Michael Harrington
Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended
College of the Holy Cross, University of Chicago (MA in
English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young man, he
was interested in both radical politics and Catholicism.
Appropriately, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker
movement. He was an editor of The Catholic Worker from 1951
to 1953. He ultimately moved towards secular socialism and
became a member of the Independent Socialist League, a small
organization associated with the former Trotskyist leader
Max Shachtman. A strong believer in democracy and socialism,
Harrington became a member of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party
when Shachtman and Thomas agreed to merge their
organizations. Harrington would back Shachtman's realignment
perspective that meant the abandonment of independent
socialist organization in favour of working within the
Democratic Party. In the early 1970s Shachtman and the
increasingling neoconservative governing faction of the
Socialist Party effectively supported the Vietnam War and
changed the organization's name to Social Democrats, USA. In
protest Harrington lead a number of Norman Thomas-era
Socialists, younger Socialists and ex-Shactmanites into
theDemocratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A smaller
faction associated with peace activist David McReynolds
formed the Socialist Party, USA. Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United
States in 1962, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy
administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on
Poverty. He was the most well-known socialist in the United
States during his lifetime, a status William F. Buckley once
compared to being "the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas."
Another unknown commentator wrote, "In any other country, he
would have been a prime minister." In the early 1980s The
Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee merged with the
New American Movementan organization of New Left veterans,
forming Democratic Socialists of America. This organization
remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist
International, which includes socialist parties as diverse
as the Swedish and German Social Democrats, Nicaragua's
FSLN, and the British Labour Party.
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Series
Books:The Other America, August 1997
Trade Size (reprint)
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