Socialist Leader : The Lonely Fight of Last Old Leftist

Twenty-five years ago, a book called “The Other America” swept Washington by storm. Not that the small volume was any intellectual or literary masterpiece. It was instead little more than the collected observations of a well-bred, well-educated, well-meaning young man named Michael Harrington, then 34, who had discovered in his travels about the United States that massive poverty still literally riddled the so-called affluent society.

Everywhere he went--from the urban ghettos of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles to the hollows of Appalachia--Harrington found them by the millions: Americans living in quiet desperation, lacking not only jobs and education but also the barest essentials of survival.

Bible of Camelot

When President John F. Kennedy read the book, he found its revelations positively riveting. Overnight, “The Other America” became the political bible of Camelot.

After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon B. Johnson, heir to Kennedy’s exuberant kingdom of socially conscious young idealists, turned the book into the cornerstone of his War on Poverty and invited Harrington to Washington to sit in council with his poverty chief, Sargent Shriver. And suddenly Michael Harrington was a minor national celebrity, swarmed by journalists seeking his opinions on everything from food stamps to health care for Arkansas sharecroppers.

Poverty on Back Burner

Johnson’s poverty war was short-lived, soon preempted by the ever-escalating costs of that other, bloodier war in Vietnam. Then, as now, domestic poverty was quickly shoved onto the national back burner in the name of foreign policy.

But Harrington didn’t forget. In the years since, he has escalated his war on poverty into a campaign to virtually level American society as we know it.

Now a weathered, generally disheveled, white-haired figure of 59, given to tweeds, open collars and little woolen worker’s caps, Harrington has become the most outspoken socialist in the United States, spiritual and ideological leader of the Democratic Socialists of America, one of the last vestiges of the nation’s Old Left.

Whether he is speaking to an audience of wealthy businessmen or unemployed factory workers, Harrington always declares that, if he had his way, our whole system would come tumbling down tomorrow morning because it is so cruelly unfair. In its place would be a society with no more extremes between rich and poor--no more people driving Mercedes Benzes while others walk, no more people eating imported caviar while others rummage through trash cans, no more private hospitals for the rich while the poor jam county hospital corridors.

A utopia, in short, in which everyone’s basic needs would be equally met--thereby, presumably, vanquishing both human greed and need forevermore.

Cynics will undoubtedly dismiss Michael Harrington as no more than just another smart man, who, having been in the right place at the right time, has made the most of his few bygone days of glory.

And they will not be altogether wrong. For this is not the tale of a lonely, misplaced and aging radical, leading a sad, solitary and thankless life as America’s token socialist.

To the contrary, in a country which still generally regards socialism as the next thing to godless communism, and is hardly seen as ripe for economic revolution, it isn’t a bad life that Harrington has carved out for himself.

In the first place, he has, since 1962--apart from his volunteer Democratic Socialists work, become a respected intellectual, a regular on the national lecture circuit (popular enough to command a $2,000 fee); a full-time political science professor at Queens College (where he specializes in courses on such personal heroes as Marx, Hegel and Engels); and author of 15 more books--not to mention literally hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. (To the disgust of conservatives, the press continually provides Harrington with a forum from which to nag at the national conscience.)

Global Conferences

Meantime, Harrington spends several weeks of each year traveling abroad as America’s representative at global conferences of the Socialist International. In 1986, for instance, he was in Bonn, West Germany; Madrid, Spain; Botswana; Lima, Peru; and Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia. (He is currently looking forward to a congress in Rome later this month.)

“I love all the formal protocol, the elegant dinners, all that,” he admits straightaway. But, perhaps even more important, however small his following in the United States may be, Harrington is respected abroad, where he rubs shoulders with such eminent world leaders as former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, French President Francois Mitterrand and Israeli Foreign Minister (and former Prime Minister) Shimon Peres. (Brandt, he marvels, “even reads all my books and actually wants to discuss them!”)

“I’m always amazed at the fact that, once I’m out of the United States, people know exactly what I’m talking about--and I always come away so stimulated, wondering why Americans are so damned ignorant, so backward. We have the worst welfare system in the advanced world, the worst health care system, the worst vacation system. Hell, in France they close up the whole place for all of August!”

And, last but not least, by virtue of his lifelong crusade in behalf of the world’s poor, Harrington has attained what he vaguely describes as a “comfortable middle-class life style” for himself in the United States--although some might find that description a bit understated.

Suburb Socialist

Including book royalties, Harrington’s annual income is now about $80,000--enough, among other things, to attract several Internal Revenue Service audits over the years; enough to send his 18-year-old son to Columbia University; and enough, too, to enable him--in a move he is still trying to live down--to relocate his family a few years ago from the squalor and crime of Manhattan to the tree-lined streets of suburban Larchmont, in Westchester County, one of the nation’s most fashionable suburbs.

“Socialist Leader Flees to Westchester,” one typically gleeful New York newspaper headline blared.

By now, of course, Harrington has heard plenty worse. Over the years, he’s been called everything from a harebrained hypocrite and pinko traitor to the kindest, wisest man in the land.

More commonly, however, he is dismissed as just another utopian dreamer, preacher of the impossible, an aging Peter Pan, beckoning Wendy through the window to come away with him to Never Never Land.

But, to their lasting frustration, even Harrington’s most vociferous political critics generally seem to wind up liking him personally. Easy-going and affable, with a dry, often self-deprecating wit, he comes across as a man without guile, incapable of being dishonest with either himself or others. (Besides that, how can anybody seriously dislike a man who, after all, only wants to see the whole world happy, healthy and well-fed?)

Harrington is, for instance, among the first to admit with a grin that sometimes he even reminds himself of Peter Pan--and that, realistically, “My tombstone will have probably long since crumbled, and my kids’ too, before my socialist utopia ever comes about, at least in the United States.”

In a touch of irony, the Democratic Socialists’ headquarters are in an office building in lower Manhattan, in the heart of the world’s busiest financial center, literally surrounded by the high-rise shadows of Wall Street’s skyscrapers.

As Harrington is fond of joking, “We moved down here on purpose--we wanted to personally preside over the collapse of capitalism, to witness firsthand the Boeskys leaping out the windows. (In truth, the Democratic Socialists of America moved from its old headquarters uptown in Union Square because rents got too high.)

On walking into the office for the first time, a stranger finds few surprises. Like any other radical minority organization, right or left, this one’s financial needs cry out, from the worn carpets and cheap desks to the chipped wall paint. Physically, the place is small, just a couple of large rooms overflowing with desks, stacks of socialist pamphlets, newsletters and books. A large photo of the late socialist leader Norman Thomas dominates the entryway.

The group’s dues-paying membership is around 6,000 annually and, although it can lay claim to a handful of national notables (such as Gloria Steinem, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Berkeley) and L.A.’s millionaire activist, Stanley Sheinbaum), its annual budget, in the best of times, is lucky to reach $400,000. The Democratic Socialists of America is a movement, not a political party, and most of its members, including Harrington himself, are registered Democrats.

‘Very Nice People’

(In fact, when discussing America’s tiny Socialist Party, Harrington sounds almost embarrassed. “They’re a tiny group of very, very nice people . . . who run these pathetic little candidacies during each presidential election, raising and spending every cent they can get--but they aren’t productive, they only take a few votes away from liberal Democrats who share many of our goals.”)

Harrington spends all of his free time at the organization’s headquarters, sitting at a small, cluttered desk in the center of the room, along with the rest of his staff. That staff presently consists of seven paid employees, whose salaries range from $12,000 to $22,000 annually.

With the exception of one handsome, olive-skinned young man who claims to be at least part black, they are all white, half of them women, with one outspoken gay. In a word, they are, like Harrington himself, mostly the products of privileged middle- to upper-class American families, fresh out of some of the nation’s most exclusive colleges.

And they practically whistle while they work, stuffing envelopes, mailing out brochures and newsletters, filing books (mostly Harrington’s) and performing other mundane office chores.

Socialist ideology, they leave to the master.

Small wonder.

Because even the master often seems ambivalent, uncertain or just downright confused about the political system he has been advocating for a lifetime.

“I really haven’t thought out all the long-term details,” he admitted on one occasion, sagging wearily into his chair, wearing a small, resigned smile.

A Higher Authority

“Obviously, you don’t go from cash incentive to moral incentive overnight. But, look at them,” he said, gesturing toward his roomful of young workers. “Here, you have a group of people working for a higher, moral authority alone. They want to do something meaningful . . . and I think, if we had a society in which income were more fairly distributed, in which everybody had health care as a matter of right, education and a certain basic food diet as a matter of right . . . if we had a society infinitely more fair than what we now have--then I think we would also have a society with more people just like these kids, motivated to help others.”

At the same time, Harrington sometimes concedes that, realistically, no political system, including his, can ever really hope to do more than control, never mind alter, the basic impulses of human nature.

This, he says, is perhaps his most fundamental disagreement with “my friend (Karl) Marx”--whose most famous axiom (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) would be the foundation for Harrington’s new world.

‘Seven Deadly Sins’

“Marx, I think, failed to take into account that individuals are very different, with very different needs; he assumed human nature could be altered. I do not. There is always going to be envy, lust, greed--you name it, all the Seven Deadly Sins.”

“But,” Harrington sighs, “neither do I see why those qualities must result in the social consequence of some people eating while others starve.”

In any case, no halfway intelligent socialist expects overnight change, he says, by way of explaining why he has spent most of his life in pursuit of such an elusive dream.

“As I tell young idealists, socialists not only in the United States but everywhere must be willing to fight with everything he or she has got, with no assurances that they are ever going to win, with the knowledge that they’re probably not going to see within their own lifetimes what they’ve dedicated their lives to, that they will, in fact, probably die without knowing if they ever won.”

And, at times, even Harrington himself doesn’t really seem to mind.

“One of the nicest things about being a socialist, especially in America,” he observed wryly one evening, “is that, since we don’t exactly have to prepare for the immediate exercise of power, we have a lot more time than most people to think and write.”

While sitting inside a bar at Grand Central Station, waiting for his commuter train to Larchmont, Harrington was peering with disgust into his glass of wine, which had been diluted by one third with water. Doctor’s orders, he sighed, ever since 1985, when he underwent chemotherapy treatments and surgery for throat cancer.

When the cancer was first discovered, Harrington, among others, was convinced that his time was surely at hand. It was, he recalls, being typically casual, a grim period--and in no way relieved by the fact that, although Harrington was raised in a rigidly Catholic family, he is now a self-described atheist. (“Why else would most people on this Earth be born to a life less than human? What kind of God is that?”)

As it turned out, Harrington wound up with no more than an unsightly scar on his neck, a lop-sided smile. Nowadays, too, he always carries around a couple of vials of painkillers and antibiotics--and sometimes looks pale and tired enough to alarm even strangers.

But, publicly at least, he only gripes about the booze.

“Just look at this--this stuff,” he sighed, once again mourning his watered wine. “It’s positively criminal.” Worse, his doctors have limited him to no more than three or four bottles of beer daily. And he loves beer. “As my wife always says, beer is one of the few really fine products society has ever produced that’s within the price range of the working man.”

Harrington is, of course, perfectly aware that his open, easy-going personality is probably his single greatest asset, not only disarming but invariably taking his critics by surprise. And, he doesn’t mind saying so: It gives him a certain malicious pleasure.

“I think most of the, uh, affable, open style is really me, it’s not a facade,” he says, “but I am also very conscious of the fact that what most people, and the media especially, expects a socialist to be is a wild man. They want a real nut, some screwball who’ll stand up and shout, ‘Hell with everything! Let’s tear this joint down!’ So, part of my mission in life, as I see it, is to puzzle a guy like Jack Kemp (New York’s supply-side Republican congressman, whom Harrington has publicly debated and personally likes).” He takes special pleasure, he adds, in addressing business groups because they are especially confused by his ordinary niceness and apparent sanity.

“Give me half an hour with damned near anybody,” Harrington says, “and I can convince them that I am in the real world, a serious person with some smart answers to plenty of practical problems plaguing this society--not just some wild-eyed dreamer.”

Subsidies for Business

Obviously, he allows, there would have to be a centralized national government to enforce the socialist order, “but that doesn’t mean we’re a bunch of communists who’re gonna shut down the churches and take over ownership of everything,” he says, exasperated by the misconceptions about socialism. (Far from nationalizing all private industry, in fact, Harrington would actually provide fat government subsidies to private businesses, but--not to be confused with Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ economic stance--”only after they provide meaningful jobs, not before.”

But, along with being egalitarian in every other way, in Harrington’s utopia there would also be no more corporate board room meetings where decisions were made and handed down by men in three-piece pinstriped suits. Instead, workers would be equal partners in both the ownership and management of their companies, equally represented in their coveralls in every board meeting. And, to ensure workers of the same intelligent advice as the company’s high-priced consultants, Harrington would see that they are provided with their own professional advisers.

And, perhaps most novel of all, he dreams of a world in which there would, initially, be full employment--government guaranteed, but leading inexorably to an increasingly reduced work week--from 40 to 35 hours, with the ultimate goal being a zero hour work week.

That is to say, in Harrington’s ultimately perfect society, those dedicated, for instance, to searching for a cure to cancer or AIDS would be free to do so; at the same time, those who preferred to fish on sunny river banks all day, or write worthless novels, or literally do nothing at all, would enjoy the same freedom of choice, maintained equally by the government.

(These are just a few of the highlights of Harrington’s utopia; never mind, for now, who’s going to foot the bill for this paradise of optional leisure, much less volunteer to clean the sewers or exterminate the rats.)

Obviously, no conversation with Michael Harrington, whether personal or political, is ever complete without a discussion of his comfortable two-story frame home, far from the squalor, crime and congestion of Manhattan, in Westchester County, one of the nation’s most celebrated enclaves of all-white, sanitized, suburban affluence. (Where he lives with his wife of 24 years, free-lance writer Stephanie Harrington, and their two teen-age sons.)

By now, Harrington sounds almost bored with the subject, he has explained himself so often to antagonists--from both the political right and left--who find it the ultimate in hypocrisy for a man whose reputation is virtually based on a book decrying the poverty he saw 25 years ago--starting in the slums of St. Louis, where he grew up, to New York’s Bowery, where Harrington lived for two years in his youth with the Catholic Worker, wading daily through some of the worst stench and filth in the land, trying to save the hopeless derelicts, mental defectives, alcoholics and other lonely, lost souls wandering helplessly through the giant city’s indifferent streets.

But, as Harrington points out, you don’t have to live with lice, bedbugs and halls crawling with rats to be sensitive to the poor.

Marx Chose Suburbs

“There are all kinds of people who think that, if you’ve written books on poverty, then you should be poor too. And that’s garbage! Friedrich Engels was a businessman, for Chris’sake! And Karl Marx lived in poverty for part of his life, but eventually moved out, in effect, to the suburbs so that his daughters could meet some eligible guys to marry.

“My point is, I don’t want to be Jesus, or even Gandhi. I am not a Franciscan. Even when I was at the Catholic Worker, I hated the lousy food, the bedbugs, the smells--poverty actually stinks, did you know that? Closed-off buildings, reeking with the odors of food, urine . . . . Anyway, you’d have to be an absolute nut to want to live like that. I’m willing to put up with it, if necessary, but I happen to like nice food, good wine . . . . And I’ve never made any secret of it.”

Certainly, Harrington’s background didn’t condition him to become a scholar of national squalor. To the contrary, he came from a prosperous, politically influential family, where it was generally assumed that young Michael, an only child, would eventually become an attorney, like his father. He still smiles, remembering the household horror when he announced that he intended instead to become a poet like his heroes, T.S. Eliot (a hometown boy) and Dylan Thomas. In those days, he grins, “being a poet meant just one thing, you had to be gay--or, as they called it then, a faggot.”

Parental Bribery

In due course, his parents attempted bribery, offering to send him, after an undergraduate education at Holy Cross, to graduate school in English literature--”but only if I agreed to try at least a year at Yale first.” Which Harrington did--but, to the even further dismay of his parents, it was at Yale that Harrington first became interested in socialism--and less convinced that he wanted to remain in the Catholic Church.

Nevertheless, true to their pledge, the elder Harringtons (now both deceased) next financed their son through a graduate English literature program at the University of Chicago and mournfully saw him set off for New York to become a bohemian socialist.

On a more practical level, “Although I could still be happy living in a loft somewhere and reading obscure German philosophers, when I became a father, my responsibilities changed. And, the fact is, Manhattan has become a place for rich people. Rents are impossible, and, if you’ve got a family, forget it! Believe it or not, it’s actually cheaper for me to live in Westchester. Besides that, although I’m an advocate of public schools, I frankly don’t want my kids living in fear, and Manhattan’s subways can be pretty scary places for kids these days.”

And, lastly, says Harrington, his mind returning to his life’s work: “If socialism is ever going to succeed in this country, it has to appeal to middle-class people, too, not just people on the bottom. So I want the middle class to identify with me because, if socialists are only going to try to organize people willing to live in poverty, we sure as hell aren’t going to get very far, now or ever.”

A quarter of a century later, Michael Harrington seems practically impervious to insult, having heard everything from hisses of “Commie” to snide remarks from college kids, wanting to know if he intends to donate his speaking fee to the homeless.

If his ego has been bruised even slightly during his lifetime as standard bearer of a seemingly hopeless crusade, it hardly shows. He is quick to admit, for instance, that none of his subsequent 15 books have even approached the acclaim of “The Other America”--but he by no means sees himself as a literary has-been.

“How many books,” he asks, “can reliably be said to have had some small impact on the history of this country?

“Not many,” he replies, satisfied.

In assessing his personal flaws, he frowns, thinking, then comes up with only one: “ . . . Well, I think I’m probably excessively abstracted, too distracted, perhaps too glib about humanity . . . . It’s, uh, a lot easier for me to love all of humankind, for example, than to, well, relate to other persons on a one-to-one level.”

But, however personally confident he may be, Harrington was obviously unprepared for his treatment during a recent trip to Washington, where he had been invited by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to testify on unemployment problems before Kennedy’s Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

Armed for Bear

This being a new Congress, stacked in favor of Democrats, at least one minority committee member, Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.), was sourly armed for bear. Although Harrington was listed on the agenda as merely a Queens College professor, Humphrey was more fully informed; and so, singling Harrington out specifically in Kennedy’s line-up of Catholic bishops, AFL-CIO leaders and feminist leaders, he straightaway demanded fuller identification.

“You’re also a socialist, isn’t that right?” Humphrey hissed. Naturally, Harrington confessed that, yes, this was so. Whereupon, Humphrey subjected him to several minutes of interrogation, falling barely short of calling him a communist. Then, he demanded of Kennedy, “Where, here, is an advocate of capitalism . . . where is the Chamber of Commerce? With all due respect,” he finished sarcastically. “I would have hoped to see a greater balance (in witnesses).”

Kennedy finally silenced Humphrey with a vicious slam of his gavel, along with the sharp remark, “We’re not giving litmus tests here, Senator, on political ideology. . . . We are only interested in the substance of various views.”

Having succeeded in embarrassing Kennedy as well as he could, Humphrey only lounged back into his chair with a smirk. All in all, it was, if nothing else, a terrific media show.

Pale and Angry

Afterward, however, Harrington not only looked paler than usual but seemed unusually disturbed, even angry. In the first place, Harrington’s love affair with the Kennedy clan goes on, and it upsets him to be the source of discomfort for any of them, living or dead.

But, moreover, he was shocked, he said, to find such ignorance in the U.S. Senate, after all these years.

“I thought this was a major league place for grown-ups . . . and so I guess I’m more surprised than anything else at his (Humphrey’s) ignorance. The dumb sonofabitch has a preconceived notion about socialism--like about 85% of the American public.”

With that, Harrington went off to the men’s room to take one of his pain pills. When he returned, his mood was much improved. He attacked his lunch with gusto, sparing himself the misery of watered-down wine by ordering a Budweiser instead.

And so it is with the last leader of the Old Left, would-be missionary of the New. A strange blend of hopelessness and hope, drearily negative at times, full of optimism at others. The self-described “Long Distance Runner” now running who knows where?

But let him answer for himself:

“I guess what I would wish most, at this exact moment, is that neither I, nor these young people around me, be depicted as a bunch of nutty utopians, some little sect with a guru . . . . This is a serious movement, not just a Sunday kind of thing with us. Even if our ideals never fully occur, the world is a still a better place, far better off now than they were 10 years ago, Food Stamps, AFDC--and so on, all of it has made life easier for millions, and we can take some satisfaction in knowing we at least played a small part.

“But, even more important, I think, is the idea that, yeah, maybe we’re dreamers--but if human beings can only begin to just imagine total perfection today, then they will at least be that much closer to achieving it tomorrow. If I go to bed tonight, for instance, dreaming my utopian dreams, then maybe I will be just that much closer to having some very good, practical ideas on how to design a health or housing program at 9 a.m. tomorrow morning, which might at least benefit those most in need, those at the very bottom of our society. And, if that’s not worthwhile,” Harrington asked, looking momentarily as confused as anybody else, “then what is?”