Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians, bankers and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, Alinsky – in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) – defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.
Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party movement and subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticized on the political left for an aversion to broad ideological goals, Alinsky has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action.
Early life Childhood Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Lithuanian Jewish emigrant parents from what was then Vilna in Russian Empire (today Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). He was the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky and his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. His father started out as a tailor, then ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop.Cook County, Illinois, U.S., Birth Certificates Index, 1871–19221920 United States census
Both parents were strict and observant Orthodox. Alinsky describes himself as being devout until the age of 12, the point at which he began to fear his parents would force him to become a rabbi. Although he had "not personally" encountered "much antisemitism as a child", Alinsky recalled that "it was so pervasive ... you just accepted it as a fact of life." Called up for retaliating against some Polish boys, Alinsky claimed that one rabbinical lesson that "sank home." After he protested that "It's the American way . . . Old Testament . . . They beat us up, so we beat the hell out of them," a rabbi responded: "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something great: 'where there are no men, be thou a man'". Alinsky considered himself an agnostic, but when asked about his religion would "always say Jewish."
College studies
In 1926, Alinsky entered the University of Chicago. He studied in America's first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park. Overturning the propositions of a still ascendant eugenics movement, Burgess and Park argued that social disorganization, not heredity, was the cause of disease, crime, and other characteristics of slum life. As the passage of successive waves of immigrants through such districts had demonstrated, it is the slum area itself, and not the particular group living there, with which social pathologies were associated. Yet Alinsky claimed to be "astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities."
The Great Depression put an end to an interest in archaeology: after the stock-market crash "all the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks." A chance graduate fellowship moved Alinsky on to criminology. For two years, as a "nonparticipant observer", he claims to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob (he explains that, as they "owned the city", they felt they had little to hide from a "college kid"). Among other things about the exercise of power, he says they taught him was "the terrific importance of personal relationships". Alinsky took a job in the Illinois, Division of the State Criminologist, working with juvenile delinquents and at the Joliet Correctional Center. He recalls it as a dispiriting experience: if he dwelt on the contributing causes of crime, such as poor housing, racial discrimination, or unemployment, he was labelled a "red."
Organizing
The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council In 1938, Alinsky gave up his last employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, to devote himself full-time as a political activist. In his free time he had been raising funds for the International Brigade (organized by the Communist International) in the Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, fighting evictions, and agitating for public housing. He also began to work alongside the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and its president John L. Lewis. (In an "un-authorized biography" of the labor leader Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House).
Alinsky's idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered "to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities."
In the belief that if his approach succeeded in these neighborhoods, it could do so anywhere, Alinsky looked to the back of the Chicago Stockyards (the area made infamous by Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel The Jungle). There with Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, Alinsky set up the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC). Working with the archdiocese, the Council succeeded in rallying a mix of otherwise mutually hostile Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats . . .) as well as African Americans to demand, and win, concessions from local meatpackers (in January 1946 the BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers), landlords and city hall. This, and other efforts in the city's South Side to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest" earned an accolade from Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson: Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual."
In founding the BYNC, Alinsky and Meegan sought to break a pattern of outside direction established by their predecessors in poor urban areas, most notably the settlement houses. The BYNC would be based on local democracy: "organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate." Residents had to "control their own destiny" and in doing so not only gain new resources but new confidence as well. "Some of Saul's real genius," according to one observer, was "his sense of timing and understanding how others would perceive something. Saul knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it. If you make the discovery yourself, you're going to strut because you made it".
The Industrial Areas Foundation
In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides. For Alinsky there was also a broader mission.
In what sixty years later, with publication of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, would have been understood as a concern for the loss of "social capital" (of the organized opportunities for conviviality and deliberation that allow and encourage ordinary people to engage in democratic process), in his own statement of purpose for the IAF, Alinsky wrote: In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity—to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care for their neighbors. This course of urban anonymity...is one of eroding destruction to the foundations of democracy. For although we profess that we are citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them—that they do not 'count'.
Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work--"rubbing raw", as the New York Times saw it "the sores of discontent" and compelling action through agitation--"from Kansas City and Detroit to the farm-worker barrios of Southern California." Although Alinsky always had rationalizations, his biographer Sanford Horwitt records that "on rare occasions" Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were "unequivocal successes". There was uncertainty about "what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own." Recognizing that the IAF could not be "a holding for People's Organizations", Alinsky thought that one solution would be for community-councils, under their native leadership, to constitute their own inter-city fund-raising and mutual-assistance network. In the early 1950s, Alinsky was talking about "a million-dollar budget to carry us over a three-year plan of organization through the country." The usual corporate and foundation funders proved decidedly cold to the idea.
Successes could also be problematic. In Chicago, the Back of the Yards Council set itself against housing integration and offered no objection to a pattern of "urban renewal" with which Alinsky professed himself "fed-up": "the moving of low-income and, almost without exception, Negro groups and dumping them into other slums," in order to build houses for middle-income whites. There being "no substitute for organized power," Alinsky concluded in 1959 that what the city needed was a powerful black community organization that could "bargain collectively" with other organized groups and agencies, private and public.
Mentoring in The Woodlawn Organization With the groundwork prepared by his deputy Edward T. Chambers, Alinsky began mentoring The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), based in the Woodlawn community area on Chicago's South Side. Like other IAF organizations, TWO was a coalition of existing community entities, local block clubs, churches, and businesses. These groups paid dues, and the organization was run by an elected board. The TWO moved quickly to establish itself as the "voice" of the black neighborhood, mobilizing, developing and bringing up new leadership. An example was Arthur M. Brazier, the first spokesperson and eventual president of the organization. Starting out as a mail carrier, Brazier became a preacher in a store front church, and then, through TWO, emerged as a national spokesman for the Black Power movement.
In 1961, to show city hall that TWO was a force to be reckoned with, Alinsky combined "two elements—votes, which were the coin of the realm in Chicago politics, and fear of the black mass" by bussing 2,500 black resident citizens, down to city hall to register to vote.