American Catholic Studies

In The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day recalled the divisions that emerged within the Old Left in the 1920s and 1930s. There were those who were sympathetic to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and those who opposed it, favoring instead the Industrial Workers of the World or “Wobblies.” The Wobblies, with their call for “One Big Union,” regarded the skilled workers of the AFL as “the aristocrats of labor.” Impatient with the dialectic of “the orthodox Marxists,” they believed in direct action—even through violence. But Day also identified small anarchist groups. While anarchism in the United States was associated with secular figures such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Day pointed to Ammon Hennacy as a “Christian anarchist” in the mold of Tolstoy and the Sermon on the Mount. Borrowing this characterization, William Marling’s Christian Anarchist: Ammon Hennacy, A Life on the Catholic Left offers the first critical biography of Hennacy, an important figure on the Left (Catholic or otherwise) and, in particular, for the Catholic Worker.

Hennacy had been involved with the Wobblies, but rejected violent class-warfare and became a pacifist who was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War I, where he met Berkman. Marling paints a vivid portrait of Hennacy starting with his childhood in Ohio raised by Quaker parents, his education at Hiram College, and his various attempts to live out his anarchist commitments, which Marling describes as “individualistic, anti-authoritarian, Christian pacifism.” Hennacy simply called it his “one-man revolution” (or as he supposedly once declared: “An anarchist is someone who doesn’t need a [End Page 81] cop to make him behave.”) The picture that clearly emerges is of a very disciplined and dedicated form of life and focus on personal responsibility. It was this pacifist anarchism that Hennacy brought to the Catholic Worker in the 1950s, though not without controversy. Indeed, Michael Baxter has even suggested that there are two poles within the Catholic Worker: the Father John Hugo-traditionalist pole and the Hennacy-anarchist pole, with most Workers falling somewhere in between. Marling also provides insights into Hennacy’s friendship with Scott Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a classic in the back to the land movement in the 1960s, and the influence of the Hopi people, who Hennacy saw as providing a template for a more social form of pacifist anarchism.

Marling does not limit his scope to an intellectual study of Hennacy’s life and thought. He spends considerable time on Hennacy’s personal life, recounting Hennacy’s first marriage to Selma Melms with whom he had two daughters. Melms eventually left Hennacy and took their daughters to join a religious cult in California. Marling gives a heartbreaking account of Hennacy’s often futile attempts to be part of his daughters’ lives. Marling also ventures into Hennacy’s relationship with Day, who influenced Hennacy’s decision to enter the Catholic Church in 1952. Marling strongly implies that this relationship was more than (as William Miller described it) “sophomoric.” Marling holds up correspondence that suggests they shared a real romantic intensity—which Day certainly exhibited when Hennacy began to pursue other (often younger) women in the Catholic Worker. If nothing else, this confirms the suspicion that Dorothy Day—in contrast to the more saintly manner she is often portrayed today—was attractive to many men and she did not always brush such attention away.

Christian Anarchist is well-written and much needed—though more interviews with folks who knew Hennacy such as Karl Meyer or the late Tom Cornell could have given it a little more familiarity. That said, Marling has provided a great service to scholars or anyone else interested in the U.S. Left, Catholic radicalism, or the Catholic Worker. Accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students, Christian Anarchist will certainly become the definitive biography of Ammon Hennacy for years to come. And as the current political and economic climate (eerily mirroring that of...