Just over a year before he died of cancer in 1989 at the age of sixty-one, Michael
Harrington remarked to an interviewer, "It's almost as if my life has been
a well-plotted story. Almost." It was certainly in keeping with the larger
contours of this "plot" that a copy of E.M. Forster's great novel of
Edwardian England, Howard's End, was found on Michael's bedside table when he
died at home the following summer.
Howard's End revolves around the complications that arise when its well-intentioned
and well-to-do heroines, the Schlegel sisters, involve themselves somewhat disastrously,
in the lives of the English poor. Though Helen and Margaret Schlegel are naifs,
Forster is clearly in their camp in the ensuing confrontation between the values
of culture and commerce. In a passage which, under less dire circumstances, would
likely have appealed to Michael's puckish sense of humor, a fatuous bourgeois
villain warns the idealistic sisters to avoid getting "carried away by absurd
schemes of social reform... You can take it from me that there is no Social Question--except
for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase."
It was the "social question" upon which Michael Harrington would make
his own reputation--and a living of sorts--by drawing the attention of Americans
to the existence of what he called "The Other America." Michael's book
of the same title, published at the start of the 1960s, challenged the then all-but-universal
opinion (at least among the opinion-forming classes) that the United States had
helped all but a tiny minority of its citizens to a fair share of the astonishing
economic abundance of its affluent society. The Other America went on to inspire
the most ambitious "scheme of social reform" of the later 20th century
in the United States, the war on poverty launched during the administration of
President Lyndon Johnson. Some historians of the 1960s have compared the significance
of The Other America to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin for the 1860s. And on the eve
of the new millennium, Time magazine described The Other America as one of the
10 most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century to be published anywhere
in the world, putting Michael's writings on poverty in such distinguished company
as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
The Gulag Archipelago.
There is another passage in Forster's novel that may have caught Michael's eye
in those last days, if he were in the mood and condition to reflect upon his own
almost-well-plotted life story:
"Looking back on the past six months, Margaret [Schlegel] realized the chaotic
nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has
been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts
that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never
comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have
removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken
unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken."
In the pages to follow I will be following Michael Harrington's life through three
overlapping and interrelated stories. There is, first of all, the story of Michael
Harrington, the "man who discovered poverty," and the consequences of
that discovery for Michael and for the nation. Secondly, there is the story of
Michael Harrington, the heir to Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas as America's foremost
socialist and the decidedly mixed success of his efforts of over a quarter-century
to create a "left-wing of the possible." And, finally, there is the
story of Michael Harrington's personal transformation from golden youth to a kind
of secular Saint Francis of Assissi--a legend that Michael helped create, and
yet at the same time at whose restrictions he chafed. These three sequences in
Michael's almost-well-plotted life are as "orderly" as I could make
them, but bearing in mind Miss Schlegel's injunction, I have tried to avoid the
temptation of making them too orderly. I have been on the lookout for those false
clues and signposts that lead nowhere--including those occasional instances when
the clues were deposited and the signposts erected by Michael himself.
I knew Michael Harrington, but not well. Nor were we contemporaries. He was born
in 1928. I was born in 1951, about the same time that he moved into the catholic
Worker House of Hospitality on the lower East Side of New York. He was part of
what he would call the "missing generation" on the American Left, those
who came of political age in the 1950s; I was part of the succeeding generation
who came of age in the 60s, the New Left that Michael hoped to influence. "Only
Connect" is the famous epigraph to Howard's End. That didn't happen with
Michael and my generation, at least not in the 1960s.
I knew about him, of course. In the mid-1960s when I was sixteen years old, and
a volunteer on an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) summer work project
in a poor and racially mixed neighborhood of Indianapolis, I was given a reading
list that included The Other America. I read it and admired it, but not as much
as I admired another book on the list, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Given the
timing, Michael never had a chance. We arrived in Indianapolis in June of 1967,
at the beginning of what turned into the "bloodiest of the long hot summers"
of racial unrest. Detroit and Newark exploded. Although racial tensions weren't
as bad where we found ourselves (in fact the only real hostility our motley crew
of teenaged idealists encountered was from some local white toughs who objected
to the fact that some of the black volunteers on the project had white girlfriends),
the AFSC subsequently scrapped its urban volunteer programs, fearing the worst.
I re-read Malcolm X's autobiography several times over the next few years. I did
not pick up another book by Michael Harrington for the next 10.
However, Malcolm (or at least his would-be ideological successors) did not wear
that well. An eventful decade or so later I encountered Michael again, this time
in person when he was giving a speech at Harvard University. He was making a pitch
that evening for Edward Kennedy's candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination
in 1980. In the question and answer period that followed I predicted, in a belligerent
tone left over from an earlier period of militant certainty, that he would no
doubt go on to endorse Jimmy Carter in the event that Kennedy failed to wrest
the nomination from the Democratic incumbent. "Well, of course," Michael
replied mildly, and then proceeded to lay out a very thoughtful justification
for the politics of the lesser evil. Although I wasn't completely persuaded, within
a year I wound up voting for the very same lesser evil. I also joined the Democratic
Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), the political organization of which Michael
was founder and chairman.
Over the next few years, I encountered Michael on a number of occasions. I heard
him speak a good half dozen times (including once when I brought him to the college
where I was then teaching, thus gaining the chance to participate in one of the
classic Harrington rituals, drinking beer with him afterwards while he told stories
of past political wars and debacles). I also interviewed him on two occasions
for my book If I had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the
New Left, which was published in 1982.
I encountered Michael for the final time at a speech he delivered in western Massachusetts
in the spring of 1987. Since the last time I had heard him speak, he had undergone
treatment for a cancerous growth in his throat. He seemed much older to me until
he started speaking; the familiar power and cadence of his speech was reassuring.
But late that fall I learned that he was again battling cancer, and this time
there was little hope that he could beat it. I remember sitting down to Thanksgiving
dinner with an old friend and comrade of Michael's, and the two of us agreeing
that someone--maybe me--should get in touch with him and arrange to tape his reminiscences.
Only Connect. But for various reasons I didn't; the chance was lost.
The Other American is not the first book about the life of Michael Harrington
(among others, Michael wrote two of his own); I doubt if it will be the last.
For those who will explore Michael's life and legacy in future years, I have arranged
to deposit the interviews I did for this book, along with other research materials,
at the Tamiment Library at New York University, which is already home to the Michael
Harrington papers.
Introduction:
The Other American