Saul Alinsky
Saul Alinsky was a prominent community organizer and social activist born on January 30, 1909, in Chicago to Russian Jewish immigrants. Raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household, Alinsky initially studied archaeology at the University of Chicago before shifting his focus to community organizing during the Great Depression. He became known for his grassroots efforts to improve living conditions in impoverished neighborhoods, particularly in Chicago's Back of the Yards area, which gained national attention as a model for community organization.
Alinsky authored influential works including "Reveille for Radicals" and "Rules for Radicals," the latter aimed at empowering marginalized groups to challenge existing power structures. His methods often sparked both admiration and controversy, leading to pushback from local politicians. Alinsky's legacy is significant, having influenced various social movements and activists, including Cesar Chavez and Barack Obama, and even reaching some conservative circles. He emphasized the importance of organizing across diverse communities, warning against the potential alienation of middle-class citizens. Alinsky passed away on June 12, 1972, but his approaches to activism continue to resonate in contemporary social and political discourse.
Subject Terms
Saul Alinsky
- Born: January 30, 1909
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Died: June 12, 1972
- Place of death: Carmel, California
Community activist
From the 1930’s to the 1960’s, Alinsky became well known as a community organizer for the poor and for radical-left social issues. He has been described as a modern-day version of Thomas Paine.
Areas of achievement: Activism; literature
Early Life
Saul Alinsky (sawl ah-LIHN-skee) was born in Chicago on January 30, 1909, to Russian Jewish immigrants Benjamin Alinsky and his second wife Sarah Tannenbaum. Saul Alinsky’s parents were strict Orthodox Jews who did not take part in the socialist politics that became a part of their son’s life. From the Orthodox style of life, Alinsky said that he learned the value of study.
Alinsky said that anti-Semitism was so much a fact of daily life in Chicago during his early years that it barely merited comment. He considered himself a devout Orthodox Jew until age twelve, at which time he heard of his parents’ plans to educate him as a rabbi. While he rebelled against that commitment, Alinsky maintained a Jewish identity all of his life.
Alinsky majored in archaeology at the University of Chicago as a working student. He was fascinated by the subject and planned to become a professional in the field. He graduated shortly after the onset of the Great Depression, so funding for that kind of work was scarce. Instead, Alinsky attended graduate school for two years, then left it for a job as a state of Illinois criminologist. He also worked on the side as an organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), his first entry into what would become his life’s work. By the end of the 1930’s, he was becoming intensely involved in general community organizing.
Life’s Work
Alinsky devoted his life to improving day-to-day living conditions for people in poor communities in urban and rural areas of North America. He began with his hometown, Chicago. During the 1930’s, Alinsky set out to organize political power in the city’s poor neighborhoods, organizing the Back of the Yards neighborhood, behind the stockyards, that had been described in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Adlai Stevenson, then governor of Illinois, became an admirer of Alinsky’s methods as a community organizer, saying that they faithfully reflected American ideals of the dignity of the individual, brotherhood, tolerance, and charity. Alinsky’s organizing efforts in Chicago soon became a national model.
In 1950, however, Alinsky’s work in Chicago’s black ghettos was criticized by Mayor Richard J. Daley as destructive of the city’s image. Later, Daley recanted that point of view. News that Alinsky was coming to town drove established politicians in some cities to panic, however. The city council in Oakland, California, tried unsuccessfully to ban him from its jurisdiction after he was invited by the Bay Area Presbyterian Church to help organize in the city’s black community.
Alinsky described his methods and philosophy in two books, Reveille for Radicals (1945), published early in his career, and Rules for Radicals (1971), which reached print one year before he died. While Niccolò Machiavelli had written Il principe (1532; The Prince, 1640) to teach the “haves” how to maintain their power, Alinsky said that he wrote Rules for Radicals to help the “have-nots” take that power away.
While Alinsky was noted as an organizer, he never joined organizations, not even the ones that he organized. He stayed out of the Communist Party during the 1930’s, when membership was popular among many people whose politics were similar to his. He implicitly distrusted ideology or dogma of any kind, whether it was from politics or from organized religion. He spurned what he called the doctrinaire, the humorless, and the intellectually constipated. Absolute truth was a mirage, he insisted, and an incubator of deadly fanaticism, from Communist purges to Nazi death camps.
Just before his death, Alinsky said that the greatest need for organizing existed in America’s white middle class, the Silent Majority who supported President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. Without attention from progressives, he feared that the white middle class would fall prey to fear and to nostalgic appeals from the right wing. Alinsky died of a heart attack at age sixty-three, on June 12, 1972, in Carmel, California.
Significance
Alinsky was a major influence on many social and political movements, notably that of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta for the United Farm Workers. Alinsky’s ideas were adapted by many activists, including college students. Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, wrote her senior honors thesis at Wellesley College on him. National leaders who have acknowledged the influence of Alinsky include President Barack Obama, who also was a community organizer in Chicago. Alinsky’s methods also earned praise from some unlikely quarters. Conservative author William F. Buckley once called Alinsky nearly an organizational genius. Some Tea Party activists, protesting the liberal direction of the U.S. government, cited him when they disrupted congressional town halls in the summer of 2009. Time magazine said that Alinsky’s organizing skills had changed the practice of democracy in the United States.
Bibliography
Alinsky, Saul. Reveille for Radicals. Reprint. New York: Vintage Books, 1969. Alinsky’s original organizing manual, which became a textbook for social change during the 1960’s.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. New York: Random House, 1971. An updated version of Reveille for Radicals, which was published after a lifetime of activism by Alinsky.
Finks, P. David. The Radical Vision of Saul Alinsky. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1984. Alinsky’s personal philosophy, including his reluctance to join organizations and his stress on examination of one’s motives.
Horwitt, Sanford D. Let Them Call Me Rebel: Saul Alinsky, His Life and Legacy. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1989. A wide-ranging biography that focuses on Alinsky’s politics.
Sanders. Marion K. The Professional Radical: Conversations with Saul Alinsky. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Alinsky’s life in an interview format, published two years before he died.