The Patriot

The golden age of modern American social criticism lasted a glorious half decade, from 1960 to 1965, which was a short enough time. But in those few years, a series of sharply-argued books came on the scene, and each one of them, in its incisiveness, managed to carve a new shape out of American life, not just temporarily. There was “Growing Up Absurd” by Paul Goodman in 1960, which pretty much founded the modern passion for school reform; “The Death and Life of American Cities” by Jane Jacobs in 1961, which became the great manifesto of the urban preservation movement; “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962, which produced the ecology movement; “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan in 1963, which did nothing less than to readjust all previous relations between the sexes; “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by X himself and Alex Haley in 1964, which transformed a good deal of subsequent thinking about American blacks; and “Unsafe at Any Speed” by Ralph Nader in 1965, which created the modern consumer movement. But the work of social criticism that, at the time, seemed to be the most promising of all, judging from the hundreds of millions of federal dollars that went gushing in its wake, was Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” an expose of American poverty, which came out in 1962. Harrington came to his topic bearing a very useful set of credentials. He was a middle-class Irishman from St. Louis who had received a proper neo-Thomist education at Holy Cross College, a bit of law at Yale, a bit of literature at the University of Chicago. And then, in the early 1950s, he plunged into New York’s downtown bohemian left, on its anti-Communist side. He spent a year and a half toiling for Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement, which made him something of a Christian anarchist, and afterward he moved along to the secular Socialists who gathered around the sweetly benign Norman Thomas and the slightly sinister Max Shachtman. Those were tiny organizations, but they gave Harrington a solid introduction to the Paul Berman is the author of “A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.” big-time labor unions, to the political traditions of the left, and to the literature of left-wing analysis. And they introduced him to the New York intellectuals and their magazines. He wrote the original sketch for his book on poverty for Commentary, the Jewish magazine, which tilted leftward in those days. And then, when he finally produced “The Other America,” the book was pushed onto the public stage by one other personality from the downtown bohemia, the natty anarchist Dwight Macdonald, who wrote a long piece about Harrington and his book for the New Yorker.

Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman, has been unable to answer the nagging question of whether President John Kennedy actually read “The Other America,” as is sometimes said, or only Macdonald’s summary and discussion. Or maybe Kennedy merely heard about the book. The book worked its wonders in any case. Middle-class America, in its naivete, had come out of World War II in the smug and happy belief that American justice and virtue had triumphed not only over Hitler, Mussolini and Japanese imperialism abroad but over poverty at home, except in a few remote and insignificant places. But that was not the case. A full third of America’s population still labored under conditions of sheerest misery, even in an age of economic boom. Harrington’s book succeeded in pointing to that strangely invisible reality. Kennedy and his top aides scratched their heads at the revelation, wondering if something oughtn’t to be done. And then, just when the topic of poverty had been broached at the White House, Kennedy was assassinated, and Lyndon Johnson succeeded to the presidency. Johnson picked up on the vague and preliminary White House discussions with enthusiasm. “That’s my kind of program,” he said. And he decided quickly and easily to launch a major effort, the Office of Economic Opportunity, whose purpose was nothing less than to stamp out American poverty entirely.

Was there any chance at all that Johnson’s War on Poverty might have succeeded? It has become a mark of sophistication to say that poverty is not really subject to government manipulation, and that utopian aspirations to abolish it pose greater dangers to mankind than poverty itself. That was not Harrington’s position. His particular school of American socialism was fond of looking back at the New Deal of the 1930s, which in selected portions of American life did succeed in abolishing the worst sorts of poverty, or nearly so--among old people, for example, by means of Social Security. And Harrington looked in Western European directions. A European orientation was considered to be one of his flaws, in the eyes of his critics, a sign that, for all his St. Louis origins, he lacked the American touch.

Harrington’s European orientation allowed him to observe, however, that in the years after World War II whole regions of Western Europe had pushed well beyond America’s New Deal. And in pushing beyond, they had succeeded rather well in wiping out ever larger swathes of poverty, even while shoring up the institutions and traditions of democracy. Scandinavian socialism, where the triumphs were largest, always did seem hugely attractive, from Harrington’s point of view. It’s true that Johnson’s War on Poverty would have required far vaster sums than Johnson himself was willing to expend, in order to achieve anything like a Scandinavian result. Johnson right away poured $800 million into the Office of Economic Opportunity. But Harrington always considered that hundreds of millions were merely a token, given the size of the problem. He wanted to open the floodgates, up to $100 billion, spread over 10 years.

Harrington was perhaps not the man to drum up that kind of enthusiasm, at least not in the world of Washington politics. The Johnson administration brought Harrington and his radical comrade Paul Jacobs down to Washington to work on the proposed new program, and the two socialists made a habit of concluding their memos with a ritual incendiary phrase, “Of course, there is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system.” Within the administration the terror was great, Isserman tells us, that Congress would get hold of those memos and discover the ritual phrase, and all hell would break loose.

Outside of Washington, though, Harrington stood at the center of what might have become quite a large national coalition against poverty, if only things had fallen into place. His background in the Catholic Worker movement gave him good connections and a respectable reputation among Catholic liberals. The Socialist Party to which he belonged was not really a party at all, merely a small and modest pressure group. But the Socialists enjoyed an ancient friendship with the AFL-CIO, where a number of the larger unions faithfully paid their Socialist dues, if only out of nostalgia for the left-wing past. The Socialists maintained a couple of student organizations, and one of those organizations was Students for a Democratic Society, which, by the late 1960s, had attracted a genuinely popular support in colleges and universities all over the country, even in the South.

mHarrington and his Socialists stood on the best of terms with the leaders of the civil rights movement, beginning with Martin Luther King Jr. himself, who used to solicit Harrington’s advice on a more or less formal basis three or four times a year. The Socialists provided foot soldiers and staffers for the civil rights campaigns through the offices of Bayard Rustin, who served as King’s back-room strategist. And so it’s easy to imagine that Harrington, together with Rustin and some other people who were thinking along similar terms, could have pulled those many contacts together, and might have produced a nice-sized political army on behalf of that great forbidden theme in American politics, a redistribution of wealth. Nothing that Harrington or Rustin or anyone else could have done would have led to Scandinavian results in America. But a big Harringtonian coalition might have made Johnson’s War on Poverty stronger and much more effective than it was.

So what happened? The Vietnam War was a tragedy 10 times over, and here was one more instance in the realm of “it might have been.” Like an ax, the Vietnam War splintered the anti-poverty coalition. Harrington himself didn’t know what to do about the war. His instincts were pacifist, but, in his ditherings, he managed to infuriate the doves to his left without ever satisfying the hawks to his right. Isserman’s biography Please see Page 10 Continued from Page 9 records those blunders at painful length. If only Harrington had risen to the moment, he might have ended up a main leader of the anti-war movement, which would have been a good thing for his own ambitions and would definitely have benefited the movement. Instead, he plunged into a series of idiotic faction fights within his ever-more sclerotic Socialist Party, in an atmosphere of plots and counter-plots that was dominated by Shachtman, the aging Machiavelli of American Trotskyism, who was much too tricky for anyone’s good. Harrington went through some kind of emotional collapse, too, which Isserman, in a spirit of admirable diffidence, describes sketchily, but with sufficient detail to allow us to imagine its crippling effects. So the later 1960s came and went, and the early ‘70s, and nothing was achieved.

Still, after the United States had finally pulled out of the war and the ultra-radicalism of the New Left had dribbled to an end, Harrington managed to shuck off his Shachtmanite friends, who were no friends at all. He put together a large and powerful faction within the Democratic Party called Democratic Agenda, which was loosely allied with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, at a moment when Kennedy’s prospects for becoming president looked reasonably good. And, by 1978 or thereabouts, Harrington seemed on the brink of realizing his every dream, minus the dreams that were merely dreams. Only, a pity! Here he stumbled into his worst blunders of all. He and Democratic Agenda succeeded in weakening President Jimmy Carter, in the largely unconscious, blithe belief that Carter’s defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan would result in a triumph, sooner or later, for the Democratic Party’s left wing. “After Reagan, us,” was the unstated idea. After Reagan came more Reagan, however, and then George Bush. Harrington developed cancer and died in 1989, at the too-young age of 61. He was elected honorary president of the Socialist International in his last days, as a gesture of respect by social democratic parties around the world. But recognition abroad meant nothing at home. For the Republicans were even then solidly in control, and the left wing of the Democratic Party was in shambles.

Isserman has written a fine and readable account of all this, affectionate, admiring, critical, and accurate, valuable especially for its guided tour of the mid-century left-wing sects--an arcane topic, which most historians get wrong and Isserman always gets right. What I don’t like about the book is mostly a gloomy suggestion that careers like Harrington’s are, in America, a thing of the past--a suggestion that Harrington himself was, in Isserman’s phrase, “the end of the line.” That may be true, and just as well, if the line in question is sectarian leftism. But in judging Harrington and his legacy today, a lot depends, it seems to me, on how you judge the Democrats of right now and their achievements. From the conventional standpoint of the American left, Bill Clinton’s White House has drifted horribly to the right, and Clintonism is nothing but Reaganism in disguise, and there is no room anymore for the values of the left, except in street protests.

But it is worth observing that, among the British Laborites and the German Social Democrats and some other parties of the Socialist International, people tend to look on the Clinton administration with friendlier eyes. And why is that? Harrington wanted to launch all kinds of expensive programs to fight poverty, and the most expensive of all was going to be, as he always made clear, a full employment policy. Full employment always did seem to him the key to ending poverty. Being a man of his time, Harrington tended to picture such a policy in the big-government style of the New Deal. But today is another time, and the Clinton administration has managed, in its own disorderly fashion, to arrive at very close to 4% unemployment, which, as these things are figured, is tantamount to full employment, at least in some places around the country. So it has been proved once again that fighting against poverty is entirely possible, and the effects can be salutary, on balance, even without the expensive welfare programs of the past.

I have no idea whether Harrington, if he were still alive, would follow the British and German Social Democrats in their admiration for Clinton. His own ideas, if they had remained unchanged, would have prevented him from doing anything of the sort. Then again, one of Harrington’s main activities was to keep up to date with the European social democrats and their ideas, and, in his books and magazine articles, to promote those ideas in the United States--which is something that Isserman discusses barely at all, by the way. An American social democrat who was up to date with the Socialist International and what is called its “Third Way” might show a lot of sympathy for the Democratic Party of right now--even while keeping up his own call for still more efforts on behalf of the poor and against the inequalities of wealth. It is true that, on America’s national stage nowadays, nobody is playing that kind of role, at least not with Harrington’s sparkly combination of earnest panache and personal charm and intellectual curiosity. But somebody could do it. Somebody should.