Activist Homesteaders: Catholic Worker Communes in the 1930s

Returning to the land was part of Peter Maurin's vision of social justice in the 1930s

An urban organization of activists devoted to social justice and racial equity decided to form a commune and go back to the land. This could be the story of countless hippie communes in the 1960s and 1970s. But this was in 1936, and the urban activist organization—Catholic Worker—was cofounded in 1933 by Dorothy Day, a former Socialist writer who converted to Catholicism, and Peter Maurin, a French priest who was active in the Catholic social justice movement. The two teamed together to start a newspaper, Catholic Worker, and opened “houses of hospitality” in New York City to house and feed people who had lost their jobs and homes in the Depression.

“The escape from industrialism is not in socialism or sovietism,” Maurin wrote in the November 1935 issue of Catholic Worker. “The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people. It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper respect and proper regard for the soil." And the Catholic Church was uniquely suited to spearhead the back-to-the-land movement. “Why Catholics?” he asked. “Because they realize more clearly than any others the shortcomings of the old capitalist industrial system.…They alone understand that while the family is the primary social unit, the community comes next. And there is no sound and righteous and enduring community where all its members are not substantially of one mind in matters of the spirit—that is to say of religion.”

After a lengthy and frustrating search, Catholic Worker found their dream homestead—a 28-acre hilly farm just outside of Easton, Pennsylvania, which they christened “Maryfarm.” They moved into the dilapidated farmhouse and “blundered our way into farming, making many mistakes,” Dorothy Day wrote in her 1963 book Loaves and Fishes. At first, they used both fertilizers and pesticides without any misgivings, joking that the man in charge of spraying pesticides was in danger of becoming “muscle bound from pumping the spray gun” so much. They didn’t start making a compost pile and farming organically until 1941.

In 1942, Peter Maurin read Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament for the first time, getting so excited about it that it “aroused…universal enthusiasm among the Workers.” Of course, with their passion for social justice, the Catholic Workers couldn’t help but notice Howard’s unquestioning endorsement of colonialism, plantation culture, and the associated social oppression. His work was a good starting point, they concluded, but they went one step further to “draw the necessary analogy between physical and spiritual health.”

Despite their enthusiasm, the Catholic Workers experienced many of the same problems that would later plague communes in the 1960s—tensions from so many unrelated people living together, arguments over work assignments, poor maintenance of communal tools, and eventually a manipulative leader who took over Maryfarm, which disassociated from Catholic Worker in 1946. In the meantime, dozens of other Catholics across the country founded their own communes—some longer lasting than the original, and many of which farmed organically. “If we have failed to achieve Peter’s ideals, it is perhaps because we have tried to be all things to all men,” Dorothy Day concluded in 1963. “We have aimed high; and we hope we have accomplished enough at least ‘to arouse the conscience.’ Here is the way—or rather here is a way—for those who love God and their neighbor to try to live by the two great commandments. The frustrations that we experience are exercises in faith and hope, which are supernatural virtues.”