Tools for Radicals
http://www.amconmag.com/blog/tools-for-radicals/
Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky, Nicholas von Hoffman, Nation
Books, 256 pages.
By Jesse Walker
September 2010
Back of the Yards is a district just south and west of the old Union
Stock Yard in Chicago. A century ago, it was best known as the
crowded, poverty-stricken setting of Upton Sinclair's muckraking
meatpacking novel The Jungle. Like most of the city, it was split
into enclaves, generally along the lines of national origin. As Mike
Royko would later put it, Chicago in those days was a confederation
of ethnic neighborhood-states, a place where "you could always tell,
even with your eyes closed, which state you were in by the odors of
the food stores and the open kitchen windows, the sound of the
foreign or familiar language, and by whether a stranger hit you in
the head with a rock."
When sociologists started studying such areas, they thought they were
looking at human wastelands. In his 1986 book Back of the Yards, the
historian Robert Slayton noted that such scholars were familiar with
the sorts of social ties that were forged in small towns but were
"blind to similar bonds of community among immigrant workers"; in
1929 one sociologist wrote bluntly that the slums were places where
"local life breaks down." Social workers and other outsiders often
adopted similar attitudes, seeing the rich ecology of neighborhood
institutions as something to be overcome, not strengthened. Social
improvement would be provided by professionals with scientific
training, not by a bunch of bohunks acting on their own behalf.
The founders of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, by
contrast, appreciated all the self-directed activity taking place in
the district. The group's first meeting, held on July 14, 1939,
featured 350 residents from 76 organizations: parish clubs, ethnic
lodges, women's groups, athletic clubs, unions, the chamber of
commerce, a community newspaper. The council was a federation of
those local groups rather than a mass organization of individuals;
its structure, in Slayton's words, was designed so as to "not
challenge the private order of segmentation and nationalism, but
instead create a public realm in which the individual pieces could
join," working together on areas of shared interest.
And work together they did. In the '30s and '40s, among many other
activities, the council built a playground, established a credit
union, did strike support work, acquired and lent out a portable bug
exterminator, brought an infant health clinic to the neighborhood,
helped young people find jobs, sprayed weedkiller in vacant lots,
sold garbage cans to the community at a fraction of the market cost,
and funded a softball league organized by some of the local gangs.
Slayton notes that when "police or merchants apprehended a young
lawbreaker, they would call the Back of the Yards Council instead of
taking him to the station. The Council then arranged a conference
with the child, the parents, the priest, educators, union officials,
and police or probation officers representatives of all the
community's resources." The council acquired its funds in a number of
ways: There were donations from a variety of civic groups and local
businesses and, in a more clandestine realm, there were the profits
from illicit gambling at a community fair. The group's slogan: "We
the People Will Work Out Our Own Destiny, We Can Do It Ourselves America."
The activists did not consider themselves libertarians, and I don't
want to imply that they eschewed any assistance from the government.
They were happy to inform the city authorities about housing
violations, to accept a federal agency's help in their job placement
services, to use surplus food distributed by the feds in the
council's free lunch program. But in the days of the New Deal, a time
when the American Left was increasingly centralist and statist, this
was a different approach: social change driven by intermediary
institutions at the most local level, not by experts erecting
bureaucracies in Washington. In 1945, in a book called Reveille for
Radicals, one of the council's founders argued that such "People's
Organizations" could be the building blocks of a new, more
participatory sort of citizenship.
The writer in question, a criminologist turned activist named Saul
Alinsky, is the subject of a new book, Radical, by his former
lieutenant Nicholas von Hoffman. Conservatives today often denounce
Alinsky as the demonic wellhead of the modern Left, a claim that's
easier to make when you don't know much about Alinsky's actual ideas
and activities. (I have even seen efforts to link the man to Antonio
Gramsci, an Italian Marxist who plays a mysteriously large role in
several contemporary conspiracy theories.) It doesn't help that
Barack Obama started his political career as a community organizer in
Chicago, where he supposedly drew deeply from Alinsky's social
vision. Alinsky's 1971 book Rules for Radicals has been studied
closely by conservatives convinced that they've found the White
House's secret playbook.
Smarter folks on the right, such as the Tea Party champions at
FreedomWorks, have been reading Rules for Radicals as well, not to
decode Obama's occult intentions but in hopes of adapting Alinsky's
tactics to the fight for freer markets. It isn't a bad idea, but it
only scratches the surface of what the foes of taxes and bailouts can
learn from Alinsky. In all his successes, mistakes, and
contradictions, Alinsky represents the dormant decentralist wing of
the left. His life is full of lessons for anyone, left or right, who
demands a devolution of power.
Von Hoffman's account doesn't try to be a detailed biography. That
already exists in the form of Sanford Horwitt's thorough 1992 book
Let Them Call Me Rebel. Instead, Radical is a thoughtful and
entertaining portrait of a friend: not a complete account of a man's
career, but an introduction to his life by someone who knew and loved
him. Alinsky comes off as a raconteur who loved to tell tales, some
of them perhaps a bit exaggerated, of his negotiations with the
gangsters, bosses, and bishops who commanded the wards and parishes
of Chicago and other mid-century cities. Von Hoffman is a raconteur
too, adding his own jokes and recollections to Alinsky's yarns. He
isn't blind to the gray areas in his old friend's career, but he
doesn't dwell on stories that make his mentor look bad. The most
notable exception is a previously untold tale from 1940, when John L.
Lewis of the CIO gave Alinsky "temporary direction" of a goon squad
tasked with pushing some communists out of union positions.
That's the only time the book describes Alinsky engaging in political
violence. The organizer's talent for Machiavellian manipulation rears
its head more often, most notably when Alinsky and von Hoffman have
to contend with a conflict between two cherished values: the fight
for community self-determination and the fight against segregation.
The Back of the Yards Council, von Hoffman writes, "had accomplished
great things between its founding at the end of the 1930s and the
middle of the 1950s. What had been an area of ramshackle, near-slum
housing tilting this way and that had been rebuilt into a model
working-class community of neat bungalow homes." In the process,
though, it had also "become a model of how a white community can stay
white." The council was assisted in this exclusion by an informal
public-private partnership: If a black family moved into the
neighborhood, a private citizen might set fire to their house and a
public official might then decline to send any emergency vehicles to
the scene of the crime.
To overcome those attitudes, Alinsky and his allies in the council
embraced, in von Hoffman's words, "a small amount of judicious
ballot-box stuffing." But not on behalf of the people you might
expect. The anti-racists fixed elections so the racists would win.
The idea, von Hoffman explains, was "to have them inside the
organization believing that it was their organization and not outside
it perfecting their Molotov cocktailchucking technique."
You can see an echo here of the council's early days, of the decision
not to "challenge the private order of segmentation and nationalism"
but instead to open up new avenues for cooperation across ethnic
lines. Von Hoffman reports that Alinsky was privately skeptical about
some of the era's civil rights bills, which is what you'd expect from
a man who would rather bend a local institution from within than
remove or remold it from above. In the early '60s, the book reveals,
Barry Goldwater contacted Alinsky and the two men had a meeting. "The
conversation," von Hoffman reports, "was about Goldwater's opposition
to pending civil rights legislation. Saul shared the conservative
misgivings about the mischief such laws could cause if abused, but he
told Goldwater that he should not morally and could not politically
oppose the legislation unless he had a better idea himself."
More broadly, von Hoffman writes, Alinsky believed that "governmental
action was the last resort, not the ideal one." He also "felt that
when the government, via one or another of its poverty programs, put
the smartest and most energetic on its payroll it made an independent
civic life next to impossible. He would point out that it opened up
avenues of social and political control that could be used by the
government to stifle independent action. In the worst case thousands
of government-paid organizers could be turned into police spies." (At
least one group that Alinsky helped to start The Woodlawn
Organization in Chicago did receive some grants from the government
during the War on Poverty, as did some institutions launched by
activists Alinsky had trained. But Alinsky himself was not involved
in any of those operations at the time.)
Alinsky sometimes spoke kindly of Franklin Roosevelt but was at best
a lukewarm supporter according to Sanford Horwitt, he described the
president privately as "the great smiler" and may have voted for
Wendell Willkie in 1940. By the time Lyndon Johnson was in the White
House, the old radical had grown even more caustic. Always hostile to
social workers, Alinsky attacked the entire Great Society in a 1965
article for the Journal of Social Issues. "The anti-poverty program
may well be recorded as history's greatest relief program for the
benefit of the welfare industry," he wrote. It wasn't that he was
ideologically opposed to federal aid to the poor. Indeed, the same
article included his own suggestions for how Washington might lend a
hand, though his proposals were so politically unrealistic that it's
unclear whether they were meant to be more than a thought experiment.
Whatever it might have been in theory, the War on Poverty in practice
was, in Alinsky's view, "a prize piece of political pornography" (not
to mention "the first war ever launched in history on a balanced budget").
This was the Alinsky that his Machiavellian reputation sometimes
concealed: a humanist radical who distrusted large institutions and
put his faith in concrete local affiliations. In von Hoffman's words,
Alinsky wanted little platoons like the Back of the Yards Council to
form a "countervailing power" against "the gigantism of government,
corporation and even labor union." The reference to unions might
raise some eyebrows, given Alinsky's close friendship with John L.
Lewis and his support for the '30s labor movement, but you don't have
to look far to find the man mixing criticism with his enthusiasm. In
Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky attacked union leaders for trying to
block new technologies, for accommodating themselves to corrupt
political machines, for restrictionist rules that make it harder for
outsiders to get jobs, for racial discrimination, and, in general,
for being "the bride of big monopoly business."
There's a lesson there for the Tea Partiers who have been studying
Alinsky's tactics, should they care to explore the rest of his
legacy. If they're serious about building a real alternative to the
Bush/Obama megastate, as opposed to merely being used by the
Republicans and discarded as soon as the GOP is in a position to
relaunch the K Street Project, the activists need to build
countervailing power of their own, rooted not merely in talk radio
and the Internet but in the indigenous institutions that shape
people's everyday lives. In some areas bank bailouts, eminent
domain, the crackdown on civil liberties, America's imperial foreign
policy they might even reach across the invisible lines that
separate their favorite segments of civil society from the churches
and councils that mobilize people on the grassroots left, to work
together on issues of shared concern even when they aren't about to
back the same candidates. Sometimes it's worthwhile to cross a
boundary, even if there's a risk that a stranger might hit you in the
head with a rock.
--
Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason and author of Rebels on the
Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America.
.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Sixties-L" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
