For all of her unswerving commitment to nonviolence, Dorothy Day (1897–1980) fiercely and almost bitterly denounced President Truman in The Catholic Worker, in September 1945, for his “jubilance” over the dropping of the atomic bombs. Like Leo Szilard and many subsequent antinuclear writers, Day sensed that with the atomic bomb something new had come into the world, and that some new language was needed to oppose it.
Day was born in Brooklyn and studied at the University of Illinois for two years, then returned to New York to become a journalist; she worked with Floyd Dell at The Masses, and like Dell and Edna St. Vincent Millay was involved with the Provincetown Players. She became a Catholic the year after the birth of her daughter Tamar in 1926; in 1933, partly under the influence of the French personalist Peter Maurin (though Day was too much her own person ever to be very much under anyone’s influence), she founded The Catholic Worker newspaper—still published today, and with a circulation in the late 1930s of 100,000—and the first Catholic Worker house of hospitality. Her pacifism cost the newspaper readers during World War II; horror at the consequences of the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki won some of them back.
I met Dorothy Day when I was in my twenties; my friend Chuck Matthei, a noted draft resister and community organizer, was staying at the Catholic Worker house in New York, and invited me to meet him there. I had no idea who she was, but Chuck was a magical person to me, so Dorothy became one too; I can still see her, though by now my memory of her is overlaid with my memories of all the photographs I’ve seen of her.
MR. TRUMAN was jubilant. President Truman. True man. What a strange name, come to think of it. We refer to Jesus Christ as true God and true Man. Truman is a true man of his time in that he was jubilant. He was not a son of God, brother of Christ, brother of the Japanese, jubilating as he did. He went from table to table on the cruiser which was bringing him home from the Big Three conference, telling the great news, “jubilant,” the newspaper said. Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.
That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, page one, column one, of the Herald Tribune says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers, scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.
Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant. We have created. We have created destruction. We have created a new element, called Pluto. Nature had nothing to do with it.
“A cavern below Columbia was bomb’s cradle”; born not that men might live, but that men might be killed. Brought into being in a cavern, and then tried in a desert place, in the midst of tempest and lightning, tried out, and then again on the eve of the Feast of the Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, on a far off island in the eastern hemisphere, tried out again, this “new weapon which conceivably might wipe out mankind, and perhaps the planet itself.”
“Dropped on a town, one bomb would be equivalent to a severe earthquake and would utterly destroy the place. A scientific brain trust has solved the problem of how to confine and release almost unlimited energy. It is impossible yet to measure its effects.”
“We have spent two billion on the greatest scientific gamble in history and won,” said President Truman jubilantly.
(“UNRRA meets today facing a crisis on funds. It is close to scraping the bottom of its financial barrel, will open its third council session tomorrow, hoping to get enough new funds to carry it through the winter.”)
(Germany is told of Hard Winter by Eisenhower.)
(Pall of Apathy Shrouds Bitter, Hungry Vienna.)
The papers list the scientists (the murderers) who are credited with perfecting this new weapon. One outstanding authority “who earlier had developed a powerful electrical bombardment machine called the cyclotron, was Professor O. E. Lawrence, a Nobel prize winner of the University of California. In the heat of the race to unlock the atom, he built the world’s most powerful atom smashing gun, a machine whose electrical projectiles carried charges equivalent to 25,000,000 volts. But such machines were found in the end to be unnecessary. The atom of Uranium 235 was smashed with surprising ease. Science discovered that not sledgehammer blows, but subtle taps from slow travelling neutrons managed more on a tuning technique were all that were needed to disintegrate the Uranium 235 atom.”
(Remember the tales we used to hear, that one note of a violin, if that one note could be discovered, could collapse the Empire State building. Remember too, that God’s voice was heard not in the great and strong wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but “in the whistling of a gentle air.”)
Scientists, army officers, great universities (Notre Dame included) and captains of industry,—all are given credit lines in the press for their work of preparing the bomb,—and other bombs, the President assures us are in production now.
Great Britain controls the supply of uranium ore, in Canada and Rhodesia. We are making the bombs. This new great force will be used for good, the scientists assured us. And then they wiped out a city of 318,000. This was good. The President was jubilant.
Today’s paper with its columns of description of the new era, the atomic era, which this colossal slaughter of the innocents has ushered in, is filled with stories covering every conceivable phase of the new discovery. Pictures of the towns and the industrial plants where the parts are made are spread across the pages. In the forefront of the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is a chapel, a large comfortable looking chapel benignly settled beside the plant. And the scientists making the first tests in the desert, prayed, one newspaper account said.
Yes. God is still in the picture. God is not mocked. Today, the day of this so great news, God made a madman dance and talk, who had not spoken for twenty years. God sent a typhoon to damage the Carrier Hornet. God permitted a fog to obscure vision and a bomber crashed into the Empire State building. God permits these things. We have to remember it. We are held in God’s hands, all of us, and President Truman too, and these scientists who have created death, but will use it for good. He, God, holds our life and our happiness, our sanity and our health; our lives are in his hands.
He is our Creator. Creator.
. . . And I think, as I think on these things, that while here in the western hemisphere, we went in for precision bombing (what chance of precision bombing now?) while we went in for obliteration bombing, Russia was very careful not to bomb cities, to wipe out civilian populations. Perhaps she was thinking of the poor, of the workers, as brothers.
I remember, too, that many stories have come out of Russia of her pride in scientific discoveries and of how eagerly and pridefully they were trying to discover the secret of life—how to create life (not death).
Exalted pride, yes, but I wonder which will be easier to forgive?
And as I write, Pigsie, who works at Secaucus, New Jersey, feeding hogs, and cleaning out the excrement of hogs, who comes in once a month to find beauty and surcease and glamour and glory in the drink of the Bowery, trying to drive the hell and the smell out of his nostrils and his life, sleeps on our doorstep, in this best, and most advanced and progressive of all possible worlds. And as I write, our cat, Rainbow, slinks by with a shrill rat in her jaws, out of the kitchen closet, here at Mott street. Here in this greatest of cities which covered the cavern where this stupendous discovery was made, which institutes an era of unbelievable richness and power and glory for man . . .
Everyone says, “I wonder what the Pope thinks of it?” How everyone turns to the Vatican for judgment, even though they do not seem to listen to the voice there! But our Lord Himself has already pronounced judgment on the atomic bomb. When James and John, (John the beloved) wished to call down fire from heaven on their enemies, Jesus said,
“You know not of what spirit you are. The Son of man came not to destroy souls but to save.” He said also, “What you do unto the least of these my brethren, you do unto me.”