The Communist Party is showing greater and greater indications that they
are drifting toward becoming social democrats. It was not that long ago
that Peoples World would have never published an article praising a
social democrat like this one. And more than that, it is written by a
social democrat too.
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/this-week-in-history-american-socialist-michael-harrington-born/
This week in history: American socialist Michael Harrington born
February 22, 2018| 10:41 AM CST| | By Maxine Phillips
This week in history: American socialist Michael Harrington born
Michael Harrington | wnyc.org
American socialist Michael Harrington was born 90 years ago, on February
24, 1928. Born in St. Louis as the only child of a teacher mother and
lawyer father, he remembered a childhood among the “lace-curtain Irish.”
His Jesuit education at Holy Cross College trained him well for a life
of debate and battle in the socialist movement.
After a year at Yale Law School, which he entered as a Taft Republican
and left as a democratic socialist, he enrolled at the University of
Chicago, where he earned a master’s degree in English. He moved to New
York’s Greenwich Village in 1949 and led the life of a bohemian, writing
poetry and spending late nights at the White Horse Tavern.
Two years (1951-1953) as a volunteer at the anarchist-pacifist Catholic
Worker house on the Lower East Side, where he was associate editor of
the Catholic Worker, marked him profoundly. He drew on those years for
The Other America (1962), his groundbreaking book on poverty in America,
and returned there twenty years later for research on The New American
Poverty.
In between those two books and subsequent ones came a lifetime of
socialist organizing and activism as well as writing and speaking about
social issues that took him to thousands of lecture halls and college
campuses. When he left the Catholic Worker and the Catholic faith, he
became organizational director for the Workers Defense League in 1953.
From 1954 to 1962 he supported himself as a researcher and writer for
the Fund for the Republic. In 1957 he published a long article on
poverty in Commentary, from which grew The Other America: Poverty in the
United States.
This period coincided with changing political alliances and faction
fights. As a leader of the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the
youth section of the Socialist Party, Harrington differed with Norman
Thomas over the latter’s critical support for the U.S. war in Korea and
took the New York YPSL into Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League
(lSL) in 1954. He was YPSL national chairman until it dissolved in June
1958. Starting in September 1958, Harrington and other ISL-YPSL members
entered the Socialist Party as a bloc. From 1960 to 1962 he edited New
America, the Socialist Party’s official paper.
With the publication in 1962 of The Other America, Harrington stepped
into the national limelight. The book was read by President John F.
Kennedy and is considered the intellectual force behind the antipoverty
programs of his administration and of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.
As the Boston Globe editorialized in 1987, Medicaid and Medicare, food
stamps and expanded Social Security benefits are “directly traceable” to
it. Harrington was also active in the civil rights movement and served
on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Advisory Committee.
During the 1960s Harrington’s rigid anticommunism and thus his inability
to support an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam
contributed to divisions on the Left that haunted him for years. As
liaison for the League for Industrial Democracy, he came into conflict
with the League’s youth section, Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS). He was upset that SDS allowed the Communist Party an observer at
its Port Huron convention in the summer of 1962. Harrington had come to
believe in realignment, that the seeds of a labor or socialist party
existed within the Democratic Party and could be nurtured by coalition
work with Leftists. He therefore believed that sections of the SDS Port
Huron Statement would offend the liberals with whom he hoped to work,
because SDS took an insufficiently critical attitude toward the Soviet
Union. Later, Harrington would call his actions “stupid” and publicly
berate himself for this blunder, but at the time he was a key force in
the split between the Old Left and New Left.
He was elected chair of the Socialist Party in 1968 as it debated its
stance toward the Vietnam War. Harrington’s Realignment Caucus opposed
the war but did not support unconditional withdrawal. (Shachtman
continued to give critical support to the U.S. efforts, while the Debs
Caucus was militantly anti-war.) Although he split with the Realignment
Caucus and formed the Coalition Caucus, which backed George McGovern,
Harrington did not resign as Socialist Party co-chair until October
1972, two months before leading his caucus out of the party convention
to become, in February 1973, the Democratic Socialist Organizing
Committee (DSOC), of which he was chair.
DSOC pursued its Democratic Party strategy through such projects as
Democracy ’76 and Democratic Agenda, which were program and policy
coalitions within the party. In the 1980s, the successor coalition was
called New Directions.
A rapprochement between some members of the Old Left and New Left
occurred when Harrington supported the merger of DSOC and the New
American Movement in 1982. Now he was working with many who had
disdained him during the 1960s but whose politics had drawn closer to
his, as had his to theirs.
The new organization, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), claims to
be the largest democratic socialist organization in the United States.
(Following the presidential primary campaign of avowed democratic
socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) and the election of Donald
Trump in 2016, DSA quintupled in membership to about 32,000 people.)
Harrington co-chaired DSA with socialist feminist Barbara Ehrenreich
until his death.
In 1972 he became a professor of political science at Queens College.
Harrington’s contribution to U.S. society through his writing and
speaking helped legitimize left-wing discourse in American politics.
Unlike many intellectuals, he was willing to participate in the tedious
work of building an organization. Colleagues marveled at his patience
and conciliatory skills and chafed at his inability to share power.
Despite a losing battle with cancer of the esophagus, Harrington
maintained a grueling writing and speaking schedule and remained active
in DSA. He joked that he hoped to stave off death by writing so much.
His sixteenth book, Socialism: Past and Future, was published in July
1989. He died on July 31, 1989.
For some further reading: Robert Gorman, Michael Harrington: Speaking
American (New York: Routledge, 1996); Michael Harrington, Fragments of
the Century (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972; Michael Harrington,
Socialism Past and Future (New York: Arcade/Little, Brown, 1989); and
Maurice Isserman, The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington
(Perseus Books: Public Affairs, 2000).
Maxine Phillips is a former national director of Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA) and worked with Michael Harrington for seven years as a
member of the national staff. She is the retired executive editor of
Dissent magazine and currently volunteers as editor of Democratic Left,
the quarterly DSA publication.
Tags:
history
politics
socialism
socialists
CONTRIBUTOR
Maxine Phillips
Maxine Phillips
Maxine Phillips is a former national director of Democratic Socialists
of America (DSA). She is the retired executive editor of Dissent
magazine and currently volunteers as editor of Democratic Left, the
quarterly DSA publication.
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