Progressive Era Repression and persecution Anti-war and civil rights movements Contemporary Edward Michael Harrington Jr. (February 24, 1928 – July 31, 1989) was an American democratic socialist.

After leaving The Catholic Worker, Harrington became a member of the Independent Socialist League (ISL), a small organization associated with the former Trotskyist activist Max Shachtman.

From the 1950s through to the 1970s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover added an untold number of names of U.S. activists he considered "dangerous characters", to be placed in detention camps in case of a national emergency.

[7] Although Harrington identified personally with the socialism of Thomas and Eugene Debs, the most consistent thread running through his life and his work was a "left wing of the possible within the Democratic Party.

[11] His voluminous writings included 14 other books and scores of articles, published in such journals as Commonweal, Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, and The Nation.

In clashes with Tom Hayden and Alan Haber, he argued that their Port Huron Statement was insufficiently explicit about excluding communists from their vision of a New Left.

Ted Kennedy said, "I see Michael Harrington as delivering the Sermon on the Mount to America," and "among veterans in the War on Poverty, no one has been a more loyal ally when the night was darkest.

"[10] By the early 1970s, the governing faction of the Socialist Party continued to endorse a negotiated peace to end the Vietnam War, a stance that Harrington came to believe was no longer viable.

[21] Harrington embraced a democratic interpretation of the writings of Karl Marx while rejecting the "actually existing" systems of the Soviet Union, China and the Eastern Bloc.

[....] The Democratic Socialists envision a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism and racial equality.

[....] I want to be on the left wing of the possible.Harrington made clear that even if the traditional Marxist vision of a marketless, stateless society was impossible, he did not understand why this had to "result in the social consequence of some people eating while others starve".

[…] While supporting liberalization and economic reforms from above, socialists should be particularly active in contacting and encouraging the tender shoots of democracy from below.Harrington voiced admiration for German Social Democratic Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, which sought to reduce antagonism between Western Europe and Soviet states.

[27] In 1978, the periodical Christian Century quoted Harrington: I am a pious apostate, an atheist shocked by the faithlessness of the believers, a fellow traveler of moderate Catholicism who has been out of the church for 20 years.Harrington observed of himself and his high school classmate Tom Dooley, "each of us was motivated, in part at least, by the Jesuit inspiration of our adolescence that insisted so strenuously that a man must live his philosophy.