Mona Charen Sept 28^th

Mona Charen questions whether Dorothy Day, honored by Pope Francis, really deserved the accolade that followed from the liberal press.  Charen gleefully points out that while Dorothy Day was a pacifist and a liberal and a fervent worker for women’s rights, she was opposed to abortion, birth control, social security and the sexual revolution. After three marriages and one abortion Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism after which she showed the typical enthusiastic support for Catholic doctrine found in converts.

Charen castigates Day for opposing our entry into WW ll. Does she remember all of the isolationists in the Republican Party who refused to vote to extend the draft, who refused to provide money to our armed services forcing them to train with wooden rifles and wooden machine guns? These were people in government who could have made a difference in our preparedness that Dorothy Day could not make. Perhaps Charen would like to comment on the efforts of Martin Dies, Burton J. Wheeler and William Jenner to keep us from opposing Hitler. She could add in Gerald Nye who was not only a prominent America Firster but a notable anti-Semite. He was speaking his obstructionist policies the night of December 7 even though he knew of the attack against us. Mona Charen’s assistants must have been unable to discover these facts, or maybe Mona would like to forget about that.

Dorothy Day’s views of communism were more complex than Charen wishes to explain. Here is Day’s response to a request from the Daily Worker in the 1930s: “Catholic Worker joins in appeal for democracy and peace, therefore asks you to join (a) protest against all dictatorships, fascist and Bolshevist, against all suppression of civil liberties, fascist and Bolshevist, including freedom of religious propaganda, education, and organization, against all war, whether imperialist, civil, or class. Merry Christmas.”  I guess Day wasn’t exactly a lover of Bolshevism

Then Charen comes, once more, to Cuba; she has misrepresented this situation before. She begins by telling us what a high per capita income Cuba had before Castro and indeed it did. But she doesn’t tell us where it came from or how it was distributed. Pre-Castro Cuba had sugar exports from huge sugar plantations that employed cane cutters a few months of the year and hoped they wouldn’t starve to death in the off-season. There was also tourism. Wealthy gamblers loved Cuba where the Baptista regime had few rules and enforced none. When the gamblers weren’t gambling there were plenty of prostitutes available so their recreational experience wasn’t one-sided.

After Castro prevailed in Cuba there was a mass exodus of the wealthy and upper middle class to Miami  all made easier by their claim that they were escaping Castro’s communism and they were. In the 1960s anyone claiming to be escaping communism got a warm welcome from our government. Before the Castro regime deteriorated into murderous repression it was popular in this country. Fidel Castro gave a four hour plus speech to the United Nations in 1960. His entourage even brought their own chickens with them from Cuba. My wife, then a sixteen-year-old, got Raul Castro’s signature on her ice skates. (She did not become a communist!)