Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
THE 1951 NEW YORK STATE Defense Emergency Act mandated that all New York residents take refuge in one of the state's thousands of air-raid shelters should civil defense drills become necessary. By 1955, the threat of nuclear attack was deemed plausible enough to put that stipulation of the act into effect.
On June 15, when the city's more than six hundred air-raid sirens were sounded at midday, all of New York City's streets and buildings were supposed to be emptied of everyone but police, auxiliary police, relevant government officials, and the elderly and infirm. Though many ambulatory people no doubt remained in their apartments with the blinds drawn, the populace in the main complied. The stock market closed for an hour, though ironically the crowds that packed Yankee Stadium for a ball game were allowed to remain in place as it was thought their numbers would make an evacuation too hazardous. Dorothy, Ammon Hennacy, and a number of others from the Catholic Worker-Stanley Borowsky, Eileen Fantino, Mike Kovalak, Mary Ann McCoy, Carol Perry, Mary Roberts, Pat Rusk, and Helen Russell-did not comply, nor did they hide. (Bob Ludlow, Tom Sullivan, and Michael Harrington were no longer with the Worker. Ludlow, burned out, had left the previous year and would soon leave the Church, Sullivan had entered a Trappist monastery the month before, and Harrington was working with the Socialist Party.) They gathered in City Hall Park with more than twenty friends and colleagues from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the War Resisters League, including A. J. Muste and the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin, and waited to be arrested.