Michael Harrington Biography Quotes 6 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Michael Harrington, born in 1928 in St. Louis, emerged from a Catholic, middle-class Midwestern upbringing into one of the most influential American writers and democratic socialists of the twentieth century. He attended Catholic schools and studied literature in college, with formative years at the College of the Holy Cross followed by graduate study at the University of Chicago. A brief attempt at law school confirmed for him that his vocation was not in the courtroom but in letters and political engagement. Books, debate, and a growing sensitivity to social injustice steered him toward the worlds of journalism, activism, and public argument.

The Catholic Worker and a Break with the Church
Harrington moved to New York and, in the early 1950s, joined the circle around Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker. There he lived simply, edited and wrote, and encountered poverty firsthand in houses of hospitality. Day's personalism and insistence on the dignity of the poor left an indelible mark on him, even as he ultimately parted ways with the Church. His departure was not a rejection of the moral impulse he learned there; rather, he sought a secular, democratic, and political path to the same ends. The experience provided the ethical core that would animate his later writing and activism.

From Socialist Faction to National Voice
After leaving the Catholic Worker, Harrington gravitated to socialist politics, initially within circles influenced by Max Shachtman and then within the broader Socialist Party tradition associated with Norman Thomas. He became known as a lucid speaker and a disciplined organizer, committed to a democratic, anti-communist left that would align with trade unions and liberals. He worked with and learned from veteran labor and civil rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who tied the struggle for racial equality to economic justice. Harrington's essays in magazines like Dissent, edited by Irving Howe, honed his profile as a writer who blended moral passion with empirical detail.

The Other America and the War on Poverty
His 1962 book, The Other America, made his name. With powerful reporting and clear prose, he argued that tens of millions of Americans lived in a hidden landscape of deprivation, largely invisible to the prosperous middle class. The book quickly moved beyond literary acclaim into political consequence. It was read and discussed in policy circles around President John F. Kennedy and, after the assassination, within the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. Harrington briefed officials and testified publicly as the War on Poverty took shape under Sargent Shriver. He pressed for structural remedies: jobs, education, health care, and community power, even as he warned that programs would falter if they substituted symbolism for resources. His exchanges with figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan crystallized debates over whether culture or structure explained persistent poverty; Harrington insisted on the primacy of economic and institutional forces.

Debates with the New Left and Realignment Strategy
The 1960s also brought friction with the emerging student New Left. Harrington advocated a strategy of realignment: working inside the Democratic Party alongside unions and liberals to build a social democratic majority. He argued with student radicals over the Port Huron Statement and the direction of Students for a Democratic Society, contending that moral urgency required political strategy and organizational patience. His stance sometimes put him at odds with anti-institutional currents of the era, but it also kept him in conversation with mainstream labor figures and elected officials who could translate ideas into policy.

Building DSOC and the DSA
In the early 1970s the old Socialist Party fractured. Harrington, unwilling to follow currents that drifted rightward or into sectarianism, founded the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in 1973 with allies including Bayard Rustin and Irving Howe. DSOC was conceived as a practical home for democratic socialists who sought influence through coalition and persuasion. In 1982 DSOC merged with the New American Movement to form the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and Harrington became its leading public face and chair. He traveled tirelessly, meeting with local chapters, union halls, campus groups, and community organizations, urging a politics that was egalitarian, democratic, and unashamedly American in idiom.

Writer, Teacher, and Public Intellectual
Harrington sustained a prolific writing life. Beyond The Other America, he published The Accidental Century, Toward a Democratic Left, Socialism, The Twilight of Capitalism, The Vast Majority, The Politics at God's Funeral, The New American Poverty, and, near the end of his life, Socialism: Past and Future. He wrote regularly for The Nation and Dissent, assessing elections, labor struggles, global development, and the moral requirements of a decent society. In lecture halls and classrooms he mentored younger activists and students; in television studios he argued with conservative interlocutors such as William F. Buckley Jr., trading barbed wit with civility while defending a generous public sphere. He cultivated relationships with public officials who were open to reform, from Johnson-era anti-poverty administrators to city and state policymakers, always pressing the case for full employment, expanded social insurance, and civil rights.

Influence, Allies, and Contention
Harrington's closest political collaborators included Bayard Rustin, with whom he shared a deep commitment to coalition politics, and Irving Howe, whose intellectual companionship stretched across decades. He revered Norman Thomas as a model of ethical socialism. He navigated complicated relationships with labor leadership and liberal policy intellectuals, sometimes aligned and sometimes in dispute. He admired the courage of civil rights leaders, worked in solidarity with A. Philip Randolph, and publicly supported the broad aims of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign. He pressed liberals in the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson to be bolder and more redistributive, and he challenged neoconservative thinkers who argued that inequality was either unavoidable or beneficial.

Later Years and Legacy
In his final years Harrington remained a relentless advocate even as illness advanced. He continued to write and to speak for a democratic socialism grounded in liberty, solidarity, and realism. He died in 1989, leaving behind an organization, the DSA, that carried his strategic vision forward; a generation of readers and activists schooled by his books; and a policy legacy that endures in debates over poverty, health care, and labor rights. The Other America helped set the stage for the War on Poverty, and its core insight endures: that a decent society must not permit the invisibility of the excluded. Harrington's voice, shaped by Dorothy Day's compassion, Norman Thomas's integrity, and Bayard Rustin's strategic wisdom, remained steady through ideological storms. He showed that American radicalism could be both moral and practical, as attentive to the dignity of persons as to the design of institutions, and he tried to make the democratic promise real for those most denied it.

Our collection contains 6 quotes who is written by Michael, under the main topics: Motivational - Deep - Equality - Human Rights.