Michael Harrington and the Debs-Thomas Tradition
Isserman, Maurice
The death of Michael Harrington in 1989 marked a melancholy turning point in the history of twentieth-century American socialism. Not since Eugene Debs made his initial run as the Socialist...
...Leaders are as important for what they symbolize as for what they accomplish...
...I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I could lead you in, some one else would lead you out...
...He communicated this feeling that he was going to be very successful in whatever he did...
...Notwithstanding their meager ranks and empty coffers, the Socialists seemed unusually well positioned to take advantage of the expanding political opportunities of the new decade...
...A local newspaper recorded the response when he spoke on the campus of Savannah State College in 1966: A tall man with blue eyes in a ruddy face, Michael Harrington has not lost the eagerness of his youthful college days . . . His words tumble out...
...And the 1970s did not prove a propitious time for creating a coalition of "the three Georges...
...But measured by the relative significance of American socialism as a movement in Thomas' and Harrington's lifetimes (not to mention in Debs's), Harrington's modesty was appropriate...
...It is true that he lacked both Debs's proletarian credentials and Thomas's roots in the evangelical reform tradition...
...That he was destined for something out of the ordinary was, however, evident early on...
...Many years later, Harrington cited a passage from the speech as his "favorite quotation on what it means to be a true democrat...
...and even more than Debs, he found sympathetic listeners within the Protestant middle class...
...From the 1930s through the 1960s, Shachtman's greatest political asset was his ability to attract talented young disciples...
...Socialism U.S.A...
...But he saw no contradiction between the personal impulses that had led him to the bohemian quarters of lower Manhattan and the larger social transformation to which he was committed...
...Or perhaps they just have less of an artistic temperment...
...Instead, it was a Republican president who took the oath of office that January and one who was, moreover, a sworn and determined enemy of the welfare state and all its works...
...But it is a mistake to read 104 • DISSENT Michael Harrington back into the very early 1960s the categorical rejection of Harrington's views that characterized the later New Left...
...To discard Corn...
...It was instead closely related to the outsider's stance that Harrington had chosen for his own cultural orientation...
...Virtually the only constant in the movement's history has been its tradition of charismatic leadership...
...At the start of the 1960s, SDS co-founder Tom Hayden named Harrington as one of three Americans over the age of thirty trusted by the new generation of campus activists (Norman Thomas was another...
...And that direction, Shachtman now argued, consisted of the "realignment" of the Democratic party leftward, forcing out the "Dixiecrats" and other conservative elements and strengthening the influence of organized labor and other liberal constituencies...
...Kahn dismissed it as the kind of place "where the Village Voice crowd, the [Bella] Abzugites, [and] the New Classniks hang out...
...The review attracted President John F. Kennedy's attention and inspired the first steps toward what, under President Lyndon Johnson, became the War on Poverty...
...Emphasis follows emphasis...
...He presented his ideas in a form at once rational and pragmatic, but also visionary and uplifting...
...We thought of him as a golden boy," James Finn, a University of Chicago classmate and later a friend of Harrington's in New York, recalled in a recent interview: "[H]e was blond and very young and he had this uninterrupted success academically...
...In a memoir entitled The Long Distance Runner, published a year before his death, Michael Harrington would refer to himself in passing as a "lesser Norman Thomas...
...Workers found their wages eroded by inflation and their economic security undermined by global markets, deindustrialization, and corporate downsizing...
...Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theater, encountered Harrington in 1954 in the White Horse...
...The "conscious working-class cohesiveness" of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath was undermined throughout the industrial west by the "combination of secular boom, full employment and a society of genuine mass consumption...
...Affable and eloquent, he swiftly gained prominence within anti-Stalinist political circles—and within the drinking crowd that gathered nightly at the White Horse Tavern, a West Village hangout for accomplished writers, aspiring folksingers, would-be revolutionaries, and assorted other bohemians...
...While Harrington retained a "professionally optimistic tone" in public, in private conversation with long-time political confidantes like Dissent editor Irving Howe, he could be decidedly more skeptical...
...Although their ultimate political goal was in the process of shifting from revolutionary socialism to social democracy, their operational model remained in many respects classically Leninist...
...A new field of historical inquiry has taken shape in recent years, one that may someday come to be called, in the fashion of these things, "the new history ofAmerican social democracy...
...At least once in the 1980s Harrington gave public voice to such doubts, in a talk he gave at Princeton University in November 1984 on the occasion of the centennial of Norman Thomas's birth...
...DSOC, which became the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982, wore itself out in what proved a futile effort to reinvigorate (and, increasingly, to substitute for) the demoralized liberal and labor defenders of traditional Democratic reformism...
...They were active in the movement against nuclear testing...
...In the midst of what turned out to be a forced march toward neoconservatism, rightwing Shachtmanites sneered at what they regarded as Harrington's dilettantish flirtation with the culturally suspect politics of the new class...
...This constituency was based in a "new class" of "scientists, technicians, teachers and professionals in the public sector of the society," predisposed "by education and work experience" to appreciate the virtues of social planning, and potentially a powerful "ally of the poor and the organized workers . . . ." Coming out of urban and suburban reform politics, supporters of civil rights, civil liberties, and anti-war causes, the conscience constituency was the core of the "new politics" movement that would have a dramatic impact on the political culture and fortunes of the Democratic party in the years to come...
...Rather, in the long run, such reforms could serve as steps toward the democratic transformation of that society...
...Although he would later be a critic of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of the revolutionary potential of the "youth culture" of the 1960s, Harrington's own radicalism at the turn of the decade contained within it a distinct countercultural strain...
...The best and the brightest of them, from Irving Howe to Irving Kristol, sooner or later rejected the substance of Shachtman's teachings, but few regretted the rigorous political training with which he had endowed them...
...Drawing on his experiences criss-crossing the country as an itinerant socialist agitator in the late 1950s, Harrington concluded that an "other America" (this was the first time he used that phrase in print), that is, an alternative America—a nation of generous democratic values and artistic and social creativity, a nation not "dominated by gadgets and mass media"—lay just beneath the surface of mainstream culture...
...Had Kennedy succeeded in his challenge, and replaced Carter in the White House in January 1981, Harrington's long-cherished ambition of creating a "left wing of the possible" might have come to fruition...
...It had been only a half-dozen years since the enormous postwar strike wave of 1946, and only four years since Walter Reuther, former socialist and current leader of the million-plus members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), had threatened to abandon the Democratic party for independent labor politics...
...Some of Harrington's erstwhile comrades in the Socialist party concluded that as good socialists—which to them meant socialists capable of working effectively within the confines of the actually existing labor movement—they could no longer either afford to be, or to be seen in the company of, good pacifists, good feminists, good friends of the poor, or anything else at odds with the prevailing political and cultural winds...
...And although I and others have argued that the history of the latter is not simply a tale of disloyal adherence to a foreign state and a totalitarian ideology, nonetheless, givenAmerican communism's fatal entanglement with the Soviet Union, it is not difficult to understand the causes for the movement's ultimate demise...
...I am not a Labor Leader," Debs declared on that occasion: I do not want you to follow me or anyone else...
...They had footholds of influence within the labor movement, or at least within union staff, from the old needle trades to the New York teacher's union to the UAW...
...Western capitalism had entered what Eric Hobsbawm has recently referred to as its "golden decades...
...It was a bleak November for Harrington, both politically and personally...
...Socialism would come—not in Harrington's lifetime perhaps, but some day and inevitably—as people awakened to the claims of "moral solidarity" and the joyous potential of "community and meaningful work...
...In any case, thoughout the 1960s, if there was one book that a not-particularly-bookish generation of young radicals had in common, it was Harrington's The Other America...
...In a famous speech in 1910, Eugene Debs disavowed the role of revolutionary tribune of the people...
...As in traditional Marxism, there was a teleological element to Harrington's socialism, but it was no longer (if it had ever really been) based on his acceptance of some iron law about the falling rate of profit or the like...
...The organizational fortunes of American socialism swung upward and downward, repeatedly and dramatically, in the years from 1900 through 1989...
...Mike is handsome and doesn't rave in extravagant adjectives about what he likes, but smiles acceptingly, and his approbation is highly valued...
...Here he differed from Debs and Thomas...
...In May 1960, in an article in the Catholic weekly Commonweal, Harrington argued that economic prosperity was no guarantee of political complacency, whatever the theorists who proclaimed the end of ideology might choose to believe...
...When the next big depression came along, they believed, it would bring with it a resurgence of left-leaning rank-and-file caucuses in the big industrial unions, as well as independent labor parties in states such as Michigan and New York...
...If they participate at all in shaping their collective future, it is most likely by opening a computer-generated envelope from some committee in New York or Washington . . . . While Harrington said nothing about his own role in the socialist movement, it was hard to avoid the implication that he would be the end of the line...
...if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this 100 • DISSENT Michael Harrington capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are...
...His involvement with radical politics—first under the tutelage of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement, then in a succession of obscure socialist youth groups—began shortly after he arrived in Greenwich Village...
...When Harrington spoke to an audience of several thousand students at a NewYork City rally co-sponsored by SDS in March 1962, the Village Voice reported that he received a "huge stomping ovation" for his criticisms of American foreign policy...
...Harrington often spoke before trade union audiences, and with good effect...
...I think that empowered people...
...When he became chairman of the board of the League for Industrial Democracy (LID) in the fall of 1964, James Wechsler lauded him in the New York Post as "a quiet thunderer" and "a man for all seasons," predicting he would emerge as the unifier of the "scattered legions among the liberal intellectual community, the civil rights activists and the more enlightened sectors of organized labor...
...When Harrington returned to the United States in December 1963 the paperback edition was on its way to breaking the hundred-thousand-copy mark in sales, and he found himself a literary and political celebrity...
...He is "Mr...
...The Other America received respectful attention from mainstream critics as well, although it enjoyed only modest sales in the months after its publication...
...The party of Debs and Norman Thomas has simply not attracted the same kind of attention lavished on the party of Earl Browder and William Z. Foster...
...His political career, spanning nearly forty years, is a case study of protracted historical irony...
...A transcript of a barroom chat with Michael Harrington," an admiring journalist once noted, "would read like the first draft of a slightly discursive New Republic essay...
...Rather, he assumed that what most people wanted, and lacked even in "the affluent society" of the 1950s and early 1960s, was some version of what he had already achieved in his personal life—that is, the power of self-definition...
...In the 1950s, the Shachtmanites were admired on the non-communist left for the uncompromising character of their anti-Stalinism and their anti-McCarthyism...
...Harrington's "ardor" proved infectious...
...Although Thomas lacked Debs's credentials as a labor organizer, he was an orator of equal power, and brought his own distinctive aura of grace to the role...
...Both of his predecessors had combined the roles of down-to-earth organizer and inspired moral tribune...
...He is so imbued with his topic one feels he can hardly wait to give one knowledge...
...Not only enriched them, but gave them some framework of "what I think is right and what my values are...
...The personal and the political collided with a vengeance in the SP 's internal factionalism, and Harrington's outsider stance came to be treated as a form of class treachery...
...As he recalled in a recent interview: I could take Harrington out and sell him...
...What Harrington added to the mix was the role of policy specialist...
...Shachtman told a gathering of youthful followers in 1954 that young people who have seen only the conservative and corrupted working class as it has been for recent years . . . do not know what the working class is like . . . Mil but a few more years it must surely show itself as it can be—the leader in the struggle for its own freedom and that of all society...
...In the pages that follow, I offer some tentative conclusions about what it meant—for Harrington and for the American left —for him to have played the role of a "lesser Norman Thomas...
...When Dave McReynolds, a young Los Angeles socialist, visited New York in 1953, he encountered Harrington holding forth in the back room of the White Horse...
...The grandchildren of men and women who once stayed late into the night at the Grange FALL • 1996 • 107 Michael Harrington hall or the union hall, talking intensely with each other about what kind of society they wanted to build, now stay home watching TV...
...A few days before the Princeton event, Ronald Reagan had won a decisive re-election victory, smashing any remaining illusions on the left that his 1980 triumph over Carter had been an aberration...
...His ideas took on force from his persona...
...Debs nonetheless remained a larger-than-life symbol of republican manhood and redemptive martyrdom to his many admirers...
...Harrington was at bottom a romantic and a dreamer, for all of his emphasis on the practical and the possible...
...If anyone could have pulled off that role— and had there not been a war in Vietnam to complicate the task—it would have been Harrington...
...If the "other Americas" —the alternative America of intellectuals and students and artists and his Greenwich Village neighbors, and the excluded America of the povertystricken and the dispossessed—could unite in coalition with a democratic labor movement, they would represent a powerful force for social justice...
...First Debs, then Thomas, then Harrington have been honored as a social conscience by millions of Americans...
...And indeed, seven years after his death, not only is there no obvious inheritor to the Debs-Thomas-Harrington mantle, but there seem to be no active contenders for the title...
...If we are indeed at the end of that dynasty, it cannot bode well for the prospects of the American left...
...A dedicated vanguard of socialist cadre needed to give history a nudge in the right direction...
...Dear Comrade," Helen Keller wrote him in 1919, after his wartime conviction under the Espionage Act: Once more you are going to prison for upholding the liberties of the people . . . . I have long loved you because you are an apostle of brotherhood and freedom...
...Harrington was an enthusiastic proponent of Shachtman's realignment strategy...
...Harrington's role at SDS's Port Huron conference later that spring, where he took Tom Hayden and others to task for what he regarded as insufficient anticommunism, is well known and has overshadowed his involvement with the early New Left...
...Instead, a host of social and cultural issues, from gun control to abortion, came to dominate political debate...
...An audience of students, faculty, social workers, and others rose in tribute at the end of the lecture...
...Jimmy's, a bar on Sheridan Square, had replaced the White Horse as Harrington's favorite watering hole in Greenwich Village...
...In 1962, a revived YPSL had as many or more members than the nascent Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...Not for the first time in the history of the American left, folly prevailed...
...Already distinguished by the appearance of such works as Nick Salvatore's 1982 biography of Debs, Steve Fraser's 1991 biography of Sidney Hillman, and Nelson Lichtenstein's 1995 biography of Walter Reuther, this new history helps redress an imbalance in the existing historiography of the American left...
...His youthful bohemianism was not shaped primarily by a desire to shock or deride his elders or mainstream culture...
...Keynesian fiscal policies lost their power to stimulate continued economic expansion, and liberal social welfare policies could no longer be funded out of an ever-expanding economic pie...
...108 • DISSENT...
...When Harrington became a socialist in 1952, it was, to be sure, the eve of Eisenhower's presidency and the height of McCarthyism...
...asked once by a high school classmate why he didn't brush his hair more often, he replied simply, "Poets don't...
...As many Democratic party hopefuls would soon find to their dismay, and Republicans to their advantage, the waning of the "golden decades" of Western capitalism increasingly pitted the followers of George Meany and George Wallace against those of George McGovern...
...At the start of the 1960s Harrington still retained traces of his midwestern accent...
...Loyal and informed socialists differed with all of them—and frequently were right...
...By mid-decade, the only sign of life shown by many DSA locals was in turning out a crowd whenever Michael Harrington came to town to speak...
...But it was Debs's picture, not that of Morris Hillquit or Victor Berger, that found a place of honor in the homes of garment workers on the Lower East Side, coal miners in West Virginia, and tenant farmers in Oklahoma...
...DSOC enjoyed some genuine if still modest successes in the next decade, growing to a membership triple that of the SP in the 1960s, attracting a number of prominent trade unionists into its ranks, and playing a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jimmy Carter sentiment at the Democratic party's 1978 mid-term convention...
...Thus the hero is in control without needing to be in command...
...But if there was a role for a single prominent democratic socialist spokesman in the 1980s, there didn't prove to be much of one for a democratic socialist movement...
...Far beyond it...
...proved hard to resist...
...Like Debs, Thomas could appeal to a broad workingclass constituency, ranging from black and white southern sharecroppers to Jewish tailors...
...As the SP headed toward a showdown in 1972, one veteran of the 1930s wrote to a party publication warning of the consequences of factional attacks on Harrington: Whatever reservations some comrades may have concerning some of Corn...
...he told New York Post columnist James Wechsler before the book came out that he would be happy if it sold 2,500 copies...
...And in 1973, he split with his former Shachtmanite comrades to form a new group, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC...
...To the extent that there was a visible and explicitly radical political challenge offered from the left, it tended to take the form of one or another particularist variation of"identity politics," at odds with Harrington's inclusionary vision of coalition-building...
...Although in the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt would steal some of his proposals and most of his voters, for a moment Thomas, like Debs before him, seemed the incarnation of the nation's egalitarian conscience...
...Born in St...
...That is not to say that the preWorld War I Socialist party (SP), with its strong local organizations, regional traditions, international ties, and internal debates and rivalries, was ever simply a personal vehicle for Debs's political vision or ambitions...
...When the dust had settled, Harrington remained in demand as a speaker by SDS chapters, and kept up friendly contacts with a number of Port Huron alumni...
...Not that he expected (or wanted) the masses to "drop out" and move to Greenwich Village...
...For every study published on the history of American socialism in the past half-century, there have probably been a dozen books devoted to American communism...
...Then in early 1963, shortly after Harrington's departure for Paris, Dwight Macdonald's fiftypage review of The Other America appeared in the New Yorker...
...These expectations were, of course, disappointed...
...You can point out, that's right, I'm a socialist because of Michael Harrington...
...Nothing Thomas ever wrote had an impact comparable to that of Harrington's The Other America on the War on Poverty...
...Many working- and middleclass Americans concluded in the course of the 1970s that the gains registered by the "Other America" must have come at their personal expense, spurring tax revolts and antiwelfare sentiment...
...Spent the evening listening to Mike Harrington tell of his experiences in the Catholic Worker," McReynolds wrote to a friend back in California, "and realize how terribly superficial my whole life is...
...Harrington, who had campaigned for Bobby Kennedy in the California primary in 1968, was an early and valued supporter of Ted Kennedy's presidential primary challenge to Carter's renomination in 1980...
...Throughout his adolescence and early adulthood he had studied various roles and tried them on...
...Harrington departed the Catholic Worker for 102 • DISSENT Michael Harrington the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL), the youth group of Norman Thomas's Socialist party, known on the left as the "yipsels...
...Nineteen sixty-four proved a year of continuing triumphs for Harrington...
...How else could this product of the St...
...Like his predecessors, he believed that to awaken the conscience or change the consciousness of a nation, one had to build an organization, start a publication, speak on a thousand street corners to crowds of hundreds (or tens, if necessary), recruiting one's followers from those converted by the sound of one's voice and the strength of one's arguments...
...Harrington spent many years thinking about and preparing himself to carry on the Debs/Thomas tradition...
...Harrington responded with a characteristically encouraging message to his followers, declaring that "there is hope even in this year zero of Ronald Reagan" of assembling a "coalition embracing the potential majority" in defense of the reforms secured in the New Deal and the Great Society...
...Harrington and the Shachtmanites rejoined the Socialist party at the end of the 1950s...
...The reasons for the failure of democratic socialism to establish itself as a serious force in American political life in the twentieth century are not nearly as self-evident...
...An honorable, even heroic vision, it was also, as Harrington reluctantly conceded in the last years of his life, one for which there remained precious little room in American political culture...
...With the Socialist party offering backhanded support to Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential race, Harrington resigned his chairmanship in protest...
...The effects of a Harrington speech, however persuasive, were apt to wear off quickly in the absence of a sizeable and credible movement that could channel the zeal of new recruits in politically rewarding directions...
...There he recruited disciples and tried out ideas...
...But he went on to carve out his own niche in the history of American social democracy, as a spokesman for what in 1968 he would dub the "conscience constituency...
...In speech after speech and book after book, he displayed his command of the ever-expanding literature of social welfare policy debates without ever succumbing to the dry, academic style of what has come to be known as the "policy wonk...
...They had friends in high places in the civil rights movement, including Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph...
...The FALL • 1996 • 103 Michael Harrington triumph of "mass culture" was neither complete nor secure in the United States...
...Not since Eugene Debs made his initial run as the Socialist candidate for president of the United States in 1900 had the movement lacked an emblematic leading figure, someone who both voiced and seemed to embody the values of brotherhood and social justice that prefigured the coming of the cooperative commonwealth...
...Yipsels played a major role within the Student Peace Union (SPU) and were on cordial terms with leading activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC...
...But a former Presbyterian minister named Norman Thomas would soon be invested with the "mantle of Debs" by his comrades...
...Harrington— or to place him in such a position that he could not function properly—would be an act of unforgiveable folly...
...Harrington, who came to know Thomas well, described him as someone whose "very bearing seems to incarnate a peculiarly American and Protestant sense of social justice and personal integrity...
...There are people of equivalent eloquence and personal charisma on the left today, but they are either more deeply embedded in their academic careers than Harrington ever chose to be, or, if involved in active political life, more narrowly focused on personal electoral ambitions...
...Just as their elders had been swept up in the industrial organizing campaigns of the 1930s and the wildcat strikes of the Second World War, so the new generation of Shachtmanites looked forward to the moment when their talents as organizers and agitators would be tapped by a revived, militant labor movement...
...Before an audience of faculty, students, and veterans of the socialist movement, Harrington offered a sober assessment of the changes that had taken place in American politics since the days of the Socialist party's greatest influence: The radical republican notion of "citizenship" which both Debs and Thomas incarnated, is disappearing...
...Harrington was not particularly disappointed by this reception...
...Louis in 1928, raised in an atmosphere of pious Catholicism and pragmatic Democratic ward politics, educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, Harrington had developed a kind of triumphal aura by the time he moved to NewYork City at the age of twenty-one...
...When he talked of creating a "democratic social order," it came out sounding, to the delight of listeners, like democratic social ardor...
...Through the mid-1950s, Harrington and his comrades clung to a fundamentalist Marxist belief in the inevitability of capitalist economic crisis...
...The result, the Shachtmanites hoped, would be the American equivalent of the British Labour party...
...most of it is chatter, but it's never the solemn defeatism of the [San] Remo [a rival drinking establishment on Bleecker Street] . . . . Mike is heroic . . . . That is, he takes in the environment and its people and includes them in a generalization of which he is the center...
...When Harrington's book was published in 1962, the Village Voice, with a certain proprietary pride, hailed him in a front page article as a "vital voice of conscience for our times...
...Early in 1964 he got a call from Sargent Shriver to come to Washington to help plan the new administration's antipoverty programs...
...But he brought to it a significant dimension of his own...
...Perhaps most important, they had outposts established on the nation's campuses, from Howard University to the University of Chicago to Berkeley...
...Had he not left the country early in 1963 for a year in Paris, Harrington would have had more opportunity to smooth over the ill feelings from Port Huron...
...But this was, at best, a defensive optimism—a far cry from the ambitious social agenda he advocated in the 1960s and 1970s, when he had argued that "the real task, for the democratic Left and for the nation, is now to go beyond the New Deal...
...and Norman Thomas from 1932-1965...
...According to Howe, Harrington in his last years came to see socialism as "increasingly problematic," less a practical goal than a kind of Kantian regulative ideal, a moral law commanding behavior...
...at the same time, they managed to irritate practically everyone who agreed to work with them in common cause by the shameless self-aggrandizement of their organizational maneuvering...
...His message was that practical reforms—the laws and policies that made life easier for ordinary people in the short run—need not be linked to acceptance of the existing political and economic FALL • 1996 • 105 Michael Harrington arrangements of capitalist society...
...But they retained from their former perspective two key elements: first, the belief that contemporary politics could best be understood in terms of class interest and conflict, and second, a strong sense of organizational destiny...
...A photograph of Michael Harrington taken when he was a sixteen-year-old undergraduate shows him sitting before a typewriter at a desk crowded with books, staring into the distance with Promethean solemnity, a carefully composed tableau of the artist as a young man...
...Still, for all their sectarian posturing, they could lay claim to a plausible rationale for political optimism...
...Courtesy of the Archives of the College of the Holy Cross...
...From early on, Harrington had a gift for the artful pose...
...Harrington's dream of reviving a socialist movement with the vitality of those led by his predecessors ran aground in the 1950s on the reefs of economic prosperity and workingclass loyalty to the Democratic party, and then, several decades later, ran aground again on the equally treacherous shoals of economic hard times and working-class dissaffection with the Democratic party...
...But the significance of Port Huron should not be exaggerated...
...He first learned about his vocation as professional revolutionary, not from any reading of the works of Marx or Lenin (that would come later), but from the novels of John Dos Passos, Andre Malraux, Manes Sperber, and Victor Serge...
...as Nick Salvatore notes, "he crystallized for many the meaning of Socialism . . . ." When Debs died in 1926, he left no heir apparent within the movement...
...And on his drive to Princeton from his home in New York, Harrington discovered a lump on his neck that shortly after would be diagnosed as cancerous...
...Except among the wealthy, economic self-interest ceased to be a good indicator of voting behavior in American politics...
...Throughout the Reagan years, Harrington continued to attract enthusiastic audiences to his public speeches, and won thousands of new listeners in his role as a National Public Radio commentator...
...In the movement, Harrington apprenticed himself to a series of knowledgeable mentors, including Thomas, Bayard Rustin, and Max Shachtman, acquiring a repertoire of gestures and rhetorical devices that served him well in a lifetime of public speaking (from Shachtman, his most influential teacher, he even picked up a hint of Yiddish inflection...
...If "knowledge" was part of what Harrington had to offer, it was knowledge made all the more attractive for being accompanied by a sense of intimacy, fellowship, and shared purpose—as if each and every listener, however previously naive, apathetic, or politically inexperienced they may have been, were now being individually welcomed as a regular in Harrington's circle around the table in the backroom of the White Horse...
...From there he moved on to theYoung Socialist League (YSL), an affiliate of Max Shachtman's Independent Socialist League (ISL...
...In the 1960s, elderly and ailing but still active politically, Thomas would anoint Harrington as his successor...
...Louis middle class and a good Jesuit education have successfully re-invented himself as the heir to Debs and Thomas...
...For years I have thought of you as a dauntless explorer going toward the dawn, and, like a humble adventurer, I have followed in the trail of your footsteps . . . . Whether he liked it or not, Debs exercised what his contemporary Max Weber called "charismatic authority...
...Harrington continued to insist that the organized working class had to be a key component of any effective movement for social change...
...But his speeches and writings had a particular appeal to college-educated, middleclass liberals...
...There would be no depression in the 1950s to serve as catalyst to industrial strife and left-wing insurgency...
...By decade's end the Shachtmanites had abandoned much of their Marxist millennialism...
...In early adulthood Harrington began a strenuous pursuit of the cultural and political margins of American life...
...Harrington's actions and views, his importance to the SP is incommensurable...
...In terms of his contribution to American social policy, that is clearly too modest a judgment...
...In the early 1970s he sometimes spoke of creating a coalition of followers of the "three Georges": McGovern, Meany, and Wallace (in the latter case, of course, it was the populist rather than the racist aspects of Wallace's appeal he hoped the left could learn to tap...
...Harrington's embrace of socialism in the early 1950s might thus be seen as an act of artistic self-creation as well as ideological conversion...
...But it was also a moment when the trade union movement represented a larger percentage of the American working class than ever before (or, as it turned out, since...
...Skip Roberts, a Vietnam veteran, union organizer, and Democratic party activist who joined DSOC in 1973, had always been proud to identify himself in public as a "Michael Harrington socialist...
...Nothing to be ashamed of, or try to hide...
...With the escalation of the war in Vietnam in 1965 and afterward, the issues of communism and anticommunism that had been debated at Port Huron took on new force...
...Mike is part of the Jimmy's crowd," Tom Kahn (a long-time Shachtmanite and newly hired George Meany speechwriter) told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal in 1972...
...in the seventies, just as Eugene V. Debs was in 1917...
...But they were all absolutely essential to the party's 106 • DISSENT Michael Harrington image and growth...
...Although McReynolds and Harrington were on the opposite side of a factional battle at the time, Harrington's charm FALL • 1996 • 101 Michael Harrington Michael Harrington, Holy Cross Purple, March 1947...
...Though smitten by Harrington (romantically as well as politically), she described him in a journal entry with a certain shrewd detachment: At the White Horse, Mike Harrington and his friends talk...
...For many years his interests were more literary than political...
...And, of course, the Socialists had Michael Harrington...
...In his speeches and writings] he helped you see how you put things together...
...That doesn't mean that any of those comrades was flawless, nor immune to criticism...
...He was able, unlike any other figure on the American left in recent memory, to combine an intellectual analysis with a set of practical proposals...
...Little in Michael Harrington's early life suggested he was destined to inherit the mantle of Debs and Thomas...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
