HARRINGTON, MICHAEL

(1928-1989), writer and political activist. The author of sixteen books and an indefatigable organizer, Harrington was the most prominent socialist in the United States from the 1960s until his death in 1989.

Harrington was born into a middle-class Irish Catholic family in St. Louis and was educated, through college, at Jesuit institutions. After brief stints as a law student at Yale, as a graduate student in English at the University of Chicago, and as a social worker in St. Louis, he commenced his activist career by joining the Catholic Worker organization in New York in 1951. Two years later, he left the Catholic church and the Catholic Worker movement but remained involved with progressive organizations, joining the anticommunist, civil libertarian Young Socialist League in 1954.

Throughout the following decade he was an active supporter of the civil rights and trade union movements, as well as other liberal and leftist causes. A member of the League for Industrial Democracy (an affiliate of the Socialist party), he became an adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965 as well as an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. Dismayed by the conservative drift of the Socialist party, Harrington resigned its national chairmanship in 1972 and a year later founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (dsoc), a group devoted to building a progressive coalition within the Democratic party. In 1981, dsoc merged with the New America Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America, which, though small, became the largest socialist organization in the United States since the 1930s.

Harrington's best-known contribution to American politics was his book The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962). This volume of statistics, straightforward analysis, and simply told narratives attracted an extraordinary amount of attention. Appearing at a time when most politicians and commentators were celebrating the achievements of the postwar American economy, the book argued that tens of millions of Americans remained desperately poor and trapped in a culture of poverty. Despite its capabilities, Harrington argued, the United States had not solved the problem of poverty; it was instead turning a blind eye to the large minority of Americans who remained poor. The attention the book received led to its being read by President John F. Kennedy and helped to prompt and shape the War on Poverty (which included an expansion of existing social programs as well as new initiatives in housing and health care) sponsored by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Harrington himself became a participant in a presidential antipoverty task force and a highly visible spokesman for liberal policies and programs.

Harrington also played an important role in unifying the American Left and shaping its policies during the decades that followed the McCarthy era. He served as something of a bridge between the Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s (although in 1962, in an act he later regretted, he bitterly denounced the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society for being insufficiently anticommunist). Similarly, he served as a point of contact and a channel of communication between Democratic party liberals, such as John and Robert Kennedy, and left-wing activists and organizers who were wary of mainstream politics. ("I want to be on the left wing of the possible," he once said.)

Although many disagreed with his political views, Harrington, over the course of decades, earned great respect, nationally and internationally, for his consistent championing of a socialism that included political democracy and civil liberties. His extraordinary energy, dedication to principles, and humane personal style rendered him an admired symbol of progressive politics even during the politically conservative decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

Michael Harrington, The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988) and The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962).

Alexander Keyssar

See also Liberalism; New Left; Poverty; Socialism; Socialist Party.