The Alinsky Connection

One of the great ironies of the 2008 election is the Chicago connection between The Hillster and The Hopester. For The Hillster, it was the road not taken and for The Hopester, it was the turning point in his life. The Hillster, a product of the Chicago suburbs, wrote her Wellesley College senior thesis on Saul Alinsky (1909-1972). The greatest community organizer in U. S. history was impressed with the Wellesley student's questions and writing skills. The Hillster spurned Alinsky's job-offer and took the road to Yale Law School and met The Slickster in her rendezvous with destiny. (Cue the violins here.) Flash forward to 1985 when young Barack Obama put plans for law studies on hold and went to Chicago to work for an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation (founded by Saul Alinksy in 1940). The IAF founder died in 1972, but his organization lived on and Alinksky's successors hired Barack Obama. After three years of community organizing work, The Hopester entered Harvard Law School. As a young attorney, he returned to the Windy City in 1991 to begin his career.

The Hillster spurned Saul Alinksky's job offer and left Chicagoland. The Hopester took a job with the Alinsky organization and put down his roots on Chicago's South Side. As Lawrence (Yogi) Berra said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." If this is (fair & balanced) political conjecture. so be it.

PS: Two items follow: ¹Time's profile of Saul Alinsky and ²the Wshington Fishwrap's take on the Alinsky connection between The Hillster and The Hopester.

¹[x Time]
Radical Saul Alinsky: Prophet of Power To The People (published two years before Alinsky's death)

Saul Alinsky has possibly antagonized more people—regardless of race, color or creed—than any other living American. From his point of view, that adds up to an eminently successful career: his aim in life is to make people mad enough to fight for their own interests. "The only place you really have consensus is where you have totalitarianism," he says, as he organizes conflict as the only route to true progress. Like Machiavelli, whom he has studied and admires, Alinsky teaches how power may be used. Unlike Machiavelli, his pupil is not the prince but the people.

It is not too much to argue that American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas. In an age of dissolving political labels, he is a radical—but not in the usual sense, and he is certainly a long way removed from New Left extremists. He has instructed white slums and black ghettos in organizing to improve their living and working conditions; he inspired Cesar Chavez's effort to organize California's grape pickers. His strategy was emulated by the Federal Government in its antipoverty and model-cities programs: the poor have been encouraged to participate in measures for their relief instead of just accepting handouts.

A sharing of power, thinks Alinsky, is what democracy is all about. Where power is lacking, so are hope and happiness. Alinsky seeks power for others, not for himself. His goal is to build the kind of organization that can dispense with his services as soon as possible. Nor does he confine his tactics to the traditionally underprivileged. Although he has largely helped the very poor, he has begun to teach members of the alienated middle classes how to use power to combat increasingly burdensome taxes and pollution.

In his view, the end of achieving power justifies a wide range of means. "To get anywhere," Alinsky teaches, "you've got to know how to communicate. With city hall, the language is votes, just as with a corporation it's stock power. This means that they never hear with their ears but only through their rears." He knows how to kick. To force slumlords, corporations or city officials to clean up buildings, provide jobs or stop cheating consumers, he resorts to picketing, boycotts, rent strikes and some imaginative dramatic stunts. He had garbage dumped on an alderman's driveway to make the point that collections were inadequate in the slums; ghetto rats were ceremoniously deposited on the steps of city hall. If the occasion requires, Alinsky's forces will not refrain from spreading rumors about an antagonist or indulging in something that comes very close to blackmail. "Our organizers," he says, "look for the wrong reasons to get the right things done." He has only contempt for liberals who appeal to the altruism of their opponents: "A liberal is the kind of guy who walks out of a room when the argument turns into a fight."

Help from the Establishment

In order to succeed, Alinsky believes, a community organization must confront or conjure up an enemy of impressive stature. In the early '60s, he was having trouble organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago until the University of Chicago presented itself as a fat target. Planning to tear down part of Woodlawn to make room for an expansion program, the university committed the tactical error of attacking Alinsky as a provocateur. That convinced the suspicious Woodlawn blacks that Alinsky was on their side. When he started organizing the Negro ghetto in Rochester in 1965, Alinsky found another suitable opponent in the Eastman Kodak Co., which refused to deal with Alinsky's organization, FIGHT (Freedom, Independence, God, Honor—Today), thereby enhancing its appeal to Negroes. Ultimately, the company was badgered into providing more jobs for the ghetto unemployed. Says Alinsky: "I can always depend on the Establishment to do the wrong thing at the right time."

Even Alinsky's everyday habits and gestures are intended to demonstrate the uses of power. Once, while addressing students at an Eastern college in the campus chapel, he lit up a cigarette. The college president rose to tell him that smoking was not allowed, whereupon Alinsky started to leave. "No smoking, no speech," he announced. The embarrassed president at once relented: though having made his point, Alinsky refrained from smoking. He upholds the public's right to good service in restaurants; to get attention, he will throw a glass on the floor or bellow insults at the waiter.

When he is not performing, however, Alinsky hardly fits the radical stereotype.

The gruff public harangue gives way to gentle, witty cajolery. The four-letter words that normally shock become almost terms of endearment.

He compulsively seeks out companionship because he unabashedly likes people—all kinds of people, from waiters and airline stewardesses to journalists and even corporation presidents. Alinsky seems genuinely to enjoy life, as if he had discharged all residue of guilt and resentment in purposeful action. The notorious agitator begins to seem more like a secret philosopher whose model is Socrates rather than Lenin.

Alinsky deliberately cultivates his split personality; he believes that a well-developed case of schizophrenia is essential to successful radicalism. The radical knows in his heart that life is tragic, men are complex, and every course of action involves a choice of evils. Nevertheless, he must act as if he were utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause. Only by so doing can he rally his supporters and intimidate the opposition. The Founding Fathers, Alinsky points out, were well aware of the benefits that England had bestowed on the colonies. But what impact would the Declaration of Independence have had, if it had given King George credit for his good deeds? Yet once a radical has achieved a position of power, insists Alinsky, he must negotiate on the basis of the world as it is: "Compromise is a noble word that sums up democracy." Alinsky claims to be doing nothing more un-American than following the precepts of the Founding Fathers. In the Federalist papers, James Madison warned against allowing any class or faction to acquire too much power. In his own way, Alinsky is trying to redress the balance of power within contemporary America. If the desire to preserve basic American principles makes one a conservative, then he indeed qualifies. His more boisterous exploits may have endeared him to Yippie Abbie Hoffman, but his efforts to reconstruct a viable society have won the respect of Nixon Aide Pat Moynihan. He surely offers proof—if any is needed—that significant change can be accomplished within the American system.

Alinsky grew up in Chicago, experiencing many of the same frustrations that now embitter the city's blacks. The son of a Jewish tailor from Russia, he burned as a youth with the need to compensate for his own lack of power. "I never thought of walking on the grass," he recalls, "until I saw a sign saying 'Keep off the grass.' Then I would stomp all over it." He studied archaeology at the University of Chicago, but what really excited him was spending a summer helping dissident miners in their revolt against John L. Lewis' United Mine Workers. Later he wrote a biography of Lewis, who became a close friend and mentor. After graduation, he received his first lesson in the realities of power when, as a graduate fellow in criminology, he studied Al Capone's gang. He learned that in the Chicago of the 1930s, crime was the Establishment. "When one of those guys got knocked off, there wasn't any court. Most of the judges were at the funeral, and some were pallbearers."

It was hatred of Hitler that first impelled Alinsky to try his hand at organization. In the so-called Back of the Yards section of Chicago in the late '30s, fascism was making many converts among the jobless, bitterly frustrated slumdwellers. "This was not the slum across the tracks," recalls Alinsky. "This was the slum across the tracks from across the tracks." By organizing a series of sitdowns and boycotts, he forced the neighborhood meat packers and slumlords to meet the demands of the community for a better life. Alien ideologies lost their force, and Back of the Yards became the model of a stable neighborhood.

The Yards gave Alinsky a name. The Chicago Democratic machine was upset that he had challenged its iron control of the city, but Publisher Marshall Field and Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard J. Sheil gave him enough backing to set up the Industrial Areas Foundation, an organization that seeks to apply the Alinsky methods to other slums. Operating on a $150,000-a-year budget, I.A.F. has a basic staff of eleven; other organizers are put on the payroll when the need arises. I.A.F. has gone into Rochester, Buffalo and Kansas City, Mo., and has set up Mexican-American organizations in California. Not all of Alinsky's endeavors have succeeded. In the Chelsea district of New York City and in Kansas City, I.A.F. suffered significant defeats. Local groups became so obsessed with conflict that they could not agree among themselves and wound up more bitterly divided after Alinsky left than before he came.

Willingness to Surrender

The community-power movement, in fact, has taken a turn not originally envisioned by Alinsky. He has always tried to make sure that demagogues did not get control of his organizations. But by building up such a fierce sense of group solidarity and resentment of the outsider, he may have unwittingly contributed to a new kind of racism. Today, Back of the Yards is under attack for keeping Negroes out; Alinsky threatens to organize the neighborhood all over again. In Rochester, FIGHT became tainted with black racism and whites have been discouraged from joining. In an updated version of his 1946 textbook on organization, Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky wonders how white liberals can believe in the dignity of all races when they are so willing to surrender their own by submitting to outrageous attacks from blacks. "During the trial of Black Pan ther Leader Huey Newton, many liberals wore buttons reading 'Honkies for Huey!' " he notes. "Can you imagine, if a white civil-rights leader were on trial, that blacks would go about with buttons reading 'Niggers for so-and-so'?"

Alinsky is equally impatient with white student radicals because of their innocence about power. "You never take an action," he says, "without first figuring out the reaction. Periodic mass euphoria around a charismatic leader is not an organization." He feels that Utopian militants are just as much dropouts from society as hippies, because both "dogmatically refuse to begin with the world as it is." He has little faith in the staying power of some of the more belligerent radicals; often they are the first to give up when the going gets rough. "He who lives by the sword shall perish by the champagne cocktail."

Threat of Paranoia

Despite his interest in helping the poor to help themselves, Alinsky believes that no durable reform is possible without the backing of at least a substantial portion of middle-class Americans. Today they are ripe, he feels, for his kind of power-oriented organization. They are squeezed by taxes and inflation, bewildered by the revolt of youth against everything they stand for. "Their fears and frustrations at their helplessness," says Alinsky, "amount to a political paranoia, which can demonize them to turn to the law of survival in the narrowest sense."

One Alinsky proposal to help the middle class seize its share of power is Proxies for People, a group that will solicit proxies to be used at stockholders' meetings. This organization would put pressure on corporations to stop polluting the environment or to support such social causes as better mass transportation. If enough concerned stockholders show up at annual meetings, contends Alinsky, corporations will eventually have to rent Yankee Stadium to accommodate them all and will hardly be able to ignore their demands. Proxies for People, he thinks, would restore an "adventure in living to the dead majority, and might even bridge the generation gap, since both parents and children would be fighting the same problems from different angles."

Proxies for People demonstrates Alinsky's unsurpassed flair for the dramatic gesture. Some fault him, however, for lack of follow-through, for jumping too quickly from one project to the next. His reply is that he pulls out as soon as he can to give local leadership a chance. It is true, though, that he is spread perilously thin. Operating on his I.A.F. income of $25,000 a year, he seems to live at airports as he speeds from one speaking engagement to the next. At 61, having suffered personal disasters (his first wife, by whom he had two children, drowned; he recently divorced his second), Alinsky has a keen sense of mortality and seems to find more satisfaction in the pursuit than in the attainment of a goal. No ultimate Utopia lies over the horizon for him. "Every time you resolve a problem," he says, "you create another. My life is a quest for the unexpected." After life? "They'll send me to hell, and I'll organize it."

Copyright © 1970 Time, Inc.

²[x Washington Fishwrap]
For Clinton and Obama, A Common Ideological Touchstone
By Peter Slevin

The job offer to "Miss Hillary Rodham, Wellesley College" was dated Oct. 25, 1968, and signed by Saul D. Alinsky, the charismatic community organizer who believed that the urban poor could become their own best advocates in a world that largely ignored them.

Alinsky thought highly of 21-year-old Rodham, a student government president who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. She was in the midst of a year-long analysis of Alinsky's aggressive mobilizing tactics, and he was searching for "competent political literates" to move to Chicago to build grass-roots organizations.

Seventeen years later, another young honor student was offered a job as an organizer in Chicago. By then, Alinsky had died, but a group of his disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate, to organize black residents on the South Side, while learning and applying Alinsky's philosophy of street-level democracy. The recruiter called the $13,000-a-year job "very romantic, until you do it."

Today, as Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton face off for the Democratic presidential nomination, their common connection to Alinsky is one of the striking aspects of their biographies. Obama embraced many of Alinsky's tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life. Clinton's interest was more intellectual -- she turned down the job offer -- and she has said little about Alinsky since their association became a favorite subject of conservative critics during her husband's presidency.

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. His approach to social justice relied on generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed. Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

Both Obama and Clinton admired Alinsky's appeal for small-d democracy but came to believe that social progress is best achieved by working within the political system, and on a national scale.

Both went to law school, turned to a mix of courthouse and community remedies, and eventually moved into electoral politics.

Associates describe the candidates as combining streaks of idealism with a realistic appreciation of the politically possible, a mix the goal-oriented Alinsky would have recognized in himself. Like Alinsky, they fashioned political strategies defined more by coalitions and compromise than by the flashy but often hollow rhetorical pyrotechnics that Clinton, in her Wellesley honors thesis, called "the luxury of symbolic suicide."

Neither candidate would agree to be interviewed about Alinsky. But Marian Wright Edelman, the Children's Defense Fund leader, who knows Obama, worked closely with Clinton and spoke at Alinsky's funeral, said the organizer's allure was formidable, particularly in the energized 1960s.

"He was brilliant. He was working for underdogs. He was trying to empower communities, which we still need to do. He spoke plainly. He had his outrageous side, but he also had his pragmatic side," Edelman said. "Both Hillary and Barack reflect that understanding of community-organizing strategy. Both just know how to leverage power."

A Colorful Thesis Subject

Born in 1909 and bred in the politicized precincts of Chicago, Alinsky was a lifelong student of the dynamics of power who concluded that the city's famed Democratic machine remained unmoved unless pushed.

Alinsky took action with an organizing campaign in 1939 in Back of the Yards, the desperate Chicago meatpacking district depicted in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Fashioning an unlikely alliance of unions, the Catholic church and others to win concessions from industry and government, he said organizers must listen to people's desires, then find leaders to carry the fight.

An organizer must "fan the latent hostilities," he wrote in his 1946 handbook Reveille for Radicals, and "he must search out controversy and issues, rather than avoid them."

A master of the attention-getting rhetorical flourish, Alinsky once pressed Eastman Kodak to hire more black workers, saying the only thing the company had done about race was introduce color film. Yet he practiced "a method that sounds more radical than it actually was," said Georgetown University historian Michael Kazin, who called Alinsky "a tactician more than he was an ideologist."

Alinsky, unimpressed by dogma, believed in coalitions linked by clear-eyed calculations of self-interest. He focused on concrete local issues: bus routes, public housing, jobs. To him, the fashionable cry of the 1960s that power comes from the barrel of a gun was "absurd." To mark his differences with the bomb-throwers, he subtitled his second book A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

The calamitous events of that decade turned Clinton away from the GOP of her Park Ridge, Ill., youth. Arriving at Wellesley, she became president of the Young Republicans, but she soon drifted left. She said that 1968, the year she met Alinsky in Chicago, was a watershed in her "personal and political evolution," marked by the escalation of the Vietnam War and the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

When she returned for her senior year that September, Clinton decided to write a thesis on the war on poverty. Her adviser suggested Alinsky. She called her 92-page work, after a line in a T.S. Eliot poem, " 'There Is Only the Fight': An Analysis of the Alinsky Model."

Much of Alinsky's agenda, she wrote after interviewing him three times, "does not sound 'radical.' " Even his tactics, she concluded, were often "non-radical, even 'anti-radical.' His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers. The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognizes the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realize them."

Among examples of Alinsky's methods, Clinton cited the 1961 decision to send 2,000 black Woodlawn community residents downtown en masse to register to vote. She mentioned activists picketing the suburban homes of slumlords and a mission to dump garbage outside the sanitation commission.

"In many cases," Clinton wrote, "the abrasive tactics paid off with the cancellation of double shifts in the schools, the increased hiring of Negroes by city businesses, growing responsiveness from the machine politicians, even some property repair."

Clinton believed that new federal poverty programs in the 1960s were a step backward because their architects neglected to listen to individual citizens — the crux of the Alinsky model. The policies, she said, invited the poor "into the mainstream not through their participatory planning, but through their acquiescent participation."

The lesson was still on her mind years later. She told an interviewer shortly after Bill Clinton became president that government programs were too often administered from on high, with too little effect.

"I basically argued that [Alinsky] was right," Clinton told The Washington Post in 1993. "Even at that early stage, I was against all these people who came up with these big government programs that were more supportive of bureaucracies than actually helpful to people. You know, I've been on this kick for 25 years."

In the end, Clinton gave Alinsky mixed reviews, admiring his charisma and his goal of democratic equality while questioning the usefulness and staying power of a small-bore approach based on stirring up conflict in the inner city. She noted that Alinsky was crafting a fresh appeal to the potentially powerful middle class.

All four thesis reviewers thought the paper was "wonderful," said Wellesley emeritus professor Alan Schechter, who described it as a pragmatic assessment of approaches to public policy problems. Schechter, a friend and political supporter of Clinton's, said her work revealed "an underlying idealism, but it's not a naive idealism."

For reasons Clinton and her staff will not discuss, the White House asked Wellesley to seal its copy of her thesis during her husband's presidency. By the mid-1990s, Republican foes regularly derided Clinton's thesis choice as evidence that she is a closet leftist. This month, Republican pollster Frank Luntz said on Fox News that Clinton treated Alinsky "almost like an icon," adding, "That's like holding up some of the people from Germany in the 1930s and '40s."

As first lady, Clinton occasionally lent her name to projects endorsed by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the Alinsky group that had offered her a job in 1968. She raised money and attended two events organized by the Washington Interfaith Network, an IAF affiliate.

IAF organizer Michael Gecan, who has met with Clinton several times, said her Wellesley work was often an icebreaker: "She would always say, 'I did my senior thesis on Alinsky.' "

As Alinsky biographer Sanford D. Horwitt put it: "Hillary is clearly aware of Alinsky's successors and the work they do. I think it's all to the good."

Clinton's 2003 memoir, Living History, devotes a single paragraph to Alinsky, whom she describes as "a colorful and controversial figure who managed to offend almost everyone." She wrote that she agreed with some of Alinsky's ideas, "particularly the value of empowering people to help themselves," but that she rejected his job offer because of a "fundamental disagreement."

"Alinsky said I would be wasting my time," Clinton recalled, "but my decision was an expression of my belief that the system could be changed from within."

Organizing in Chicago

Community organizing, for Clinton principally an academic exercise, was more complex for Obama when he arrived in Chicago in 1985 to work with the Developing Communities Project, an offshoot of the Alinsky network. His experience became an emotional and visceral exploration of the roots of urban African American decay and his own identity.

Times had changed. The '60s were over. Chicago had a black mayor, and Alinsky was gone, dead of a heart attack in 1972. But his work and the fundamentals of his philosophy survived on the far South Side.

Obama stepped into the Alinsky tradition after deciding "mainly on impulse," he has said, at age 21 to become a community organizer. His passion ran to romantic visions of the civil rights struggle.

"He wanted to make that kind of contribution and didn't know how to do it," said Gerald Kellman, who hired Obama. "There's that side of him that's strongly idealistic, very much a dreamer, and this kind of work attracts that kind of person. It isn't just that we're going to change things, but we're going to change things from the grass roots."

Obama spent three roller-coaster years trying to build a new source of power in the Altgeld Gardens housing project and the Roseland community, maneuvering among neighbors, church leaders and politicians who did not always welcome the encounters.

"It was poverty on top of poverty. There were so many people who had given up. They just didn't care," said Loretta Augustine-Herron, who signed up to work with Obama. "I don't think he knew how bad it was until he came to our area. He had to have the tenacity and the patience to train us, and sometimes he had to be frustrated."

The Alinsky method, which Obama taught long afterward, is centered on one-on-one conversations. The organizer's task is to draw out people's stories, listening for their goals and ambitions — "the stuff that makes them tick," one of his teachers told him. There he would find the self-interest that would spark activism.

Fellow community organizer Madeline Talbott said Obama mastered the approach. She remembers a successful 1992 voter-registration drive that he ran for Project Vote.

"He says things like, 'Do you think we should do this? What role would you like to play?' " said Talbott, chief organizer for Illinois ACORN. "Everybody else just puts out an e-mail and says, 'Y'all come.' Barack doesn't do that."

In time, Obama helped build and guide a small network of grass-roots groups that agitated for better playgrounds, improvements in trash pickup and the removal of asbestos from public housing. The city opened a jobs office in the tumbledown community as the lights were going out in nearby factories.

It was in those neighborhoods, Obama said in announcing for president, "that I received the best education I ever had, and where I learned the true meaning of my Christian faith." But by the time Obama moved on, Kellman said, he had seen "the limits of what could be achieved."

Obama spent three years at Harvard Law School, then returned to Chicago, where he taught constitutional law, handled civil rights cases and worked with community groups. He continued to teach the Alinsky philosophy, although he told the New Republic recently that "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest."

Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), a friend of Obama's, sees another difference. "If you read Alinsky's teachings, there are times he's confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack. He's always looking for ways to connect."

But when Obama first ran for office in 1995, he echoed Alinsky's credo — and Clinton's thesis — in arguing that politicians should not see voters "as mere recipients or beneficiaries."

"It's time for politicians and other leaders to take the next step and to see voters, residents or citizens as producers of this change," Obama told Hank De Zutter of the Chicago Reporter. "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?"

What Obama and Clinton both learned, said Edelman, of the Children's Defense Fund, is that "community organizing is crucial but not enough."

Chicago organizer Gregory Galluzzo, Obama's former supervisor, who likes to describe himself as Alinsky's St. Paul, believes that Obama's exposure to the organizer's liturgy taught him that wisdom can emerge from the grass roots. "Hillary," he said, "leans toward the elites."

But Galluzzo believes that both candidates were influenced by their encounters with Alinsky and his methods. "By either one of them being in office," he said, "we're going to have a government that's more responsive to the ordinary people."

[Peter Slevin covers national politics for The Washington Post.]

Copyright © 2007 The Washington Post Company

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