The Other American
The Life of Michael Harrington, Assessed

When Michael Harrington died in the summer of 1989, many DSA members felt both a political and personal pang of loss. Echoing Gore Vidal at the passing bier of Eleanor Roosevelt: “That’s that, we’re really on our own now.” Mike was our most public spokesperson, as Irving Howe said, “our voice,” the ‘default socialist’ in a country, as Maurice Isserman describes in his fine new book, that barely had room for one.

Isserman, a respected historian of the left at Hamilton College, has written Which Side Are You On?: The American Communist Party in the Second World War; If I Had a Hammer, The Death of the Old Left and Birth of the New Left; and The Civil War of the 1960s, with coauthor Michael Kazin, among other writings. He has also written tracts for DSA, where he has been a member for many years. This biography of Michael Harrington is a well-researched, well-written work of scholarship that has been many years in the making. Every DSA member would do well to read it. A complete review will appear in the Labor Day DL, and it has been reviewed in major publications such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The New Republic and Publisher’s Weekly. DSA locals are encouraged to organize discussion parties around themes — many vividly current for the organization at this minute—addressed in Isserman’s book.

DSA threw a book party and roundtable in New York City for Maurice and The Other American at the Socialist Scholars Conference 2000. The Queens College Labor Resource Center also played host to Isserman upon publication of the biography. What follows are personal and political assessments of Harrington’s life and work, from comrades of different generations who entered DSA or its predecessor organizations, in light of the time past since his death and the current movement to challenge corporate domination of the world.

Bogdan Denitch recruited Michael to the socialist movement. He is a National Chair of DSA and a professor emeritus at CUNY; Francis Fox Piven is a distinguished analyst of social movements and welfare, is a professor at CUNY, cofounder of Human SERVE, and also serves as a leader of DSA; Maxine Phillips was the talented DSA staff editor of this publication for many years, is currently an editor of Dissent, and member of the editorial committee of Religious Socialism. Joseph M. Schwartz, a professor of political science at Temple University, was Youth Organizer for DSOC/DSA, and now serves as a key member of the National Political Committee.

MAURICE ISSERMAN
“I decided to write this biography the day I got a call from the DSA National Office that Michael Harrington had just died. I’d been kicking myself ever since that writing this bio didn’t occur to me before he died. People always ask me about “what Mike would think today?” I am uncomfortable speaking for him from beyond the grave, but I think that he’d like that John Sweeney gave me a book blurb. Neither George Meany nor Lane Kirkland would have done that. Mike would also have been very happy with the events in Seattle last fall, vindication in 3-D of the coalitionist politics that he advocated for so many years. He would also be very happy with the cutting edge of campus activism around labor solidarity and standards, anti-sweatshop activity and international links. Though Mike was a congenital optimist and determined activist, as an incisive critic he would also find much in this new millennium to displease him.

Michael Harrington is along side Mark McGuire on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. That is appropriate since he came of age in that Midwestern city, and went on from there to become the “man who discovered poverty,” and the “foremost socialist of the United States.” My book traces those trajectories.

Mike was not born into poverty himself. He was the child of solidly bourgeois Irish Catholic Democrats. He later said that he only discovered the Great Depression when he read about it in the serious Catholic schools in which he excelled. After graduating Holy Cross College at 19, he went on from there to Yale Law to please his parents, did well academically there, but followed his ambitions as a poet to the University of Chicago, and then to Greenwich Village. He eventually ended up at Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker, until he left not only the Worker, but the Catholic Church, eventually becoming the acknowledged socialist successor to Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas.

That Michael Harrington is so often identified as the “man who discovered poverty” is partially the result of happenstance. He was asked by the then liberal-left magazine Commentary to look into the issue of the poor in the U.S. He wrote this article, characteristically diligent in his research, in the tradition of the Partisan Review New York intellectuals who prided themselves on their abilities to draw culture, politics and economics into splendid little essays. In Mike’s article he married the notions that there were millions of poor Americans out there in the “Affluent Society,” to a concept that he picked up from radical anthropologist Oscar Lewis, based on his study of family life in Mexico. This was the “culture of poverty,” which was later completely distorted by the neo-conservative hard right of the following decades.

Harrington’s Commentary piece attracted more attention than usual to such journalism, helped by the timing of a 1960 presidential primary in which JFK was pitted against Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia, where the media was transmitting images of very depressed mining communities. Later, after JFK’s elections, CBS broadcast Harvest of Shame, which highlighted the plight of migrant workers. At this time a shrewd editor at Macmillan asked Mike to turn his Commentary pieces into a book, resulting in The Other America, which got good but not spectacular reviews. Mike was so certain that the book would hardly sell that he had no trouble going to Paris for a year.

In that year the longest ever New Yorker review, fifty pages, was written about TOA, by Dwight MacDonald.
Reprints of the review sold in the tens of thousands. The review came to the attention of Walter Heller, Chair of Kennedy Council of Economic Advisors, and eventually landed on JFK’s desk. JFK’s primary economic strategy up to that point had been to seek a tax cut that would benefit the middle class, but Heller suggested that the 1964 campaign would be helped by doing a bit for those that hadn’t made it into the affluent society. But 1963 was the year of Birmingham, the March on Washington, and a growing civil rights movement that included a place for the demands of the poor.

Upon JFK’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson needed to make the martyred Kennedy programs his own, and he picked up this idea of a war against poverty. So Michael returned from Paris in 1963 to find himself famous. He was summoned to DC to take part in discussions on the war on poverty legislation being drafted by Sargent Shriver’s task force. However, what they borrowed from Harrington is this notion of the culture of poverty, that is to say that poor people lived lives with a different set of values and norms from that of the dominant culture, or the middle class. This, to Harrington, was in part because they were beaten down by structural economic forces, not the thoroughly behaviorist notions that the right later employed to distort this concept and gut the social wage in the 1980s.

LBJ wanted to wage war on poverty–but cheaply. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then at the Labor Department as Assistant Secretary, was supported by Mike and Paul Jacobs in advocating that jobs programs were the most effective means to raise people up — but they were expensive. LBJ wanted to limit any “war” on poverty to under a billion dollars. By contrast, the initial 1935 appropriation for the WPA was five billion dollars—ten billion in 1964 dollars! Johnson didn’t want to spend money. The administration also selectively picked up the ‘culture of poverty’ argument that suited its purposes, making the values/aspirations aspect of the notion the centerpiece of most programs. Mike always said that you have to spend money, and create jobs. In his 1984 book, The New American Poverty, Harrington quite consciously distanced himself from the notion of the culture of poverty.

One of the nostrums of biography is that there are no second acts in American life. Michael really did have a second act. His first act was as “the man who discovered poverty,” missing simultaneous opportunities to play unifier of the scattered legions of the 1960s left. In the 1980s he emerged as a kind of authentic voice of American radicalism. Many people who were not socialists, might not join DSA, would turn out to hear Mike, buy his books or listen to his NPR radio commentaries–because he was in that great American tradition of religious and political dissent. He presented the sharpest, most articulate conscious challenge to the values of Reaganism at a time when most Democratic politicians were lying down and playing dead. Early on in the Reagan administration, Mike spoke at the University of Maine. “Ronald Reagan,” he said in that magnetic, inflected voice, “is the first president in years who is actually carrying out his program, putting into effect the policies that he ran on in the campaign. That’s refreshing.” Then there was a pause: “It’s too bad that the program that he ran on was insane and cruel.”

That ultimately was Michael Harrington’s legacy, speaking truth to power when it was distinctly unfashionable to speak on behalf of the poor.

BOGDAN DENITCH

I met a fairly unkempt and hairy Michael Harrington, clothed as most Catholic Workerists at the time in frocks donated for the poor, on a rainy picket line in 1951. After many political discussions—and drinks–Mike joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL) a short while later. As Maurice notes in the book, we did what the mainly Jewish, deeply marginal left did at the height of McCarthyism in those days, we shoved the Waspy-looking (to us, when shaved) Irish-Catholic Midwesterner right to the top and made him YPSL National Chair. The Socialist Party of the time was delighted, particularly since beneath that sweet Irish face lay a steel hard political mind. For the next seven years Mike and I worked very closely together, he as the ‘good cop’ in debates across the country, me as ‘bad cop’. And we worked very closely with the growing Civil Rights movement, through our connections with Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and with the Sleeping Car Porter’s Union.

Michael was that rare phenomenon of which there are too few now, a full time organizer. Sometimes he had a job, but not too often. We were a peculiar variety of full times who were not paid. Mike’s full commitment, or Pascal’s Gamble, if you will, was: “We don’t know if a democratic socialist movement can be built in this country, but we know that if we don’t try it won’t happen–for sure. If we do try, maybe–just maybe, there’s a little hope.” For that hope Mike spent decades pounding the pavements at campuses and union halls.

Maurice noted that Mike was among the few in the top leadership of the socialist movement who was jailed rarely. This was a deliberate choice of the organizations, not Mike’s choice. Mike wanted to share the fate of other activists in the civil rights movement, but we decided that Mike could accomplish more out raising bail money, spreading publicity or going to unions. Every once in a while Mike would be jailed to keep his credentials up, so we’d tell him to “bring a toothbrush today. We’ll see you in two days after bail is raised.”

Michael Harrington had a peculiar quality of drawing loyalty in people, and people like that often have strong loyalties themselves. Mike’s two loyalties were to Norman Thomas, the grand old man of the Socialist Party, and, unfortunately, Max Schactman. Schactman was a brilliant, relentless, remorseless factionalist, who started moving right at approximately the time when Mike and I joined the youth wing of his Independent Socialist League. So Mike was unfortunately trapped in this conservative Schactmanite trajectory at the exact time when opportunities for a broad left, particularly among students, began to open up. He consequently ended up on the wrong side of a number of issues which were emotionally devastating to Mike. In the early 60s he even broke for a while with close friends like Debbie Meier over the issue of the Cuban invasion, and our call for total, immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam.

One of the reasons Mike had a breakdown in the sixties was that all the people he was close to were on different sides. The people he stayed close to he really couldn’t stand. In fact many of them later scattered to the pre-Sweeney AFL-CIO bureaucracy, and some much later to the Reagan administration. Max Schactman created some right-wing Bolsheviks, who were subsequently relentless at publicly tearing down Mike’s reputations after he finally did break with them, form DSOC and then DSA. But by this time it was hard to cut off Harrington’s access to people; he had become too well known as the poverty-finding “Mr. Socialism” of the U.S.

If I have one fault with Maurice’s excellent book, it is the underestimation–which we may have helped ourselves–of the socialist role around Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and in some unions. Because our publicly acknowledged socialist presence would have been the kiss of political death, the basis on which many civil rights activists were often red-baited, our very credible activism as hard-working, key behind the scenes players (with Bayard,) who got things done—is not well known. Mike was the closest we had to a ‘respectable’ public face with oratorical skills, so he got a piece of the credit, but the honorable activity of socialists did a great deal of good, should make DSAers proud of their historical roots, and might well be emulated today.

It speaks a lot for Mike, who was not a natural organization man in terms of administration or temperament, the he devoted so much time and energy to DSA. He would have preferred to be a writer, perhaps an editorial board member of an interesting socialist magazine, spending time in Paris writing poetry and being an intellectual–which he was. For him DSA was almost an act of religious witness or devotion. He ended up building what, for all its weaknesses, is the largest of the midgets, the biggest democratic socialist organization in America since the 1930s. It still is. For Michael, as for all of us full-timers, there was no such thing as an unorganized socialist. The whole notion of socialist politics is to participate in real world efforts to collectively change reality. Otherwise you can be a student of socialism, or a consumer—not producer—of radical politics. Michael preeminently wanted to be a producer of radical politics

FRANCIS FOX PIVEN

I knew Mike in the last two decades of his life. Usually I argued with him, in the first instance over the anti-war movement–which I defended. But through all those arguments Mike was also my friend. In debates inside DSA in which we were sometimes on different sides, we would frequently talk to each other.

Mike wrote TOA at a time when the American economy was on a postwar roll. Many expected endless economic growth, creating opportunities for everyone; almost every worker expected that their real wage income would increase every year. But other structural changes were occurring in the economy, which Mike picked up: the displacement of rural workers from the South, Caribbean and later mainland Latin America, who all came to the cities in large numbers in the 60s–the exact places where the manufacturing economy was slipping away. Even the Bureau of Labor Statistics was then warning that the U.S. was running short of good-paying jobs necessary to absorb these new internal or international migrants.

As Maurice wrote, government responses attributed to TOA, which got such a play in the press and in sectors of the Kennedy administration, was not a response to the problem of poverty. In fact the spreading civil rights movement was creating terrible political problems for a Democratic administration, forced to choose between the allegiance of blacks, often newly enfranchised because of their migration to northern cities, and sometimes of an insurgent bent—and their old allies in the white South. Several of the legislative measures of the Great Society were in response to the new black urban voters, who were helping to expand the influence of insurgents in the civil rights movement, first as voters than as demonstrators. I believe that there was even an advantage to crediting The Other America with inspiring initiatives against poverty. No Democratic leader of the 60s wanted to give credit to the black movement.

Mike recognized that the poor were part of the working class. We should stop making distinctions between poor and working class people. The poor do form a reserve army of labor, and people on welfare always moved back and forth between irregular labor markets and public assistance–when they could get it.

It is important to appreciate Michael Harrington as a work in progress. He did not make The Other America arguments in the 1980s. He was very keenly aware of the changing nature of the U.S. and world economy, its growing tendencies toward polarization. He in fact tried very hard to expand on a very laborist vision of how change could come about in the U.S., taking account of new movements of people of color, feminists and others. He was certainly open to incorporate new insurgencies to his vision of the way in which movements could transform the U.S.

Mike would be in his element if he were here today. He would be in a sense liberated by recent political developments. The dilemma that plagues Michael for a good part of his life was between his fundamental intellectual and political loyalty to the working class and its organized expression in the unions–he regarded that as a sort of rock-bound loyalty. He was always in the middle between new insurgencies and old unionists adamantly opposed to them. Many of the old conflicts in DSA had to do with that problem. The change in leadership in the labor movement, and the willingness of key leaders and some of the international unions to connect and even embrace social movement politics would have set Michael free. It’s too bad that he isn’t with us now. He was after all one of the most talented people on the left, a brilliant orator, who could speak and move people so much–even in bad political times. He would have been so happy in today’s politics.

MAXINE PHILLIPS

I came to this story chronologically later. Years after Mike left the Catholic Worker, he still would return there once a year to deliver a lecture on socialism. I went to hear him, and noticed that he addressed this little group of fifteen–many nodding in their own worlds right off the Bowery–as if he were talking to a room of 500. I started as a liberal democrat, and would never have become a socialist but for Michael Harrington.

In my seven years on staff, I met many people whose lives were touched by Mike, either because they were actually recruited to activism, or because he just made them think in a different way.

I missed most of the intense faction fighting that Maurice chronicles in his book, but saw a bit at its tail end. I think that Mike learned a lot from that excessive factionalism, and made a socialist milieu that might not have been very congenial to the average American more comfortable. Mike kept a lot of people in the organization, and that fact that DSA is still going years later is in part a tribute to him; we thought it might just last two or three years beyond his death. However, Mike wasn’t good at grooming successors. Charismatic leaders don’t often reproduce themselves in history, they seem to just come up through the ranks, though Mike did have the advantage of some mentoring from Norman Thomas.

Jim Chapin has said that Maurice’s book should have been called “Pilgrim’s Progress,” because the biggest demon Mike had to fact was despair. He rarely gave in to it, despite the rough times for the left in the last few decades. Some people did call him a progressive Pollyanna, but a little bit of hopefulness can go a long way in organizing.

Even though Mike’s language paid tribute to his religious background (while denying it in some ways), and perhaps because religious symbols resonate with me, I felt that Mike’s Church training was a key to his ability to look on the bright side. I never really felt that he had completely left the Church. Everything he did was so Catholic, and I’m one of those mushy Protestant liberals he playfully disdained. In fact Mike seemed to be a pre-Vatican II Catholic, who left a different Church than the one that succeeded it. He never really caught up with the changes.

Michael Harrington did not need the socialist movement. We needed him. He was capable of being famous on his own. In some ways we used to sit in the office and bask in his reflected glory. He could have done the same public speaking or broadcasting and raked in much higher fees than he got, but he always spoke strategically: “Can I get a gig here, so that we can build a DSOC/DSA local there?” I regret that he didn’t live to become the grand old man of the left, instead of ‘America’s oldest young socialist’, which is probably the way he’ll go down in history.

JOE SCHWARTZ

Those who have heard Michael Harrington speak in public are now over 35, which is a huge issue for DSA. If Mike were alive today there would be many more young people in this room right now listening to him. It’s our responsibility to make sure that we don’t ‘gray’ the way that the Socialist Party of Debs and Thomas did.

One of the real strengths of Maurice Isserman’s book, is that Maurice is, first and foremost, a great historian of the left. He uncovered some extraordinary material on St. Louis in the 40s, Mike’s family origins, and his psychological formation–which created this interesting insider-outsider personality. Mike always wanted to be mainstream, but also a dissident. Mike was fairly proud, for example, that his favorite singer was Sinatra. He was ‘conservative’ in many ways, didn’t have much of an ear for the later sixties feminist movement, or the black liberation movements–though he later tried to embrace them.

Maurice’s book poses the question of why Mike stayed with all those right-wing anti-Communist mostly Jewish New York needle trades losers–almost through 1973. That tragedy of Mike’s life, that he didn’t leave the ossifying old SP with Bogdan and Debbie Meier in 1965, and didn’t come out earlier against the war and for unilateral withdrawal. At the same time Isserman identifies the out-of-proportion influence of this small group, in which Bogdan played a key role, of anti-authoritarian socialists who pre-figured in many ways the decentralized, liberatory stands of the New Left, including notions of participatory work, humane uses for technology, and for injecting aspects of the heart in politics. We have to remember that the Stalinist left did have an outsized role when Mike and others were foursquare radical democrats in the fifties.

There’s a mention in the book that Mike was the socialist you took your parents to hear if they were fairly Middle-American, to show that socialists weren’t crazy. In this way he was both a popularizer, and I think, he also wanted to be an academic. In America, by and large, there aren’t such public intellectuals bridging both worlds. I think that for many a book like Socialism, or his last book Past and Future, did reach more people than the academic tomes that many of us write. Mike was incredibly good at giving an accessible version of Marx’s critique of capitalism. That capitalism really was a social system, interdependent and cooperative in the way it produced the world, uncooperative in its governance, and often anti-social. He would always take Marx’s German and say “capitalism was a social system governed asocially,” a system that should be governed democratically but wasn’t. Mike did more to popularize that type of analysis and to resurrect Marx from the dustbin of authoritarianism than anybody else.

Maurice’s conclusion in his book is historically accurate: the conditions that would support a socialist movement yielding a Debs-Thomas-Harrington figure have changed. In fact, his chapters on the 70s and 80s give one pause; if you are a DSA loyalist you have to consider Maurice’s honest challenge to us. Mike’s original inclusive strategy in those years was realignment, building a left social democratic presence around the Democratic Party and unions. Ever since the Democratic Agenda strategy, predicated on a strong liberal trade union left in the Democratic Party crashed with the Reagan election, we have been in an organizationally weak position. Of course, as Steve Max and others have observed, “we are all now left social democrats,” meaning the old faction fights are over and the commitment to liberty and democracy on the broad left is not questioned. Add to that the people who worked with or fought with Mike who now staff high councils of the AFL, like Andy Stern of SEIU, and many others.

In Mike’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future, written under the cloud of terminal cancer, he addressed the decline of the labor movement, the greater fragmentation of social movements among various identities, and asked if they could unite around a common commitment to radical democracy, or what he and we would call democratic socialism. At the 1985 DSA convention, he said that “there is no universal class anymore,” in the way of the labor movement of the 30s, or as King and the civil rights movement might have embodied universal aspirations for democracy, social rights and justice. He knew back then that all this would present major organizing obstacles into the next (this) century.

DSA has trained many younger people to be nonsectarian radical activists, to go out and do the work. Mike used to go to colleges and his first sentence was that “the revolution is not going to happen in your lifetime,” and what he meant was that there was a small, ongoing revolution happening daily below the radar screen. This is a hard message to employ if you want to motivate 18 year olds, who may want to go to the barricades the next morning. But Mike tried to inspire and describe the world as it is, while giving people hope that it could change. Many acted on his call for a life commitment to social justice by action.

Thanks to Miriam Thompson of the Queens College Labor Resource Center, and to Suzanne Gottlieb for their assistance.