The Moral Bucket List

Dorothy Day was a 20th-century social and political reformer. Day was born into a middle-class Episcopalian family in New York in 1897. She became politically active when she briefly attended the University of Illinois, where she became steeped in socialist writing and joined the Socialist Party. Back in New York in 1916, she joined the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union, and the staff of the Call, a socialist newspaper. A self-proclaimed anarchist, Day eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and became a leader of the Roman Catholic workers’ movement.

More important to Brooks than Day’s political career is the fact that she radically changed her life after the birth of her daughter. For Brooks, Day’s reformation is an example of the power of “energizing love.” Taking his narrative of Day’s life from her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952), Brooks recounts Day’s description of the bohemian lifestyle and sense of drifting that pervaded her early years. Her sense of wandering without purpose led to excessive drinking and attempted suicide.

Day found meaning and transformed her life when she gave birth, as an unmarried woman, to Tamar Day in 1926. After she experienced this “energizing love,” Day became a different person. She converted to Roman Catholicism, and, although she continued to espouse anarchism, she devoted herself to Catholic activism. She spent the rest of her life committed to her daughter and her work. In the 1990s, 10 years after her death, the Vatican began the process of canonizing her.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a five-star general in the US Army during World War II and subsequently the 34th president of the United States, in office from 1953 to 1961. Eisenhower helped plan and execute some of the most significant campaigns in Europe during the war, including the invasion of Normandy. As president, he opposed McCarthyism, supported the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and drove the founding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). He was, by all accounts, an exceptionally successful military and political leader.

Most important to Brooks, Eisenhower was known for his calm and measured manners, ethical conduct, and personal integrity. In the public eye, he was soft-spoken. Individuals close to Eisenhower, however, including his son John, Richard Nixon, and Kay Summersby, recounted stories of Eisenhower’s occasional outbursts of temper. Based on these stories, David Brooks presents Eisenhower as an example of “self-defeat,” the moral bucket list item in which the self-aware person conquers their greatest weakness. Brooks argues that Eisenhower acknowledged his temper and then developed strategies and habits to overcome it, like writing down the names of people he was angry with and then tearing up the papers.

Mary Ann Evans, pen name George Eliot, was a 19th-century British author best known for complex novels of social commentary and character depth. Evans was born in 1819 into the family of an estate manager in rural England. Although women were not encouraged to pursue intellectual endeavors, Evans’s father invested in her education because he felt that she was too physically unattractive to have strong marriage prospects. Between the ages of five and 16, she attended several girls’ schools. In 1850, Evans moved to London with aspirations of becoming a writer. After publishing early work in the Review, she published her first piece of fiction in 1857, the novel Adam Bede, under the name of George Eliot. Although women were publishing under their own names at the time, Eliot wanted to avoid stereotypes associated with women’s writing. She went on to publish seven novels, including her most acclaimed work, Middlemarch, which appeared in 1871 and 1872.

As he does with Dorothy Day, Brooks cites Eliot’s personal life as an example of one of the challenges on his moral bucket list, the “conscience leap.” Eliot was considered homely throughout her life, and as a young woman, she did not enter any long-term romantic relationships. When she was 32, considered old by the standards of her day, she met George Lewes, who was still technically married to another woman. Despite the restrictions placed on women’s behavior at the time, she became romantically involved with Lewes, and the two considered themselves married from 1854 until Lewes’s death in 1878. Brooks argues that Eliot’s commitment to Lewes despite the social backlash illustrates the “conscience leap” because Eliot rejected all notions of status and social prestige.