Edward Michael Harrington was an American democratic socialist.
Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He attended St. Louis
University High School, College of the Holy Cross, University of
Chicago (MA in English Literature), and Yale Law School. As a young
man, he was interested in both leftwing politics and Catholicism.
Fittingly, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement, a pacifist
group that advocated a radical interpretation of the Gospel. Above
all else, Harrington was an intellectual.
He
loved arguing about culture and politics, preferably over beer,
and his Jesuit education made him a fine debater and rhetorician.
Harrington was an editor of The Catholic Worker from
1951 to 1953. However, Harrington became disillusioned with religion
and, although he would always retain a certain affection for Catholic
culture, he ultimately became an atheist.
This
estrangement from religion was accompanied by a growing interest
in Marxism and a drift toward secular socialism. After leaving
The Catholic Worker Harrington became a member of the Independent
Socialist League, a small organization associated with the former
Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington and Shachtman believed
that socialism, the promise of a just and fully democratic society,
could not be realized under authoritarian Communism and they were
both fiercely critical of the "bureaucratic collectivist"
states in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
When
Shachtman and Thomas agreed to merge their organizations, Harrington
became a member of Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Harrington
backed the Shachtmanite realignment strategy of working within
the Democratic Party rather than running candidates on a Socialist
ticket.
During
this period Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in
the United States, a book that had an impact on the Kennedy
administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty.
Harrington became a widely read intellectual and political writer.
He would frequently debate noted conservatives but would also
clash with the younger radicals in the New Left movements. Arthur
Schlesinger referred to Harrington as the "only responsible
radical" in America, a somewhat dubious distinction among
those on the political left.
By
early 1970s Shachtman's anti-Communism had become a hawkish Cold
War liberalism. Shachtman and the governing faction of the Socialist
Party effectively supported the Vietnam War and changed the organization's
name to Social Democrats, USA. In protest Harrington led a number
of Norman Thomas-era Socialists, younger activists and ex-Shactmanites
into the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. A smaller
faction associated with peace activist David McReynolds formed
the Socialist Party USA.
In
the early 1980s The Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee
merged with the New American Movement, an organization of New
Left veterans, forming Democratic Socialists of America. This
organization remains the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist
International, which includes socialist parties as diverse as
the Swedish and German Social Democrats, Nicaragua's FSLN, and
the British Labour Party.
Harrington
died in 1989 of cancer. He was the most well-known socialist in
the United States during his lifetime. |
