Two New Yorkers, Two Ways to Love the Poor
On the newest episode of Acton Line, Thomas Dias sets Dorothy Day beside New York’s new mayor and finds two irreconcilable answers to an old question.
In 1955, when sirens sounded across Manhattan for a compulsory civil defense drill, Dorothy Day did not take shelter. She and her fellow Catholic Workers sat on a bench in front of City Hall and waited to be arrested. To the authorities, the drill was prudence. To Day, it was theater. A Cold War exercise in fear mongering designed to condition the public for war. She would be arrested for such protests five times. She refused to outsource her conscience to the state and would not outsource her charity to it either.
That refusal sits at the center of the argument my colleague Thomas Dias makes on the newest Acton Line. The conversation was inspired by his writing in Public Discourse. There Thomas set two New Yorkers side by side, Dorothy Day and Zohran Mamdani. He examined the tensions between their approaches to the serving their city’s poor.
Day arrived in New York in 1916 and, apart from her travels, never really left; she died at Maryhouse in Manhattan in 1980. With Peter Maurin she founded the Catholic Worker movement in 1933. A newspaper, but above all houses of hospitality that fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless. More than 180 of them still operate today.
She had come to this work the long way around. As a young woman she moved through the city’s radical movements of socialism, communism, and syndicalism. Then the Christian anarchism of Tolstoy and finally converting to Catholicism in 1927. What changed was not her concern for the poor but her account of their poverty. Her whole experience, she wrote, had been that “our failure has been not to love enough.” Her remedy was correspondingly personal: the poor were to be met, fed, and known face to face, by hands that could not hand the task to anyone else.
Zohran Mamdani, now the mayor of the same city, shares Day’s concern but almost none of her method. His platform locates the remedy for poverty in political power: rent freezes for the rent-stabilized, hundreds of thousands of new affordable units, government-run grocery stores, and universal childcare. The strategy is to win power, staff it with allies, and legislate. It is a theory of change that runs through the machinery of the state rather than through the encounter of persons.
Thomas is careful not to caricature this. Mamdani is no cynic, and the provision of material goods is a real good. The question is whether it is a sufficient one.
Here Thomas reaches for Hilaire Belloc, whose 1912 warning about the Servile State identified the danger precisely: a society that secures the body’s provision by making men permanently dependent on the power that provides it. Such an arrangement can fill a stomach. What it cannot do is the very thing Day thought indispensable: to meet a person as a person, and in doing so restore the dignity that provision alone leaves untouched.
The fault line, then, is not fiscal but anthropological. For Day, loving the poor was an act that could not be assigned to a bureau, because a love that is delegated is no longer quite love. The modern state, by contrast, converts charity into a transfer: efficient, scalable, and impersonal. Its great temptation is to let the institution will what only we can will, and to mistake the smooth functioning of the transfer for the work of encounter.
Which returns us to the woman on the bench. The road she walked of voluntary poverty, repeated arrests, and a lifetime of meeting the poor where they were was a hard one. It is also humanizing. It refuses the shortcut of handing our obligations to someone, or something, else. Day’s radical call to love still rings.
Two New Yorkers, two answers—listen to the full conversation on Acton Line: