[250 years ago this week, Elizabeth Ann Seton was born in New York City. The first US-born Saint, Seton is one of the most famous individual examples of an American Catholic, so this week I’ll analyze her and other American Catholic histories!]
Three
telling details about Dorothy
Day and Peter Maurin’s
groundbreaking newspaper.
1)
The Origins: Day and Maurin published the first issue of The
Catholic Worker on May Day 1933, launching not just this new periodical but
really the whole of their Catholic Worker Movement in the process. Apparently
Maurin preferred the name The
Catholic Radical, but Day, rooted in both her prior experiences with
Communism and her overall sense of solidarity with all who labor in any way, successfully
advocated for calling it The Catholic Worker. Clearly that chosen title
and the newspaper’s contents (largely written by
Day, both in that initial issue and for most of them thereafter) did
resonate with readers, perhaps especially in that Depression-era moment, and
after an initial print run of 2500 copies (which Day sold in New York’s Union
Square, calling out “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation” while she did so) the
circulation numbers exploded to 20,000 in September 1933 and 150,000 by 1936.
2)
The Tides of History: The Great Depression was
only the first of many significant historical events with which The Catholic
Worker engaged forthrightly and controversially. The next such controversy did
significantly affect the paper’s circulation numbers—Day was committed to an unpopular
pacifist stance during World War
II, and as a result circulation
decreased by 75% during the war, from a high of nearly 200,000 to 50,000. But
this trend in no way affected Day and the paper’s dedication to taking
principled stances on unfolding histories, as illustrated just five years after
the war: in the July 1, 1950 issue the paper published
a letter from the African American nurse, educator, and Catholic activist Helen
Caldwell Day Riley that represented an early and powerful argument for
wedding the Catholic Worker Movement to the
nascent Civil Rights Movement.
3)
The Price!: I’m not sure I’ll ever write a
more striking sentence in a blog post than this one: the price for each issue
of The Catholic Worker has
remained steady at 1 cent (that’s one pretty penny) from that first May
1933 issue up to the present moment. If you want an annual subscription
(which gets you the paper’s seven issues a year by mail), however, you do have
to be willing to shell out 25 cents (that’s one shiny quarter). I genuinely can’t
imagine a more impressive way to put philosophy and ideology into practice than
that, and I’m apparently not alone; according to this
2023 The Nation article, the paper still has more than 25,000
subscribers. Amen to that!
Last
CatholicAmericanStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Catholic histories or contexts you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment