Saul Alinsky

Saul Alinsky (1909 - 1972) was a liberal community organizer 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 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. We 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.

He was awarded a doctorate in archeology from the University of Chicago and was awarded a fellowship in sociology, which he never completed. He was nicknamed "The Red" for his radicalism --his book was dedicated tongue-in-cheek to Lucifer, the first radical.

Alinsky's approach to community organizing stressed "self interest as the generating reality of life." This view arose from 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. Alinsky produced notable results like the Back of the Yard and the Woodlawn organizations in Chicago. 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.

Community Organizer

In 1931, he went to work as a sociologist for the Illinois Division of Juvenile Research. It was through this work that he attributed much of America's criminal activity to poverty. In 1936 he left the Division of Juvenile Research in order to form the Back-Of-The-Yards Neighborhood Council. This was his first act of "community organizer," and cemented his position as a radical reformer. He went on to found the Industrial Areas Foundation, which was largely responsible for most of the liberal community groups throughout the country.

Alinsky had a tendency to rub the sores of a community raw. During the Great Society campaigns of Lyndon Johnson, he pushed the Eastman Kodak Company to hire more black workers. However, his hard-knock, do-anything techniques rubbed many leaders the wrong way, and in 1967 he found himself without a contract. This led him to label Johnson's "war on poverty" as a political pork barrel.

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.

Legacy

Many right-wing talk radio hosts, such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, 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. Obama had a passion for Alinsky's work. Before he left Harvard, Barack wrote "After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois." 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."

Works

• Reveille for Radicals, 1946
• Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971. and text search
• The Philosopher and the Provocateur: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Saul Alinsky edited by Bernard E. Doering (1994), 118pp. Maritain was a conservative Catholic theologian

Further reading

• Bailey, Robert, Jr. Radicals in Urban Politics: The Alinsky Approach. 1974. 187 pp.
• Horwitt, Sanford D. Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky: His Life and Legacy (1992), 595pp
• Levine, Charles F. "Understanding Alinsky, Conservative Wine In Radical Bottles." American Behavioral Scientist 1973 17(2): 279-284.