Politics & Power Quote by Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day opens with a throat-clearing that’s really a power move: she disarms the room before it can file her into the era’s most convenient categories. “Let it be remembered” is courtroom language, but Day isn’t begging for credibility; she’s dictating the terms on which she’ll be heard. The sentence stages a double refusal. Yes, she’s an “ex-Communist,” a label that could be weaponized against her in Cold War America. But she immediately rejects the ritual purification expected of that label: she has not performed the era’s dominant script of repentance by testifying before Congressional committees or publishing exposés of a shadowy “conspiracy.”

The subtext is a critique of how anti-Communism became a public genre, complete with stock villains and profitable confessions. By specifying what she hasn’t done, Day hints at the moral theater of HUAC and its ecosystem of informers, memoirists, and careerists. She’s distancing herself from both sides of the binary: not a Communist, not an anti-Communist crusader.

Context matters here: Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a radical committed to the poor, to pacifism, and to a Christianity that refused to bless state violence. In the 1940s and 50s, that made her suspect even without party membership. This line functions as a preemptive defense of conscience: she will speak from lived experience and moral conviction, not from fear, ambition, or the coercive politics of naming names. It’s integrity framed as syntax.