A man who made a difference:

...I remained in the front...

...That very discipline served him to the end...

...An aspiring, and published, poet in his younger years (his last major article for Commonweal was an extraordinary appreciation of James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover), Michael not only made himself a scholar of Marx and of socialist history, he plunged into government documents of every kind and tracked political and economic events in the serious press of several languages...

...I asked her...

...As his autobiographical writings reveal, Mike retained an impressive capacity to carouse during the night and work hard during the day...

...More of that came through, of course, in his observations on his own religious roots, reflections that were always generous and perceptive...

...She turned to relay my words to him...

...We kept in touch and when I accepted a teaching fellowship a N. Y.U., Mike was there to introduce me to various attractions of the city-high among them being a nearby bar, the San Remo...

...I asked him a couple of months back, as his condition seemed to be slipping...

...I was highly impressed with Mike's evident ability to thread his way through the utterly byzantine corridors of socialist organizations, which splintered, regrouped, splintered again, and again regrouped...

...He gave little attention to religious experience, worship, community...

...I glanced up to see a young blond guy standing at the side of my cubicle...

...Its title was "The Other America...

...The question was whether or not one could and should pull the Democratic party to the left, for both Mike and Bill were assured that Stevenson was going to win handily...

...Patrick, he's giving you a clenched fist...

...Michael knew that his commitment to socialism had sprung from the faith of his childhood and, yes, of the Jesuit education for which he was grateful...

...I'm sure that he spoke about the need to build broader coalitions-to reach out beyond the usual suspects and actually try to persuade-yes, persuade-ordinary folks that America's problems require radical solutions and approaches beyond the constraints of timid liberalism...

...That was Mike...

...A memorial service to honor Michael Harrington will be held at Riverside Church (Riverside Drive and 120th Street, New York City) on Friday, September 15,7:00-9:00 P.M...

...But Mike did...

...I am...

...I am culturally and psychologically a Catholic" wrote this "atheist fellow traveler of moderate Catholicism," who automatically responded to moments of intense beauty by echoing the opening phrases of the Magnificat...

...Writing his best two books in a dozen years...

...less interesting than our fellow drinkers at the San Remo, I gradually transferred my evening's allegiance to the latter...

...It was during this period that Mike discovered the Catholic Worker and moved into the quarters that were then on Chrystie Street...

...Taking religion very seriously while I was growing up was a critical part of the destiny my childhood packed into me," he wrote a year ago...

...References to Marx, Proust, and a U.S...

...Michael Harrington was a writer, teacher, orator, organizer, a man of sentiment who could weep for the fate of a character in a novel, a man of intellect who knew how to respect but distrust sentiment, a man of unflagging energy and generosity in the pursuit of a just, free, and equal society...

...The energy this demanded stood him in good stead as, true to his radical commitment, he became an active political organizer, speaker, theorist, writer, teacher, and debater, always in support of the poor and the oppressed, always with the declared goal of extending the boundaries of political and economic freedoms...

...I recall Stephanie, his wife, observing us at one party and saying, "Those two have been talking to each other for over thirty years...

...He sold me on it that night and I signed on for the duration...

...It was as a socialist and because I was socialist, that I fell in love with America," he wrote last year in his second autobiographical work, The Long-Distance Runner...

...Though not an excerpt or a forerunner of his book by that name-a volume that seized the imagination of many Americans and helped bring about the War on Poverty-the article prefigures an underlying theme of that work...

...A Radical Commitment Michael Harrington and I met over the pages of Commonweal...

...After I returned to work on my doctorate at Chicago we kept in touch and Commonweal again played an important part in our relation...

...Interesting magazine, isn't it...

...Just as Commonweal's name and the names of its editors crop up throughout Michael's writings, so does the question of religion...

...Does Mike have any messages for us...

...Two days later he was gone...

...Still, as he himself put it, "to be a socialist is to make an act of faith, of love even, toward this land....It is to sense the seed beneath the snow...

...Our political differences grew, but even though the time came when we saw each other only infrequently, our conversations never flagged...

...Knowing that he was soon to die, he had the uncommon satisfaction of seeing the entire pattern of his life and judging it to be good...

...I remember very clearly that first meeting over forty years ago...

...Less simply than I tell it here, I did, and I often edited Mike's contributions...

...The only visible magazine was the latest issue of Commonweal, which I had been reading...

...The consciousness of this fact, much like the consciousness for Christians of the mass cruelties that have been committed in the name of their God, kept Michael's socialist faith from ever being simple, made him sensitive to the historical detours and delusions it had suffered...

...And-in the end-he taught us how to die...

...He knew the odds...

...And yet he was careful to insist that socialism should not pose itself as a substitute religion...

...Michael also disagreed with Marx's idea that the coming of socialism would mean the disappearance of human alienation and, with it, of religious faith...

...Mike was, however, still in a learning process...

...When we would go to the movies-a quaint term today-we would subject even the lightest fluff of a film to the heavy artillery provided by our study of Aristotle's Poetics...

...to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies...

...Is there anything I can do...

...Hell, Stephanie, give him one back for us...

...Again and again he rethought his notions about socialism, both ends and means, starting a brilliant book on the subject, the just-published Socialism: Past and Future, on the very day that doctors told him he had inoperable cancer...

...The debate was not about who would win the election...

...One had to substantiate it, test it, risk it against the claims of critics-and often that was the greater part of courage, certainly of hard work...

...Perhaps it was an unfortunate legacy of grade-school catechism and Jesuit education that he approached religion largely in terms of doctrine, a God-validated philosophy of life...

...Did great brilliance waste itself, unrecorded, on the midnight air...

...As are we all...

...Mike had been writing for Commonweal and when John Cogley, executive editor of the magazine, embarked on an intensive blacklisting study for The Fund for the Republic, he hired Mike as his assistant...

...I was one of a scraggly group of peaceniks who had set up a traveling exhibit of photos to illustrate the U.S...

...Senate committee report might be found side-by-side in his writings...

...But a few years later he was schooled in a branch of anti-Stalinist socialism for which a central problem was the fact that in our time the socialist struggle against injustice had lent itself to totalitarian evil, crushing freedom instead of creating it...

...Solidarity was the concept that fueled Mike's socialism-a society where none are doomed by race, class, or region to a future where they will not have the opportunity to pursue their God-given gifts...

...A chapter in The Accidental Century, which followed The Other America, addresses "The Crisis of Belief and Disbelief...

...His serious intellectual/political life had begun...

...And since the unspoken rule at the Worker was that whoever turned out the work was the one who filled the columns of the monthly tabloid, his articles soon began to appear in The Catholic Worker regularly...

...it is a mark of both Mike's great gifts and integrity that on his death many people of widely diverse political views acknowledged the essential honesty, decency, and dedication that he brought to the political struggle...

...What these people couldn't grasp was that socialism was at the very heart of Mike's being...

...Despite some critical comments about Mrs...

...These efforts were never as sweeping, as clearcut, as they might have been if they had issued from his study alone...

...I looked down at my desk to see what he was referring to...

...responsibility to reconstruct Vietnam, grant amnesty to war resisters, and cut off aid once and for all to the Thieu regime still clinging to power...

...He inspired us to live a life rich in commitment-commitment born in equal parts from joy and anger...

...Mike's interests at that time were primarily literary and aesthetic, as were my own...

...He often described that commitment in terms of faith...

...I was sitting in the Modern Language Reading Room at the University of Chicago, under the attractive but rather severe countenance of Francois Mauriac, whose picture was mounted on a column in front of me, when a shadow fell across my desk...

...I can't recall Mike's exact words then, try as I might...

...Yes," I agreed rather dimly, not knowing quite where to go from there...

...The irony of Harrington, at that time a conscientious objector and a novice socialist, reviewing a book on saints by a champion of capitalism and the Cold War is more apparent than real...

...Could it possibly have been as scintillating and witty, as informed and sophisticated as we thought it...

...Mike made his mark in the first place by dint of discipline-in his research, his speaking, his writing, his politics...

...peter steinfels Peter Steinfels, formerly the editor of Commonweal, is the religion correspondent for the New York Times...

...I am grateful to be able to note in these pages the small part I played in that pattern...

...He had had a few poems published in Poetry magazine and thought of himself as a poet in potentia, but at the Worker he set foot on the path that he would follow through much of his future life, for it was there that he first seriously encountered socialism and Marx...

...To be a socialist and a Marxist in America is not the surest way to honor and recognition...

...This American egalitarianism is a more decent and human way of people meeting people than exists in societies which have impressive monuments to tradition...

...Almost thirty years later, in an interview that the "MacNeil/Lehrer Ne wshour" rebroadcast after Michael's death, he used almost the same phrases in affirming his faith in a fundamental American decency...

...james finn James Finn is editorial director of Freedom House and editor of its bimonthly magazine, Freedom at Issue...

...After all the thousands of words-through news clippings, television commentaries, cards, letters, and faxes-that have flowed across my desk since Mike died, it's a little hard to know where to begin...

...Other folks, on Mike's right flank, also just couldn't catch on...

...His was a radical vision of how the world could work, completely divorced from sectarian, moralistic posturing and armchair philosophizing...

...It meant, above all, that I accepted the idea that life was a trust to be used for a good purpose and accounted for when it was over...

...underlining a crucial political truth...

...Out of one of these visits came the suggestion that I might become an editor of Commonweal...

...His voice reduced to a hoarse whisper, he depended on his wife Stephanie for most of his communicating...

...As the right-wing New York Post, an unlikely source, editorialized: "The American left is poorer for his passing, as is American life in general...

...But though he left the Catholic church, ceasing to be a "believer," in conversation, in his writing, in his life-long work to bring justice to this world, I doubt that Michael Harrington ever repudiated anything, lost anything, or forgot anything...

...Left Wing of the Possible My last remembrance of Mike Harrington was a clenched fist...

...In the presidential contest between Stevenson and Eisenhower, Bill opted for Stevenson, but Mike argued for Darlington Hoopes, the socialist candidate...

...If Michael Harrington did not achieve what Paul Ricoeur called a "second naivete" in religious faith-a capacity for belief and worship that has encountered and absorbed the modern critique of religion-he was the very model of such an attitude in his commitment to socialism...

...When it did so, it became an unholy mixture of heaven and earth that would most likely turn out to be infernal...

...PATRICK LACEFIELD Patrick Lacefield is the national organizational director of the Democratic Socialists of America...

...It is probably best not to press such questions...

...It led us, over a short time, to talk about religion, our backgrounds, our favorite authors, our uncertain plans for the future-and all the great questions of life...

...Passionately discharging his duties as husband and father...

...He knew the historical baggage that socialism carried-the "modest successes" and "massive betrayals" that always seem to cling to any great idea...

...From October 1987, when he was diagnosed, until February of this year, Mike maintained a schedule that, though reduced by a third, would have brought a healthier man to his knees...

...A NAN WHO MADE A DIFFERENCE MICHAEL HARRINGTON IN OUR HISTORY PETER STEINFELS, JAMES FINN, & PATRICK LACEFIELD Life Is a Trust Michael Harrington first appeared in Common-weal's pages October 3,1952 with a review of Saints for Now, edited by Clare Booth Luce and published by Sheed and Ward...

...Not long before his death he talked of writing a book about issues of everyday morality...

...I first tripped across Mike in the shabby "penthouse" of the old Hotel Muehlbach in Kansas City during the Democratic party's midterm 1974 convention...

...Unlike believers who think that good intentions and religious fervor suffice in the world of political and social struggle, Michael knew the necessity of blending action, knowledge, and critical thought...

...Haven't you figured out that you are whistlin' in the wind...

...Ironic indeed, that in the article, Harrington criticized Dwight Macdonald's low opinion of this mass culture-Macdonald being the man who through his review of the book, The Other America, in the New Yorker did so much to call the book and the issue of widespread, hidden poverty to public attention...

...Indeed, this is probably the American monument...

...The Other America: Poverty in the United States raised him to national prominence as a leading socialist in this country...

...The work, he probably said, is to build a democratic left working within the left wing of the possible...

...In their frequent trips between New York and California, they sometimes stopped off in Chicago...

...Then he added, "And make it cherry-flavored...

...Luce's collection-he particularly objected to Joan of Arc's being made patron saint of law and order, "a saint for the Cold War"- Harrington underlined the importance of saints, not just as "symbols and cultural meanings," but as men and women who made a difference...

...With his puckish Irish manner, easy charm, and ready smile, Mike faced with incredible courage an uphill battle against the cancer that finally took him from us...

...On the contrary, he argued, socialism, which could relieve unnecessary suffering but could promise no ultimate remedy to death, tragedy, and evil, might even usher in an intensely religious era, in which the starkest facts of finitude, the most basic questions of human existence, would no longer be cloaked by social injustice...

...He was a man who made a difference...

...he asked...

...I recall vividly a long, intense debate between Mike and Bill Clancy, another editor of, yes, Commonweal...

...Teaching working-class kids at Queens College...

...When I last saw him, earlier this year, we recalled our days at Chicago and Mike said that he had determined then that he would be a writer-and that he had fulfilled that determination...

...When we received our degrees in 1949,1 headed for the broad plains of Nebraska and my first teaching position, Mike for the high adventure of New York, part-time work, and a literary career...

...The young reviewer of 1952 was an habitue of the Catholic Worker, a temporary Pascalian returnee to the faith he had thought unsustainable and which, a few months later, he was to decide once and for all that he had lost...

...Neither this nor Mike's longstanding and principled and progressive anticommunism went down too well with those who fixated on whatever third-world authoritarianism as a model and seemed to revel in their political and cultural marginality...

...Working with Willy Brandt and Michael Manley and company at the Socialist International...

...two days before his death and I called the Harrington homestead to check in...

...Through decades in which he traveled far, intellectually and politically, Michael Harrington continued to write in these pages...

...He became a noticeable actor on the large political scene, national and international...

...At the beginning of the 1980s, he updated and modified those views in an entire volume, The Politics at God's Funeral, subtitled, "The Spiritual Crisis of Western Civilization...

...One of the more intriguing of his contributions, eventually republished in his 1985 collection of essays, Taking Sides, appeared in the May 27, 1960 issue...

...Unlike those who discover the weaknesses in their radical political simplicities and promptly think their disabused condition is the ultimate stage of worldly wisdom, Michael had a lasting commitment that would neither ignore nor surrender to setbacks, betrayals, and historical ironies...

...I didn't see the fist, mind you...

...Mike," they would say, "why not drop this socialism stuff...

...Finding my fellow students at N.Y.U...

...I have been an atheist for about thirty years, yet in this fundamental conception of the meaning of existence I am as Catholic as the day on which I made my First Communion...

...He'd been home from the hospital after eight weeks of losing ground in his eighteen-month battle against his second cancer...

...It was not enough to proclaim a radical vision and hold to it courageously...

...They were, in fact, forged in the process of political activity, of building coalitions and sharing the often indeterminate experiences of socialist parties throughout the world...

...The Other America" is an essay countering the criticisms of American conformity and complacency and celebrating the diversity and richness rooted in the American sense of equality...

...Strangely, he understood about socialism what he seemed to leave out of his thoughts on religion, that it is not a set of pure ideas but a lived reality, an encounter (and a struggle, if you will) with the divine...

...Lecturing in Iowa and Ireland...

...Mike lived an intensely political life, but in his own eyes his life was not entirely encompassed by politics...

...We saw much of life through the prism thus provided...

...His refusal to tolerate social injustice began in 1949 with a chance exposure to a rotting slum...

...Tending the organizational fences at the Democratic Socialists of America...

...Yeah," he answered matter-of-factly, "come up with a cure for cancer...

...As part of his own political education Mike conducted highly informal "socialist seminars" in the back room of the White Horse...

...In this most proudly unsocialist of lands, Mike insisted on building a democratic socialist center- the Democratic Socialists of America-which would link arms with the broader democratic left to build a majoritarian movement...

...Mike was a patriot in the best sense of the word...

...And when "the bad place"- our name for the Remo-would overflow, we headed for the White Horse where, among the constantly shifting population, there was a relatively stable community of people who were content to drink and talk the night away-religion, politics, ballet, psychoanalysis, theater, books, movies, friends, gossip...

...Back in New York I went with Mike to a number of socialist meetings, featuring, for example, not only Norman Thomas, but the brilliant speaker, Max Shachtman...

...If the left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the left and the people will be right...

...That's a hell of a lot more than just a plant-closing law-or a liberalism mired in special interests and indifferent to how little people get left behind...

...That fact established, our conversation was launched...

...He had used the Commonweal to find out whether I was a Catholic...