Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century by Blythe Randolph

---

JOHN DAY WAS A DIFFICULT man. A southerner of modest means, he had come North in his early twenties to make a living and find a wife, which he did, but his enthusiasm over the course of his married life was often directed less toward career advancement or family and more toward his race horses, professional sports, gambling, male bonding, the bottle, and nights on the town. And, on occasion, other women.

Sharp-tongued and opinionated, “Judge Day,” as he liked being called in later years (for no other reason than his demeanor and tendency to pronouncements), was used to being deferred to. Born in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1870, he grew up in a Scots-Irish family that claimed a distant kinship to Daniel Boone and Sam Houston; his father had served the Confederacy as a surgeon and been taken prisoner in the last weeks of the conflict. In the recollection of his eldest daughter, Dorothy, John Day was a man not given to self-doubt or displays of paternal affection, and he shared many of the biases of his place of birth, his time, and his class. He was “intemperate,” in her generous words, about foreigners and African Americans. He had no use for religion. As a Republican, he had even less use for political radicalism.

It was a supreme irony that John Day lived to see three of his five children—two of them his girls, no less—become as critical of capitalist America, as politically radical, as it was possible to be in the United States in the early twentieth century. Della, his youngest daughter, was a longtime supporter of Margaret Sanger’s birth control crusade and walked the picket line in Boston the day the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed. John, his youngest son and namesake, became a Communist in the 1930s. And Dorothy, his middle child, was to follow a path entirely beyond his grasp—one for which he felt nothing but amazement and a deep revulsion.

Grace Satterlee, his wife, came from a different background and had a very different temperament. Born in 1870 in upstate New York, she was the youngest of six and was put to work in a Poughkeepsie shirt factory at the age of nine when her father died, never having fully recovered from wounds incurred fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Like John Day’s father, he had been captured by the enemy and spent time in a prisoner of war camp. When a government pension belatedly came through, Grace was able to return to school.

Family finances didn’t allow for any misplaced notions of gentility for this young woman in want of a career, and it was while attending a branch of the Eastman Business School in New York City that Grace met John Day. About their courtship, we know very little. Grace must have been impressed with her suitor’s self-assurance, southern drawl, and sandy-haired good looks. Eight months after they were married on September 19, 1894, in an Episcopal church on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, their first child was born. Though the groom had been raised a Congregationalist and the bride an Episcopalian, neither was more than nominally religious, and their wedding day was the last occasion for some time that either set foot in a house of worship. None of their children was baptized.