The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington

Christian Century, Oct 11, 2000 by Gary Dorrien

The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. By Maurice Isserman. Public Affairs, 431 pp., $27.50.

Countless times in his career, Michael Harrington heard himself introduced as "the author of The Other America, the book that sparked the war on poverty." His other books on democratic socialism tended to get short shrift. Harrington was a friendly, generous figure, not inclined to chide a welcoming host, but these introductions were hard to bear. Sometimes he reintroduced himself: "I've written quite a few books since The Other America, some of which might interest you," he would say. He could see his epitaph in the making: "Wrote The Other America, downhill after that."

Maurice Isserman has given us a version of this epitaph that is long on early biographical detail and very short on the aspect of Harrington's life and work that was most important to him--the struggle to create a democratic socialist tradition. On all counts except this one, The Other American is a splendidly conceived and meticulously researched biography.

Had Harrington been born anywhere in Western Europe, he would have become a major social-democratic party leader. As it is, he could have become America's leading liberal intellectual. But he aspired to build a serious democratic socialist tradition in this country, and he had to settle for being America's leading socialist, which, as William F. Buckley Jr. once teased him, was something like being the tallest building in Kansas.

Born in St. Louis in 1928, Edward Michael Harrington was educated by the Jesuits at St. Louis University High School, where he was called Ned, and by the Jesuits at Holy Cross College, where friends called him Ed. In later life he was sensitive to the resemblance between the Thomistic scholasticism in which he was trained and the Marxist scholasticism that he embraced as an adult. "I have long thought that my Jesuit education predisposed me to the worst and best of Marx's thought," he acknowledged.

Having graduated from college near the top of his class at the age of 19, he had a few extra years to find himself. To please his parents he spent a year at Yale Law School, which bored him, and a year studying English at the University of Chicago, which he liked, but not enough to hang on for a doctorate. Harrington later claimed that he shed his right-leaning politics at Yale and that his "Damascus Road" conversion to social activism occured during a summer job in St. Louis working for the public school system's Pupil Welfare Department. Isserman couldn't find a Yale classmate who remembered him as a socialist, however, and he reveals that Harrington worked for the Pupil Welfare Department for a total of three days.

It was in Greenwich Village that he started to become Michael Harrington, successor to socialist icons Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas. Upon moving to New York in 1951, Harrington moved into Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker House of Hospitality, where he promptly took over the Catholic Worker newspaper and became a favorite of the founder. Harrington spent little time actually ministering to the poor in the Bowery--the newspaper proved more interesting--but he repeated the Worker's standard answer to inquirers about why he was living at the House of Hospitality: in order to become a saint. For nearly two years he tried to adopt Day's anarcho-pacifist politics and her devotion to Catholic orthodoxy, while spending his evenings at the White Horse Tavern. The White Horse was famous in Greenwich Village for the poets and writers who drank there, including Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Dan Wakefield. Young Democratic Party operative Daniel Patrick Moynihan was another regular.

For ten years Harrington was a fixture at the White Horse. He fancied himself a poet and Bohemian, smoked and drank every night, held court on politics and literature, took home a lengthy succession of women, and dropped Day's anarchism, pacifism and religion, in that order. Under the influence of Bogdan Denitch, then a young operative in the Young People's Socialist League, Harrington joined the socialist "movement," as the YPSL cadre called their grouplet. He traded one sect for another, while telling himself that this time he was working to end the system that produced human misery rather than merely ministering to it.

The middle portion of Isserman's story is the one most likely to tax readers' patience. This section details Harrington's 20-year career of sectarian intrigue, faction-fighting and movement building as a Shachtmanite. Max Shachtman was a charismatic autodidact, brilliant party hack and spellbinding orator who left his mark on a peculiar mixture of radicals and conservatives. He began his political pilgrimage as a communist and ended it as a father figure to the generation of right-wing socialists who later won high positions in the Reagan administration. In the 1920s Schactman was a Soviet-style communist; in 1929 he cofounded American Trotskyism and was a close associate of Leon Trotsky; in 1940 he founded the post-Trotskyist Independent Socialist League, which espoused what Shachtman called "Third Camp" revolutionary socialism; in the 1950s his theory of "democratic Marxism" provided the ideological scaffolding for democratic socialists who considered themselves too "hard" to join Norman Thomas's Socialist Party; in the 1960s he moved to the right, joined the Socialist Party, and cozied up to the leadership of the AFL-CIO; subsequently he was revered by neoconservatives as the champion of militantly anticommunist trade unionism.