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In 1937, Dorothy Day traveled to Milwaukee to speak to an auditorium nearly the size of Madison Square Garden about social action. To create meaningful change, she argued, one must refuse to participate in the barbarism of institutions like the draft or income taxes that enable the apparatus of war and are thus incompatible with the inheritance of divine love. The crowd erupted into applause. “I don’t think the audience realized the implications of what I was saying,” she later wrote of the experience. But an exception in the crowd was Ammon Hennacy, a handsome anarchist who had spent two years in prison as a conscientious objector and found God in the process.
The two met afterward in the backseat of a car. Hennacy wanted to gauge how committed Day was to the socialist cause—if the two spoke the same language of resistance. Had she ever been arrested? Jailed? For how long? She disclosed, with some self-consciousness, her “modest” rap sheet: sixteen days in a Washington, D.C., jail alongside members of the League for the Defense of Political Prisoners and a long weekend in Chicago after the police raided an Industrial Workers of the World boarding house. It was enough to prove her trustworthiness, and to begin to bind their legacies of a committed politics of Christian socialism.
