Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MECHANIZED FIRE-THE SEARING OF HUMAN flesh-became an accepted part of warfare early in the twentieth century. The flamethrowers introduced in the Great War had one disadvantage, though: gasoline burned too quickly to do damage on any but a limited scale. Not so with napalm. Employed extensively during World War II, it is a form of jellied gasoline in which the thickening agents of naphthenic and palmitic acid better produce the long-range, long-lasting effect its users desire. A single bomb can engulf a 2,500-square-yard area, melting the skin off anyone it touches. Though it had been used in Southeast Asia on a small scale in the closing days of the Kennedy administration, napalm raining from the skies over Vietnam only became widespread, and its impact on the civilian population widely known, in 1965.
On November 6 and 9, 1965, Americans saw different images of fire-based destruction on the nightly news. On the sixth, less than three months after Congress had passed a law making the destruction of draft cards a crime, an antiwar rally was held in Union Square. Dorothy Day was at the podium with A. J. Muste and other notables in the pacifist movement. "I speak today," she told a crowd of two thousand, "as one who is old and who must endorse the courage of the young who themselves are willing to give up their freedom. " Theirs was a struggle, she insisted, for "full freedom and human dignity," a vital protest against the "cruelty and hysteria of war. " She spoke of other successful struggles "begun by courage, even in martyrdom," referring to the emerging nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the black civil rights movement. She concluded with a prayer from St. Francis: "O Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. " Following her remarks, four Catholic Worker young men including Tom Cornell joined her on the platform and burned their draft cards. (Cornell had to ask the Selective Service office for a duplicate of his card as he had burned the original at an earlier action.) Hecklers from the other side of the street screamed abuse at "Moscow Mary," a traitor and Communist, and called out to the young men to torch themselves, not their draft cards. One man with a fire extinguisher reached the foot of the stage, spraying Dorothy, Cornell, and the others. "It should have been acid, not water," one of the counterprotestors yelled.