Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ONE WONDERS: WHAT DID THE students at St. John's University in Minnesota in 1960 make of Dorothy's statement that it would be better to die in a nuclear attack than to retaliate and slaughter so many innocents with our own missiles? What did the students at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts think of her condemnation of President John F. Kennedy a few weeks after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in the spring of 1961 and her claim that the US government should be giving aid to Cuba, not provoking bloodshed? What did any student audience think of her observation-an insistent theme now in campus talks-about "the mortal sin" that had been committed by the United States in incinerating the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The first years of the new decade occasioned three momentous and unexpected developments in the world: the election of a Roman Catholic to the White House, the breakdown of the United States' relations with its onetime ally Cuba, and the opening of the Second Vatican Council. The first of these was a source of satisfaction to millions of American Catholics (though not to Cardinal Spellman, known to be a supporter of Vice President Richard Nixon). To Dorothy, Kennedy was a Cold Warrior who had made much during his campaign of an alleged missile gap with the Soviet Union, a senator who had never taken a stand against Joseph McCarthy or spoken up for civil rights, i.e., not a leader from whom she could expect much. She surely suspected that his Catholicism was of the thinnest kind. Nuns might line up by the dozens at polling places, but she had no more intention of voting in that election than in any other. The Cuban missile crisis would confirm her belief that Kennedy was just another occupant of the Oval Office in the dangerous spirit of Truman and Eisenhower.