Harrington, Michael, 1928-1989?

Michael Harrington (1928-1989), a U.S. socialist writer and political leader, best known as the author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), and as the founder and leader of Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S. affiliate to the Socialist International, was born in St. Louis, received a Jesuit secondary education, graduated from Holy Cross College in 1947 and, after a brief interval at Yale Law School, received a MA degree in English from the University of Chicago in 1949, then moved to New York City.

From 1951-53 he was a volunteer at the radical Catholic Worker house on New York's Lower East Side, and was associate editor of its newspaper, also called the Catholic Worker . Leaving Catholicism, he first became organizational director of the Workers Defense League in 1953, joined the Socialist Party, and shortly became the leader of the SP's Young People's Socialist League. Coming under the influence of the (not quite yet) post-Trotskyist Max Shachtman, whose anti-Communism and grand political strategy, known as realignment (i.e., seeking to employ a leftist-influenced organized labor movement as the leading force in reorienting the Democratic Party towards socialism) became and remained in one form or another the cornerstones of Harrington's political outlook, Harrington led the New York YPSL into Shachtman's Independent Socialist League in 1954, and served as YPSL national chair until the 1958 dissolution of the ISL and its members' return to the Socialist Party, and from 1960-62 edited New America, the SP paper.

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