Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
JOHN DAY WAS A DIFFICULT man. A southerner of modest means, he had come North in his early twenties to make a living and find a wife, which he did, but his enthusiasm over the course of his married life was often directed less toward career advancement or family and more toward his race horses, professional sports, gambling, male bonding, the bottle, and nights on the town. And, on occasion, other women.
Sharp-tongued and opinionated, "Judge Day," as he liked being called in later years (for no other reason than his demeanor and tendency to pronouncements), was used to being deferred to. Born in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1870, he grew up in a Scots-Irish family that claimed a distant kinship to Daniel Boone and Sam Houston; his father had served the Confederacy as a surgeon and been taken prisoner in the last weeks of the conflict. In the recollection of his eldest daughter, Dorothy, John Day was a man not given to self-doubt or displays of paternal affection, and he shared many of the biases of his place of birth, his time, and his class. He was "intemperate," in her generous words, about foreigners and African Americans. He had no use for religion. As a Republican, he had even less use for political radicalism.