Word: harrington
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Crushed Argument. There are other Bobbys within that slim, taut, toothy exterior. If Michael Harrington discovered America's poor, Kennedy adopted them ?not only in the urban ghettos, where the votes are, but also in the shacks of grape pickers, in the hillbilly hollers, along the rutted tobacco roads. He can communicate with the disinherited as few others of his race or rank are able to do. He can maul a William Manchester, then have the author serve as honorary chairman of a Kennedy for President club. He can be morose or merry, expansive or petty, merciless or magnanimous?...
TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC LEFT by Michael Harrington. 314 pages. Macmillan...
Socialist Michael Harrington is one of the last of the political evangelists-by temperament more Old Left than New Left. He comes on, in the words of Britain's best America-watcher, D. W. Brogan, like a pastor at the moment of decadence. In The Other America, Harrington heaped coals on the heads of his middle-class pewholders by exposing the suffering of the "invisible poor"-and helped make it a new priority of national concern. In this book, Harrington attempts Jeremiah's longest leap: from the catalogue of sins to the calculus of redemption. "The American system...
...emphasizing the practical, Harrington makes concessions that neither the Old Left of idealistic socialism nor the New Left of angry anarchism is likely to applaud. But he is dealing with only the next 20 years of American life, and, he observes accurately, it is not realistic "to expect that the American people will decide to transform capitalism during that period." To get something done, one must "locate a radical program midway between immediate feasibility and ultimate Utopia." He has little patience with calls for instant destruction of the existing order: "A hazy apocalypse is no substitute for an inadequate liberalism...
Poor Definitions. Few phenomena in human history have been so closely scrutinized by statisticians as American poverty. From Michael Harrington's 1962 study. The Other America, to last month's report by the Citizens' Crusade Against Poverty, Hunger, U.S.A., which found that 10 million Americans are chronically malnourished, the condition of the U.S. poor has been catalogued in a sierra of statistics. Central to any understanding of the subject is the "poverty line," a sliding scale devised five years ago by Social Security Economist Mollie Orshansky. Her flexible income line rises for large urban families and recedes for those...