The Other American
Isserman, Maurice & Fisher, James T.
Catholicism so profoundly at odds with tween the elements of prophet, priest, Senator Robert Taft. This "Oedipal reac- itself. Wills recently published a book and king. Prophecy...
...As a But distrust of the church's government, while the royal element of the church graduate student in English at the Uniand of the church's past, looms every- was its organizational and historical di- versity of Chicago, Harrington experiwhere in the book under review...
...Given his charisman whose best-known book, The Other ma and the "evangelical pitch" of his orAmerica (1962), was credited with the atory, his success was no surprise, but "discovery" of poverty amid a postwar Isserman also explores "the gulf that had James T. Fisher affluence so widely touted that many opened between his personal qualitiesbelieved social injustice had been ren- of which so many people thought so n the 1980s Michael Har- dered obsolete...
...Isserman rington informed a cousin that after thirual sectarianism would limit his effec- suggests that Harrington's ability to ty years of atheism "he still deeply loved tiveness in the New Left during the mo- "speak American" was one of this na- the Catholic church and found its rituals mentous decade to come...
...In the end, however, Wills's cri- these differing energies in balance, priv- rable tour of duty with the New York tique of the present state of the church is ileging none over the others...
...It was a heady experience for a bohemian Socialist who suddenly became, in the words of Harrington's occasional patron APPROACHING THE UNKNOWABLE Robert Maynard Hutchins, "the only man ever to get rich off of poverty...
...the historic party of Eugene Victor For death is not empirical, but "metaDebs and Norman Thomas is today F. Gonzilez-Crussi empirical," as philosophers have redoing the work of Richard Nixon...
...Prophecy meant intellect, the- tion," as Harrington later described it, titled A Necessary Evil: A History of Amer- ology, and its demands...
...The visitor themselves at a loss for words to say the Democratic Socialist Organizing to the bookstore or the pub- what it is, this thing that transcends all Committee and its successor, the DSA...
...the full ideological context for Michael son whose fidelity to a political vision Without mentioning socialism in the Harrington's socialist journey...
...For Newman true Catholicism from Catholicism, but returned to the Christian officials, at their own estima- involved an endless struggle to hold church long enough to serve a memotion...
...When a younger group of stuoften invited to call or visit Harrington's School, suggests Isserman, Harrington dent radicals emerged in the 1960s, the office at the Democratic Socialists of acquired "a sense of moral gravity" still boyish Harrington was ideally situAmerica (DSA) headquarters on Union rather than a specific ideological outlook...
...In many unite in coalition with a democratic labor rian of the American Left who provides ways he was a very straightforward permovement," was also published in 1962...
...The book helped to shape virtually imperceptible to outsiders-to the antipoverty agendas of both the emerge as a revered leader of democra- James T. Fisher teaches American religious Kennedy and Johnson administrations, tic socialism in the 1970s with a moral history at Saint Louis University...
...priesthood was supplanted by a more meaningful ican Distrust of Government, in which he meant the prayerlife of the church and encounter with leftist thought during a defended the role of federal authority...
...The Other America, a work driven, ac- wavering devotion to socialism occa- He claimed that if he died on the opercording to Isserman, by Harrington's vi- sionally limited his recognition of other ating table and wound up in heaven, sion that the "alternative America of in- forms of American discourse-from the "he was going to accuse God face-totellectuals and students and artists and utopianism of SDS to Reaganism-that face of mumbling to humankind...
...His latest and Harrington himself worked briefly authority that assumed international book is Catholics in America (Oxford Uniwith Sargent Shriver in the planning proportions...
...with his middle-American qualities, proMaurice Isserman These qualities of openness and en- pelled him to the forefront of the socialPublicAtfrirs, $_'8.50, 449 pp, gagement are vividly captured in Mau- ist movement at a time of rather modest rice Issermari s superb biography of the competition in the field...
...ological reflection, but that was simply stricken and the dispossessed could Maurice Isserman is a leading histo- not Harringtori s line of work...
...other story...
...The Reagan years were an- no one has ever experienced and come nomena of the empirical realm...
...Always, and all of us, tage George McGovern's bid for the Farrar, of raus £• Gima.i 521, 796 pp...
...presidency in 1972, Harrington finally No theoretical foreknowledge here, and resigned his membership, alleging that no empirical savvy, either...
...Is this one factory, since no language can have sought, Harringtori s "moderate, prag- addition to the dauntingly prolific race of words for what is fundamentally inefmatic radicalism," Isserman argues, ex- "How To" books, if books they be called...
...Harrington showed a great at Maryhouse, a Catholic End of Saint Louis and the adjoining sub- devotion to sectarian infighting, a parWorker community located on Man- urb of University City, where his family's ticularly fruitless occupation for an hattan's Lower East Side...
...El nightly sojourns to the White Horse Tavto opposing positions, and which en- ern and on various picket lines he convisages no function or motive for eccle- tinued to mingle with secular radicals...
...Who, indeed, can ex- The curious reader takes the book in stood why so many formerly Democra- pound on being dead...
...It is of mensions-structure, hierarchy, tradi- enced his initial "indecisive apostasy" course prudent not to take officials, even tion...
...In marked with their pretentious language...
...its spiritual and intuitive dimension...
...When he fia complex interplay-and tension-be- by Yale University Press...
...Harrington's insistence that the concern to Harrington, while embrac- manistic imagination...
...Harrington overcame the psychic toll ers exist...
...From the Je- fought over the slim socialist pickings of ther "clarification of thought" were suits at Saint Louis University High the 1950s...
...Isserman also takes Har- versity Press...
...the 1970s Harrington finally assumed mong book titles, surely They mean that death is not an experiThomas's role as moral leader of the Being Dead ranks with the ence, properly so called, but they find non-Communist Left, as cofounder of A most intriguing...
...While undergoyoung militants were naive about the ing an "identity politics" with which he ing treatment for cancer in 1985, HarSoviets was surely accurate, but his resid- was never fully comfortable...
...He would Catholic Worker in the early 1950s...
...Out his Greenwich Village neighbors, and were more appealing to segments of the of such concerns has sprung much thethe excluded America of the poverty- nation than his own claims...
...Who can teach us that which ble comparison with objects or pheratic party...
...Cardinal New- Magdalene College...
...Harrington never under- back to tell about...
...without exception, must face this reality...
...They must invent Though he never found the mass base and catching a fleeting sight of the title, new terms that are themselves unsatisfor "conscience politics" that he had long cannot but stop and wonder...
...The one role that all of us, withof success but remained haunted by in- out exception, will one day be called to ternecine warfare on the Left...
...This "Oedipal reacitself...
...Ismemoir From Union Square to Rome) was conservative Republicanism of Ohio serman's detailed treatment of HarringCommonweal 26 July 14, 2000 ton's struggles with Tom Hayden over cies he believed to be both "insane and ringtori s religious life seriously, treatdrafts of the Port Huron Statement (the cruel...
...Yet Isserman shows how HarThe Other American stature as an accessible and generous rington's quick and agile mind, coupled The Life of Michael Harrington leader of the American Left...
...He is the author of The Catholic Workers by dramatically branman, one of Wills's truth-telling heroes, Stripping of the Altars and Saints and Sin- dishing a membership card in the Young thought the life of the church involved ners: A History of the Popes, both published People's Socialist League...
...When the Being Dead enact, but to which we shall come as igSocialist party peevishly tried to sabo- Jim Crace norant neophytes...
...Is the author perCommonweal 2 7 July 14, 2000...
...Critics and middle-class Irish Catholicism and civic- acolyte of Max Shachtman, leader of one admirers alike who gathered around mindedness placed them near the cen- of the numerous splinter groups that the lectern after the talk to pursue fur- ter of a vital community...
...This is the one con- his hands and glances at the jacket: Being tic voters embraced a leader whose poli- dition for which no instructors, no teach- Dead, by Jim Crace...
...ated to guide them, but leaders of the Square...
...lic library, ambulating through the stacks possible experience...
...Eamon Duffy is Reader in Church History in siastical authority except ignoble and the University of Cambridge and Fellow of In 1952, however, he shocked fellow overbearing self-interest...
...The same locale that served as The child of staunch Democrats, while fledgling Students for a Democratic Sothe springboard for Dorothy Day's rad- at The College of the Holy Cross Har- ciety (SDS) failed to pass the Shachtical journey (as described in her 1938 rington was for a time enamored of the manites' anti-Communist litmus test...
...fable, undescribable, and beyond possierted real influence within the Democ- What folly...
...He shows shared by relatively few was the meatext, Harrington offered an analysis of how Harrington surmounted the "Old sure of his vocation as a witness, if not a poverty that was both reasoned and im- Left" infighting of the 1950s and 1960s- prophet...
...one-year stint at Yale Law School...
...At a monologue, which attributes no worth have hated this book...
...nally left the Catholic Worker and the church for good, Dorothy Day was reportedly relieved that theology, not a woman, was the issue, though accordLEADER WITHOUT A FOLLOWING ing to Isserman the young Harrington rarely lacked for female companionship as Catholic or socialist...
...stages of LBJ's War on Poverty...
...tive radical's greatest gifts, yet his un- immensely beautiful and comforting...
...In response the Democrats began ing his apostate Catholicism not as a veshistoric 1962 manifesto of SDS) is grip- their long retreat from issues of deep tige but as an ongoing source of his huping...
...Yet Harrington's ap- white American males in the postwar pearances at Maryhouse reflected his decade...
...o passioned...
...the final stop on Harringtori s reverse Harringtori s wanderings were not unpilgrimage from Catholic radical to so- like those of many relatively privileged cialist agnostic...
...highly-and the character of his politics, rington occasionally spoke Harrington grew up in the 1930s in which did not inspire the same universal I at Friday night meetings comfortable neighborhoods in the West admiration...
Vol. 127 • July 2000 • No. 13
