Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an author, activist, and left-wing community organizer and rabble-rouser in Chicago who developed a method of local organizing that was widely copied by Democrats, and influenced Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He is credited with coining the term "community organizer." His most well-known accomplishment was the book Rules for Radicals. He wanted reform inside the system by pressuring government officials to take into account the needs and wants of neighborhood residents, and he believed that the end justified any means.
He was opposed by far-left radicals who wanted to destroy capitalism and who feared that Alinsky was strengthening it by resolving the issues most important to the poor, and was nicknamed "The Red" for his radicalism—his book was dedicated tongue-in-cheek to Lucifer, the first radical.[1]
Alinsky was born on January 30, 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian-Jewish[2] parents Benjamin and Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky.[3] While living in Chicago, he attended Marshall High School.[4] His parents divorced when he was thirteen.[5] Early on, Alinsky was educated in an Orthodox Yeshiva,[6] where he learned the teachings of Rabbi Hillel.[7]
After moving to California with his Father and graduating from Hollywood High School,[8] he attended the University of Chicago, where he received a doctorate in archaeology. In addition, he was awarded a fellowship in sociology which he never completed.
When he finally graduated college it was in the midst of the Great Depression, and found it hard to find work in his field of study. He said: "Archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks."
While he was attending the University of Chicago, he met Helene Simon, his first wife.[9] They married in 1932, and remained married until her death in an accidental drowning in 1947.[10][11][12] They had two children, Kathryn and David.[13] In 1952, he married Jean Graham. After his divorce from Graham in 1969,[13] he married Irene McInnis in 1971.
Alinsky attended the University of Chicago from 1926 to 1932.[14] In his junior year he enrolled in a course on social pathology.[9]
During that time, he was heavily influenced by sociologists from the Chicago School of Sociology.[15] As a student, the two professors who had a most profound impact on him were Ernest Watson Burgess and Robert Ezra Park. Park in particular would become Alinsky's favorite professor.[16] Later as a graduate student, he would be influenced by the work of another University of Chicago sociologist, Clifford Shaw.[17]
Edward Chambers, a director for the Industrial Areas Foundation noted that Alinsky's principles for organizing are contained in his autobiography of John Lewis. By the time Alinsky reached the streets and started working with union activists like Lewis and Samuel Gompers, he had already developed his principles based on the teaching he received from his professors.[15]
In 1931, he went to work as a sociologist for the Institute of Juvenile Research (IJR), which was run by Shaw.[18] It was through this work that he attributed much of America's criminal activity to poverty.[19]
Clifford Shaw was a protege of Burgess, and the IJR is where Alinsky and Shaw would work to implement[18] the Chicago Area Project, a major effort by Burgess.[15][20][21]
The late Andrew Breitbart, in his book, Righteous Indignation, identifies Alinsky as the “first modern community organizer,” and a Communist, too, but a pragmatic one, and a realist who knew from experience what would work and what wouldn’t work in Western democracies. Alinsky took the pretentious ideas of the Frankfurt School and turned them into clear and actionable rules for war, a war with Judeo-Christian civilization, informed above all else by the maxim that the ends justify the means. Breitbart suggests that “if Marcuse was the Jesus of the New Left, then Alinsky was his Saint Paul, proselytizing and dumbing down Herbert Marcuse’s message, making it practical, and convincing leaders to make it the official religion of the United States, even if that meant discarding the old secular religion of the United States, the Constitution."[22]
Alinsky's approach to community organizing stressed "self interest as the generating reality of life." This view was solidified by his experiences in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as an organizer in the style of labor union leaders Samuel Gompers and John L. Lewis. Many of the CIO organizers that he worked with were card-carrying communists.[23]
Alinsky produced notable results like the Back of the Yard and the Woodlawn organizations in Chicago, which led him to spend the next decade spreading his methods across the entire nation, "from Kansas City and Detroit to the barrios of Southern California." The panic-stricken city council of Oakland, California, introduced a resolution banning him from the city.[24][25]
Using the funding from Marshall Field III, Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation utilized confrontational tactics and dramatic protests to help members gain bargaining status and a larger share of the local pie. He disavowed with increasing vigor any national issue strategy or ideological outlook. The weakness of his emphasis on the organizer as a tactician only and the granting of control to those organized was that racist goals could be chosen by the membership as a whole.[26]
Alinsky's efforts were noticed by then governor Adlai Stevenson, who said his goals: "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual."[27]
After parting ways with the Institute of Juvenile Research in 1939(some sources say that he was fired by Shaw[28]), he teamed up with Joseph Meegan[29] where they formed the Back-Of-The-Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC), named after the Union Stockyards,[30] the meatpacking district of Chicago which was made infamous by Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle.[4] This was his first act of "community organizer," and cemented his position as a radical reformer. John Lewis' main organizer in the Back of the Yards was Herb March, who became good friends with Alinsky.[31]
In reviewing the BYN, Alinsky made the following observation:[32]
A survey of the possibilities for community organization of the residents of the Back of the Yards neighborhood reveals two basic social forces which might serve as the cornerstone of any effective community organization which would, first, be representative of the people of the community and, second, by the very virtue of such representation, posesses the necessary strength to effect constructive changes in the life of the Back of the Yards neighborhood. These two elemental social institutions are, first, the Catholic church and second, organized labor.[33]
Alinsky's work in BYNC could not have been possible without his contacts among churches favorable to Christian socialism, the Social Gospel, and Social Justice. For his effective use of faith-based organizations, Alinsky's method has sometimes been referred to as Congregation-based Community Organizing.[34]
For a more detailed treatment, see Catholic Campaign for Human Development.
Several decades later, many of the early organizers who participated in the BYNC would go on to help establish the Catholic Campaign for Human Development. On August 25, 1995, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin gave a speech which began:
It is fitting that we are gathered here because since the beginning, Chicago has been important to the Campaign and the Campaign has been important to Chicago. As you may know, Msgr. George Higgins of this Archdiocese wrote a Labor Day message that pointed the way to the Campaign; Auxiliary Bishop Michael Dempsey of Chicago was the CHD’s first spokesperson; Msgr. Jack Egan organised the 'Friends of CHD' in the mid-1970s, and for decades has been an inspiration to the Campaign's work; the great work of community-organising began in Chicago, and Chicago has many important networks and training centres; CHD enjoys a rich tradition of support here, both in the form of active and enthusiastic participation by people in organisations and projects funded by CHD, and in the generous donations to the annual CHD Collection.[35]
In these remarks, Bernardin highlights four points directly linked with Alinsky. George Higgins' Labor Day message was authored by a protege of Alinsky, P. David Finks. Alinsky's first priest intern was Jack Egan, and the "Friends of CHD" was modeled on an Alinsky strategy designed ten years earlier known as "Friends of FIGHT". Bernardin stated that the great work of community organizing began in Chicago, which is a reference to the BYNC, as is the reference to the "important networks" in the area - all of these organizations based their methodologies on the Alinsky model. Lastly, the "organizations and projects" funded by CHD are all of the left wing Alinsky-style organizations in the Chicago area that the Catholic Campaign had worked so hard to deliver funds to.[35]
Bernard J. Sheil, the auxiliary bishop of Chicago was made an honorary chairman of the BYNC, which "gave Alinsky and Meegan's campaign added visibility and luster".[36] Bishop Sheil made national headlines in 1954 for his public denunciations of Senator Joseph McCarthy.[37]
Having demonstrated his proven abilities in organizing through his activities at BYNC, Alinsky was awarded funding from the Marshall Field Foundation.[38] Using this funding, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) was born in 1940,[39] which was largely responsible for most of the liberal community groups throughout the country.
In the 1960s, the Temporary Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was formed on behalf of local churches to confront a plan by the University of Chicago to expand in the area, as well as work toward better neighborhood schools.[40][41] They consulted with Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation to help confront Mayor Richard J. Daley's secretary of education, Benjamin Willis.[42]
Woodlawn organized a series of protests, using negative publicity to its advantage. In once instance, residents brought their cameras into the schools and took pictures of unoccupied desks. during protests in front of the homes of white slumlords, black residents were bussed in where they held signs all the way up and down the streets distributing pamphlets and protesting to gather attention to the situation.[43]
During the 1940s, Alinsky learned of the community organizing activities of Fred Ross. Ross and Alinsky met, and in 1947, Alinsky hired Ross to work at the Industrial Areas Foundation.[44]
With the aid of Alinsky and the IAF, Ross would go on to found the Community Service Organization (CSO) in Los Angeles, California, with his friend Edward R. Roybal.[45][46] CSO is well known for teaching others the Alinsky ways, such as Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.[47]
Alinsky had a tendency to rub the sores of a community raw.[48] During the Great Society campaigns of Lyndon Johnson, he organized groups like FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today) in order to push the Eastman Kodak Company to hire more black workers.[49] Headed by the radical pastor Franklin Florence,[50][51] FIGHT chose to remain an exclusively black organization. In response, Friends of FIGHT was formed, in order to bring in the involvement of white progressives.[50]
One of the most well known strategies was the use of the "fart in", or "flatulent blitzkrieg".[52] Activists were to eat a large baked bean dinner, then attend the quiet Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra where the operation could be better heard.[53] Later, Alinsky threatened a "piss in" at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.[54] The plan was leaked to city officials that well-dressed black activists would stand in front of the urinals and occupying toilets in men's bathrooms, blocking patrons who actually needed to use the facility from doing so.[55] The plan was never implemented, as the city caved in to their demands.
In 1965, Syracuse University opened the Community Action Training Center (CATC) under the guidance of Professor Warren Haggstrom.[56] Haggstrom, who was a fan of Alinsky's ideals of community organizing,[56] received a grant from the federal government's Office of Economic Opportunity to open the CATC.[57] The grant was for the amount of $314,000.[58] Using this funding, Haggstrom hired Saul Alinsky as a consultant, who also brought in the assistance of Fred Ross. Using the available base of indoctrinated students at the University of Syracuse, the CATC sent "trained" students to go out into the neighborhoods and whip up the residents into a frenzy. It did not take long for the mayor of Syracuse, William F. Walsh, to point out that the purpose of the center was to "train agitators" and teach "Marxist doctrines of class conflict."[59] After Walsh and Haggstrom flew to Washington, D.C., to put pressure on the OEO, funding for the CATC was canceled.[56] No longer having the direct funding of government largess, Alinsky labeled Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty" as a political pork barrel, as there was nothing left in it for him.
Alinsky's hard-knock, do-anything techniques rubbed many leaders the wrong way, and in 1967 he found himself without a contract. Alinsky would influence many activists in organizing, such as Wade Rathke, Michael Gecan, Greg Galuzzo,[32] Edward T. Chambers, and Ernesto Cortes, many of whom went on to become leaders in Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation. The Black Panther movement in the 1960s made it hard for Alinsky to organize the black populace; they had a difficult time dealing with white leadership. He finally settled with organizing middle-class white Americans to protest against the deterioration of the suburban markets. Alinsky is best known for his work around the city of Chicago, but he also traveled to other places to build up community organizing efforts in places like California, New York City, Michigan, and several other "trouble spots".
The CPUSA newspaper, the Daily Worker named Alinsky as one of the sponsors of a dinner for Pearl Hart, a notorious communist fronter, arranged by the Midwest Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. Alinsky was identified in the Daily Worker as chairman of the Public Housing Association of Chicago Illinois. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, with which the Midwest Committee was affiliated, was cited by the President Harry S. Truman's Attorney General Thomas Clark as subversive and Communist. It was also cited by the Special Committee on Un-American Activities as one of the oldest auxiliaries of the Communist Party of the United States.[60]
Speaking in an interview with Playboy Magazine, Alinsky explained the following:
PLAYBOY: What was your own relationship with the Communist Party?ALINSKY: I knew plenty of Communists in those days, and I worked with them on a number of projects. Back in the Thirties, the Communists did a hell of a lot of good work; they were in the vanguard of the labor movement and they played an important role in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers. Anybody who tells you he was active in progressive causes in those days and never worked with the Reds is a goddamn liar. Their platform stood for all the right things, and unlike many liberals, they were willing to put their bodies on the line. Without the Communists, for example, I doubt the C.I.O. could have won all the battles it did. I was also sympathetic to Russia in those days, not because I admired Stalin or the Soviet system but because it seemed to be the only country willing to stand up to Hitler. I was in charge of a big part of fund raising for the International Brigade and in that capacity I worked in close alliance with the Communist Party.
When the Nazi-Soviet Pact came, though, and I refused to toe the party line and urged support for England and for American intervention in the war, the party turned on me tooth and nail. Chicago Reds plastered the Back of the Yards with big posters featuring a caricature of me with a snarling, slavering fanged mouth and wild eyes, labeled, "This is the face of a warmonger." But there were too many Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians and Latvians in the area for that tactic to go over very well. Actually, the greatest weakness of the party was its slavish parroting of the Moscow line. It could have been much more effective if it had adopted a relatively independent stance, like the western European parties do today. But all in all, and despite my own fights with them, I think the Communists of the Thirties deserve a lot of credit for the struggles they led or participated in. Today the party is just a shadow of the past, but in the Depiession it was a positive force for social change. A lot of its leaders and organizers were jerks, of course, but objectively the party in those days was on the right side and did considerable good.[61]
For more detailed treatments, see Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals.
In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky wrote specifically to the 1960s generation of New Left radicals: "What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."[62]
Alinsky died of a heart attack on June 12, 1972 in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. He was 63 years old.[63] Time Magazine wrote of Alinsky that "It is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."[64] William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote of Alinsky on October 19, 1966 in the Chicago Daily News:
For a fee ALINSKY contracts to come into your city and, so to speak, bust up the joint. His purposes, needless to say, are like the Jacobins in France who sought to break up the power structure so as to release the energies and increase the opportunities of the lower class. ALINSKY is twice formidable. For one thing, he is very close to being an organizational genius. For another he has a way of making practical idealists feel sort of foolish - by pushing aside their efforts to help the poor or the racial minorities as ventures in facility.
ALINSKY cannot abide men of reason or conciliation. He thrives on strife, the more the better, and especially relishes the opposition when it is tough. Add to all this a penetrating sense of irony. "An integrated neighborhood" he once observed, "is defined as the length of time between arrival of the first Negro and the departure of the last white."[65]
In addition, Buckley noted that one of Alinsky's favorite tactics was to employ left wing priests and ministers, because police have a built in reluctance to tossing them into a jail cell.[65] On the December 11, 1967 broadcast of his show Firing Line, William Buckley interviewed Alinsky in a discussion known as "Mobilizing The Poor."[66]
Several conservative talk radio hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Michael Savage, attribute many of the strategies of the Democratic Party to Alinsky's Rules For Radicals. Hillary Clinton's senior honors thesis was an analysis of the works of Saul Alinsky and the effect that they have on politics today. Barack Obama can also trace his roots to the teachings of Saul Alinsky[67] and the use of them at the Alinskyite organization ACORN.[68][69] Obama had a passion for Alinsky's work. In 1988 while he was still at Harvard, Barack wrote "Problems and promise in the inner city",[70] which became a chapter in the book "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois."[70] Under the tutelage of an Alinsky admirer John L. McKnight, Obama says he got the "best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School." [1]
His most well known book "Rules for Radicals", in addition to its influence among leftists, became a useful tool for members of the Tea Party Movement. Organizations like FreedomWorks handed out copies of the book to members of its leadership and would use it to train activists all across the country.[71][72]
Alinsky has played a role in several presidential elections. In the Presidential Election 2012, candidate Newt Gingrich declared that President Obama "is legitimately and authentically a Saul Alinsky radical", routinely bringing up Alinsky during the primaries.[73][74][75][76] It was also learned that Mitt Romney's father George Romney knew Alinsky and was sympathetic to his views.[77][78] Governor Romney said in 1968: "I think you ought to listen to Alinsky."[79]
During the 2016 presidential election, then candidate Ben Carson urged Americans to read the book Rules for Radicals to get a better grasp on the tactics used by community organizers.[80] Carson again brought up Alinsky at the RNC, pointing out that Hillary Clinton's "Hero" is Saul Alinsky.[81][82]
Comparisons during the 2016 election revealed that Michelle Obama plagiarized Alinsky for one of her speeches during the United States Presidential Election, 2008.[83]
Alinsky did an interview with Playboy Magazine shortly before he died, which has become a primary source of information about Alinsky's views first hand. In the interview, he revealed how he learned many of his tactics from mafia bosses like Frank Nitti, who was Al Capone's number two man.[84] Alinsky was less interested in the wealth of the mob than he was their ability to keep an iron fist on power in the community. Additionally, during the interview he discussed his view of the afterlife:
ALINSKY: ... if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: They're my kind of people.
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
Dinesh D’Souza took aim at several of the left's big names in his movie America: Imagine a World Without Her,[85][86] including Alinsky, including video not seen by most American audiences.
The Diocese of Davenport awarded Alinsky with its Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award in 1969.[87]
Two documentaries have been produced about the life and influence of Saul Alinsky. In 1999, a documentary titled The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy was produced,[88] and 2016 the EWTN released a second documentary titled A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.[89][90]
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