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ABSTRACT: John Proctor Jr., a Puritan settler of Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was convicted of witchcraft in a Salem court on August 5, 1692, and hanged two weeks later. He was one of twenty men and women executed in the Salem witchcraft trials.

Volume I, Number 1 of Dissent showed up in mailboxes of charter subscribers in early 1954, as inauspicious an occasion for the debut issue of a socialist magazine in the United States as can be imagined. Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon were waging a no-holds-barred political war to stigmatize Democratic opponents as soft on communism—or worse. Demoralized and divided, Democrats feebly defended themselves against charges that their party had presided over "twenty years of treason," while some panicked liberal leaders abandoned any commitment to basic civil liberties to burnish their anti-communist credentials.

Volume I, Number 1 of Dissent showed up in mailboxes of charter subscribers in early 1954, as inauspicious an occasion for the debut issue of a socialist magazine in the United States as can be imagined. Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon were waging a no-holds-barred political war to stigmatize Democratic opponents as soft on communism-or worse. Demoralized and divided, Democrats feebly defended themselves against charges that their party had presided over 'twenty years of treason,' while some panicked liberal leaders abandoned any commitment to basic civil liberties to burnish their anticommunist credentials. Adapted from the source document.

Michael Harrington's most famous appeal to the American conscience, 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 that survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures 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." That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us—and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington's work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue.

When Michael Harrington's 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 (seventy thousand in several editions within its first year and over a million in paperback since then), 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 Week noted, "The Other America is already regarded as a classic work on poverty." Time magazine later offered even more sweeping praise, listing The Other America in a 1998 article entitled "Required Reading" as one of the twentieth century's ten most influential books, putting it in such distinguished company as Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Harrington's own knowledge of poverty was, for the most part, acquired secondhand, as he would recount in two memoirs, Fragments of the Century (1973) and The Long Distance Runner: An Autobiography (1988). Born in 1928 in St. Louis, the only child of loving and moderately prosperous parents of sturdy Irish-Catholic lineage, educated at Holy Cross, Yale Law School, and the University of Chicago, he moved to New York City in 1949 to become a writer. In 1951, he joined Dorothy Day's Catholic Worker movement as a volunteer at its soup kitchen; there he got to know a small subset of the nation's poor, the homeless male alcoholics of New York City's Bowery district. Within a few years he left the Catholic Worker (and the Catholic Church) and joined the Young People's Socialist League, the youth affiliate of the battered remnants of the American Socialist Party, a party then led by Norman Thomas. A tireless organizer, prolific writer, skillful debater, and charismatic orator, Harrington succeeded Thomas as America's best-known socialist in the 1960s, just as Thomas had succeeded Eugene Debs in that role in the 1920s. Socialism was never the road to power in the United States, but socialist leaders like Debs, Thomas, and Harrington were, from time to time, able to play the role of America's social conscience. In the years since Harrington's death from cancer in 1989, at the age of sixty-one, no obvious successor to the post of socialist tribune in the Debs-Thomas-Harrington tradition has emerged. Harrington's most famous appeal to the American conscience, 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 that survived on an annual income of less than $3,000. These figures 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." That was then. Fifty years since the publication of The Other America the poor are still among us -- and in a testament to the lasting significance of Harrington's work, not at all invisible. Whether or not the poor exist is thus no longer a matter of debate; what if anything can be done to improve their condition remains at issue. Adapted from the source document.

Harrington did his work well, and the march attracted five to six thousand supporters, many more than organizers had anticipated. The day before it stepped off, Harrington picked up King on his arrival at Los Angeles airport. Over the next few days he shepherded King around Los Angeles, to the march itself, and to a meeting with the convention's platform committee. Harrington and King also found time for private discussions about political strategy and philosophy. In Fragments of the Century, his 1973 memoir, Harrington reported how he was heartened to learn from their time together that King had "in the course of a much more profound political and intellectual journey than mine, come to a view of America and the world that I largely shared." King, he believed, was a democratic socialist in all but name.

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., AND THE STRUGGLE FOR ECONOMIC JUSTICE by Thomas F. Jackson University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006 459 pp $39.95 IN EARLY SUMMER 1960, socialist activist Michael Harrington was asked by his friend and comrade Bayard Rustin to help civil rights groups in Los Angeles plan and organize a march to the site of the Democratic National Convention when it opened deliberations in that city in July. Instead of the 'oversold and underfunded programs of the War on Poverty,' which came to be perceived by white working-class and middle-class voters as attempts to buy off an undeserving black urban underclass, King's preference for policies 'that would further racial equality in the context of human rights to decent housing, medical care, guaranteed work, wages, and family incomes for all Americans' was a great and tragically 'missed alternative.'.