The Long Loneliness

Day begins this chapter by remarking on people’s need to worship. Unfortunately, she notes, this can also create dictators like Mao Zedong: “The dictator becomes divine” (223). She also looks at unions and wonders if the community of the union exists, do workers need to take ownership and responsibility? Working together helps to create major gains. Peter Maurin wants to create “mutual-aid credit unions in the parish to start what he first liked to call agronomic universities, where the worker could become a scholar and the scholar a worker” (225). Indeed, some of Day and Maurin’s followers start their own agrarian communities, although some leave that way of life because they can’t do the labor.

Tom Mooney also supports going back to the land. Day visits Mooney in prison. He is serving twenty years in San Quentin for the Preparedness Day bombing. That bombing occurred in San Francisco in 1916 during a parade held to commemorate the United States’ entry into World War One. Mooney and another man were accused of setting off the bomb, which killed 10 people. Many sailors Day speaks to want to work the land when they retire, not live in a city, away from the nature.