Scholars Consider Works of Socialist Leader Harrington

By Barbara Jester

      Having successfully pro­cessed and curated the papers of Michael Harrington, the most prominent American socialist intellectual and political leader of the latter half of the 20th century, NYU’s Tamiment Library recently celebrated their official “opening” with a symposium featuring some of the best thinkers of our time.

      Speakers at the November event included Norman Dorsen, Stokes Professor of Law at NYU and past president of the ACLU; E.J. Dionne, Jr., syndicated columnist and author of They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives will Dominate the Next Political Era; Todd Gitlin, author of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats; and Maurice Isserman, author of The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington.

      Harrington (1928-1989) is best known as the author of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, published in 1962, a book widely credited with setting the agenda for the War on Poverty during the Johnson administration. He was also a founder and leader of Democratic Socialists of America, the U.S. affiliate to the Socialist International.

      The Harrington Papers include political and literary correspondence, manuscripts, including one for an unpublished book, Danger from the Right, (ca. 1964), and Harrington’s reading notebooks on Marx, Hegel, continental and ancient Greek philosophy, current economic and social conditions, political economy and theory, theology, and American and European literature. Of special interest are the biographical notebooks titled “Me – Boheme,” and “Village,” describing Harrington’s early years in New York.

      The Tamiment Library/Wagner Labor Archives, located on the 10th floor of New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, is a unique center for scholarly research on the history and culture of American activism and labor.