Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky
Born	(1909-01-30)January 30, 1909 Chicago, Illinois
Died	June 12, 1972(1972-06-12) (aged 63) Carmel, California
Cause of death	heart attack
Nationality	American
Education	University of Chicago, Ph.B. 1930 U. Chicago Graduate School, criminology, 1930–1932
Occupation(s)	Community organizer, Writer
Known for	writing on politics
Notable work	Rules for Radicals
Spouse(s)	Helene Simon of Philadelphia, m. 9 June 1932 – her death Jean Graham, 15 May 1959 – div 1970 Irene Alinsky, May 1971
Children	Katherine and David (by Helene)
Parent(s)	Benjamin Alinsky (tailor and landlord) Sarah Tannenbaum
Relatives	two half brothers and a half sister from his father's earlier marriage a younger brother died in childhood
Awards	Pacem in Terris Award, 1969
Notes

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing, and has been compared to Thomas Paine as being "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left." He is often noted for his book Rules for Radicals.

In the course of nearly four decades of political organizing, Alinsky received much criticism, but also gained praise from many public figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions of the African American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other "trouble spots".

His ideas were later adapted by some U.S. college students and other young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond. Time magazine once wrote that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas," and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was "very close to being an organizational genius."

Early life and family

Alinsky was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. Alinsky stated during an interview that his parents never became involved in the "new socialist movement." He added that they were "strict orthodox, their whole life revolved around work and synagogue ... I remember as a kid being told how important it was to study."

Because of his strict Jewish upbringing, he was asked whether he ever encountered antisemitism while growing up in Chicago. He replied, "it was so pervasive you didn't really even think about it; you just accepted it as a fact of life." He considered himself to be a devout Jew until the age of 12, after which time he began to fear that his parents would force him to become a rabbi. "I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit ... But I'll tell you one thing about religious identity," he added. "Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say—and always will say—Jewish."

Education

He worked his way through the University of Chicago, where he majored in archaeology, a subject that fascinated him. His plans to become a professional archaeologist were changed due to the ongoing economic Depression. He later stated, "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."

Early jobs

After attending two years of graduate school he dropped out to accept work as a community organizer for the state of Illinois as a criminologist. On a part-time basis, he also began working as an organizer with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). After a few years, by 1939, he became less active in the labor movement and became more active in general community organizing, starting with the slums of Chicago. His early efforts to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest aroused the admiration of Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who said Alinsky's aims 'most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.'"

As a result of his efforts and success at helping slum communities, he spent the next 10 years repeating his organization work across the nation, "from Kansas City and Detroit to the barrios of Southern California." By 1950 he turned his attention to the African American ghettos of Chicago, where his actions would later earn him the hatred of Mayor Richard J. Daley, although Daley would later say that "Alinsky loves Chicago the same as I do." He traveled to California at the request of the San Francisco Bay Area Presbyterian Churches to help organize the black ghetto in Oakland. Hearing of his plans, "the panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city."

Community organizing and politics

In the 1930s, Alinsky organized the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made infamous by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle for the horrific working conditions in the Union Stock Yards). He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood, which trained organizers and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country. In Rules for Radicals (his final work, published in 1971 one year before his death), he addressed the 1960s generation of radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power. In the first chapter, opening paragraph of the book Alinsky writes, "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." Alinsky did not join political organizations. When asked during an interview whether he ever considered becoming a Communist party member, he replied:

"Not at any time. I've never joined any organization—not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."

Nor did he have much respect for mainstream political leaders who tried to interfere with growing black–white unity during the difficult years of the Great Depression. In Alinsky's opinion, new voices and new values were being heard in the U.S., and "people began citing John Donne's 'No man is an island,'" he said. He observed that the hardship affecting all classes of the population was causing them to start "banding together to improve their lives," and discovering how much in common they really had with their fellow man. He stated during an interview a few of the causes for his active organizing in black communities:

"Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred and feathered, castrated—or killed. Most Southern Democrat politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."

Alinsky's tactics were often unorthodox. After organizing FIGHT (an acronym for Freedom, Independence, God, Honor, Today) in Rochester, New York, Alinsky once threatened to stage a "fart in" to disrupt the sensibilities of the city's establishment at a Rochester Philharmonic concert. FIGHT members were to consume large quantities of baked beans after which, according to author Nicholas von Hoffman, "FIGHT's increasingly gaseous music-loving members would hie themselves to the concert hall where they would sit expelling gaseous vapors with such noisy velocity as to compete with the woodwinds." Satisfied with the reaction to his threat, Alinsky would later threaten a "piss in" at Chicago O'Hare Airport. Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well dressed African Americans to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the city to the bargaining table. According to Alinsky, the threat alone was sufficient to produce results.

Alinsky described his plans in 1972 to begin to organize the white middle class across America, and the necessity of that project. He believed that what President Richard Nixon and Vice-President Spiro Agnew called "The Silent Majority" was living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically-active citizens. He feared the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, "making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday." His stated motive: "I love this goddamn country, and we're going to take it back."

Alinsky's own words, from his 1946 "Reveille for Radicals", capture his perspective, his motivation, and his style of engagement:

• A People’s Organization is a conflict group, [and] this must be openly and fully recognized. Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A People’s Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of life. . . .

• A People’s Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. It is a war against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness. They are basically the same issues for which nations have gone to war in almost every generation. . . . War is not an intellectual debate, and in the war against social evils there are no rules of fair play. . . .

• A People’s Organization lives in a world of hard reality. It lives in the midst of smashing forces, dashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos, the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people prosaically refer to as life and students describe as 'society'.

Legacy

The documentary The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy, states that "Alinsky championed new ways to organize the poor and powerless that created a backyard revolution in cities across America." Alinsky formed the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940, and Edward T. Chambers became its Executive Director after Alinsky died. Since the IAF's formation, hundreds of professional community and labor organizers and thousands of community and labor leaders have attended its workshops. Fred Ross, who worked for Alinsky, was the principal mentor for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Other organizations following in the tradition of the Congregation-based Community Organizing pioneered by IAF include PICO National Network, Gamaliel Foundation, and Direct Action and Research Training Center (DART). Hillary Clinton's senior honors thesis on Saul Alinsky, written at Wellesley College, noted that Alinsky's personal efforts were a large part of his method. including Ed Chambers, Tom Gaudette, Ernesto Cortes, Michael Gecan, Wade Rathke, and Patrick Crowley. Alinsky is often credited with laying the foundation for the grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s. Jack Newfield writing in New York magazine included Alinsky among "the purest Avatars of the populist movement," along with Ralph Nader, Cesar Chavez, and Jesse Jackson.

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In 1969, he was awarded the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award.

Alinsky died of a sudden, massive heart attack in 1972, on a street corner in Carmel, California, at the age of 63.

Published works

• Reveille for Radicals. Vintage Books. 1946 [1969, 2nd edn]. ISBN 0-679-72112-6. paperback
• John L. Lewis: An Unauthorized Biography. 1949. ISBN 0-394-70882-2.
• Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. Random House. 1971. ISBN 0-394-44341-1. Vintage books paperback: ISBN 0-679-72113-4

Biographies and works on Alinsky

• Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy, by Sanford D. Horwitt, (1989) Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0394572432; Vintage Books paperback: ISBN 067973418X
• The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy, 1999, Chicago Video Project, co-produced by Bruce Orenstein.
• The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky by Marion K. Sanders, (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).
• The Love Song of Saul Alinsky, by Tony-nominee Herb Schapiro, originally produced in Chicago in 1998 by Terrapin Theatre, directed by Pam Dickler and with Gary Houston as Alinsky. Script has since been published by Samuel French: ISBN 9780573651298
• The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky, by P. David Finks, (1984) Paulist Press, paperback: ISBN 0809126087
• Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky, by Nicholas von Hoffman. New York: Nation Books, 2010. ISBN 978-1-56858-439-3

External links

• Website of a documentary about Alinsky and his legacy, Democratic Promise
• Watch the National Film Board of Canada documentary Encounter with Saul Alinsky
• Interview with Alinsky, published in Playboy in 1972. The interview is in twelve parts. The entire text is copied onto one page, here [1].
• Santow, Mark Edward (January 1, 2000). Saul Alinsky and the dilemmas of race in the post-war city (Dissertation abstract).
• Chambers, Whittaker (February 25, 1946). "Books: Problem of the Century". TIME. Retrieved 2011-09-09. Book review of Reveille for Radicals. Chambers is not named.
• Behrent, Michael C. (10/06/2008). "Saul Alinsky, la campagne présidentielle et l'histoire de la gauche américaine" (in Template:Fr). La Vie des Idées. Retrieved 2011-09-08. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); Unknown parameter |trans_title= ignored (|trans-title= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: unrecognized language (link)
• Behrent, Michael C. (11-05-2011). "Obama as Philosopher". La Vie des Idées, a/k/a Books & ideas.net. Obama: the one who embraces a realistic understanding of power and of the role of self-interest in social life; the disciple of Saul Alinsky, the father of "community organizing," for whom power is the "very essence, the dynamo of life" {{cite web}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); |format= requires |url= (help); Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help); Missing or empty |url= (help); Text "url-http://www.booksandideas.net/IMG/pdf/20110510_Behrent-2.pdf" ignored (help) Book review of James T. Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, Princeton University Press, 2010.