Saul Alinsky - "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left." - praised by William F Buckley
Johnny Asia
"one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left."[1]
In the course of nearly four decades of organizing the poor for
radical social action, Alinsky has made many enemies, but he has also
won the respect, however grudging, of a disparate array of public
figures: French philosopher Jacques Maritain has called him "one of
the few really great men of this century," and even William Buckley,
Jr., a bitter ideological foe, has admitted that "Alinsky is twice
formidable, and very close to being an organizational genius."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Alinsky
Saul Alinsky (January 30, 1909, Chicago, Illinois – June 12, 1972,
Carmel, California) was an American community organizer and writer. He
is generally considered to be the founder of modern community
organizing and has been compared in Playboy Magazine to Thomas Paine
as "one of the great American leaders of the nonsocialist left."[1]
Early jobs
After attending two years of graduate school he dropped out to accept
work with 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.' "[1]
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 quickly earned him the hatred of
Mayor Richard J. Daley, although Daley would later say that "Alinsky
loves Chicago the same as I do."[1] He traveled to California at the
request of the 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."[1]
In the course of nearly four decades of organizing the poor for
radical social action, Alinsky made many enemies, but he has received
praise from an array of 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 US college students and other
young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies
for organizing on campus and beyond.[2] 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."[1]
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."[4]
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." [1]
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.[1] 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, feathered, castrated -- or killed. Most
Southern politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no
compunction about boasting of it."[1]
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."[1]