A Life of Commitment and Compassion

I met Michael Harrington only once. We were picked up together at Chicago's O'Hare airport and driven into the city to speak at a conference. In the slow afternoon traffic we had a good chance to talk.

Several months later I became quite grateful for that ride and the rush-hour traffic when I heard the news that Michael Harrington had died of cancer on July 31.

The first thing we talked about that day on the Chicago freeways was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who had made such a deep impression on both of our lives. Harrington had joined the Catholic Worker in the early 1950s, and it was with the Catholic Worker newspaper that he really got his start as a writer. It was the clear commitment to the poor and oppressed that drew him to Dorothy Day and her work. Though he eventually left the church, his experience at the Worker was very formative and set him in a direction from which he never departed. As he told old stories about Dorothy, I could sense the deep love and indebtedness he still felt for the great woman and the community he had known.

We got into a discussion about religion, and Harrington shared his problem with "belief." The social implications of the gospel were perfectly clear to him (more clear than they are to many Christians), but philosophical and theological questions had become for him a stumbling block.

Nevertheless, in our conversation and at the weekend conference, Harrington challenged the religious to be unswerving in their faith and practice and never to water down their beliefs to accommodate secular sensibilities. We need religious people to be religious, he believed. Harrington exhorted people of faith to exemplify the very best of their tradition.

BEING WITH MICHAEL HARRINGTON was a great treat for me. Years earlier I had, like many others, been struck by his book The Other America, which brought him to national attention and helped to inspire the "War on Poverty." Sixteen books in all flowed from Harrington's prophetic and prolific pen, along with countless articles. His regular commentaries on National Public Radio were an oasis in the parched media desert -- always crackling with energy, sanity, and compassion. Harrington's insightful commentaries and tireless advocacy influenced even the Washington, D.C. establishment, while for four decades his good judgment and clear vision shaped the political Left in the United States as well as the international labor movement.

Michael Harrington was the best known socialist in the hardest country in the world to be a socialist. His socialism was always democratic, non-dogmatic, and inclusive. Harrington steadfastly opposed the totalitarian socialism of the Soviet bloc and the Third World varieties so often romanticized by other North American leftists.

Harrington advised both Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson. As the co-chair of Democratic Socialists of America, he sought to move the Democratic Party toward its truest populist and egalitarian tradition. He despised elitism and sectarianism of the Left and always sought to reach out to the mainstream of the America he really did love. Harrington described his political position as "the left wing of the possible."

Early in his life, Michael Harrington had an encounter with the wretched poverty and human misery of a St. Louis settlement house. He decided to spend the rest of his life "putting an end to that house and all that it symbolized." From that clear sense of call, Michael Harrington never wavered. "I realized that somehow I must spend the rest of my life trying to obliterate that kind of house and to work with the people who lived there."

Michael Harrington did as much as anyone in his time to help America see and feel the suffering of those who are so often hidden and easily forgotten. For that, the church he left behind should be deeply thankful. Certainly, Michael Harrington must have the gratitude of the one who said, "As you have done it to one of the least of these, you have done it to me."

Shortly before he died, two Christian socialist friends paid a visit to his bedside. Tentatively, they asked if they could pray for him. Grinning broadly, Harrington replied, "If Dorothy Day appeared here at my death bed and healed me, I would take it!"

I suspect that somehow Dorothy was there at the end. But she probably would have said something about how much Michael Harrington had done to help heal all of us.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.