26 Facts About Michael Harrington

Michael Harrington was a founding member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and its most influential early leader.

Michael Harrington was born in St Louis, Missouri, on February 24,1928, to an Irish-American family.

Michael Harrington attended Roch Catholic School and St Louis University High School, where he was a classmate of Thomas Anthony Dooley III.

Michael Harrington later graduated from College of the Holy Cross and the University of Chicago, and attended Yale Law School.

Michael Harrington joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker Movement, a communal movement that stressed social justice and nonviolence.

Michael Harrington enjoyed arguing about culture and politics, and his Jesuit education had made him a good debater and rhetorician.

Michael Harrington was an editor of the newspaper Catholic Worker from 1951 to 1953, but he soon became disillusioned with religion.

In 1955, Michael Harrington was placed on the FBI Index, whose master list contained more than 10 million names in 1939.

Later, Michael Harrington was added to the master list of Nixon political opponents.

Michael Harrington served as the first editor of New America, the official weekly newspaper of the Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, founded in October 1960.

Michael Harrington became a widely read intellectual and political writer, in 1972 publishing a second bestseller, Socialism.

Michael Harrington was present in June 1962 at the founding conference of Students for a Democratic Society.

Michael Harrington was appointed a professor of political science at Queens College in Flushing, New York City, in 1972.

Michael Harrington wrote 16 books and was named a distinguished professor of political science in 1988.

Michael Harrington is credited with coining the term neoconservatism in 1973.

Michael Harrington said that socialists had to go through the Democratic Party to enact their policies, reasoning that the socialist vote had declined from a peak of approximately one million in the years around World War I to a few thousand by the 1950s.

Michael Harrington considered running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but decided against it after Senator Ted Kennedy announced his campaign.

Michael Harrington later endorsed Kennedy and said, "if Kennedy loses or is driven out of this campaign, it will be a loss for the left".

Michael Harrington remained chairman of DSA from its inception to his death.

Michael Harrington died of esophageal cancer in Larchmont, New York, on July 31,1989.

Michael Harrington embraced a democratic interpretation of the writings of Karl Marx while rejecting the "actually existing" systems of the Soviet Union, China and the Eastern Bloc.

Michael Harrington made clear that even if the traditional Marxist vision of a marketless, stateless society was impossible, he did not understand why this had to "result in the social consequence of some people eating while others starve".

Michael Harrington voiced admiration for German Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, which sought to reduce antagonism between Western Europe and Soviet states.

From May 30,1963, until his death, Michael Harrington was married to Stephanie Gervis Michael Harrington, a freelance writer and staff writer for the Village Voice.

Gervis Michael Harrington published articles in The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, The New Republic, The Village Voice, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Newsday and other publications.

Gervis Michael Harrington died on November 8,2008, at age 71.