CREDIT: Courtesy of the Tamiment Library, New York University
FOR MOST of the 1950s, Michael Harrington barely made a living. He lived in voluntary poverty as a member of the Catholic Worker, sharing living space with homeless men and winos in the Bowery district, New York City’s skid row, and wrote articles for tiny left-wing magazines. With his mentor Dorothy Day and others, he joined and sometimes helped organize protests against the Korean War and nuclear arms and for civil rights. Traveling by bus and thumb across the country, he spoke to small groups of students on college campuses as a representative of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL). He spent many evenings at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, hanging out with poets, writers, bohemians, folksingers, and radicals. But by the early 1960s, Harrington was taking planes to Washington, DC, invited by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s top advisers to help develop a strategy to reduce poverty. He sat in on high-level meetings, drafted memos, and recommended policy ideas.
Harrington’s journey from the White Horse to the White House started with the publication of his book The Other America in 1962. Although he was neither an economist nor a sociologist, the book gave him credibility as an expert on the most pressing economic and social issues of the day. One columnist called him “the man who discovered poverty,” and the label stuck. The book became required reading for social scientists, elected officials and their staffs, college students, members of study groups sponsored by churches and synagogues, reporters and intellectuals, the new wave of community organizers, and the student activists who traveled to the South to join the civil rights crusade. Harrington was soon in great demand as a speaker on college campuses, at union halls, and before religious congregations. Reporters and television talk-show hosts wanted to interview him.
Throughout his life Harrington walked a political tightrope, both a reformer and a radical. He gave America a socialist conscience, and socialism an American accent.
The accent came from St. Louis, Missouri, where Harrington was raised in a middle-class Irish Catholic family. He attended Catholic schools, where he was popular and smart and where he edited the school paper and yearbook. He wanted to be a writer and a poet. At twenty-one, after fleeting experiences at Yale Law School and graduate school in English at the University of Chicago, he moved to New York in 1949, and soon joined the Catholic Worker.
After two years, Harrington decided that instead of ministering to the poor he wanted to work to abolish the system that produced so much misery. Harrington left Catholic Worker. Several Old Left socialists tutored him in Marxism and groomed him for a public role, recognizing that his midwestern boyish charm and his fiery speaking style made him a natural leader. But even in his twenties, Harrington rejected the tendency of his mentors to boil everything down to economics. He began writing for magazines like Dissent, New Leader, and Commonweal about war and politics but also about culture, movies, and novels. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Harrington traveled to college campuses giving speeches about peace, civil rights, civil liberties, and other topics, meeting with small groups of activists, hoping to sign up recruits for YPSL. He discovered that there were a handful of radical students on many campuses, inspired by the civil rights movement, who were ready to confront America’s political, economic, and moral problems but who were in need of guidance from older, experienced activists. Harrington, though only thirty-two years old in 1960, appointed himself to that job.
Few students joined YPSL, however. Many of the most talented student activists came together to form the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They admired Harrington, who was one of a handful of nonstudents invited to the SDS convention in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962. Harrington could have had a big influence shaping the trajectory of the New Left. But he blew it by angrily attacking the first draft of SDS’s manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, written primarily by Tom Hayden, a student leader at the University of Michigan. Harrington accused the manifesto of being inadequately critical of the Soviet Union and of American communism and too critical of the political complacency of labor unions. Even though Hayden and his coauthors revised the document to meet some of Harrington’s concerns, Harrington’s nasty assault and lack of respect created a deep rift between him and early SDSers. Eventually Harrington apologized and got back in the student radicals’ good graces.
Harrington would have been content with being America’s “oldest young socialist,” as he often called himself, a somewhat marginal figure in American politics and culture. But after he had written a few articles about poverty for Commentary and other small magazines, an editor at Macmillan suggested that he expand his articles into a book. The book changed Harrington’s life, and the country as well.
The Other America struck a nerve, in part because America was ready to hear its message. John Kenneth Galbraith’s best seller The Affluent Society, published in 1958, expressed concern that there were still Americans who were left out of the nation’s prosperity. Edward R. Murrow’s CBS television documentary Harvest of Shame, broadcast in 1960, had drawn attention to the plight of migrant farm laborers. That year, when John F. Kennedy was campaigning for president, he was shocked at the suffering he saw in West Virginia, where the poor were mostly rural whites. JFK starting talking about the millions of Americans living in substandard housing and about the elderly living on inadequate incomes—statistics he probably got from Harrington’s Commentary articles. After JFK took office, his economic adviser Walter Heller gave him a copy of Harrington’s book, which came out in March 1962, or a lengthy review of the book published in the New Yorker.
The southern sit-ins, which began in February 1960, put a spotlight on the intertwined realities of racism and poverty. JFK was concerned that the exposure of widespread poverty and racism would embarrass the United States in the Cold War race with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the world’s people. Three days before he was assassinated, he told aides that he wanted to do something about poverty. On taking office, LBJ wanted to build on JFK’s unfinished agenda. He told Heller that abolishing poverty was the kind of big, bold program he could get behind. He appointed Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver to head the new Office of Economic Opportunity. Shriver invited Harrington to join the program’s planning committee.
It was not just good timing that made Harrington’s book a hit with the public. His writing style—informal, accessible, morally outraged but not self-righteous—appealed to readers. The Other America challenged the conventional wisdom that the nation had become an overwhelmingly middle-class society as a result of postwar prosperity. He reported that almost one-third of all Americans lived “below those standards which we have been taught to regard as the decent minimums for food, housing, clothing and health.”
Harrington did not rely primarily on statistics to make his argument. Instead, he told stories, humanizing the poor as real people trapped in difficult conditions not of their own making. He described people living in slum housing, people who got sick and lived with chronic pain because they could not afford to see a doctor, who did not have enough food for themselves or their children and lived with constant hunger.
“The fate of the poor,” he concluded, “hangs upon the decision of the better-off. If this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a generation from now and it will be the same or worse.” He added, “Until these facts shame us, until they stir us to action, the other America will continue to exist, a monstrous example of needless suffering in the most advanced society in the world.”
Harrington was a committed socialist, but the word “socialism” did not appear in The Other America. He wanted the book to tug at people’s consciences, to outrage them, and to push them to action. He wrote that poverty was caused and perpetuated by institutions and public policies, not by individuals’ personal pathologies. But he did not argue that it was caused by capitalism or that the solution was socialism. The solution, he wrote, was full employment, more funding for housing and health care, and better schools and job training.
In February 1964 Harrington, his friend Paul Jacobs (a labor activist and writer), and US Labor Department official Daniel Patrick Moynihan (later a US senator from New York) wrote a background paper for Shriver’s War on Poverty planning committee. The memo argued, “If there is any single dominant problem of poverty in the U.S., it is that of unemployment.” The remedy, it said, was a massive public works initiative similar to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps programs.
It was on this point that Harrington parted company from Johnson’s aides. Jobs programs were expensive. The WPA had cost $5 billion in 1936. Johnson insisted that the “unconditional war on poverty” he had called for had to come in at under a billion dollars a year. The strategy was to help the poor improve themselves—a “hand up, not a handout,” in Shriver’s words. The War on Poverty legislation, passed in August 1964, included funds for preschool education, social services through community action agencies, and legal services, but no major jobs programs and no major direct cash grants to the poor.
Harrington complained to Shriver that America could not abolish poverty by spending “nickels and dimes.” Shriver responded, “Oh really, Mr. Harrington. I don’t know about you, but this is the first time I’ve spent a billion dollars.”
The reality is that these policies (including Medicaid, subsidized housing, Head Start, legal services, and, later, food stamps), in combination with a strong economy, did significantly reduce poverty from the middle 1960s through the early 1970s. The biggest beneficiaries of LBJ’s Great Society were the elderly, whose poverty rate declined significantly thanks to Medicare and cost-of-living increases for Social Security.
But Harrington was correct that the level of spending for antipoverty programs (less than 1 percent of the federal budget) was never sufficient to make a major dent in the problem. And as spending for the Vietnam War escalated, antipoverty programs suffered.
Harrington’s stint as an adviser to the Johnson administration lasted about a month. But by then he had a platform as America’s leading poverty expert. He mesmerized audiences, especially on college campuses, with his eloquent, funny, and morally uplifting lectures. He was also a talent scout, recruiting young activists and plugging them into different movement activities. When he talked about democratic socialism, he made it sound like common sense—rational, practical, and moral at the same time.
Harrington warned that campaigns for civil rights, union drives, and calls to withdraw US troops from Vietnam were not enough. They were necessary stepping-stones toward a better world, but they were not sufficient to end poverty, expand happiness, or stop imperialism. He told audiences, “You must recognize that the social vision to which you are committing yourself will never be fulfilled in your lifetime.” In the meantime, though, socialists, radicals, progressives, and liberals had to fight today for what he called the “left wing of the possible.”
What was possible depended on the specific political situation. When Democrats controlled the White House and Congress, “the possible” included raising the minimum wage above the poverty line, giving workers and their unions a voice on corporate boards, providing government-sponsored health insurance for every American, dramatically expanding public transportation, outlawing race and gender discrimination by employers, and increasing tax rates on the very rich. When Republicans controlled the levers of political power, it shrank to protecting existing liberal programs, exposing the GOP’s ties to its corporate sponsors, and organizing to help elect progressive Democrats in the next political season.
Although he wrote eleven more books, The Other America was Harrington’s calling card, and he used it to help build a “left wing of the possible” movement. Unlike Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas—his predecessors as the nation’s leading socialists—Harrington never thought it was possible to create a radical third party that could succeed in electing candidates and gaining power. The task of socialists was to keep the flame of socialism alive while building coalitions among labor, civil rights, religious, and intellectual liberals and others to form a left flank within the Democratic Party. He worked closely with the leaders of the United Auto Workers, Service Employees International Union, and Machinists union. He wrote speeches for Ted Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and drafted a Poor People’s Manifesto for King in 1968.
In the aftermath of the 1960s and the decline of the antiwar movement, Harrington recruited students, professors, clergy, writers, and union activists to join the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, founded in 1973, and later Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), to make sure that the tradition of American socialism did not disappear. Although DSA never had more than 10,000 members, many of its members became key activists within unions, environmental groups, and other progressive organizations. During the last two decades of his life, Harrington was actively involved in the day-to-day activities of these organizations—a distraction from his writing and speaking, but a commitment he had made to himself years earlier. If he was to help keep socialism alive in the world’s most capitalist country, he had to help maintain socialism’s fragile infrastructure.
After Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the word “socialism” made a curious comeback. Obama’s opponents labeled anything Obama proposed, including his modest health-care-reform proposal, “socialism.” Were Harrington still alive, he would have injected himself into the public debate, clarifying what socialism is and is not, and explaining that Obama was far from a socialist. Then he would urge liberals, progressives, and real socialists to push the Democrats to be bolder, to give Obama more room to maneuver, and to fight hard for the “left wing of the possible.”