In the Fifties, he turned his attention to the black ghetto, and again
began in Chicago. His actions quickly earned the enmity of Mayor Richard
J. Daley (who, while remaining firmly opposed to Alinsky’s methods over
the years, recently conceded that “Alinsky loves Chicago the same as I
do”). He also redoubled his travel schedule as an “outside agitator.”
After long but successful struggles in New York State and a dozen
different trouble spots around the country, he flew to the West Coast,
at the request of the Bay Area Presbyterian Churches, to organize the
black ghetto in Oakland, California. Hearing of his plans, the
panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution
banning him from the city, and an amendment by one councilman to send
him a 50-foot length of rope with which to hang himself was carried
overwhelmingly. (Alinsky responded by mailing the council a box of
diapers.)
When Oakland police threatened to arrest him if he entered the city
limits, he crossed the Bay Bridge with a small band of reporters and TV
cameramen, armed only with a birth certificate and a U.S. passport. “The
welcoming committee of Oakland police looked and felt pretty silly,”
Alinsky fondly recalls. Oakland was forced to back down, and Alinsky
established a local all-black organization to fight the establishment.
By the late Sixties, Alinsky was leaving most of the field work to his
aides and concentrating on training community organizers through the
Industrial Areas Foundation Training Institute, which he calls a “school
for professional radicals.” Funded principally by a foundation grant
from Midas Muffler, the school aims at turning out 25 skilled organizers
annually to work in black and white communities across the nation.
“Just think of all the hell we’ve kicked up around the country with only
four or five full-time organizers,” Alinsky told newsmen at the
school’s opening session. “Things will really move now.”
He was right — if his subsequent success as a radical organizer can be
measured by the degree of opposition and exasperation he aroused among
the guardians of the status quo. A conservative church journal wrote
that “it is impossible to follow both Jesus Christ and Saul Alinsky.”
Barron’s, the business weekly, took that odd logic a step further and
charged that Alinsky “has a record of affiliation with Communist fronts
and causes.” And a top Office of Economic Opportunity official, Hyman
Bookbinder, characterized Alinsky’s attacks on the antipoverty program
(for “welfare colonialism”) as “outrageously false, ignorant,
intemperate headline-seeking.”
Perhaps the one achievement of his life that has drawn almost
universally favorable response was the publication of his new book, Rules for Radicals,
which has received glowing reviews in practically every newspaper and
magazine in the country. To show his staff exactly how he felt about all
this unaccustomed approbation, he called them in to say, “Don’t worry,
boys, we’ll weather this storm of approval and come out as hated as
ever.” It provided Alinsky with some consolation that the book provoked a
hostile reaction in at least one major city — his own. The Chicago
Tribune greeted the publication of Rules for Radicals with a lead editorial headlined “ALINSKY’S AT IT AGAIN” and concluded:
“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but
we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The
country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without
working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky’s
amusement.” To which Alinsky responded: “The establishment can accept
being screwed, but not being laughed at. What bugs them most about me is
that unlike humorless radicals, I have a hell of a good time doing what
I’m doing.”
To find out more about why Alinsky is doing what he’s doing, and to probe the private complexities of the public man, Playboy
sent Eric Norden to interview him. The job, Norden soon discovered, was
far from easy: “The problem was that Alinsky’s schedule is enough to
drive a professional athlete to a rest home, and he seems to thrive on
it. I accompanied him from the East Coast to the West and into Canada,
snatching tape sessions on planes, in cars and at airport cocktail
lounges between strategy sessions with his local organizers, which were
more like military briefings than bull sessions. My first meeting with
him was in TWA’s Ambassador Lounge at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. He was
dressed in a navy-blue blazer, buttondown oxford shirt and black knit
tie. His first words were a growled order for Scotch on the rocks; his
voice was flat and gravelly, and I found it easier to picture him
twisting arms to win Garment District contracts than organizing ghettos.
As we traveled together and I struggled to match his pace, I soon
learned that he is, if nothing else, an original. (Alinsky to
stewardess: ‘Will you please tell the captain I don’t give a f— what our
wind velocity is, and ask him to keep his trap shut so I can get some
work done?’)”
“Nat Hentoff wrote last year, ‘At 62, Saul is the youngest man I’ve met
in years,’ and I could see what he meant. There is a tremendous vitality
about Alinsky, a raw, combative ebullience, and a consuming curiosity
about everything and everyone around him. Add to this a mordant wit, a
monumental ego coupled with an ability to laugh at himself and the world
in general, and you begin to get the measure of the man.
“And yet late at night, in a Milwaukee motel room, his face was gray,
haggard and for once he showed the day’s toll (three cities, two
speeches, endless press conferences and strategy sessions). A vague
sadness hung around him, as if some barrier had broken down, and he
began to talk — off the record — about all the people he’s loved who
have died. There were many, and they seemed closer at night, in airport
Holiday Inn rooms, sleeping alone with the air conditioner turned high
to drown out the roar of the planes. He talked on for an hour, fell
abruptly silent for a minute, then sprang to his feet and headed for the
door. ‘We’ll really f— ’em tomorrow!’ The race was on again.”
Norden began the interview by asking
Alinsky about his latest and most ambitious campaign: to organize
nothing less than America’s white middle class.
* * *
PLAYBOY: Mobilizing
middle-class America would seem quite a departure for you after years of
working with poverty-stricken black and white slum dwellers. Do you
expect suburbia to prove fertile ground for your organizational talents?
ALINSKY: Yes, and it’s
shaping up as the most challenging fight of my career, and certainly the
one with the highest stakes. Remember, people are people whether
they’re living in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are
just another kind of reservation — a gilded ghetto. One thing I’ve come
to realize is that any positive action for radical social change will
have to be focused on the white middle class, for the simple reason that
this is where the real power lies. Today, three fourths of our
population is middle class, either through actual earning power or
through value identification. Take the lower-lower middle class, the
blue-collar or hard-hat group; there you’ve got over 70,000,000 people
earning between $5000 and $10,000 a year, people who don’t consider
themselves poor or lower class at all and who espouse the dominant
middle class ethos even more fiercely than the rich do. For the first
time in history, you have a country where the poor are in the minority,
where the majority are dieting while the have-nots are going to bed
hungry every night.
Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income
groups — all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites — and
then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all
together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most
optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade — but
by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the
overwhelming majority will be middle class. This is the so-called Silent
Majority that our great Greek philosopher in Washington is trying to
galvanize, and it’s here that the die will be cast and this country’s
future decided for the next 50 years. Pragmatically, the only hope for
genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and
to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for
change. If we just give up and let the middle classes go to the likes of
Agnew and Nixon by default, then you might as well call the whole ball
game. But they’re still up for grabs — and we’re gonna grab ’em.
PLAYBOY: The assumption
behind the Administration’s Silent Majority thesis is that most of the
middle class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful
organizational tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?
ALINSKY: Conservative?
That’s a crock of crap. Right now they’re nowhere. But they can and will
go either of two ways in the coming years — to a native American
fascism or toward radical social change. Right now they’re frozen,
festering in apathy, leading what Thoreau called “lives of quiet
desperation:” They’re oppressed by taxation and inflation, poisoned by
pollution, terrorized by urban crime, frightened by the new youth
culture, baffled by the computerized world around them. They’ve worked
all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their
color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems to have turned to
ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling,
their jobs unsatisfying, they’ve succumbed to tranquilizers and pep
pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in
longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces.
They’re losing their kids and they’re losing their dreams. They’re
alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the
political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of
status and security has become a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels
have sprouted prison bars and their disillusionment is becoming
terminal.
They’re the first to live in a total mass-media-oriented world, and
every night when they turn on the TV and the news comes on, they see the
almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit and even outright idiocy of
our national leaders and the corruption and disintegration of all our
institutions, from the police and courts to the White House itself.
Their society appears to be crumbling and they see themselves as no more
than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values
seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social
chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores
of discontent, galvanize them for radical social change. We’ll give them
a way to participate in the democratic process, a way to exercise their
rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment that oppresses
them, instead of giving in to apathy. We’ll start with specific issues —
taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution — and from there move on to
the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and the
board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they’ll
keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people
power. We’ll not only give them a cause, we’ll make life goddamn
exciting for them again — life instead of existence. We’ll turn them on....
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