Harrington, Michael (1928–89)

MICHAEL HARRINGTON's The Other America (1962) is credited with the “discovery” of poverty in “affluent” America and as being the stimulus for the so-called War on Poverty. But just as the war in Vietnam buried even a chance of fighting a war on poverty, it buried Lyndon Johnson, and it confounded Harring-ton's hopes for a “left-wing of the possible.” In the tradition of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, Michael Harrington was America's foremost socialist, consistently Marxist in his analysis of capitalist society and consistent in his belief that socialism could be achieved only democratically.

Harrington was raised in a middle-class family in St. Louis, Missouri. He went exclusively to Catholic schools and then to Holy Cross University. After a year at Yale law school and a year at the University of Chicago, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, going “as far left as you could go within the Church.” A 1952 essay, “Poverty—U.S.A.,” attracted little attention, but its conclusion suggested what his approach would be: “It goes without saying that the incomes structure must be changed.”

Putting his commitments to the church behind him—in later years he identified himself as “an Ethnic Catholic”—he joined, in 1953, the Young People's Socialist League. This began for Harrington a lifelong struggle with sectarian radical politics, first with the Socialist Party; second, over the politics of the Korean war, with the Young Socialists League; third, with the Independent Socialist League and their anticommunist “drift to the right”; and fourth with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) over what a sound antiwar policy should be. To put the matter as briefly as possible, Harrington found himself caught between an “Old Left” that had become neoconservative and a revolutionary “New Left” that had little sympathy with his lifelong commitment to the Democratic Party, with a strong labor movement at the center. (His 1973 Socialism is an excellent introduction to the issues as he saw them.)

In 1962, President John Kennedy, who had read Dwight Macdonald's long review of The Other America, asked Walter Heller to look at the poverty problem. After Kennedy was assassinated, Johnson proclaimed that his administration “today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” Harrington and Paul Jacobs joined the President's Task Force. They ended their memos, “Of course, there is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system.”

But a memo to Sargent Shriver that was not utopian put the matter squarely: “if there is any single dominant problem of poverty in the United States, it is that of unemployment.” Secretary of Labor Wirtz agreed, but when he raised this idea at a cabinet meeting, Johnson [Page 461]ignored him. How could he offer tax cuts, reduce government spending, fight a war, and create jobs? Instead the poor would get job training, which they could use in the hoped-for expanding economy.

Harrington has been wrongly remembered as being identified with the idea of a “culture of poverty.” As his biographer writes, “throughout the book, ‘culture of poverty’ is used interchangeably with another term, ‘vicious circle.’” Harrington's point was that the structure of institutions, labor markets, slums, and schools made it quite impossible for the poor to get a good job and to find good housing where schools were good.

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