Michael Harrington and the “Left Wing of the Possible”

Nearly a hundred times per year for over thirty years, Michael Harrington heard himself introduced before he launched into an earnest, learned, humorous, sometimes rhetorically scintillating speech on some aspect of his democratic socialist politics. Gifted with charm and a quick wit, he was adept at handling hecklers; the low point of these events, from his perspective, usually came during the introduction. Nearly always he was described as “the author of The Other America, the book that sparked the War on Poverty,” while his other books got short shrift. Harrington was too affable to admonish a welcoming host, but these introductions were hard to bear. Sometimes he reintroduced himself. “I’ve written quite a few books since The Other America, some of which might interest you,” he would say. His major works were very important to him, and The Other America was not one of them. He could see his epitaph in the making: “Wrote The Other America, downhill after that.”

That, indeed, is how Harrington is usually remembered. He usually gets a page or two in books on the Johnson administration and a brief mention in books on the Civil Rights movement, but as American socialism gets few books of any kind, the rest of his work is downgraded or forgotten. Even Maurice Isserman’s otherwise splendid biography of Harrington, The Other American, says almost nothing about the aspect of his career that mattered most to him.¹

Had Michael Harrington been born anywhere in Western Europe, he would have become a major social democratic party leader. Having been raised, instead, in Missouri, and then transplanted to New York, he could have become America’s leading liberal political intellectual, but he was committed to building a serious social democratic tradition in his country. Thus, he settled for being America’s leading socialist, which, as William F. Buckley Jr. once teased him from a podium, was something like being the tallest building in Kansas.

Edward Michael Harrington was born in St. Louis in 1928 to a securely middle‐class family that was Irish Catholic on both sides. His father Edward Harrington was a mild‐mannered patent lawyer whom Harrington described, in his writings and public interviews, as a gentle soul. His mother Catherine Harrington was a domineering personality whom Harrington described, with more reserve, as a “public‐spirited” volunteer in Catholic and civic organizations. In private, Harrington explained that his mother was a militant Catholic whose dogmatism and forcefulness gave him much to overcome, though even to friends, he refrained from commenting on the irony of being an only child in a conservative Catholic household. Edward Harrington Sr. taught his son by word and example to do what Catherine wanted. After Harrington achieved fame for The Other America, Catherine recalled to an interviewer that when Michael was seven years old, “We were both reading in bed. He was reading Dickens and he turned to me and said, ‘My, this author expresses himself well.’” That was a true picture, even if Catherine Harrington improved the quote.²

Michael Harrington was educated by the Jesuits at St. Louis University High School, where he was called Ned, and by the Jesuits at Holy Cross College, where friends called him Ed. At both places he was very young, having started high school at the age of twelve. Harrington later recalled that he grew up “in a pleasant Irish Catholic ghetto, which made the death of God particularly poignant for me.” He also acknowledged that his training in Thomist scholasticism probably had something to do with his later attraction to Marxist scholasticism.³

After graduating from Holy Cross at the age of nineteen, near the top of his class, he took a few years to find himself. To please his parents, Harrington spent a year at Yale Law School, which bored him, and a year studying English at the University of Chicago, which he liked, but not enough to hang on for a doctorate. He later claimed that he converted from Taft Republicanism to Socialism near the end of his law schooling and that his “Damascus Road” conversion to social activism occurred during a...