This Op-ed ran on the internet edition ofThe Chicago Tribune on April 30, 2000

POWER AND POVERTY

A REVIEW BY TARA FITZPATRICK

OF

THE OTHER AMERICAN: THE LIFE OF MICHAEL HARRINGTON
By Maurice Isserman
(Public Affairs, 449 pages, $28.50)

Michael Harrington (1928-1989) was best known -- in the words of the New York Herald Tribune -- as "The Man Who Discovered Poverty." Harrington'sThe Other America (1962) confronted postwar Americans" complacent optimism about the inevitable spread of affluence by demonstrating that between a quarter and a third of the nation's population lived, largely invisibly, in poverty. The poor, Harrington wrote, constituted "another America" of 40 million to 50 million people: "the unskilled workers, the migrant farm workers, the aged, the minorities, and all the others who live in the economic underworld of American life."

Harrington's work struck a chord in official Washington and prompted, in significant measure, President Lyndon Johnson's decision in 1964 to declare a "war on poverty." But as historian Maurice Isserman shows in his compelling new biography, Harrington's fame as a chronicler of poverty during the age of affluence was an almost accidental result of his long and sometimes frustrating crusade to continue the democratic socialist legacy of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas in the second half of the 20th Century.

The Other American is a cautionary tale, one that Harrington would no doubt have understood: "How," as Isserman puts it, "could one balance principle and pragmatism in an imperfect world?" Harrington's whole life was torn between these poles. Recalling the factional debates among young socialist ideologues in the 1950s, Harrington wryly admitted:

"Our sense of oneness with the masses . . . was dangerously delusional. We had nominated ourselves as leaders on the grounds that our ideas were right. Later, when flesh and blood people, and not a Social Force, insisted on choosing their own spokesmen, we learned, sometimes painfully, that politics is not a folk song."

With The Other American, Isserman, whose earlier books include "Which Side Were You On?: The American Communist Party During the Second World War" and If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and Birth of the New Left, provides a fascinating, often melancholy examination of the agony of the American left in the age of the folk song.

Harrington was the only child of a prosperous, devoutly Catholic family in St. Louis. His boyhood was steeped in the intense intellectualism and disputative apologetics of Jesuit education. At Holy Cross College in the 1940s, Harrington was president of the debating society and managing editor of the literary magazine, where some of his earliest political writings appeared. To appease his traditional parents, he agreed to attend Yale Law School after graduation, but he left after just a year, convinced that he really wanted to make his way as a writer.

But the year at Yale challenged the certainties of his Holy Cross education. Harrington started law school in the heyday of legal realism, a philosophy that questioned the notion that abstract and immutable principles should -- or could -- be the basis for legal decisions. Instead, the realists argued that "law must be studied as part of the social process." Later, Harrington would credit his Yale classmates with converting him to socialism-less perhaps by their politics than by their analytical pragmatism. For Harrington, socialism was rooted in historical process rather than revolutionary utopianism, a distinction that would become crucial in understanding his complicated role in the left's internecine struggles during the 1960s.

But Harrington's first steps toward a life of political activism took him back toward the rituals of his childhood faith. In 1951, Harrington walked into the St. Joseph House of Hospitality on Chrystie Street, just off New York's Bowery, and joined the Catholic Worker movement. Begun by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933, the Catholic Worker was both a monthly tabloid and a lay Catholic movement dedicated to living and working among the poor and outcast. In the 1950s, the movement provided a haven for young Catholic intellectuals, like Harrington, who saw in the teachings of the church a mandate to work for social justice, pacifism and workers' rights. Immersed in the writings of contemporary European Catholic thinkers such as Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel and Romano Guardini, the younger generation at the Catholic Worker adopted a personalist philosophy. Personalism insisted on the unique humanity and social responsibility of each person and tried to imagine an alternative to unbridled liberal capitalism and mass collectivist movements of the right or left.

Soon enough, however, Harrington chafed at the unworldliness of the Catholic Worker. Though drawn to Day's direct acts of charity, her "love and grief for what goes on before our eyes," Harrington worried that the Catholic Worker movement produced "pilgrims of the absolute" rather than people dedicated to the long, slow, pragmatic work of social change. To move from charity to justice, Harrington's friend Bogdan Denitch later recalled, "you have to think in terms of power." In 1952, Harrington began a systematic study of Marx, moved out of Chrystie Street and joined the Young People's Socialist League. For the rest of his life, he would labor for the socialist cause.

Though Harrington's sojourn at the Catholic Worker lasted only a couple of years, the lessons he learned there about the dangers inherent in "the politics of "moral gesture" guided decisions he would make the rest of his public life. As Isserman persuasively argues, Harrington developed a profound mistrust of apocalyptic or messianic politics, defending instead the position of radicals who faced up to an inevitable and "uncomfortable tension" between `integrity and impotence, flexibility and betrayal." " Recognition of this tension made Harrington an effective strategist when the Socialist Party sought to build alliances with the labor movement, the progressive elements of the Democratic Party and mainstream civil liberties and civil rights organizations in the 1950s and '60s. Where this approach failed him, however, was in building a lasting coalition with a new generation of young radicals in the 1960s. Like so many dreams of that decade, Harrington's were derailed by the Vietnam War.

Speaking on campuses across the country during the 1950s, Harrington had foreseen the emergence of student activism and a New Left. As the 1960s began, with the election of an energetic young president and increasing national attention to the civil rights movement and the problems faced by the country's poor and dispossessed, Harrington's lonely labors in ever-more fragmented sectors of the socialist movement seemed finally about to pay off. The Other America won him the ear of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, while his reputation as "America's oldest young socialist" suggested him as the natural conduit between the older socialist tradition of Norman Thomas and the new imperatives of the Students for a Democratic Society. But, for complex ideological, strategic and temperamental reasons -- which Isserman documents in great detail -- Harrington could not overcome his distaste for the confrontational tactics increasingly employed by the New Left and black militants. He distrusted what he saw as their moral absolutism as well as their willingness to abandon longstanding alliances with organized labor and liberal Democrats. As the war in Vietnam escalated, Harrington lost what Isserman regards as "the chance of a lifetime to make a democratic socialist perspective relevant to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who supported the anti-war movement."

While this reading may overstate the significance of any one private individual's potential to mobilize the politics of a nation, Isserman's analysis is provocative. If Harrington missed his chance, he had his reasons, many of them sound. The "oldest young socialist" in America was as strong a critic of communist dictatorship as of capitalist imperialism. Harrington opposed the war in Vietnam but disdained the New Left's sympathy for the Hanoi regime and, for much of the war, disagreed with the anti-war movement's call for unilateral American withdrawal. He detested Johnson's pursuit of the war but hoped to retain access to the White House to fight for the War on Poverty. He was loathe to denounce the pro-war position of the nation's most powerful labor organization, the AFL-CIO. He supported the presidential candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, hoping for a realignment of the Democratic Party and convinced that real political change required the broadest coalition possible.

But he also recalled, perhaps too well, the lessons that drove him from the Catholic Worker two decades earlier. When he needed most to remember the importance of moral -- even if futile -- gestures, the power of 'the passionate voice of conscience," he instead got caught in the snares of equivocal logic and pragmatic politics. Though the fortunes of the democratic socialist cause would rally briefly in the 1970s before fading in the face of the very different and cataclysmic political realignment wrought by the so-called Reagan revolution, Harrington had decided long before not to be a martyr, not to be a saint. Politics was not a folk song.