Episode 21B - Michael Harrington: 10-Minute Profile

Michael Harrington was a writer and scholar primarily concerned with the problem of poverty within the otherwise affluent postwar 20th Century USA. He grew up in a Midwestern Irish-American family, and he attended parochial schools, where he excelled academically. Harrington moved to New York & became involved in the Catholic Worker movement, before he lost his faith and turned to more secular political organizations. He considered himself a socialist, but he downplayed those beliefs when he wrote a bestselling book aimed at liberal reformers entitled "The Other America: Poverty in the United States." That 1962 work became a bestseller that helped to inspire Pres. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. Harrington continued to speak out against economic inequality throughout his life. He founded Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) during the 1980s and remained its leader until his 1989 death from esophageal cancer at age 61. During the 21st Century, DSA experienced a boom in membership, but it also began taking controversial positions that some original members questioned. We conclude the episode by noting that Harrington's work exposing the neglected issue of American poverty remains relevant today, as the USA's unusual gap between relatively high average incomes & relatively low life expectancy continues to grow.

Transcript

“From Boomers to Millennials” provides a fresh look at 20th Century American history. Welcome to Episode 21B, entitled “Michael Harrington: 10-Minute Profile.” After our recent profile episode about Rachel Carson, here we will once again spotlight a key writer from the 1960s who helped set the agenda for social reforms.

            Author Michael Harrington brought to light the plight of the poor who were being left out of the American dream. He also became a key critic of the capitalism that he believed had brought about this economic inequality. Harrington was born into an Irish Catholic family in St. Louis, Missouri during February 1928. He attended parochial schools as a young man, and proved to be a very gifted student. He entered the College of Holy Cross in Massachusetts at just age 16, and he was only 19 years old when he obtained a bachelor’s degree from that Jesuit institution. After obtaining a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago, Harrington enrolled in Yale Law School, but he decided law was not for him, & dropped out after one year. He felt that becoming a writer who was directly involved in social activism would be a better way for him to make an impact on the world. He moved to New York City and got involved in the Catholic Worker Movement. Founded amid the Great Depression of the 1930s, this organization was dedicated to helping the poor. It also declared a pacifist stance on international affairs, and it required voluntary poverty for its members. 

I hope you will excuse a brief digression here, because to understand the Catholic Worker Movement, it helps to know something about its famous founder, Dorothy Day. She grew up as a rebellious daughter of a prosperous middle-class family. During the 1910s and 20s, she had been a suffragette, a secular socialist, and a bohemian. Yet Day then became a zealous convert to Catholicism during the 30s, and she co-created the Catholic Worker Movement as a vessel that would enable its members to put the church’s teachings into rigorous practice through austere lives of service to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden. This faith-based movement provided a path to those who felt secular reform movements lacked a grounding in Christian morality, but who also believed that the existing institutions of American Christianity were not doing enough to prioritize Jesus’s admonitions to help the poor.

            Michael Harrington wrote for the newspaper of the Catholic Worker movement from 1951 to 1953. However, he would not remain affiliated with the group, because he found himself unable to remain a devout believer in Catholicism. Although he lost his faith in the church, Harrington remained highly interested in left-wing political movements in general, and the fight against poverty in particular. He became involved in a group called the Independent Socialist League (or ISL), and his membership in this organization resulted in his name being added to an FBI watchlist. This was the 1950s, after all. However, the US government had little to fear, because the ISL had contempt for the Eastern bloc and labelled its Communist governments as exemplars of a “bureaucratic collectivism” deeply out of sync with its own vision of egalitarian socialism.

            Harrington became convinced that Socialist political parties were a waste of time, given the USA’s two-party political system. He tried to promote leftist ideas within the framework of the mid-20th century Democratic Party, which was (despite the lingering presence of Dixiecrats) generally the less reactionary major American political party. In order to further this agenda, Harrington researched and published a book in 1962 called The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which drew attention to the fact that, despite being one of the richest countries in the world & having experienced over a decade of very robust economic growth, the United States still contained a very large number of poor people. He estimated that almost a third of Americans were struggling, but alleged that the middle-class majority was often blind to the problem, because poverty was concentrated in remote rural areas & rough urban neighborhoods that so-called “respectable people” tended to avoid.

            Despite his own ideological beliefs, Harrington did not directly advocate socialism within the pages of The Other America; he instead focused narrowly on his argument that the government needed to do more to help the poor. As you can probably guess based on the fact that it is being discussed on a podcast in 2025, the book did become a quite successful & influential work. It became a favorite in liberal political circles, and Pres. John F. Kennedy claimed to have read The Other America in 1963. In regard to this & his claim to have read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, I doubt the busy president regularly read books cover to cover, but it is likely that he at least skimmed such popular works of nonfiction & became familiar with their arguments. Harrington’s book also got the attention of Vice-President Lyndon B. Johnson, who later cited it as an inspiration for some of the Great Society anti-poverty programs created during his own presidency.

            Following the publication of his bestselling book about poverty, Michael Harrington could apparently afford a wedding, and in May 1963 he married Stephanie Gervis, a writer for the Village Voice. He continued to be in demand as a writer and commentator for various publications. Harrington’s expertise regarding social problems and his fame as a public intellectual helped him to obtain a professorship at Queens College in New York City. During the Sixties and Seventies, Harrington remained involved with socialist organizations, and he predictably supported the civil rights movement and came to oppose the Vietnam War. However, he became a fierce critic of the “militant revolutionary tactics” of some New Left radicals, such as the infamous Weather Underground that sought to destroy existing institutions (sometimes literally).

            In 1982, Michael Harrington became a founder and leader of the Democratic Socialists of America organization, or DSA, which emerged out of a merger of different left-wing groups. Harrington once argued that his group envisioned (quote) “a humane social order based on the popular control of resources and production, progressive economic planning, equitable distribution [of wealth], feminism, and racial equality” (close quote). Harrington remained chairman of the DSA until his premature 1989 death from cancer of the esophagus at the age of 61.

            That may have been the end for Harrington, but it was not the end for DSA. In 2016, Independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders narrowly lost the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. Sanders had sometimes described himself as a “democratic socialist,” and following the inauguration of Donald Trump’s first term in office in 2017, former Bernie supporters began joining the DSA in droves. Between 2018 and 2021, DSA membership doubled from 43,000 members to over 90,000. Even more startling was the demographic shift; over a 7 year period, the average age of a DSA member went from someone in their mid-60s to someone in their mid-30s. This is because, for the first time in decades, it seemed that labor organizing & discussion of socialist ideas were now popular among many young people.

            The young radicals brought new energy and excitement to a once moribund organization, but they also altered the political trajectory of DSA, eventually taking it well to the left of Bernie Sanders. During the 2020s, the organization stalled after years of fast growth, and it even began losing some members. Although DSA members were permitted to hold a diversity of views, some commentators chalked up the slowdown in growth to the DSA platform having endorsed positions too far outside of the mainstream; for instance, writer Ben Burgis, himself a DSA member, criticized the organization’s advocacy of not just reforming but actually abolishing prisons. 

The DSA also was scrutinized for many of its foreign policy views, such as defending the left-wing authoritarian government of Venezuela. Founder Michael Harrington had held generally pro-Israel views, but by the 2020s DSA became fiercely anti-Zionist. In 2023, some longtime DSA members published a resignation letter in The New Republic magazine after the organization failed to issue a statement condemning Hamas following its October 7th attacks on civilian Israelis. DSA later released a statement condemning violence against civilians on all sides, and claims it has gained members from the pro-Palestinian movement during these 2 years of what it regards as an Israeli ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. But DSA’s most newsworthy development during this year (2025) is that a member in good standing, the charismatic former New York Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, has won the Democratic Party primary for mayor of New York City and is likely to soon lead the largest city in the country. It appears that DSA will continue to be an influential, if controversial, force on the American Left. However, it could face scrutiny from the second Trump administration, because the regime has recently made threats to go after left-wing anti-fascist organizations.

            Let’s now return to the legacy of Michael Harrington and his passionate advocacy for fighting poverty. Many historians and political scientists believe that the Great Society programs instituted during the 60s did decrease poverty, although they did not eliminate it. However, government assistance to the poor faced increasing political criticism during the 70s and 80s, culminating in President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich reaching a compromise bill in 1996 to (quote) “end welfare as we know it” in favor of a new state-administered system that limited the length of benefits & added strict work requirements.

            In 1962, Michael Harrington wrote that there were tens of millions of Americans (quote) “existing at levels beneath those necessary for human decency. If these people are not starving, they are hungry, and sometimes fat with hunger, for that is what cheap foods do. They are without adequate housing and education and medical care” (close quote). His words remain sadly relevant, as the USA now lags behind other developed nations in terms of life expectancy (in 2022, it ranked 49th in the world) due to issues such as unaffordable health care and widespread gun violence. It is important to note that the gap in mortality between the rich and poor has grown substantially since the 1980s, and one MIT study from 2016 finds that the richest 1% of Americans live an average of 10 to 15 years longer than the poorest Americans.

The work of Michael Harrington remain an important touchstone for anyone concerned with the historical efforts to address the issue of poverty in America. I promise that the next episode will be longer-form content rather than another short profile. However, we still encourage you to provide feedback on this 10-minute profile episode at boomertomillennial@outlook.com. Let us know if you love or hate the shorter episodes. Of course, if you generally enjoy our show, we would love it you would leave a favorable 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, or give us a follow on Instagram and BlueSky. We even have a Patreon if you really want to help out. Thanks again to everyone for your support, and as we always say, thank you for listening.