harrington and saint louis

8/2/2019 Harrington and Saint Louis

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This speech was delivered on April 18, 2012 at the Missouri History Museum in its

Stories of Resilience lecture series. The speaker, Maurice Isserman, is professor of

history at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and the author ofThe Other

American: The Life of Michael Harrington (2000), as well as to an introduction to the

50th anniversary edition of Harringtons The Other America.

When Michael Harringtons The Other America: Poverty in the United States first

appeared in bookstores in March 1962, its author had modest hopes for its success, expecting

to sell at most a few thousand copies. Instead, the book proved a publishing phenomenon,

garnering substantial sales, wide and respectful critical attention, and a significant influence

over the direction of social welfare policy in the United States during the decade that followed.

By February 1964,Business Weeknoted that, The Other America is already regarded as a

classic work on poverty. Time magazine later offered even more sweeping praise, including

The Other America in a 1998 list as one of the 20th centurys ten most influential books,

putting it in such distinguished company as Sigmund Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents

and Alexander Solzhenitsyns The Gulag Archipelago.

Although there will be a number of gatherings this year to mark the 50th anniversary of

the publication ofThe Other America it seems fitting to me that one of the first should be held

in Mikes hometown of St. Louis. Mike was born to Edward Michael Harrington and

Catherine Harrington in St. Louis Maternity Hospital on February 24, 1928. Three weeks later

he was baptized by the Reverend William Glynn at St. Rochs church, three blocks from his

parents apartment on Waterman Avenue on St. Louiss west side (the church, named for a 14 th

century French aristocrat who, at the age of 20, gave away all his possessions to the poor and

cared for the victims of the plague.) The Great Depression, a different kind of plague, began a

year and a half after the birth of Edward Michael Harrington, Jr. He grew up, the pampered

only son of doting and prosperous parents, and by his own testimony oblivious to the

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economic distress felt by so many Americans in the 1930s. His father was a successful patent

law attorney, who moved the family in 1935 to their own house on quiet tree-lined Harvard

Avenue in University City, and later to a house on McPherson Avenue, where Mike lived for

the last two years before departing for college. The Harringtons were well enough off to send

Mike to private schools, keep a car, have a maid, and take summer vacations.

Both of Mikes parents had been born in St. Louis. His fathers family history proved

difficult for me to reconstruct before his own generation, but his mothers -- she was the

daughter of Patrick Fitzgibbon, an Irish immigrant who moved to the city in 1881, opening a

saloon in the Kerry Patch neighborhood, and rising to modest prosperity through a variety of

pursuits, including public office and insurance sales, and in the process becoming a power in

the local Democratic party. In 1920 he bought a comfortable three story house on Bartmer

Avenue, where Mike would spend a lot of time visiting and listening to his grandfathers

stories of the old days (Irish and Missourian). This was a family that, among other things,

valued education: a self-educated man, Patrick Fitzgibbon had fourteen children, and all of

them, including all the daughters, went to college. Mikes mother Catherine earned a teaching

degree from Harris Teachers College in 1920. Upon marrying in 1922, she was barred by

Missouri state law from employment in public education. Unusually for the era, she went back

to school after the birth of her son, receiving a BA from Fontbonne College in 1937, and an

MA in economics from Saint Louis University in 1940. She returned to Fontbonne in 1944 as

director of personnel and student guidance.

This was also a family that valued political engagement. These were years when St.

Louis was a fervently Democratic city (FDR popular not only for his New Deal economic

policies, but for ending prohibition in 1933, which led to the reopening of St. Louiss shuttered

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breweries.) The Fitzgibbons and Harringtons were politically active; Catherines brother Dave

Fitzgibbon was elected on the Democratic ticket in 1940 as judge of the St. Louis Court of

Criminal Corrections, a post he would hold for over three decades (Judge Fitzgibbon was

known for the human treatment of defendants who appeared in his court, occasionally paying

the fines he levied on poor people he convicted.) In 1944 Patrick Fitzgibbon, too ill to leave

the house to attend mass, refused to take communion from the local priest who he suspected of

Republican sympathies. He was carried out of the house that November so that he could go to

the local polling place and cast a final vote for FDR.

Boyhood in St. Louis did not make Michael Harrington a radical. But the imprint of

his earliest experiences could be seen in the kind of radical he turned out to be. From his

grandfather, Mike acquired a fascination with politics, a love of rhetoric, and a sense that

words had meanings and consequences. From his uncle David he learned that laws were not

abstractions but were, or should be, about how people deserved to be treated. And from his

mother he acquired a respect for intellectual accomplishment, a sense of self-respect and self-

discipline, and an authority figure against whose standards of right and wrong he alternately

hoped to fulfill and rebelled against.

Apart from his family, the presence that loomed largest in Mikes life growing up in St.

Louis was the Catholic Church. He would later depart from the formal teachings of the church,

but as he was first to acknowledge, never shed its influence.

Mikes parents were very active in the Church, and his mother Catherine counted a

number of Jesuit priests as friends and bridge partners (she was a championship level bridge

player, among other accomplishments.) Influential figures such as Father Paul Reinert

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(president of Saint Louis University) and Father Robert Henle (dean of the graduate school at

SLU, and later president of Georgetown University) were frequent visitors to the Harrington

home.

Mike began his Catholic education at the age of 4, in the kindergarten of St. Rose

parish on Goodfellow Boulevard, continuing in the parish school through third grade before

transferring to a boys school, Chaminade, run by the Marianist order. The most important

Catholic institution shaping him, religiously and intellectually, was the Jesuit-run Saint Louis

University High School, which he transferred to in 1940, age 12, skipping eighth grade, and

enrolling in the elite Classical Course (four years of Latin, two years of Greek), along with

philosophy, theology, literature and the arts, in a curriculum that hadnt changed much since

the Jesuits first adopted it in 1599. The emphasis was on hard work and discipline, instilled

through memorization, drills, and exercise, to develop supple minds capable of a spirited

defense of a fixed system of ideas.

The most important benefit of a Jesuit education, the high school yearbook proclaimed

in 1942, was that it instilled the necessary fortitude and enthusiasm to step forth in battlefield,

college, or workaday world, and strive towards the urgent conversion of a perverted, pagan

universe. That sounds rather grim, but the reality for Mike was a joyous period of intellectual

flowering. One of Michael classmates, John Padberg, who went on to become a Jesuit priest,

told me that the kids were wildly in love with the place. It was hard to get us to come home in

the evening. My mother said at times she didnt know why I didnt keep a bed down at the

school.

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Mike felt the same way. He shone academically, undertook his first venture in

journalism (as sports editor of the school newspaper), and was a star of the schools highly

competitive debate club. Bill Loftus, who was a classmate of Mikes at both Saint Louis

University high school, and at Holy Cross, told me in an interview:

Many a time in high school, I saw Mike win a debate by standing there with his

open Irish face, blinking at the judges, quoting brilliantly from a purely fictitious

authority to prove his point. In one debate he even had the nerve to quote from

Dr. Dingbat Fu, and they bought it. He was very, very good.

Despite the Jesuits 400-year old reputation as defenders of altar and throne, the

political message offered students at Saint Louis University High School was open to

conflicting interpretations. Catholic social teachings were often antipathetic to the rules of the

capitalist market economy; disciples of Thomas Aquinas knew from his teachings that it is

impossible for happiness, which is the last end of man, to consist in wealth. Among the texts

assigned to students at the high school was Pope Leo XXIIIs 1891 papal encyclicalRerum

Novarum, which condemned unchecked capitalism as a system in which the teeming masses

of the laboring poor [bear] a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

Pope Pius XI issued a follow-up encyclical in 1931 that in places sounds a bit like an

Occupy Wall Street manifesto, declaring that It is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated

in our times, but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the

hands of a few.

Of course, there were other teachings that cut the other way, and certainly Mike would

have been taught to have a horror for atheism and Marxism, among other lessons. His Catholic

education did not make Mike a radical. Instead, it gave him a sense of moral gravity, which

would serve him in good stead in later years as he emerged as a social critic and a political

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dissenter. I grew up in the Catholic Church, he would recall in his memoirs, and from the

time I was a little kid the Church said your life is not something you are to fritter away; your

life is in trust to something more important than yourself. And in a later book, The Politics at

Gods Funeral, he would write that socially committed believers and unbelievers have the

same enemy: the humdrum nihilism of everyday life in much of Western society.

Mike graduated from high school at the age of 16, in 1944 his parents told him he

could go to any college in the country, as long as it was Catholic and he chose Holy Cross.

Like many colleges, Holy Cross had adopted a sped-up schedule during the war, and Mike

graduated three years later in 1947, age 19, salutatorian of his class. From Holy Cross he went

to Yale Law School (excelled, dropped out after a year); followed by graduate studies in

literature at the University of Chicago (excelled, dropped out after a year); and then moved to

New Yorks Greenwich Village to become a writer. In the process of which he read and

reasoned his way out of and back into the Catholic Church several times. He was looking for

something thought he found it when he joined Dorothy Days Catholic Worker movement in

1951 but by 1952 he was out of Worker and the Church and became a socialist. He had

found his path.

Which brings us back to The Other America. The Other America, was a short work

(one hundred and eighty-six pages in the original edition) with a simple thesis: poverty in the

affluent society of the United States was both more extensive and more tenacious than most

Americans assumed. The extent of poverty could be calculated by counting the number of

American households who survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures

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were readily available in the census data, but until Harrington published The Other America

they were rarely considered. Harrington revealed to his readers that an invisible land of the

poor, over forty million strong, or one in four Americans at the time, fell below the poverty

line. For the most part this Other America existed in rural isolation and in crowded slums

where middle-class visitors seldom ventured. That the poor are invisible is one of the most

important things about them, Harrington wrote in his introduction in 1962. They are not

simply neglected and forgotten as in the old rhetoric of reform; what is much worse, they are

not seen.

To explain the tenacity of poverty, Harrington borrowed the notion of the culture of

poverty from anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis, whose ethnographic study of Mexican

slum-dwellers, Five Families; Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty, was published

in 1959, contended that being poor was not simply a condition marked by the absence of

wealth; rather, poverty created a subculture of its own. However different their places of

origin, he argued, poor people in Mexico might have more in common -- in terms of family

structure, interpersonal relations, values systems and so forth -- with their counterparts in

Puerto Rico or New York City than with other, better off people from their own countries.

Echoing Lewis, Harrington argued that American poverty constituted a separate

culture, another nation, with its own way of life. Poor Americans were not distinguished

from their affluent counterparts simply by their lack of adequate income. Rather, they were:

people who lack education and skill, who have bad health, poor housing, low

levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distressEach disability is the

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more intense because it exists within a web of disabilities. And if one problem is

solved, and the others are left constant, there is little gain.

Poverty would not be solved automatically by the expansion of the economy (as in a

rising tide lifts all boats, the belief of many liberals at the time), and it certainly would not

be ended by exhortations to the poor lift themselves up by their own bootstraps (the remedy

that appealed to conservatives). Society, Harrington concluded, must help them before

they can help themselves. America needed to undertake a broad program of remedial action

on behalf of the Other America a comprehensive assault on poverty.

In the introduction to The Other America Harrington wrote that the poor needed an

American Dickens to make them visible to better-off citizens, although quickly hastening to

add that he was no Dickens. There is, however, significant evidence of literary craft in the

book, notwithstanding the informal and almost conversational tone that Harrington adopted in

his prose. His creative achievement involved not only the sympathetic description of the lives

and problems of the poor, but the creation of his own authorial persona.

The voice Harrington adopted throughout The Other America was calm and reasonable,

but also idealistic and impassioned. Unlike many left-wing pamphleteers, he had the ability to

convey moral seriousness without lapsing into moralism. There is no hint in his writing of the

sanctimonious bullying of the better-off that pervaded so much of the radical style to come

later in the decade. His tone suggested that the reader was a reasonable person, just like the

author, and reasonable people, once apprised of the plight of the Other America, would agree

on the need to find solutions. The enemies he identified in the book tended to be distanced

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abstractions like social blindness or the vocabulary of not caring rather than identifiable

individuals or political groups.

Harrington often illustrated points with his favorite literary device, the use of paradox.

The welfare state benefits those least who need help most, he wrote, because social security

pensions and unemployment benefits were more likely to be available and more generous to

those with good and steady employment. Poverty was expensive to maintain, because poor

communities required extensive public spending on fire, police, and health services.

Harrington did not imagine the poor as finer, more authentic, or more generous human

beings than their better-off brethren, as Beat novelist Jack Kerouac had recently done in On the

Road, or as John Steinbeck had done a generation earlier in The Grapes of Wrath. The lives of

the poor as portrayed in The Other America were generally nasty, brutish, and short, precisely

because they lacked such amenities of middle class life as decent housing, education, nutrition,

and medical care.

The Other Americapopularized the phrase culture of poverty, which went on to

shape the main thrust of President Lyndon Johnsons war on poverty. But a close reading of

Harringtons book reveals an ambiguity in his employment of that term. Throughout the book

he used culture of poverty interchangeably with another term, vicious circle, a staple of

reformist literature since the Progressive Era. Here is one of the most familiar forms of the

vicious circle of poverty, Harrington wrote in a typical passage:

The poor get sick more than anyone else in the society. That is because they livein slums, jammed together under unhygienic conditions; they have inadequate

diets, and cannot get decent medical care. When they become sick, they are sick

longer than any other group in society. Because they are sick more often and

longer than anyone else, they lose wages and work, and find it difficult to hold a

steady job. And because of this, they cannot pay for good housing, for a

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nutritious diet, for doctors. At any given point in this circle, particularly when

there is a major illness, their prospect is to move to an even lower level and to

begin the cycle, round and round, toward even more suffering.

Harrington sought to convince his readers that poverty was a condition not easy to

shed. Everything in the lives of the Other Americans conspired to keep them in poverty.

Outside intervention by the federal government was necessary to improve their condition. But

nothing in the vicious circle he sketched above was culturally determined in the sense that

anthropologist Oscar Lewis had meant when he talked of the culture of poverty as a normative

system at odds with the values of the larger society, an ingrained and unchanging way of life

passed down from generation to generation. No part of the circle Harrington described was

related to a low level of aspiration, or a tendency to indulge in immediate gratification, or a

propensity for violence, or sexual promiscuity. Poor nutrition, poor medical care, poor

housing, and the resultant frequent and lengthy illnesses were a result of lack of income, not of

cultural traits or behaviors. Everything that Harrington described in this particular example of

the vicious circle could be improved through the simple expedient of additional household

income.

Harrington had initially been drawn to the concept of the culture of poverty because

he thought it would serve as a prod to federal action on many fronts: providing the poor with

better housing, better medical care, better education, as well as job creation. What he did not

anticipate was that the theory could cut in other ways, antithetical to his own values and

policy preferences. In the 1970s, the neo-conservatives (a term coined by Harrington in

1973 to describe former liberals who had grown disaffected with government social welfare

programs), would use the notion of the culture of poverty to argue for abandoning the federal

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war on poverty. Harrington had argued that structural barriers to social mobility helped

create and perpetuate a set ofsymptoms -- low aspirations, petty criminality, and the like

that distinguished those living in the culture of poverty from the mainstream. Neo-

conservatives, in contrast, described such attitudes and behavior as the operative causes of

poverty. And federal social welfare programs, they argued, were actually counter-

productive, encouraging the spread of single parent families and of a culture of dependency.

That argument, much more than Harringtons views, would determine the fate of

social welfare policy in the United States in the decades that followed. For President Ronald

Reagan, it was axiomatic that government is not the solution to our problem; government is

the problem. Reagan was a conservative Republican who had consistently opposed social

welfare spending since emerging as a political contender in the mid-1960s. There were

those, including Michael Harrington, who hotly contested such views during Reagans

administration; his bookThe New American Poverty, published in 1984, challenged those

who blamed the poor for their own condition, and argued for a resumption of bold anti-

poverty initiatives.

But when Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992

pledging to end welfare as we know it, and later proclaimed that the era of big

government is over, it was clear who had won the political argument on the merits and

liabilities of social welfare spending. The poor never returned to the invisibility that had

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been their fate in the 1950s, before the publication ofThe Other America; but concern over

their condition never returned to the list of national priorities, not even in years of

Democratic political ascendancy.

How relevant does The Other America remain today, as the poverty level creeps back

up from its low point in the late 1960s and early 1970s? As social theory, the book shows both

the signs of age, and the imperfections of its central concept. Harringtons culture of poverty

thesis was at best ambiguous, at worst an impediment to making the case for what he regarded

as the real solution to poverty, federal spending on jobs programs. (In later books, he made no

use of the term.)

But what remains vital in The Other America these many years later is its moral clarity.

In the final chapter of the book, Harrington asked his reader to make use of their vision

and to do so in two senses. First, he asked them to see through the wall of affluence and

recognize the true dimensions of poverty in the United States and its cost in human dignity.

Second, he declared that they need to deploy their vision in the sense of purpose and

aspiration. Harrington summoned his readers to war on poverty not just for the sake of the

poor but for their own sakes. Americans, he felt, should be unwilling to live in a society that,

having the resources to provide everyone a decent standard of living, was instead divided into

two nations. The fate of the poor, he concluded, hangs upon the decision of the better-off. If

this anger and shame are not forthcoming, someone can write a book about the other America a

generation from now and it will be the same or worse.

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