The paternalists' bible: The Other America, which helped create modern welfare, turns 50.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus

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PUBLISHED IN the spring of 1962, Michael Harrington's The Other America was a sweeping description of the country's poor, combined with an appeal to the federal government and "better-off" to save them. It became one of the best-selling books ever authored by an American socialist, inspired the creation of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society regime, and has been routinely hailed as one of the most influential books of the 20th century. This year partisans of the welfare state are commemorating the golden anniversary of The Other America with a series of celebrations and renewed calls for government programs to save the poor once more.

Several of the left's heavy hitters have penned op-ed pieces singing the book's praises. Peter Dreier, writing in The Huffington Post, praised The Other America for causing Americans to "be ashamed to live in a rich society with so many poor people." In The New York Times, Harrington's biographer, Maurice Isserman, praised the book's "moral clarity" and lamented that since Harrington's death in 1989 "no one has assumed the role of socialist tribune" that "Harrington so eloquently filled." In March there was a two-day conference at Harrington's alma mater, Holy Cross, to honor his "seminal analysis of poverty" and present an array of new proposals for government policies on behalf of "the 'Other America' of today."

What none of these celebrants has noted is The Other America's profound and even jarring conservatism. The book is stridently paternalistic, hostile to what the left calls "multiculturalism" (and to African-American culture particularly), and it spawned an ideology that enabled the agents of the country's elite to control the most intimate aspects of the lives of the poor.

Raised in an Irish-American family in St. Louis and educated in Catholic schools from kindergarten through college, Michael Harrington was shaped by what was then the institutional soul of conservatism. According to Isserman's The Other American: The Untold Life of Michael Harrington (2000), "Apart from family, the presence that loomed largest" in the young Harrington's life "was that of the Catholic Church." Although he later left the Church and differed with its doctrines, Harrington," as he would be the first to acknowledge, never shed their influence." Paramount among these teachings was the injunction to seek out, raise up, and redeem the poor--an exhortation that merged seamlessly with the socialism he embraced as a young adult...