The Long Loneliness

After returning from Washington DC, Day rents furnished rooms in various New York neighborhoods. She works for The Liberator magazine, which is the replacement for The Masses. The sheen of working at a magazine has faded. After a night out with her friends, Day sometimes goes to morning Mass just to be in the comforting environment of a church. She feels a need to be “there in the atmosphere of prayer—it was an act of the will” (85). Though her faith at this time seems to be due to some sort of gravitational pull, the conversations she has with her friends are about ideas and revolution.

Indeed, at that time, it seems as if workers would take control of the means of production. She and her young friends are living in the present moment. However, they really don’t know very much about Marxist ideas. Lenin is rising in power. He has left the farm that he had started and attends law school. He begins to see a woman who helps the poor in the slums and then develops his idea of a revolution led by industrial workers. Eventually, Lenin’s proletariat becomes a dictatorship of elites, frustrating Day. She and her friends are not poor, either; rather they are taking on voluntary poverty in order to help others: “The word charity had become something to gag over, something to shudder at” (87). Their goal is justice instead of welfare.

Later in the year, the former editors of The Masses are put on trial and Day is subpoenaed as a state witness. She works with the defense attorney and ends up being a bad witness for the state. In the meantime, World War One is in full swing and Day cannot continue to live a life free from any knowledge of the war. She has family members who are nurses. Though Day is a pacifist when it comes to war (but not the revolution), she decides to become a probationary nurse at King’s County Hospital in Brooklyn to fill in for the many nurses who have been sent abroad.

Day begins work as a nurse at the King’s County Hospital in 1918. Her friends complain that she is freeing other nurses to go to the front and assist the soldiers. Day insists that she is helping the poor. The hospital is a free hospital, so this aligns with her ideals.

When she works at the hospital, Day sees the closeness of life and death. In fact, the war coincides with the heart of the influenza epidemic and many of her patients die. Day reflects that “[n]ursing was like newspaper work. It was impossible to suffer long over the tragedies which took place every day” because all of the nurses were just too busy (92).

Day also begins to go to Mass with another nurse. She questions humankind’s purpose. Why does the Lord watch over him? What is the meaning of life? She begins to think that worship is necessary for human beings because only then are they truly themselves.

Day ends up being a nurse for a year, but then she is drawn back to her first love: journalism. As a nurse, she is too busy and exhausted to really even experience Armistice Day. This perhaps leads her to feel like she is missing out on the major world events that journalists count on and wish to experience and analyze. Day tells the head nurse that she is leaving. Her supervisor is very displeased and retorts that Day is only quitting because she feels that she is too good for the work.

Day then mentions that there is not very much to say about the next few years of her life: “I never intended to write an autobiography. I have always wanted instead to tell of things that brought me to God and that reminded me of God” (94). She also does not want to write too closely about people that she was friends with because she does not want to reveal intimate details of their lives.

Day is arrested again after she moves back to Chicago. This only serves to make her a bigger supporter of the revolution. She has been staying with a mentally unstable friend in IWW housing and they are arrested in a “Palmer Red Raid” for being prostitutes (99). They have to wait on the street for the police wagon while barely clothed. Day is ashamed because she feels like she has been careless by staying in the house, where women are not allowed. She is picked up as part of the red hysteria of the times, but also because of her carelessness. Day hates to discuss this incident, but she is glad that she had the experience “of thousands who had worked for labor” (99). As a picketer, she always feels a vulnerability, like she is in the wrong, but there is incremental change coming from the labor protests.

When she is in jail, Day feels the anguish of the other women imprisoned there: “It was a valid experience, I felt, and I was sharing, as I never had before, the life of the poorest of the poor, the guilty, the dispossessed” (104). She also remarks that she was inside yet outside of the incident because of her privilege. Indeed, Day is able to get out of jail because of her connections.

While in Chicago, Day lives with Catholics. They do not try to convert her, but she begins to learn Catholic terminology from them. Day likes that they judge actions over talk. She is also attracted to the fact that Catholicism is the religion of the workers.

The book Day is working on sells that spring, as do the movie rights. With the $5,000 in proceeds, Day returns to New York and buys a beachfront house on Staten Island.