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281 Chapter 16 Maurice Isserman,“’My Recollections of Mike’: Harrington the Thinker and Socialist Activist,”26 March 1991. Introduction Maurice Isserman conducted this previously unpublished interview in the course of his research for The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000). Howe reprises here the recent history of American radicalism, with a different emphasis from that in Robert Negin’s interview; largely ignoring Shachtman, he concentrates on the most significant leaders of a wider American Socialist movement : Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, and Michael Harrington. The first two led the Socialist Party of America during the early and mid-twentieth century, when it verged on becoming a major force in American politics. Harrington (1928-89), the main figure here, devoted his life to resuscitating an American Socialism whose day had never come. Occurring less than two years after Harrington’s death, this interview is a fitting—and more in-depth—sequel to the New York Times interview in 1984 that featured Howe and Harrington. Howe was Harrington ’s closest colleague and political comrade, and it is obvious in this interview that Harrington’s death induces Howe to reflect on his own mortality and legacy. Isserman, a knowledgeable scholar of the history of Socialism, questions Howe in detail about his relationship to Harrington and his assessment of the latter ’s achievements. Isserman’s book If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left had appeared four years earlier, and it had included material from his 1982 interview with Howe. Between this interview and the study of Harrington, Isserman would publish books on homelessness, Vietnam , and social activists Dorothy Ray Healey and Jane Addams. The Harrington 282 Chapter 16 biography reached print near the same time as his critical study on American politics and culture in the 1960s. This is a follow-up interview, conducted almost a decade after Isserman’s two interviews of the early 1980s. Some of the information that Isserman gathered here found its way in revised form into his intellectual biography of Michael Harrington. In that book, Isserman explains that Harrington “was part of what he would call the missing generation on the American Left, those who came of age in the 1950s; I was part of the succeeding generation who came of age in the 1960s, the New Left.”1 Malcolm X had initially been a stronger influence on Isserman than had Harrington, but the latter grew in importance. Isserman interviewed dozens of people who knew Harrington for the book; this conversation with Howe possesses special value because little from it appears verbatim in the text. Isserman seeks, through examining Harrington’s role in American Socialism , to facilitate historical continuity on the Left. Because Isserman is writing a biography of Harrington, he is much more concerned here with Harrington himself than with the sort of issues that governed his two previous interviews with Howe, such as the history of the American Left and the role of Dissent magazine. This interview, which addresses the intellectual history of American Socialism up to the 1990s, is informed by rich historical knowledge. The Socialist movement led by Debs in the early years of the twentieth century faltered, largely due to the Socialist Party’s unpopular opposition to World War I. Revived by the Great Depression, the Socialist Party under Thomas again disintegrated due to its unpopular and exclusive positions, opposing the New Deal reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt as merely a palliative for an essentially sick capitalist system. The purity of these positions led to political disaster, which helps explain Howe’s increasingly moderate positions after his youthful radicalism. Given Howe and Harrington’s postwar moderation, the term “liberal” would have been easy to fall back on; nevertheless, Harrington (more so than Howe) continued to insist on the term “Socialism.” Prompted by the memory of Harrington, Howe returns, despite some digressions and doubts, to embrace the term: “But Mike wanted, and here I entirely agree with him, that what we were doing had to be Socialist or it wasn’t worth the trouble. Even though we knew that the term Socialist had been misused and led to endless confusion, etc. and all that.” For the two men, the term “Socialism” represented a banner of an ideal society, albeit one with no hope of realization except in some distant and indefinite future. One aspect of Socialist analysis that Howe maintained was the emphasis on economics and on class to the exclusion of other...

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