Radical

Nicholas Von Hoffman, “Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky”, Nation Books, 2010, 214 Pages

The author, Von Hoffman, spent 10 years as Saul Alinsky’s top community organizer and then worked for the Chicago Daily News and then the Washington Post. Saul died in 1972 and had been greatly influenced by John L. Lewis. Saul’s organizing tactics have been studied by community organizers; Alinsky is to community organizing what Freud is to psychoanalysis.

I found this memoir-biographical book particularly interesting when it describes Saul’s relationship with Chicago’s Catholic bishops and priests (Saul was Jewish) from the 1930s through the 1960s. For instance, every spring for a period of years the rector of Chicago’s Catholic seminary sent a small group of the most promising members of the graduating class to spend a few hours with Saul. Saul would explain to these young men that they would have to choose between being priests or bishops, between practicing their faith or practicing real estate. Much of Saul’s financing came through his contacts within the Catholic church.


Alinsky quote: "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?" (pp. 9-11):

My notes:
(p. 26):
Saul's time at Joliet’s Correctional facility convinced him that the odds on successful rehabilitation programs were not promising. He came to believe that by the time most of the men were driven in shackles through the penitentiary's gates they were irremediably set in who they were and only advancing years would lessen their chances of becoming repeat offenders. He was not much more sanguine about most of the programs aimed at teenage gangs, seeing little connection between such things as athletic programs and the lessening of juvenile delinquency. He looked on adolescent males as "nature's natural fascists."
(pp. 27-29):
As Saul studied gangs and juvenile delinquency he said he came to believe that the social setting the kids were born into would have to be changed. As long as children were inescapably destined to grow up in an environment in which they had to join in gang life to protect themselves, programs premised on individual redemption could have only limited success.
(p. 34):
John L. Lewis and Alinsky organized adults, people who had families, children, jobs, mortgages, doctor bills, all the responsibilities of being grown-ups. For an adult with responsibilities the loss of a paycheck is often a family catastrophe. Saul was not big on provoking arrests. That was not something that leaders in the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements would necessarily worry about, since most of the rank-and-file demonstrators in these movements were young, unmarried people, high school and college students, sometimes grammar school kids.
(pp. 45-48):
Although Chicago had an African American congressman and other elected officials, it was, if you examined the census, more segregated than Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia or any other state in the Old Confederacy. Blacks and whites shared washrooms and sat together in the downtown movie theaters, but outside of downtown an African American stood about the same chance of being served in a restaurant in Chicago as he would have in Jackson, Mississippi.
The whites of Chicago entertained racial myths every bit as screwy as those in the Deep South. Many white Chicagoans in that period believed that the NAACP periodically designated certain days as "shove days" when blacks on buses, in subways and on the sidewalks were supposed to shove or push or bump any white they happened to be close to. Hundreds of taverns in the white areas of the city's south and west sides could be entered only after the barkeep got a good look at your face and then hit a buzzer, releasing the door lock.
The white part of Chicago was a honeycomb of conspiracies to confine black people to "their" part of the city. The banks, savings and loan institutions, government, churches, schools, hospitals, fire and police departments, news media, the Real Estate Board -- everybody was part of it. No institution, low or high status, refrained from keeping the burgeoning black population penned up in sections exploding with people. The University of Chicago belonged to a neighborhood group that bought up vacant houses it feared might be purchased by an African American family. [ . . . ] African American families unlucky enough to buy a home in a white section ran the risk of going without fire, ambulance or police service just when they needed it most. How any adult white Chicagoan could go south to tell the people there how to order their affairs was a bit much in Saul's opinion.
(pp. 55-56):
Viewed from the twenty-first century, what we did to try to integrate other areas may seem indefensible, but you had to have been there. In Chicago, African Americans could vote, could use the public libraries, beaches and swimming pools and schools. But if these were not segregated by law, they were by practice and custom. In Chicago everybody was equal, everybody enjoyed their civil liberties, yet the place was almost like pre-Nelson Mandela South Africa.
Saul's belief that in the long run people allowed to make their own decisions will make the right choice, did nothing for the short run, which was a problem. In 1958 the only thing people in those southwest side districts wanted to hear from an organizer was a better way to keep their communities uniracial.
(p. 63):
Alinsky won his reputation for cynicism by insisting that most of us are moved to action by self-interest first, moral principles second, if at all. The Alinsky aesthetic was repellent to those who claimed to be motivated by disinterested commitment to the welfare of others.
(pp. 74-75):
It was the antithesis of an Alinsky operation where outside volunteers were generally shooed away not only because they got in the way but also because they didn't have any skin in the game. Laudable as it is to volunteer to help other people wrestle with their problems, effective organizations are built with people who have a direct and personal interest in their success. The task is to help the people build their own organization. Ideally the outsider is the catalyst, the invisible element who starts the process and goes away, although in real life things do not go that smoothly.
The lumpen proletariat or the poorest of the poor are worthless for founding a functioning organization. Once a powerful and effective organization is up and running the membership may want to try to help the very poor, but you cannot start with them.
They suffer from what some call social pathologies, meaning their lives are a chaotic sequence of emergencies, terrible coincidences and unforeseen disasters. The lumpens are accident prone and emotionally unstable. Their lives are a chain of bad news -- gas is cut off, electrical service terminated, the landlord is evicting them, a cousin is in jail, the baby has to be rushed to the emergency room, one of the kids sassed a social worker and the family is getting cut off, the reigning male came home and beat the hell out of the mother, Wilson stole the food money, Janice is pregnant, Mother missed her appointment with the vocational counselor because she was drunk. The very poor are unreliable, not the stuff of organizations which are composed of people bound together by keeping their commitments.
(pp. 81-82):
Saul warned about trapping yourself. You may need a back door as much as the other side. Hence, bellicose announcements of "nonnegotiable demands" and "deal breakers" were anathema to him. Unconditional surrender made sense to Saul when it was Franklin Roosevelt backed up by thirteen million men in arms in World War II; otherwise, he considered demanding it lunacy.
Fight as though you are 100 percent right, knowing that half the time you're lucky if you are only 49 percent wrong. Stay cool, keep your ego out of it and remember there must be an end game. Saul was known to harp on the disastrous places leaders' egos can take an organization or an issue, as a decent compromise is turned down because they want to look like the big winner.
For Alinsky, the archetypal example of petulant ego decision making of the period was Bill Ayers in his salad days, decades before he met Barack Obama. Ayers, the son of a rich Chicago corporate executive, was part of the Weather Underground, a minuscule group of collegians whose opposition to the Vietnam War took them into a comic-book leftism whose principal feature was anger at a government which did not do as they bade it. Their foot-stamping anger and humiliation at their failures at organizing and influencing current events made them believe they were justified in taking up violence.
(pp. 89-90):
It was around 1939 while he was organizing the Back of the Yards that Saul began his long association with John L. Lewis (1880-1969). Lewis was the president of the United Mine Workers, a union of perhaps a half-million members with a long and violent history in an industry as famous for its bloody strikes as for its terrible accidents. Although today few people have heard of him, in the 1930s Lewis was a huge figure on the American scene, as well known in that decade as Martin Luther King was in the 1960s. Those living in a service/consumption society must stretch their imaginations to picture the dirty, bloody, laborious, dangerous coal mining life which Lewis grew up in. There is nothing like it in the United States today.
Lewis had provided the direction and the impetus for the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the feared CIO. In four or five years he had laid the foundation for the transformation of the economic and social landscape of the country. The middle-class life, the loss of which the nation was to suffer with the crash of 2007, came about in no small measure thanks to the organizational drives started by Lewis.
Alinsky's association with Lewis taught him the tactics of humor, surprise and theatrics on a national stage. He doted on narrating stories of how Lewis brought the largest corporations in the world and the most powerful politicians to their knees.
(p. 126):
In Saul's eyes most social workers were rice-Christian missionaries. For him social work was a tool for top-down management instead of bottom-up governance. Social workers, as far as he was concerned, were white-collar Pinkertons, a name which in his era stood for rent-a-cops employed by companies to spy on union activity, escort strikebreaking scabs across picket lines and use sap, club and gun on union members as the occasion indicated.
(pp. 135-136):
Jack Egan became one of the first voices of prominence to denounce urban renewal and its treatment of African Americans. As the archdiocese's spokesman for urban affairs, he went before the Chicago City council to call the University of Chicago's slum-clearance program Negro removal. That performance made all the papers and won for him the condemnation of whites, liberal and conservative.
In recruiting people Alinsky was in a situation similar to John L. Lewis's when he put Communists on the payroll to organize the workers in the steel, rubber and other mass-production industries. The Communists were the ones with the zeal and the intelligence for the work. In place of Communists Alinsky often hired Christians. It wasn't a policy decision. They were usually the ones who would work until they dropped and who did not flinch at risky derring-do.
(p. 160):
If the danger with Communist organizers is that they may sacrifice the members for the cause, the risk with religious organizers is that they may sacrifice the cause to save an individual member, harkening as they do to the words of Luke 15:7: "I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance."
Unfortunately, organizing demands concentrating on those ninety-nine.
(pp. 162-164):
Though the saintly César later emerged to cast a spell over men like Bobby Kennedy, women like Dorothy Day and a wide liberal public, he was not a figure Saul could trust. The leadership he admired and whose decision making he could rely on was that of a Franklin Roosevelt or a John L. Lewis, men who might be devious, cynical, power loving and glory seeking but who lacked that pious tick that can make for calamity.
Alinsky believed that César didn't have the internal dialogue that keeps one aware of the outside world and puts life in perspective. A person who did not know and understand his appetites was someone, Alinsky believed, who lacked the self-knowledge to control himself or know what he was doing. Yet Saul helped César get seed money to start the farm workers' union, hoping it and César would end well. Neither did.
By the time of his death César had destroyed the union he had once led with such brilliance, leaving the Mexican American farmworkers as unorganized and defenseless as they had been before his rise. As the union reached its summit of accomplishment Chávez grew autocratic and dangerously eccentric. he fell under the influence of Chuck Dederich, the boss of Synanon, a semicriminal drug-rehabilitation cult. Synanon's central rite, which César made his own, was the Game, in which a person, or in this case one of the union's staff, was put in the center of a room and surrounded by his or her colleagues who screamed epithets and accusations until the victim was reduced to human rubble. By this and similar acts of sadism the United Farm Workers' talented and dedicated staff was one by one driven off and the organization shattered by César's cruelty.
(p. 182):
The most often-quoted may be rule 13: "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it." Thirteen is used as an example of Saul's ruthlessness, but no campaign can be won by attacking impersonal abstractions such as Injustice or High Taxes. The American Revolutionists personalized "no taxation without representation" by going after George III. Abstractions are not going to get feet marching. You must name who is responsible for it or those who are will slither out of reach with bromides like, "There is enough blame to go around." As Alinsky wrote, "The problem that threatens to loom more and more is that of identifying the enemy."
(pp. 185-187):
Were Saul alive now he would not be organizing as he did seventy years ago in the Back of the Yards. He early saw that the America he had known in the days of a dynamic labor movement was fading into a white-collar world. He had seen the United Mine Workers with more than four hundred thousand members shrivel. He knew that their president, John L. Lewis, had not fought the introduction of labor-saving equipment or blinded himself to the decline of the industry; instead, Lewis had tried to find a path on which to lead his members into a changed existence.
Before his death, Saul had already begun to experiment with new approaches. Instead of picket lines in the battle with Kodak, he used stock proxies. Given Saul's vulnerability to new toys he would not have put up a technophobic resistance to the Internet. He was a sucker for every new office machine which came down the pike. Were Saul alive, he would be blogging and tweeting with the best of them.
Believing as he did that every generation must invent its own forms of freedom and power, Saul would have attempted to help the atomized and unrooted white-collar millions find power and firm ground to stand on.