this issue.

He has one of many toeholds on the land. We could list perhaps fifty among our friends and if we went through our files, we could find many more. These toeholds have meant, however, that the young, married couples had a little stake to start with. They had, or could borrow a bit of money to make a down payment on a farm. Their families could give them a start if it was only a few hundred dollars. (There was an ad in the New York Times yesterday of a farm for sale for $1,200, three hundred down and $25 a month.) Even with the bit of money, however, faith, vision, some knowledge of farming or a craft, are needed. People need to prepare themselves. Parents need to prepare their children.

On the one hand there are already some toeholds on the land; there are those farmers already there who have the right philosophy; there is still time, since we have not yet a socialist government or nationalization of the land. We have some government control, but not much yet. Not compared to what there may be soon.

On the other hand, there are such stories as that in the last issue of Commonweal about the de Gorgio strike in the long central valley of California, of 58,000 acres owned by one family, of 2,000 employees, of horrible living conditions, poor wages, forced idleness "times of repose" between crops, when machines are cared for but not men, women and children. "The Grapes of Wrath" pattern is here, is becoming an accepted pattern. Assembly line production in the factory, and mass production on the land are part of a social order accepted by the great mass of our Catholics, priests and people. Even when they admit it is bad, they say, "What can we do?" And the result is palliatives, taking care of the wrecks of the social order, rather than changing it so that there would not be quite so many broken homes, orphaned children, delinquents, industrial accidents, so much destitution in general.

Palliatives, when what we need is a revolution, beginning now. Each one of us can help start it. It is no use talking about how bored we are with the word. Let us not be escapists but admit that it is upon us. We are going to have it imposed upon us, or we're going to make our own.

If we don't do something about it, the world may well say, "Why bring children into the world, the world being what it is?" We bring them into it and start giving them a vision of an integrated life so that they too can start fighting.

This fighting for a cause is part of the zest of life. Fr. Damasus said once at one of our retreats, that people seemed to have lost that zest for life, that appreciation of the value of life, the gift of life. It is a fundamental thing. Helene Isvolsky in a lecture on Dostoevsky at the Catholic Worker house, last month, said that he was marked by that love for life. He had almost been shot once. He had been lined up with other prisoners and all but lost his life. From then on he had such a love for life that it glowed forth in all his writings. It is what marks the writings of Thomas Wolfe, whose life was torrential, whose writing was a Niagara.

But how can one have a zest for life under such conditions as those we live in at 115Mott street? How can that laundry worker down the street, working in his steamy hell of a basement all day, wake each morning to a zest for life?

In the city very often one lives in one's writing. Writing is not an overflow of life, a result of living intensely. To live in Newburgh, on the farm, to be arranging retreats, to be making bread and butter, taking care of and feeding some children there, washing and carding wool, gathering herbs and salads and flowers--all these things are so good and beautiful that one does not want to take time to write except that one has to share them, and not just the knowledge of them, but how to start to achieve them.

The whole retreat movement is to teach people to "meditate in their hearts," to start to think of these things, to make a beginning, to go out and start to love God in all the little things of every day, to so make one's life and one's children's life a sample of heaven, a beginning of heaven

The retreats are to build up a desire, a knowledge of what to desire. "Make me desire to walk in the way of Thy commandments." Daniel was a man of "desires." Our Lord is called "the desire of the everlasting hills."

Yes, we must write of these things, of the love of God and the love of His creatures, man and beast, and plant and stone.

"You make it sound too nice," my daughter once said to me, "when I was writing of life on the land, and voluntary and involuntary poverty which means in specific instances the doing without water, heat, washing machines, cars, electricity and many other things, even for a time the company of our fellows, in order to make a start.

And others have said the same thing, who are making a start on the land. And I know well what they mean. One must keep on trying to do it oneself, and one must keep on trying to help others to get these ideas respected.

At Grailville, Ohio, there is not only the big school where there is electricity, modern plumbing, a certain amount of machinery that makes the work go easier and gives time for studies; but there is also a sample farm, twelve acres, with no electricity, no modern plumbing, no hot water, where the washing is done outside over tubs and an open fire, and yet there, too, the life is most beautiful, and a foretaste of heaven. There one can see how all things show forth the glory of God, and how "All the way to heaven is heaven,"

Artists and writers, as I have often said, go in for voluntary poverty in order to "live their own lives and do the work they want to do." I know many a Hollywood writer who thought they were going out there to earn enough to leave to buy a little farm and settle down and do some really good writing. But the fleshpots of Egypt held them. And I knew many a Communist who had his little place in the country, private ownership too, and not just a rented place, a vacation place.

Property is proper to man. Man is born to work by the sweat of his brow, and he needs the tools, the land to work with.

This article is but an introduction to a series of articles on what has been written and thought about Distributism.

The principles of Distributism have been more or less implicit in much that we have written for a long time. We have advised our readers to begin with four books, Chesterton's What's Wrong With the World, The Outline of Sanity, and Belloc's The Servile State and The Restoration of Property.

These are the books which Douglas Hyde must have read which gave him the third point of view, neither industrial capitalist or communist.

In a brief pamphlet by S. Sagar, made up of a collection of articles which ran in The Weekly Review, distributism is described as follows:

To live, man needs land (on which to have shelter, to cultivate food, to have a shop for his tools) and capital, which may be those tools, or seeds, or materials.

"Further, he must have some arrangement about the control of these two things. Some arrangement there must obviously be, and to make such an arrangement is one of the reasons why man forms communities." -- Men being what they are, every society must make laws to govern the control of land and capital.

The principle from which the law can start is "that all its subjects should exercise control of Land and Capital by means of direct family ownership of these things. This, of course, is the principle from which, until yesterday, our own law started. It was the theory of capitalism under which all were free to own, none compelled by law to labor." (Popular magazines like Time and the Saturday Evening Post are filled with illustrations of these principles, which all men admit are good, but unfortunately the stories told are not true. It is the reason why great trusts like the Standard Oil and General Motors have public relations men, why there is a propaganda machine for big business, to convert the public to the belief that capitalism really is based on good principles, distributists' principles, really is working out for the benefit of all, so that men have homes and farms and tools and pride in the job.) "Unfortunately, in practice, under capitalism the many had not opportunity of obtaining land and capital in any useful amount and were compelled by physical necessity to labor for the fortunate few who possessed these things. But the theory was all right. Distributists want to save the theory by bringing the practice in conformity with it....

"Distributists want to distribute control as widely as possible by means of a direct family ownership of Land and Capital. This, of course, means cooperation among these personal owners and involves modifications, complexities and compromises which will be taken up later.

"THE AIM OF DISTRIBUTISM IS FAMILY OWNERSHIP OF LAND, WORKSHOPS, STORES, TRANSPORT, TRADES, PROFESSIONS, AND SO ON.

"Family ownership in the means of production so widely distributed as to be the mark of the economic life of the community--this is the Distributist's desire. It is also the world's desire.... The vast majority of men who argue against Distributism do so not on the grounds that it is undesirable but on the grounds that it is impossible. We say that it must be attempted, and we must continue to emphasize the results of not attempting it."

In the next issue of the paper we will continue with a number of articles dealing with these problems.

Catholic Worker

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The Way Of Love/1

by Bill Kauffman

The title "Dorothy Day and the American Right" promises a merciful brevity, along the lines of "Commandments We Have Kept" by the Kennedy brothers. After all, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement and editor of its newspaper lived among the poor, refused to participate in air-raid drills, and preferred Cesar Chavez to Bebe Rebozo.

But there is more to the "right" than a dollar bill stretching from the DuPonts to Ronald Reagan, just as the "left" is something greater than the bureau-building and bomb-dropping of Roosevelts and Kennedys. Maybe, just maybe, Dorothy Day had a home, if partially furnished and seldom occupied, on the American right.

The Catholic reactionary John Lukacs, after attending the lavish twenty-fifth anniversary bash for National Review in December 1980, held in the Plaza Hotel, hellward of the Catholic Worker House on Mott Street, wrote:

During the introduction of the celebrities a shower of applause greeted Henry Kissinger. I was sufficiently irritated to ejaculate a fairly loud Boo! ... A day or so before that evening Dorothy Day had died. She was the founder and saintly heroine of the Catholic Worker movement. During that glamorous evening I thought: who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day, whose respect for what was old and valid, whose dedication to the plain decencies and duties of human life rested on the traditions of two millennia of Christianity, and who was a radical only in the truthful sense of attempting to get to the roots of the human predicament. Despite its pro-Catholic tendency, and despite its commendable custom of commemorating the passing of worthy people even when some of these did not belong to the conservatives, National Review paid neither respect nor attention to the passing of Dorothy Day, while around the same time it published a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party.

National Review, dreadnought of postwar American conservatism, occasionally aimed its scattershot at Day. Founder William F. Buckley, Jr. referred casually to "the grotesqueries that go into making up the Catholic Worker movement"; of Miss Day, he chided "the slovenly, reckless, intellectually chaotic, anti-Catholic doctrines of this goodhearted woman--who, did she have her way in shaping national policy, would test the promise of Christ Himself, that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us."

The grotesqueries he does not bother to itemize; nor does Buckley explain just what was "anti-Catholic" about a woman who told a friend, "The hierarchy permits a priest to say Mass in our chapel. They have given us the most precious thing of all--the Blessed Sacrament. If the Chancery ordered me to stop publishing The Catholic Worker tomorrow, I would."

If Buckley and Kissinger were the sum of the American right, mine would be a very brief article indeed. But there is another American right--or is it a left, for praise be the ambidextrous--in which Miss Day fits quite nicely. Indeed, I think she is more at home with these people than she ever was with Manhattan socialists. They are the Agrarians, the Distributists, the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition. The keener of them--particularly the Catholics--understood their kinship with Day. Allen Tate, the Southern man of letters and contributor to the 1930 Southern Agrarian manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, wrote his fellow Dixie poet Donald Davidson in 1936:

I also enclose a copy of a remarkable monthly paper, The Catholic Worker. The editor, Dorothy Day, has been here, and is greatly excited by our whole program. Just three months ago she discovered I'll Take My Stand, and has been commenting on it editorially. She is ready to hammer away in behalf of the new book. Listen to this: The Catholic Worker now has a paid circulation of 100,000! [Tate neglects to say that the price is a penny a copy] ... She offers her entire mailing list to Houghton-Mifflin; I've just written to Linscott about it. Miss Day may come by Nashville with us if the conference falls next weekend. She has been speaking all over the country in Catholic schools and colleges. A very remarkable woman. Terrific energy, much practical sense, and a fanatical devotion to the cause of the land!

The program that so excited Miss Day was summarized in the statement of principles drawn up at the Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists. Mocked as reactionary for their unwillingness to accept bigness as an inevitable condition, the conferees declared (inter alia):

--The condition of individual freedom and security is the wide distribution of active ownership of land and productive property.

--Population should be decentralized as well as ownership.

--Agriculture should be given its rightful recognition as the prime factor in a secure culture.

Though Day was absent from Nashville, she was to speak the language of the Southern Agrarians, without the drawl, many times over the years. "To Christ--To the Land!" Day exclaimed in the January 1936 issue. "The Catholic Worker is opposed to the wage system but not for the same reason that the Communist is. We are opposed to it, because the more wage earners there are the less owners there are ... how will they become owners if they do not get back to the land."

Widespread ownership was the basic tenet of the Agrarians' Catholic cousins, the Distributists. The Catholic Worker published all the major Distributists of the age, among them Chesterton and Belloc, Vincent McNabb, Father Luigi Ligutti, and the Jesuit John C. Rawe (a Nebraska-born "Catholic version of William Jennings Bryan"). On numberless occasions Dorothy Day called herself a Distributist. Thus her gripe with the New Deal: "Security for the worker, not ownership," was its false promise; she despaired in 1945 that "Catholics throughout the country are again accepting `the lesser of two evils'.... They fail to see the body of Catholic social teaching of such men as Fr. Vincent McNabb, G.K. Chesterton, Belloc, Eric Gill and other Distributists ... and lose all sight of The Little Way."

Dorothy Day kept to the little way, and that is why we honor her. She understood that if small is not always beautiful, at least it is always human.

The Catholic Worker position on economics was expressed quite clearly:

[W]e favor the establishment of a Distributist economy wherein those who have a vocation to the land will work on the farms surrounding the village and those who have other vocations will work in the village itself. In this way we will have a decentralized economy which will dispense with the State as we know it today and will be federationist in character.... We believe in worker ownership of the means of production and distribution as distinguished from nationalization. This to be accomplished by decentralized cooperatives and the elimination of a distinct employer class.

The American name for this is Jeffersonianism, and the failure of Distributism to attract much of a stateside following outside of those Mencken derided as "typewriter agrarians" owes in part to its Chesterbellocian tincture. "Gothic Catholicism" never could play in Peoria.

Nor could it stand upon the Republican platform. Garry Wills recalls this exchange during his first visit with William F. Buckley, Jr.: "`Are you a conservative, then?' [Buckley asked]. I answered that I did not know. Are Distributists conservative? `Philip Burnham tells me they are not.' It was an exchange with the seeds of much later misunderstanding."

Were the Distributists conservative? Was Day conservative? Depends. Herbert Agar, the Kentucky Agrarian and movement theorist, wrote in the American Review (April 1934), "For seventy years, a `conservative' has meant a supporter of Big Business, of the politics of plutocracy," yet "the root of a real conservative policy for the United States must be redistribution of property." Ownership--whether of land, a crossroads store, a machine shop--must be made "the normal thing."

"Property is proper to man," insisted Dorothy Day, though she and the Distributists--and much of the old American right--meant by property something rather more substantial than paper shares in a Rockefellerian octopus. "Ownership and control are property," declared Allen Tate, making a distinction between a family farm--or family firm--and a joint-stock corporation, the artificial spawn of the state.

Like Tate and the Southern Agrarians, Day was no collectivist, eager to herd the fellaheen onto manury unromantic Blithedales. "The Communists," she said, sought to build "a sense of the sacredness and holiness and the dignity of the machine and of work, in order to content the proletariat with their property-less state." So why, she asked, "do we talk of fighting communism, which we are supposed to oppose because it does away with private property? We have done that very well ourselves in this country." The solution: "We must emphasize the holiness of work, and we must emphasize the sacramental quality of property too." ("An anti-religious agrarian is a contradiction in terms," according to Donald Davidson.)

Day described the Catholic Worker program as being "for ownership by the workers of the means of production, the abolition of the assembly line, decentralized factories, the restoration of crafts and the ownership of property," and these were to be achieved by libertarian means, through the repeal of state-granted privileges and a flowering of old-fashioned American voluntarism.

During the heyday of modern American liberalism, the 1930s, when Big Brother supposedly wore his friendliest phiz, Day and the Catholic Workers said no. They bore a certain resemblance to those old progressives (retroprogressives)--Senators Burton K. Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Hiram Johnson--who turned against FDR for what they saw as the bureaucratic, militaristic, centralizing thrust of his New Deal. The antithetical tendencies of the Catholic Worker and the 1930s American left were juxtaposed in the November 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker. under the heading "Catholic Worker Opposition to Projected Farm-Labor Party.," the box read:

Farm-Labor Party stands for: Progress Industrialism Machine Caesarism (bureaucracy) Socialism Organizations.

Catholic Worker stands for: Tradition Ruralism Handicrafts Personalism Communitarianism Organisms.

And never the twain shall meet.

An anarchistic distrust of the state, even in its putatively benevolent role as giver of alms, pervaded the Catholic Workers, as it did the 1930s right. But then as the late Karl Hess, one-time Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Wobbly homesteader, wrote, the American right had been "individualistic, isolationist, decentralist--even anarchistic," until the Cold War reconciled conservatives to the leviathan state.

The 1930s dissenters--the old-fashioned liberals now maligned as conservatives; the unreconstructed libertarians; the cornbelt radicals--proposed cooperatives and revitalized village economies as the alternative to government welfare. The Catholic Workers agreed. The holy fool Peter Maurin, Day's French peasant comrade, asserted that "he who is a pensioner of the state is a slave of the state." Day, in her memoir The Long Loneliness, complained:

The state had entered to solve [unemployment] by dole and work relief, by setting up so many bureaus that we were swamped with initials.... Labor was aiding in the creation of the Welfare State, the Servile State, instead of aiming for the ownership of the means of production and acceptance of the responsibility that it entailed.

"Bigness itself in organization precludes real liberty," wrote Henry Clay Evans, Jr. in the American Review, a Distributist journal. The home--the family--was the right size for most undertakings. And so the home must be made productive once more. In the April 1945 Catholic Worker, Janet Kalven of the Graiiville Agricultural School for Women in Loveland, Ohio called for "an education that will give young women a vision of the family as the vital cell of the social organism, and that will inspire them with the great ambitions of being queens in the home." By which she did not mean a sequacious helpmeet to the Man of the House, picking up his dirty underwear and serving him Budweisers during commercials, but rather a partner in the management of a "small, diversified family firm," who is skilled in everything "from bread-making to beekeeping." For "the homestead is on a human scale"--the only scale that can really measure a person's weight.

The Agrarians and Distributists dreamed of a (voluntary, of course) dispersion of the population, and Day, despite her residence in what most decentralists regarded then and regard now as the locus of evil, agreed: "If the city is the occasion of sin, as Father Vincent McNabb points out, should not families, men and women, begin to aim at an exodus, a new migration, a going out from Egypt with its flesh pots?" asked Day in September 1946. This revulsion against urbanism seems odd in a woman whose base was Manhattan, symbol of congestion, of concentration, of cosmopolitanism rampant. Yet she wrote of the fumes from cars stinging her eyes as she walked to Mass, of the "prison-gray walls" and parking lots of broken glass. "We only know that it is not human to live in a city of ten million. It is not only not human, it is not possible." The Southern Agrarians would not demur.

World War II destroyed agrarianism as an active force in American intellectnal life--just as it fortified the urban citadels of power and money. Foes of America's involvement in the war, heirs to the non-interventionist legacy of George Washington, were slandered--most notably Charles Lindbergh, whom the Catholic Worker defended against the smears of the White House.

Despite Day's disavowal of the "isolationist" label, the Catholic Worker of 1939-1941spoke the diction of the American antiwar movement, which, because it was anti-FDR, was deemed "right-wing." Sentences like "We should like to know in just what measure the British Foreign Office is dictating the foreign policy of the United States!" could have come straight from the pages of Colonel McCormick's Chicago Tribune. So could the objection to the "English and Communist Propaganda" of the New York papers, and the reverence toward the traditional "neutrality of the United States" and the keeping of "our country aloof from the European war."

Bill Kaufman is the author of Look Homeward, America.

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Dorothy Day and Distributism

by Dale Ahlquist

One trait that the Catholic Workers share with most everybody else is that they often quote G.K. Chesterton. But what sets them apart is that they also take his ideas on Distributism seriously.

As Mark and Louise Zwick show in their book on the Catholic Worker Movement (see Review on page XX), Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day founded the work in 1933, realizing that with unemployment reaching 25 percent “there had to be an alternative to the economic system that had left the social order in such disarray.” In tracing the rise of capitalism, the Zwicks argue that there is a connection between the Calvinistic doctrine of predestination and the deterministic “invisible hand of the market” that gave justification to the idea that being poor is just your own fault. Although it didn’t stop capitalists from working hard to get rich, it strangely prevented them from being charitable to the poor since the scheme of salvation downplayed good works. This mentality has served to create quite a distance between the rich and the poor in America. The solution to the problem involves not only a devotion to the works of mercy, but helping the poor become self-sufficient. Distributists are the only social theorists who seem to understand this. Economics must not be more important than people. “Profits do not have rights, but workers do.” Conversely, the opposite danger from the spread of cancerous corporations is the gargantuan growth of government. In The Catholic Worker paper Dorothy Day tried “to awaken our readers to the necessity of combating the ‘all-encroaching state.’”

The only way to combat both the forces of the big business and big government is with a society of owners, families who own their own property, workers who own their own businesses. Worker ownership is not only more respectful of the dignity of the person, but it produces goods of greater quality.

In spite of the connection between Calvinism and Capitalism, the Distributist solution is not something that must be explained only to Protestants. Most Catholics, especially in America, don’t get it either. They have bought into Capitalism. In 1948 Dorothy Day wrote in the Catholic Worker:

“If the priesthood studied distributism as a long-term movement and did not play two ends against the middle by endorsing the present capitalistic system, we would be ready for what the future would bring.”

This is prophetic. If a Distributist solution had been embraced in large numbers, starting with Catholics in the transitional years following World War II, we could have prevented “the military-industrial complex” that developed instead, with huge corporations serving as government contractors and lobbying for more and more military buildup with the bureaucratic buildup that inevitably accompanies it. In order for the big corporations to compete for the huge contracts they would need cheap labor, cheap parts. The result was low wages, outsourcing, loss of domestic manufacturing, loss of jobs. America does not make anything anymore. It just orders it. Wage slaves live in stacks. Ownership is only a vague dream.

Dorothy Day often quoted Chesterton and praised him as much: “To us who daily suffer the ugly reality of industrial capitalism and its fruits, the… words of Chesterton ring strong.” She also invoked St. Thomas Aquinas as a defender of property, that “a certain amount of goods was necessary to lead a good life.” In other words, that property had to do with what was proper or appropriate to a man.

What prevents the proper distribution of property are “structures of sin.” What is going to change these structures of sin is going to have be something both physical and spiritual. It is not going to happen merely by materialistic means. It is not going to be forced onto a populace from above. It must come from conversion, from a change of heart, from people themselves who not only care about their families, but about their neighbors’ families.

Dorothy did not only write about Distributism, she did Distributism. She helped people become self-sufficient. She started farms. She focused on the wonder of everyday life. She did things for herself rather than hiring others to do them. While she admitted that Distributism had an agrarian emphasis, she said that does not mean that everyone must become a farmer. There must also be an urban emphasis on widespread ownership and self-sufficiency. “We are not going to leave the city to the Communists.”

Dorothy Day said on several occasions that Distributism is not dead. The idea of a local economy is not dead. The evidence that it is not dead, she said, is that people are always burying it.

©Gilbert! Magazine (The Distributist)
Reprinted with Permission

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Hilaire Belloc

by Dorothy Day

"May the Angels Lead Thee Into Paradise"

At a time when life is cheap and casualty lists have mounted again in Korea, it is good to contemplate the long and full life of this great writer who died last month in his home in England. He visited us in 1937 when the Catholic Worker office was on Mott street and talked briefly to our Friday night meeting, and we remembered him with awe as a Johnstonian figure with a long life of fruitful and pleasurable literary activity behind him, a life of walking trips and pilgrimages, of long conversational evenings in coffeehouses, of travel in Europe and America. It was said that he walked across the United States to propose to his wife, a California girl. He was not an Englishman, though he lived his life in England. He was born of a French father and an Irish mother in Paris and he married an American. He had five children. His oldest son was killed in the first World War and his youngest in the second. There is another son living in Canada, and two daughters, one of whom, Eleanor, also visited us in New York and has been a dear correspondent since. Belloc himself served as an ambulance driver in the first world war.

We have more than often spoken of his two books, "The Servile State," and "The Restoration of Property," than other of his hundred or so books. But his "Path to Rome," to our mind was his greatest, the story of a pilgrimage made on foot to St. Peter's. His verses and sonnets, his essays on everything under the sun, show always his great zest and joy in life. He was the forerunner of our Ogden Nash, and his nonsense verse reminded one of Lewis Carrol. His interests took in the whole of life, and if we differed from him politically there were fundamental agreements that overcome any such differences. He was an apostle to this world, recognizing the importance and beauty of this 1ife, here and now, today and tomorrow; he was the layman always, dealing with the things of the lay world, and while he saw how wrong things were in man's world; he saw also how very good things were in God's world, and his gratitude to God was shown in his happiness and zest.

May he rest in peace.

Dorothy Day Library on the Web at http://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/

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