Struggles of an American Socialist
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Struggles of an American Socialist The Long-Distance Runner: An Autobiography By Michael Harrington Holt. 260 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Roseland, the ancient haven of...
...Louis, I went into a decayed, beautiful house, near the Mississippi River, which stank of stopped-up toilets, dead rats, and human misery...
...During the first two days, the effects are mild enough to allow him to write...
...Typically, I was led from a practical immersion in Marx, to reading Hegel and Kant, and then Fichte and Schelling...
...The group he heads...
...Kennedy's beautifully written and delivered speech made more than one member of the crowd regret the personal failings that had closed the White House door to an authentic, passionate crusader for social justice...
...Among those who spoke in praise of Mike were Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan of the Brooklyn Roman Catholic diocese...
...Although in its current phase much of that magazine can readily be confused with Norman Podhoretz' Commentary, it deserves extended quotation on this occasion (even if it has the publication date of The Other A merica and Harrington's age wrong): "Liberal America, it has been said, makes room for only one notable Socialist at atime...
...William ("Wimpy") Winpisinger, president of the International Association of Machinists and unabashed member of Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America (DSA...
...Moreover, we face unwillingly a common adversary...
...I had come there as a temporary and opportunistic social worker trying to save up enough money to go to New York and be a poet and Bohemian...
...Unlike his famed predecessors Norman Thomas and Eugene V. Debs, Mike Harrington never ran for President...
...The author of The Other America remains ambivalent about thebook, regarding it as an interruption in his progress as an intellectual...
...His 1960 book, The Other America, reminded Americans that a generation after FDR, perilously close to 'one-third of a nation' was still ill-fed and ill-housed...
...Dwight Macdonald was inspired to write a 40-page New Yorker article that spread the message to a larger public, and a President was moved as well by the grim realities of poverty that Mike evoked...
...It was a terrible shock to my privileged, middle-class nostrils...
...The consequenceofJohnF...
...and—the inevitable costar of the evening—Senator Edward M. Kennedy...
...Nevertheless, Mike writes affectionately about his colleagues and students at the City University of New York's Queens College, whose Political Science Department has been his academic home for the last 15 years...
...When the International eventually yielded to Mike's entreaties, the United States—with possibly a total of 20,000 Socialists—became the only country having dual representation...
...I do not often refer to an author by his first name, much less its informal variant...
...In Coming Issues Phoebe Pettingell on Penelope Fitzgerald's "Charlotte Mew and Her Friends" and Julia Briggs' "A Woman of Passion: The life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924" Written under the shadow of death, The Long-Distance Runner is a political memoir to be read and treasured by admirers of the unique phenomenon who is Michael Harrington...
...In 1963, Mike published the work that made him famous, TheOtherAmerica...
...has helped to rescue Democrats from neoconservatism and the democratic Left from political irrelevance...
...Eleanor Holmes Norton, head of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission under Jimmy Carter...
...New York City Council Member Ruth Messinger...
...The obstacles he has encountered have not discouraged him: "I have been running toward that goal now for almost 40 years, and I am not tired, even though the finish line keeps receding...
...By contrast, in the Socialist International—a loose formation of generously defined democratic socialists— he is esteemed as the intellectual equal of the likes of Willy Brandt, Olof Palme, Mario Soares, and François Mitterrand...
...Although I have never before mentioned it in print, I have myself struggled with cancer for seven years...
...The last chapter of this affecting memoir, "Life and Death," deals candidly with the cancer of the esophagus that now afflicts him...
...To add to the irony of his situation, he had to lobby furiously to secure DSA affiliation with the International...
...Jack Sheinkman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers...
...Some 600 members of the respectable Left gathered to celebrate Michael Harrington's 60th birthday, as well as the launching of a new foundation to carry on his work and the publication of his 15th book...
...But at the same time, it gave me at least as much pleasure to speak to a group of steelworkers in Canada or machinists in the United States as it did to trade scholarly small talk with fellow academics...
...A painfully honest writer, Mike blames himself for the inadequate appreciation accorded the New Left by the Old, and muses with understandable sadness over the absence in U.S...
...Edward Broadbent, theleaderof Canada'sNew Democratic Party...
...When Mike refers to the standard treatments—surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (cut, burn, and poison)—my feelings go beyond sympathy...
...I love giving rousing speeches —and being a pedant...
...politics of a force comparable to Canada's New Democrats, let alone a Socialist party strong enough to form a government from time to time, like those in Western Europe...
...In our own time this has surely been Michael Harrington...
...He underestimates his own achievements...
...Mike indeed combines the talents of the activist and the erudite explicator of social and political phenomena...
...For after this country's Socialist Party split over Vietnam, the larger faction, which became the Social Democrats USA, was automatically admitted to the International, and Mike's minority Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (later the DSA) was left out in the cold...
...The book by the 32-year old Harrington had at least as much influence on the KennedyJohnson Presidency as Thomas had on the New Deal...
...I am," Mike begins his book, "a long-distance runner...
...As evidence I cite words of praise from an unexpected source, the New Republic...
...Kennedy's determination to eliminate these ills was his successor's "unconditional" War Against Poverty...
...But he has played as large a role in the American political discourse...
...It's been a problem for him: "I have never been able to decide whether I am primarily an agitator or a thinker...
...Here is how the race started: " On a rainy day in 1949 in St...
...But Mike is an old friend, a colleague on the editorial board of Dissent and my leader in DSA...
...An hour or so later...
...Here he has for the most part been dismissed as heading a tiny grouplet on the Left...
...the final two days, about which he is reticent, create disabling misery...
...He spends four days of each month at New York's Albert Einstein hospital, where an IV drips into his vein apotent platinum derivative...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Roseland, the ancient haven of New York's dime-a-dance set, now a disco, entertained an unusual clientele on the evening of June30...
...it dawned on me that I should spend the rest of my life putting an end to that house and all that it symbolized...
...After this moment of pleasant irony, he delivered a characteristically passionate restatement of his lifelong devotion to socialism and declared his intention of dedicating his remaining energies not to celebrating the past but to bringing about a better future...
...Much of The Long-Distance Runner concerns the strange dichotomy between its author's stature at home and abroad...
...Mike's response began with thanks for the scientific precision that had marked previous speakers' praise of his life and achievements...
...All the reviews were favorable, including the one I contributed to the old New York Herald- Tribune Sunday book supplement...
Vol. 71 • July 1988 • No. 13
