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.