Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF January 1970, Ammon Hennacy picketed each day outside the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City. Opponents of capital punishment, he and his wife of five years, Joan Thomas, were protesting the imminent execution of two convicted murderers. On the eighth, he was stricken with a heart attack on the street. A week later, he was dead. Dorothy was shaken and in her February column eulogized him, extolling the "romantic Irishman" who had never, to his last day, lost his "love of drama, [his] love of life. " "He was an inspiration and a reproach," she wrote mournfully. The same issue printed eulogies by Karl Meyer, Tom Cornell, Michael Harrington, Mary Lathrop, and Joan Thomas.
Though she had probably been flattered by Hennacy's romantic attentions when they first met-reconciling herself to life without a loving partner had been hard-Dorothy knew that theirs would have been a completely unsuitable marriage. It was for his politics and his passion that she held him in such high regard, even after he left the Church. He felt the urgency of their shared mission as intensely as anyone at the Catholic Worker ever had. The year before had represented a hallucinatory unraveling in America: the Chicago Seven trial, the Stonewall riots, Woodstock, the Manson murders, more troops sent to Vietnam-staggering numbers, peaking at more than half a million men. To Ammon Hennacy, none of it was surprising. His country had always been a chaotic, even tragic, work in progress, a wayward nation that needed to be reminded of its moral duty by its dissidents. With his passing, a certain kind of radical-unflappable, intransigent, jubilantly ornery, a Gandhian never reconciled to injustice and inequality-was gone.