The Long Loneliness

Day is able to eke out an existence in the slums, where there isn’t a race to have the best things. She writes about peace meetings for the Call, as well as about organizations that are against the United States’ entry into World War One. The paper does not care much about the anarchists, and Day tends to focus on the movements the paper asks her to report on. She meets anarchist Louis Kramer, who has been sentenced to two years in the Atlanta Penitentiary for distributing anti-conscription materials. He is about to report for his sentence, and often spends time with Day. There are dances every Friday night at Webster Hall, for fundraising for radical groups. She goes to the Anarchist Ball; Kramer is waiting for her there. He quickly embraces her. Surprised, Day either shoves him or slaps him—she can’t recall which. Taken aback, he returns the slap. Other reporters kick him out. Day is ashamed because she believes that the incident reveals that she does not have conviction: she is neither a Christian, a pacifist, nor a radical.

Day often scrutinizes her reactions and motivations. She has a deep desire to be with the poor, but partially views it as a way to fulfill her “own self-love, [her] own gropings for the love of others, [her] own desires for freedom and for pleasure” (60). She is also intent on what she calls “the work of the man,” reporting from the picket lines, going to jail and writing to influence others: “How much ambition and self-seeking there was in all of this!” (60).

Day continues to do this type of reporting, traveling with a group of Columbia University students to Washington for an Anti-Conscription League protest in April of 1917. She is 19 at the time. Before reaching Washington, they stop in Philadelphia, Chester, PA, Wilmington, DE, and Baltimore, MD. While they are in Baltimore, there’s a riot. The aggressors, another group of students, beat up the Columbia group and call them “‘Jew radicals’” (61). This is Day’s first experience with a mob. These movements and agitations help the labor movement make gains.

Though Day supports this progress, she “wavered between [her] allegiance to socialism, syndicalism (the I.W.W.’s) and anarchism” (62). Whatever she happens to be reading at the time sways her toward a certain ideology. However, the IWW has the most practical plan and is focused on the United States, so Day signs on with them. The movement is not concerned with religion because the members are generally indifferent to it. In fact, Marxists do not believe in an afterlife, which is why they are willing to sacrifice themselves in the here and now, which would then ironically allow them to obtain eternal good for their predecessors. It is a paradox that confounds Day.

As World War One continues, the war effort creates more jobs and unemployment drops. However, the cost of living also rises, so strikes continue. On the West Coast, a year earlier, five people had been accused of setting off a bomb at a Preparedness Day parade, killing nine people. One of the accused is Tom Mooney, who went to prison. Day later goes to visit him at San Quentin. There are other labor leaders accused of violent crimes; Day suggests that they were framed.

Day is also lucky enough to meet Leon Trotsky when he is in New York City. He writes for a Russian socialist newspaper called Novy Mir. She interviews him for the Call: “He refused to be lured into talking about his exile in Siberia or his various escapes in disguise, but instead talked of the failure of socialism to halt the war” (64-65). Trotsky also criticizes New York socialists for being parliamentarian, which irritates the Call. As a result, the paper only publishes one interview with Trotsky, and his name appears in the publication just twice.

Though she is sent to interviews with famous figures like Trotsky, Day notes that she was so busy she did not have time to analyze any of her experiences or the words of her interview subjects. The journalists are supposed to build a case against the system of government that would encourage American workers to revolt. Day’s “editorial heads trusted in legislation and education, but we younger ones believed that nothing could be done except by the use of force” (66). The older journalists believe in progress via the system already in place, whereas the younger journalists had seen that system fail time and again and yearn to start anew. They are also inspired by revolutions occurring abroad.

The Russian Revolution begins on March 8, 1917, and is celebrated at Madison Square Garden on March 21. Day joins in the revelry for the victory of the Russian workers. Perhaps, in these revolutionary times, Day suggests, “people were looking for leaders; during the years ahead there would be Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Churchill, and Roosevelt, men so dominated by ideas that they sacrificed to them countless millions of human beings” (67). War continues throughout the beginning of the 20th century, and Day and her colleagues continue to cover the protests for the rights of workers at home while others died abroad.

Day has to leave her job at the Call after the incident that she has with Kramer at the ball at Webster Hall because her city editor thinks that she had been very rude. While she is between jobs, Day travels with the Columbia students. Soon after leaving the paper, she gets a new job with The Masses, a paper with an older staff. As she continues to report on the various groups in the movement, she begins to realize that there is a lack of cohesion among factions that include socialists, anarchists, members of the IWW, and liberals.

Day goes on to describe each of these groups. The socialists have been on the vanguard of the fight for workers’ rights, and are mostly “doctrinaire and foreign” (67). They discuss ideas in cafes and mostly speak Yiddish. The IWW garners its ideas from the agrarian West, South, and Northeast. Day supports the IWW, but feels like its best days have come and gone. Many of the great labor strikes had occurred before 1917, and now some leaders were in prison for their efforts. The anarchist group is very small, and with European roots. The Columbia students do not have clear political affiliations, but they are against the war. Some of them end up going to Mexico to avoid the draft.

It turns out to be the last six months of The Masses’ existence, but Day is able to take on a lot of responsibility. She becomes an interim editor so that the actual editor, Floyd Dell, can write a novel. Rayna visits and Day goes about her editing duties for a few hours every morning while living in an apartment lent to the magazine staff, who are all away for the summer. In her free time, she spends hours with friends at the pier, singing revolutionary songs, and goes to the beach on Staten Island. Rayna’s fiancé, Raph, comes and stays with Day. Later, Rayna and Raph get married, but Rayna wants to further her education and goes to the University of Chicago, while Raph stays in New York. Day and Rayna are very different: “[Rayna] thought [Day’s] interest in radicalism purely emotional and [Day] thought her approach to life too intellectual (70). Later on, Rayna divorces Raph and marries William Prohme, a communist who takes her to China. He continues to work for the cause in the Philippines while Rayna is in Hankow with Madam Sun Yat-sen. After China falls, she escapes to Russia, where she studies at the Lenin Institute. Then she passes away very suddenly. Day laments that Rayna died never having met a Christian.

There is a mandatory conscription law enacted, and men either join the military or flee. Some are imprisoned for draft dodging. The brother of a friend of Days is put in jail for shirking his duty, and dies after a few weeks. The jail says that he had killed himself, but Day believes that there was foul play, and “the cold, calculated torture and killing of prisoners was a mystery which left [Day] shuddering” (72).