* She is reading a book titled The Plight of the PeasantBaby is concerned that some people live more poorly than other people. Some people receive fewer, lesser opportunities and must surmount more, larger obstacles. Baby intends to devote her life to improving the equality of the world's population.
* She intends to major in the Economics of Underdeveloped Countries
* She intends to join the Peace Corps.
* She is concerned about hunger in Southeast Asia
* She "is going to change the world"
* She rejects Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead
* She complains to her father that everyone does not "get a fair break"
In contrast, Rand is concerned that the world's most inventive, energetic, entrepreneurial people are impeded by social and governmental controls. Rand wants society to be innovative and dynamic. Rand devoted her life to improving the freedom of the world's population.
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As an egalitarian in 1963, Baby probably would be influenced, by the time she graduated from college, by the book The Other America: Poverty in the United States, written by Michael Harrington and published in 1962. The book became a best-seller, and eventually more than a million copies would be sold.
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| The 1962 cover of "The Other American" |
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| Michael Harrington in about 1963 |
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In a retrospective essay published in 2012, Socialist journalist Harold Meyerson summarized the book's importance as follows:
Michael Harrington’s The Other America, the book that first documented the existence of pervasive poverty within the postwar United States — then congratulating itself for being the world’s first majority-middle-class nation — struck American liberals like a thunderbolt after its publication 50 years ago.======
It became required reading among college students, particularly for that exceptional group of young people who went south, at considerable risk, to register black voters in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. It was required reading for journalists, labor activists, and Democratic reformers. It was read in the White House, where it provided at least some of the impetus for the War on Poverty. Martin Luther King Jr. joked with Harrington that “we didn’t know we were poor until we read your book.”
Harrington’s was one of three books published in 1962 and 1963 that changed the way millions of Americans thought about the world.
1) Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring exposed the threat that industry posed to nature and helped incubate the environmentalist movement.
2) Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique made the subordination of women a public issue and helped engender modern feminism.
30 Harrington’s book didn’t create a movement but had far-reaching consequences. By documenting that half of America’s seniors were poor — an easily verifiable fact that no one else had managed to notice — it laid the groundwork for establishing Medicare and indexing Social Security, thereby greatly reducing poverty among the elderly.
Like Carson’s and Friedan’s volumes, The Other America unearthed an ill that readers may have sensed, however dimly, but could not have articulated or documented until they read about it. More directly than the other two volumes, Harrington’s book was aimed at the nation’s conscience, at its sense of human solidarity and fairness. “How long shall we ignore this underdeveloped nation in our midst?” he asks at the book’s conclusion. “How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer?” ...
Harrington begins with a chapter on the working poor, describing a typical morning at New York’s 80 Warren Street, home to dozens of temporary employment agencies, where thousands reported daily for short-order jobs in kitchens and on construction sites. He next visits a non-union, low-wage factory in Chicago. Then he looks more broadly at low-paying jobs, noting that 16 million Americans in a labor force totaling 69.6 million were excluded from the federal minimum-wage law. He moves on to chapters about agricultural workers, African Americans, Appalachia, the elderly, the alcoholic and the mentally ill, in every case beginning with on-the-scene reporting before dissecting the broader historic, socioeconomic, and political factors that created so much misery. ...
Each year, Harrington delivered hundreds of talks that mobilized his listeners in both the immediate struggles for justice and the long-term battle against capitalism. But The Other America makes no reference to socialism (or capitalism, for that matter) for fear, as Harrington later wrote, that it “would divert attention from the plight of the poor.” ....
Although The Other America eschews the S-word, Harrington’s socialism is what enabled him to see what almost everyone else had missed: that 40 million Americans in a nation of 176 million were poor. Amid what he termed the “familiar America” of new suburbs and two-car garages, the poor were still with us, but they were a hidden poor, “a great mass of people, yet it takes an effort of the intellect and will even to see them.” The new middle-class majority that had moved to suburbia bypassed the decaying inner cities on the recently built interstates, kept their distance from the African American ghettos, never encountered the migrant farmworkers, and failed to see (at least in aggregate) the millions of impoverished elderly. None of these groups had political power or a visible collective presence; they had not found a way to announce their existence. So Harrington did.
How, we may wonder at the distance of half a century, did everyone else — even the social critics of the 1950s — miss them? The answer, understandably enough, is that everyone was amazed at America’s unprecedented, and unprecedentedly widespread, prosperity. The New Deal and post–New Deal reforms were working. Unions were powerful, employment levels were high, and thanks to the G.I. Bill, vastly more Americans were college-educated. .... A handful of intellectuals — disproportionately socialists — believed that the national preoccupation with affluence obscured the country’s actual condition. ...
Harrington introduced a distinctly non-socialist concept in The Other America, that of a “culture of poverty” to which the poor were prey. Concentrated into ghettos and slums; unable to find work in thriving, unionized industries; uneducated with little hope of advancement, the new poor, he wrote, frequently led lives of disconnection, disorganization, and despair. In poor communities, families disintegrated and out-of-wedlock births increased. ...
... at the start of 1964, a somewhat startled Harrington found himself acclaimed as “the man who discovered poverty” and was asked to come to Washington to help formulate Johnson’s war. For 12 days, he was immersed in round-the-clock meetings with cabinet members and administration economists. In a string of memos, Harrington recommended upgrading the quality and availability of education and health care and instituting massive public-works programs on a Rooseveltian scale. What ultimately emerged from the White House and Congress were programs boosting aid to education and setting up community organizations through which the poor could better themselves — good ideas as far as they went, Harrington believed, but not sufficient to the problem at hand.
Most of the memos Harrington wrote were co-authored with his friend Paul Jacobs, a onetime Trotskyite who two years later was to become one of the founders of the radical magazine Ramparts. Aware that they were improbable presidential policy advisers, they puckishly concluded many of their papers with the same punch line: “Of course, there is no real solution to the problem of poverty until we abolish the capitalist system.” Harrington, who was famous for counseling radicals to work for “the left wing of the possible,” was kidding. He also meant it.
Harrington’s mission, like that of a number of writers and activists who emerged in the early 1960s, was to create a movement for justice. To the extent that he sought to create a specifically socialist movement — perhaps an impossibility on American soil — he failed, as in fact he expected to. To the extent that he sought to swell, deepen, and partially socialize American liberalism, he succeeded, at least for a time. But he had no illusions as to the depth and permanence of the challenges confronting the poor and working people. “In times of slow change or stalemate, it is always the poor who are expendable in the halls of Congress,” he wrote at the conclusion of The Other America. “There is no realistic hope for the abolition of poverty in the United States until there is a vast social movement, a new period of political creativity.” ....
In the following interview in about 1963, Harrington is challenged by conservative journalist William F. Buckley.
Unfortunately, YouTube has only Part 1 of this interview.
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In 1967, Martin Luther King based the following speech on Harrington's book.
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History Professor Brian Domitrovic lectures about "The Myth of Equality in the 1950s" in the following video. The lecture features much talk Harrington's book The Other America.
In the following video, Socialist journalist Abby Martin provides her own perspective on why Socialist politicians have failed in the USA.
In the following video, Socialist journalist tells how Socialism would improve the USA.
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This article will be continued in Part 2 and Part 3.
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