The Long Loneliness

As a teenager, Day is attracted to the sermons of John Wesley, and to Christian Science teachings. Her father gets a job as a sportswriter on The Inter Ocean and they move to the North Side; they now have more money and are more comfortable. The cozy house on Lincoln Park with a fireplace indeed feels like home. At that time, when Day is 14, another child is born, a baby brother. Day helps to take care of her brother and also falls in love with a musician. She and her sister take the baby out in his carriage to the outdoor bandstand in Lincoln Park, where her crush plays, but if it rains or the baby cries, all is ruined.

Day equates her love for her little brother with her first love, as “[t]he two seemed to go together” (31). Early every morning, her mother puts the newborn in bed with her. Her father goes to sleep at two o’clock in the morning, so it’s important that the baby is quiet. She sings hymns to him to get him to sleep. In addition to caring for her brother, Day loves languages. She writes a letter to her friend, Della, about caring for the baby and spiritual happiness. She also discusses sin, which she knows that she has to forgo in order to get to heaven: “‘Only after a hard bitter struggle with sin and only after we have overcome it, do we experience blessed joy and peace’” (33). She is writing about “the conflict of flesh and spirit,” which interests her when she is 15 years old (34). Her own family acts like the Anglo-Saxons that they are and are not so interested in intimacy. She craves this sort of familial closeness, and a reader can infer that she looks for this in a relationship with God. Day reflects on the fact that she then threw those beliefs away a few years later. 

Just as Dorothy Day’s older brother becomes a labor journalist, she begins to read socially-conscious books. Carl Sandburg, a poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, is on the staff. There aren’t any ads in the paper, so the journalists are free to investigate labor violations at places like department stores. The paper also makes Day aware of Eugene Debs, one of the original members of the Industrial Workers of the World (or the IWW.). Debs would go on to run as a presidential candidate with the Socialist Party.

Along with discovering Debs, Day reads Jack London and Upton Sinclair, authors who exposed early-20th-century labor and working conditions in the United States and England. Day enjoys walking along the working-class West Side of Chicago with her sister and baby brother in tow while thinking of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Since Sinclair’s 1905 book is set in Chicago, she feels like it is a chronicle of her life. In relation to Sinclair’s classic explication of poverty, Day writes that walking those Chicago streets “made me feel that from then on my life was to be linked to theirs [the poor], their interests were to be mine; I had received a call, a vocation, a direction to my life” (38). Day begins to think that God wants everyone to be happy; therefore, everyone should help each other.

A year after graduating from high school, Day goes to the University of Illinois, where she joins the Socialist Party. She has a scholarship to attend the school. Her father’s employer, the Inter Ocean, has gone under earlier that year; Day cannot would not have been able to attend university without the financial assistance. Day feels homesick after two months in Urbana-Champagne. She meets a Methodist professor of romance languages who invites her to his house each day to have lunch with himself, his wife, and their children. Day discusses books with her professor and faith with his wife. She begins to feel that “radicalism…was in conflict with religion, which preached peace and meekness and joy” (41). The youth need to be active and go to war for their ideas, Day thinks, but only in terms of class war. She wants to deny religion, and begins to add swear words to her vocabulary. Russian writers like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Gorky also interest her. However, the ideas of faith in the books make her feel alien and a bit uncomfortable. In fact, because religion makes people feel comfort, Day thinks that she should remove it from her life.

Day does not socialize; instead, she only works and reads. She begins to write for the town paper, but sometimes her work is too critical for them to publish. She also begins to go hungry on purpose: “I was seventeen, and I felt completely alone in the world, divorced from my family, from all security, even from God” (45). This loneliness leads to a sense of danger that gives Day an adrenaline rush. During her solitary time, she questions why great efforts are made to remedy social problems rather than in investigating how to mitigate them before they occur. For example, the state pays for daycare for children, but why can it not pay fathers enough in wages so that mothers can stay home? Day is discovering secular heroes, those beyond Christ, like Eugene Debs and the working masses. The year is now 1915, and in a few cities, a ten-hour workday and higher wages have been instituted, which is progress, but only 8% of workers have been organized into unions. There is still a lot of work that needs to take place.

In college, Day becomes friends with a girl named Rayna Simons (later Rayna Prohme) who is good at giving all her attention to the person or project that she is focused on at the time. Though she is a Christian, her boyfriend is Jewish and she lives in a Jewish sorority, which she invites Day to join. Day enjoys her “idyllic” time with Rayna and Rayna’s boyfriend, Raph. Then, in the summer of 1916, Day’s father gets a job at The Morning Telegraph in New York City. Day realizes that she wants to be near her family, quits school, and moves to New York.