Michael Harrington
Edward Michael Harrington (February 24, 1928 - July 31, 1989) was an American socialist.
Harrington was born in St. Louis, Missouri. As a young man, he was interested in both radical politics and Catholicism. Appropriately, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement. He ultimately moved towards secular socialism and became a member of the Independent Socialist League, a small organization associated with the former Trotskyist leader Max Shachtman. Harrington then became a member of Norman Thomas' Socialist Party when Shachtman and Thomas agreed to merge their organizations. Harrington would back Shachtman's realignment perspective that meant the abandonment of independent socialist organisation in favour of working within the Democratic Party.
He wrote The Other America (ISBN 068482678X) in 1962, a book about poverty in the United States that had an impact on the Kennedy administration, and on Lyndon B. Johnson's subsequent War on Poverty. He was probably the most well-known socialist in the United States during his lifetime, a status William F. Buckley once compared to being "the tallest building in Topeka, Kansas." He was one of the founders of the Democratic Socialists of America.
