The Other American : The Life of Michael Harrington

Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful Look At Socialist Activist Michael Harrington
Review: Anyone familiar with the tortured history of American socialism can appreciate this fine and pensive biography of one of its leading 20th century luminaries, fabled socialist and humanist author Michael Harrington. Noted historian Maurice Isserman ("America Divided"-see my review) delivers a wonderful account that passionately and comprehensively covers the long and eventful arc of Harrington's amazingly productive and prolific writing and academic careers as well as his exhaustive involvements in socialist politics and social activism. A stream of notables ranging from folksingers Peter, Paul and Mary, SDS's Tom Hayden, intellectuals like Irving Howe, and political figures like George Meany rub shoulders with Harrington, and we come to see his personal intellectual and political journey toward a better and fairer America as one with which we can each take common cause.

Educated in Massachusetts at Holy Cross, Harrington adopted the Jesuit perspective of enlightened social engagement early, and soon found himself rejecting his own comfortable middle class background to work among the urban poor. According to Isserman, it was inevitable for Harrington to act on his own antipathy to the gross materialism that surrounded him, and to extend this distaste for those living in luxury amid the squalor that surrounded them to his own philosophy and politics. Indeed, his own intellectual and philosophical journey provides the reader with a splendid portrait of the nature of American socialism in the middle of this century, and we find ourselves delving into remote nooks and crannies of the movement as Harrington makes his philosophical odyssey toward his own mature view of an open and democratically based contemporary socialism.

Along the way we learn a lot of important details about socialism as well as about how politics works in America. One at times becomes a bit winded at Harrington's sheer level of energy and capacity for work, for he sometimes seems to be everywhere doing everything at once. And it is this frenetic pace and sheer level of productive energy that one comes to admire in Harrington. In this day of self-satisfied torpor and delirium tremors from over-consumption, it is interesting to read about a man whose life was centered so energetically and so passionately around moral imperatives and ideas. Whether discussing his failure to successfully meld his old-style moral socialism with the new-left politics of young mavericks like Tom Hayden or his failure to actively engage the American Socialist Party in the debate over the war in Vietnam, Isserman brings Harrington and his times to vibrant life in these pages.

Of course, it was the publication of his overwhelmingly successful and influential book, "The Other America" that made Harrington a permanent fixture on the American scene, and everyone from John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton have made reference to the importance of the book in forming their own perspectives regarding poverty in America. My recommendation is to first read "The Other America", because it is such a historical book both in terms of its content as well as in its effect on social policy for the last half of the 20th century. Then read this wonderful biography to understand the complex and troubling life of its author, one of the 20th century's most misunderstood and yet ultimately influential intellectuals. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Michael Harrington Still Matters
Review: Mr. Isserman's biography is neither sentimental (but it is written with plenty of sentiment) nor uncritical in its appraisal of the late Michael Harrington. This book is not intended to answer the question, 'What is socialism?'; however, because of the amazing amount of details concerning the socialists (obviously, especially Harrington), their ideas, party dissolutions and rebirths, one will be quite prepared for further study of Harrington and socialism. Isserman has an uncanny ability to use narative to reflect the pace of events -- especially when desciribing how quickly the 'war on poverty' was started and lost by the duplicity of Democrats and Republicans -- he picks up the pace of his words he needs to and uses more reflective words when he needs to. If one is not interested in learning about Micahel Harrington, Isserman is a good story teller who's book can be read for the narrative alone.

Rating:
Summary: An American Socialist
Review: The Other American is required reading for any activist on the left with an interest in how the recent past affects movements of today. Maurice Isserman, one of the leading chroniclers of the recent American left, has given us not only a highly engaging portrait of the outstanding American socialist of the last half of the 20th century, but also a narrative of the left politics of the 1950s through 1960s that makes the often complicated political twists and turns of that period both comprehendible and interesting.

Isserman's thorough and well-researched portrait of Harrington's early years illustrate how his Jesuit training in high school and at college at Holy Cross informed his ideas and actions long after he rejected the Church itself. Not only did these institutions instill a "moral gravity" and lessons in commitment. "Catholic social teachings were from the beginning antipathetic to the assumptions of a capitalist world," Isserman writes. "Disciples of Thomas Aquinas knew from their master's teaching that `it is impossible for happiness, which is the last end of man, to consist in wealth.'"

Given this background, it is not difficult to understand how this young man from a comfortable, middle-class background sought to put his ideals to practical experience by ministering to those less-fortunate souls who sought out the Catholic Worker. Among those drawn to the Worker, it was, Harrington would say, a "perfectly rational and legitimate thing to say that one's ambition in life was to become a saint" - even as he eagerly experienced the bohemian nightlife of 1950s Manhattan during his free time.

Less understandable - apparently to Isserman as well - was that when Harrington left the pious cocoon of the Catholic Worker, he jumped directly into the sectarian squabbles of socialist politics. Isserman does show that during his two years at the Worker, Harrington was becoming increasingly convinced that the human ills he saw in the Bowery could not be fully addressed though acts of charity, but required political solutions. Nevertheless, "it all seemed very unlike Michael," writes Isserman, to step directly into the faction fights of the Socialist Party, becoming co-founder of the Young Socialist League, a sectarian group with a Trotskyist twist. Isserman offers a variety of factors: the unfortunate influence of Socialist factionalist extraordinaire Max Schactman; the influence of Jesuit doctrines of discipline and commitment; his friendship with experienced faction-fighter - and later DSA co-founder - Bogdan Denitch. Whichever the case, none of the explanations is fully convincing.

It took some two decades of socialist activism to complete Harrington's evolution from sectarian infighter to proponent of an open, inclusive, non-sectarian democratic socialism. His disastrous collision with Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron may have torpedoed hopes for an alliance between the old and new lefts in the 1960s that could have given the social energies of that decade a stronger ideological grounding. Harrington spent years apologizing for his intemperate criticisms of the Port Huron Statement and its authors and, as Isserman demonstrates, he learned painful lessons from this mistake. Harrington them mostly spun his organizational wheels for the remainder of the decade, as the Socialist Party's infighting and its failure to oppose the war in Vietnam made it largely irrelevant to most activists. In 1972 he finally broke with his old mentor Schactman - who was leading the SP hard to the right in an effort to curry favor with cold-warrior George Meany and his AFL-CIO - to lead the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).

Nevertheless, during the 1960s Harrington built his own public presence, largely of the strength of his first and most popular book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962. It was a case of writing the right book at the right time: Many journalists and policymakers were only then coming to realize that the postwar prosperity had not benefited everyone. Harrington, despite his experience at the Catholic Worker, had never considered himself an expert on poverty. Nevertheless, the book made Harrington "the man who discovered poverty" and brought him a measure of public fame and affluence that clashed with his self-image as a socialist warrior.

While Isserman thoroughly covers Harrington's life and politics up to the early 1970s, he gives his last two decades - including the entire history of DSOC and its successor, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), during Harrington's time - relatively short shrift. He devotes a 45-page chapter largely to the writing and influence of The Other America, while he devotes only some 60 pages to the last two decades of Harrington's life - a time in which his political ideas flowered into maturity. Even as Harrington urged the left "to put aside the quarrels of the 1960s and to unite all who could be brought together into the democratic socialist movement," Isserman seems to regard this period of Harrington's life as largely a failure. While his effort to make democratic socialism the left wing of the Democratic Party collapsed with Reagan's victory in 1980, Harrington kept DSA together and - through his own hard work, his credibility and his notoriety as "America's Socialist" - visible and active in a difficult political environment. Isserman also scarcely touches on Harrington's other books, which may be his most valuable legacy. In particular, Socialism and Socialism: Past and Future, while hardly bestsellers, are likely to inspire future generations of left thinkers and activists.

Nevertheless, The Other American rewards the reader with its insights into the man and the movement. And it ends on a note of melancholy - not only on Harrington's premature death from cancer, but also on what his demise meant to the socialist movement. Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington represented the face of socialism to many Americans. "No claimant has emerged to pick of the mantle of Debs and Thomas and Harrington," Isserman writes. Will it take another Harrington-like leader to revive American socialism?

Rating:
Summary: An American Socialist
Review: The Other American is required reading for any activist on the left with an interest in how the recent past affects movements of today. Maurice Isserman, one of the leading chroniclers of the recent American left, has given us not only a highly engaging portrait of the outstanding American socialist of the last half of the 20th century, but also a narrative of the left politics of the 1950s through 1960s that makes the often complicated political twists and turns of that period both comprehendible and interesting.

Isserman's thorough and well-researched portrait of Harrington's early years illustrate how his Jesuit training in high school and at college at Holy Cross informed his ideas and actions long after he rejected the Church itself. Not only did these institutions instill a "moral gravity" and lessons in commitment. "Catholic social teachings were from the beginning antipathetic to the assumptions of a capitalist world," Isserman writes. "Disciples of Thomas Aquinas knew from their master's teaching that 'it is impossible for happiness, which is the last end of man, to consist in wealth.'"

Given this background, it is not difficult to understand how this young man from a comfortable, middle-class background sought to put his ideals to practical experience by ministering to those less-fortunate souls who sought out the Catholic Worker. Among those drawn to the Worker, it was, Harrington would say, a "perfectly rational and legitimate thing to say that one's ambition in life was to become a saint" - even as he eagerly experienced the bohemian nightlife of 1950s Manhattan during his free time.

Less understandable - apparently to Isserman as well - was that when Harrington left the pious cocoon of the Catholic Worker, he jumped directly into the sectarian squabbles of socialist politics. Isserman does show that during his two years at the Worker, Harrington was becoming increasingly convinced that the human ills he saw in the Bowery could not be fully addressed though acts of charity, but required political solutions. Nevertheless, "it all seemed very unlike Michael," writes Isserman, to step directly into the faction fights of the Socialist Party, becoming co-founder of the Young Socialist League, a sectarian group with a Trotskyist twist. Isserman offers a variety of factors: the unfortunate influence of Socialist factionalist extraordinaire Max Schactman; the influence of Jesuit doctrines of discipline and commitment; his friendship with experienced faction-fighter - and later DSA co-founder - Bogdan Denitch. Whichever the case, none of the explanations is fully convincing.

It took some two decades of socialist activism to complete Harrington's evolution from sectarian infighter to proponent of an open, inclusive, non-sectarian democratic socialism. His disastrous collision with Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society at Port Huron may have torpedoed hopes for an alliance between the old and new lefts in the 1960s that could have given the social energies of that decade a stronger ideological grounding. Harrington spent years apologizing for his intemperate criticisms of the Port Huron Statement and its authors and, as Isserman demonstrates, he learned painful lessons from this mistake. Harrington them mostly spun his organizational wheels for the remainder of the decade, as the Socialist Party's infighting and its failure to oppose the war in Vietnam made it largely irrelevant to most activists. In 1972 he finally broke with his old mentor Schactman - who was leading the SP hard to the right in an effort to curry favor with cold-warrior George Meany and his AFL-CIO - to lead the formation of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC).

Nevertheless, during the 1960s Harrington built his own public presence, largely of the strength of his first and most popular book, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962. It was a case of writing the right book at the right time: Many journalists and policymakers were only then coming to realize that the postwar prosperity had not benefited everyone. Harrington, despite his experience at the Catholic Worker, had never considered himself an expert on poverty. Nevertheless, the book made Harrington "the man who discovered poverty" and brought him a measure of public fame and affluence that clashed with his self-image as a socialist warrior.

While Isserman thoroughly covers Harrington's life and politics up to the early 1970s, he gives his last two decades - including the entire history of DSOC and its successor, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), during Harrington's time - relatively short shrift. He devotes a 45-page chapter largely to the writing and influence of The Other America, while he devotes only some 60 pages to the last two decades of Harrington's life - a time in which his political ideas flowered into maturity. Even as Harrington urged the left "to put aside the quarrels of the 1960s and to unite all who could be brought together into the democratic socialist movement," Isserman seems to regard this period of Harrington's life as largely a failure. While his effort to make democratic socialism the left wing of the Democratic Party collapsed with Reagan's victory in 1980, Harrington kept DSA together and - through his own hard work, his credibility and his notoriety as "America's Socialist" - visible and active in a difficult political environment. Isserman also scarcely touches on Harrington's other books, which may be his most valuable legacy. In particular, Socialism and Socialism: Past and Future, while hardly bestsellers, are likely to inspire future generations of left thinkers and activists.

Nevertheless, The Other American rewards the reader with its insights into the man and the movement. And it ends on a note of melancholy - not only on Harrington's premature death from cancer, but also on what his demise meant to the socialist movement. Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington represented the face of socialism to many Americans. "No claimant has emerged to pick of the mantle of Debs and Thomas and Harrington," Isserman writes. Will it take another Harrington-like leader to revive American socialism?

Rating:
Summary: Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Review: This is a well-honed biography of a man and his persistence in an idea, and the trials of that venture through thick and thin, against all odds. Harrington is a unique witness to the tribulations of real social change, and the living question, what is the fate of the capitalist circumstance? A persistent critic of the Bolshevik episode, his question endures. He is suddenly revealed here both in his quiet heroism, and as slighly skewed or 'out of phase' with respect to the sudden upsurge of the sixties left, yet his endurance and vision remain at the end as a permanent challenge to a system of overwhelming force, against which easy change is forever substracted. It is this factor in the account that stands out, the studied contrast of the political background, as a prism revealing the reality of liberal politics as it is.