The Last Socialist. - Review - book review

National Review, May 1, 2000 by Ronald Radosh

The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington, by Maurice Isserman (Public Affairs, 449 pp., $28.50)

INTRODUCING Michael Harrington on Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that being a socialist in America is akin to being the tallest skyscraper in Kansas. If so, then Harrington was like the World Trade Center. A warm, engaging, brilliant advocate of socialism-whom Buckley described shortly before his death in 1989 as a "brave and admirable man"-Har rington was a worthy successor to Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas as the last of America's socialist leaders. Now Maurice Isserman, one of the major historians of the American Left, has produced a sympathetic yet critical account of how this product of traditional Catholic education moved to adopt a very American form of Marxism.

Born Edward Michael Harrington in 1928 to a Democratic, Irish-Catholic family, Harrington dropped his father's first name and become known simply as "Mike." His mother enrolled him in a Jesuit institution, seeking in part to give him the social network he would need "to make his mark in St. Louis society." Much to his parents' dismay, Harring ton moved in quite another direction. But he would credit his Jesuit education with giving him habits of discipline and study, as well as a set of assumptions antipathetic to those of a capitalist social order.

Harrington did not start out a socialist. During his college years at Holy Cross, he declared himself a Taft Repub lican, a flirtation that Isserman links with the disaffection of many Catholic voters with a liberalism "out of touch with their social concerns." Har ring ton's strongest formative influence was probably theologian John A. Ryan, who argued that natural law demanded a living wage for workers and the right to unionize. In this light it is fascinating to read Harrington's student- paper editorial, "For the Radicals," espousing what would later be a conservative viewpoint-arguing against divorce, birth control, and crass material ism.

Harrington tried Yale Law School, but abandoned a promising legal career for the bohemian life of a writer in New York's Greenwich Village. It was at Yale that Harrington moved from Repub lican conservatism to disenchantment with the capitalist system, and also lost religious certainty. Harring ton decided that a just God could not send an individual to hell for all eternity; yet he retained a love for Catholic ceremony, ritual, and commitment, and did not immediately leave the Church.

When Harrington moved to New York to stay in 1951, he sought out Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement, explaining later that it was "as far Left as you could go within the Church." There he became a legend as the movement's house intellectual and as someone who could take defiant political stands, such as opposition to the Korean War. It was also there, in a movement that sought to serve the urban poor, that Harrington first wrote about the persistence of poverty in America.

Harrington did the work of the movement by day, and spent his nights at the White Horse Tavern drinking with other intellectuals, radicals, bohemians, poets, and artists, including Dylan Thomas, who died one night when Har rington was there. He was already becoming frustrated with the Catholic Worker, which eschewed building a mass political working-class movement. That led him to the writings of Karl Marx and a small group of anti-Stalinist Marxists whom he had met on various picket lines-followers of a renegade Trotskyist named Max Shacht man. Harrington severed his ties with the Church as well, and joined the ranks of a small, largely irrelevant and highly combative Marxist sect.

Harrington managed to appear to transcend the sectarian squabbles of the Left, while persuading many others who would never be socialists of the need to address the inequities of American society. He became the public face of "democratic socialism," which others described as a left-wing variant of traditional social democracy. At times he would soft-pedal his socialism in order to reach average Americans with his critique of the capitalist system.

The Other America, published in 1962, was the book that made Harring ton famous. Harrington argued that despite the view of America as an "affluent society," there was another Ameri ca in which some 50 million people lived in an economic underworld. These "invisible poor" were steeped in a culture of poverty that only a massive nationwide effort could address. Society, Harrington wrote, had to help the poor "before they can help themselves." Not only did the book ac quaint the nation with its underclass, it also gave Har rington a new public persona. After the book was given wide publicity in a New Yorker essay by Dwight Macdon ald, it came to the attention of John F. Kennedy and became "re quired reading" among those shaping the administration's domestic policies. Har ring ton thus found himself regularly in Wash ington, D.C., where he became part of the new Johnson administration's task force on poverty.