Maurice Isserman - The Other American The Life Of Michael Harrington

The Other American

The Life of Michael Harrington

MAURICE ISSERMAN

PublicAffairs
NEW YORK

Copyright 2000 by Maurice Isserman.
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 W. 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.

Photo credits: Neddie Harrington courtesy of Stephanie Harrington. Ned Harrington courtesy of St. Louis University High School Yearbook. Ed Harrington courtesy of the Holy Cross Archives. Edward Harrington courtesy of the Holy Cross Yearbook. Cartoon courtesy of the Catholic Worker. Dorothy Day courtesy of the Marquette University Archives. Bogdan Denitch courtesy of Carol Sydney Marshall. Norman Thomas courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University. Michael Harrington at a Socialist Party conference courtesy Peter Graham. Michael Harrington in Paris courtesy Johanna Hawes. Harrington marriage announcement courtesy of The Village Voice. Max Schactman courtesy of Peter Graham. Book covers courtesy of the author. Lyndon Johnson Magnum Photo, Inc./Ren Burri. Sargent Shriver Black Star. The march on Montgomery Black Star. Photo of Irving Howe courtesy of the City University of New York. Michael Harrington and family Bob Adelman. Stephanie, Alex, and Teddy Harrington courtesy of Harry Fleischman. Michael Harrington, Marjorie Phyfe Gellerman and William Winpisinger courtesy of the author. Michael Harrington speaking in Atlanta courtesy of Matt Mancini.

Book design by Jenny Dossin.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Isserman, Maurice.
The other American: the life of Michael Harrington/Maurice Isserman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1586480367
1. Harrington, Michael, 19281989 2. Social scientistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Political scientistsUnited StatesBiography. 4. SocialistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
H59. H36 I85 2000
300'.92dc21

Just over a year before he died of cancer in 1989 at the age of sixty-one, Michael Harrington remarked to an interviewer, Its almost as if my life has been a well-plotted story. Almost. It was certainly in keeping with the larger contours of this plot that a copy of E.M. Forsters great novel of Edwardian England, Howards End, was found on Michaels bedside table when he died at home the following summer.

Howards End revolves around the complications that arise when its well-intentioned and well-to-do heroines, the Schlegel sisters, involve themselves, somewhat disastrously, in the lives of the English poor. Though Helen and Margaret Schlegel are naifs, Forster is clearly in their camp in the ensuing confrontation between the values of culture and commerce. In a passage which, under less dire circumstances, would likely have appealed to Michaels puckish sense of humor, a fatuous bourgeois villain warns the idealistic sisters to avoid getting carried away by absurd schemes of social reform... You can take it from me that there is no Social Questionexcept for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase.

It was the social question upon which Michael Harrington would make his own reputationand a living of sortsby drawing the attention of Americans to the existence of what he called The Other America. Michaels book of the same title, published at the start of the 1960s, challenged the then all-but-universal opinion (at least among the opinion-forming classes) that the United States had helped all but a tiny minority of its citizens to a fair share of the astonishing economic abundance of its affluent society. The Other America went on to inspire the most ambitious scheme of social reform of the later twentieth century in the United States, the war on poverty launched during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Some historians of the 1960s have compared the significance of The

There is another passage in Forsters novel that may have caught Michaels eye in those last days, if he were in the mood and condition to reflect upon his own almost-well-plotted life story:

Looking back on the past six months, Margaret [Schlegel] realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken.

In the pages to follow I will be following Michael Harringtons life through three overlapping and interrelated stories. There is, first of all, the story of Michael Harrington, the man who discovered poverty, and the consequences of that discovery for Michael and for the nation. Secondly, there is the story of Michael Harrington, the heir to Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas as Americas foremost socialist and the decidedly mixed success of his efforts of over a quarter-century to create a left-wing of the possible. And, finally, there is the story of Michael Harringtons personal transformation from golden youth to a kind of secular Saint Francis of Assissia legend that Michael helped create, and yet at the same time at whose restrictions he chafed. These three sequences in Michaels almost-well-plotted life are as orderly as I could make them, but bearing in mind Miss Schlegels injunction, I have tried to avoid the temptation of making them too orderly. I have been on the lookout for those false clues and signposts that lead nowhereincluding those occasional instances when the clues were deposited and the signposts erected by Michael himself.

I knew Michael Harrington, but not well. Nor were we contemporaries. He was born in 1928. I was born in 1951, about the same time that he moved into the Catholic Worker House of Hospitality on the Lower East Side of New York. He was part of what he would call the missing generation on the American Left, those who came of political age in the 1950s; I was part of the succeeding generation who came of age in the 1960s, the New Left that Michael hoped to influence. Only Connect is the famous epigraph to Howards End. That didnt happen with Michael and my generation, at least not in the 1960s.

I knew about him, of course. In the mid1960s when I was sixteen years old, and a volunteer on an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) summer work project in a poor and racially mixed neighborhood of Indianapolis, I was given a reading list that included The Other America. I read it and admired it, but not as much as I admired another book on the list, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Given the timing, Michael never had a chance. We arrived in Indianapolis in June of 1967, at the beginning of what turned into the bloodiest of the long hot summers of racial unrest. Detroit and Newark exploded. Although racial tensions werent as bad where we found ourselves (in fact the only real hostility our motley crew of teenaged idealists encountered was from some local white toughs who objected to the fact that some of the black volunteers on the project had white girlfriends), the AFSC subsequently scrapped its urban volunteer programs, fearing the worst. I reread Malcolm Xs autobiography several times over the next few years. I did not pick up another book by Michael Harrington for the next ten.