Harrington, Michael

Maxine Phillips

HARRINGTON, MICHAEL (1928–1989). For years the best-known “bright young socialist” in the United States, Michael Harrington inherited the mantle of Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs. Although never the leader of a large movement, he was the only socialist after 1960 whom many Americans could identify and trust.

Born in Saint Louis in 1928, the only child of a teacher mother and lawyer father, he remembered a boyhood among the “lace-curtain Irish.” His Jesuit education at Holy Cross College trained him well for a life of debate and battle in the socialist movement. After a year at Yale Law School, which he entered as a Taft Republican and left as a democratic socialist, he enrolled at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in English. He moved to New York’s Greenwich Village in 1949 and led the life of a bohemian, writing poetry and spending late nights at the White Horse Tavern.

Two years (1951–1953) as a volunteer at the anarchist-pacifist Catholic Worker house on the Lower East Side, where he was associate editor of the Catholic Worker, marked him profoundly. He drew on those years for The Other America (1962), his groundbreaking book on poverty in the United States, and returned there twenty years later for research on The New American Poverty.

In between those two books and subsequent ones came a lifetime of socialist organizing and activism as well as writing and speaking about social issues that took him to thousands of lecture halls and college campuses. When he left the Catholic Worker and the Catholic faith, he became organizational director for the Workers Defense League in 1953. From 1954 to 1962 he supported himself as a researcher and writer for the Fund for the Republic. In 1957, he published a long article on poverty in Commentary, from which grew the book The Other America. This period coincided with changing political alliances and faction fights. As a leader of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth section of the Socialist Party, Harrington differed with Norman Thomas over the latter’s critical support for the US war in Korea and took the New York YPSL into Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League (ISL) in 1954. He was YPSL national chair until it dissolved in June 1958. Starting in September 1958, Harrington and other ISL-YPSL members entered the Socialist Party as a bloc. From 1960 to 1962, he edited New America, the Socialist Party’s official paper.

With the publication in 1962 of The Other America, Harrington stepped into the national limelight. The book was said to have been read by President John F. Kennedy and is considered the intellectual force behind the antipoverty programs of his administration and of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. As the Boston Globe editorialized in 1987, Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps and expanded social-security benefits are “directly traceable” to it. Harrington was also active in the civil rights movement and served on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Advisory Committee.

During the 1960s, Harrington’s rigid anticommunism and thus his inability to support an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam contributed to divisions on the Left that haunted him for years. As liaison for the League for Industrial Democracy, he came into conflict with the League’s youth section, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). He was upset that SDS allowed the Communist Party an observer at its Port Huron convention in the summer of 1962. Harrington had come to believe in realignment, that the seeds of a labor or socialist party existed within the Democratic Party and could be nurtured by coalition work with Leftists. He therefore believed that sections of the SDS Port Huron Statement would offend the liberals with whom he hoped to work, because they took an insufficiently critical attitude toward the Soviet Union and other authoritarian regimes. Later, Harrington would call his actions “stupid” and publicly berate himself for this blunder, but at the time he was a key force in the split between the Old Left and New Left.

He was elected chairman of the Socialist Party in 1968 as it debated its stance toward the Vietnam War. Harrington’s Realignment Caucus opposed the war, but did not support unconditional withdrawal. (Shachtman continued to give critical support to the U.S. efforts, while the Debs Caucus was militantly anti-war.) Although he split with the Realignment Caucus and formed the Coalition Caucus—which backed George McGovern—Harrington did not resign as Socialist Party co-chairman until October 1972, two months before leading his caucus out of the party convention to become, in February 1973, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), of which he was chairman.

DSOC pursued its Democratic Party strategy through such projects as Democracy ’76 and Democratic Agenda, which were program and policy coalitions within the party. In the 1980s, the successor coalition was called New Directions.

A rapprochement between some members of the Old Left and New Left occurred when Harrington supported the merger of DSOC and the New American Movement in 1982. Now he was working with many who had disdained him during the 1960s but whose politics had come closer to his, as had his to theirs. The new organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), claimed for years to be the largest democratic socialist organization in the United States since the Socialist Party of 1936, and after the election of right-wing populist Donald Trump as president in 2016 and of democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to Congress in 2018, grew rapidly to more than 70,000 members. At the time of the 1982 merger, there were perhaps 5,500 members. Harrington co-chaired it with socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich until his death.

Although widely known for his work on domestic issues, Harrington took great pleasure and pride in DSOC’s, and then DSA’s, participation in the Socialist International. As secretary of the Resolutions Committee at the Socialist International Congress in 1983, he drafted the Manifesto of Albufeira, a political resolution adopted by the sixty-five parties, and served as coordinator of the Committee on a New Declaration of Principles.

In 1972, he became a professor of political science at Queens College. Harrington’s contribution to U.S. society through his writing and speaking helped legitimize left-wing discourse in U.S. politics. Unlike many intellectuals, he was more than willing to participate in the tedious work of building an organization. Colleagues marveled at his patience and conciliatory skills and chafed at his inability to share power. Despite a losing battle with cancer of the esophagus, Harrington maintained a grueling writing and speaking schedule and remained active in DSA. He joked that he hoped to stave off death by writing so much. His sixteenth book, Socialism: Past and Future, was published in July 1989. He died on 31 July 1989.

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Harrington, Michael

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