This was hard for many activists to take. They were afraid that a distant center would be insensitive to local concerns and indulge in empire-building. Moreover, it went against SNCC’s founding ethos. Participatory democracy in practice, however, had been found frustrating and exhausting. There were the familiar problems of finding local people able to commit time and energy to the cause, and the tendency for the principle to paralyze decision-making with constant discussions which nobody dared bring to a conclusion, as every attempt to take an initiative was challenged as usurpation of democratic rights. In her book, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta recounts how demands to “let the people decide” came up against the exasperating tendency of the people to be moderate and risk averse, seeking social services rather than revolution. This led to the conviction that people needed to have their real interests explained to them. There were also deeper factors at work. There was an issue with educated northerners who were often seen by the local southerners as being self-serving, with a patronizing reverence for the untutored wisdom of the poor and ignorance of local culture. According to Polletta, this was more about class and education than race, though there were concerns about white liabilities as black community organizers. By 1966, however, black power had taken over and the new leadership of SNCC wanted to distinguish themselves from northern liberals by something tougher and more militant.28
The Heroic Organizer
It is worth comparing the experience of community organization as an exercise in participatory democracy with that of the man who did more than most to develop the idea of organizing local communities to take on local power structures. Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and joined the University of Chicago’s sociology department as an undergraduate in 1926. The department was then under the leadership of Robert Park. Park, who had come to sociology later in his career after starting off as a reporter, was attuned to city life in all its forms and studied it with an almost voyeuristic curiosity. Introduction to the Science of Sociology, the book he published in 1921 with his close colleague Edwin Burgess, was for two decades a core text in the field. Burgess, a diffident man and in Parks’s shadow, was more of a social reformer. He viewed “social research as the solutions to society’s ills,” but less in terms of elite prescriptions and more in democratic terms, as a means of “harnessing social change.”29
Park and Burgess took students on field trips to explore Chicago, from the dance halls to the schools, the churches, and the families. The city was large and diverse, with distinctive immigrant communities. Organized criminal gangs, of which Al Capone’s was the most famous, flourished during the Prohibition Era. The proximity to Canada meant that Chicago was a natural base for smuggling illicit liquor into the United States, and vicious competition developed over the control of the trade. The city should be a focus of study, Park argued, for it showed “the good and evil in human nature in excess. It is this fact, perhaps, more than any other which justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied.”30 Critical to this school of thought was the conviction, bolstered by research, that social problems had social rather than personal causes. Burgess took this a step further than Park, arguing that the role of researchers was to “organize the community for self-investigation.” The community should survey its own problems, educate themselves about social issues, and develop a core group of leaders prepared to organize for “social advance.”
Burgess became a major influence on Alinsky, not least because he recognized in his student an ability that his academic record had obscured.31 Alinsky was drawn to criminology and upon graduation, he got a fellowship with Burgess’s support. He decided to make a study of the Capone gang, if possible from the inside. Eventually he made contact by hanging around the gangsters and listening to their stories.32 For a while he worked as a criminologist in a state prison. Then, in 1936 he joined the Chicago Area Project designed to show how delinquency could be addressed socially. The cause of criminality was not individual feeble-mindedness but neighborhoods marked by multiple and reinforcing problems of poverty and unemployment. Burgess set the principles for the organizers. The program should be for the neighborhood as a whole, with local people autonomous in planning and operations. This required an emphasis on training and local leadership, strengthening established neighborhood institutions, and using activities as a device to create participation.33 He argued that local organizers, preferably former delinquents, could help show their own people a way to more acceptable behavior. This approach was controversial. He was directly challenging paternalistic social work and was accused of tolerating criminality, encouraging populist agitators to stir up local people against those who were trying to help them and had their best interests at heart.
In 1938, Alinsky was assigned to the tough Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, already notorious as the jungle of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel. He was a natural in the organizer’s role. Clever, street-wise, and brash, Alinsky had a knack of gaining the confidence of people who might otherwise feel neglected and marginalized. His approach was more political than the project allowed, however. Not only did he use the issue of delinquency to move into virtually all problems facing the neighborhood, but he also put together a community organization based on representatives of key groups who had clout because of who they represented and not just as individuals. Alinsky also drew organized labor into his campaign, well exceeding his brief by getting involved in a struggle against the meatpacking industry. By 1940 he had left the project and struck out on his own.
Over time he became more scathing in his critique of the social sciences as remote from the realities of everyday existence. Quoting a description of the University of Chicago’s sociology department as “an institution that invests $100,000 on a research program to discover the location of brothels that any taxi driver could tell them about for nothing,” he added his own observation that “asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing an enema for diarrhea.”34 Certainly tendencies in sociology had moved on since the Park/Burgess era at Chicago. Nonetheless, Alinsky’s initial trajectory reflected the preoccupations of the discipline during the interwar years.
In an article published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1941, Alinsky provided a clear account of his approach. He described the wretched lives of those working in the slaughter houses and packing-houses of the Back of the Yards area. The neighborhood was a “byword for disease, delinquency, deterioration, dirt, and dependency.” The traditional community organization would be of little value in such an area because it considered individual problems in isolation from each other and the community in isolation from the “general social scene.” Instead, by placing each community within its broad context, its limited ability to “elevate itself by means of its own bootstraps” could be acknowledged. He identified “two basic social forces which might serve as the cornerstone of any effective community organization.” These were the Catholic Church and organized labor: “The same people that comprise the membership of a parish also form the membership of a union local.” He got local organizations to come together to form the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. Membership did not just involve the church and the unions, but also the local chamber of commerce, the American Legion post, as well as “the leading businessmen, the social, the nationality, the fraternal, and the athletic organizations.”
Through the council, problems such as unemployment and disease were shown to be threats to all the people, both labor unions and businesses dependent upon local purchasing power. The various leaders “learned to know one another as human beings rather than as impersonal symbols of groups which, in many cases, appeared to be of a hostile nature.” Behind this was a “people’s philosophy” that emphasized rights rather than favors and the need to rely on an organization “built, owned, and operated by themselves” to get their rights.35
This wa
s obviously a completely different philosophy to Hayden’s. Alinsky went out of his way to draw in local organizations; Hayden was worried that this kept ordinary people excluded and reinforced local power structures. At the time, many on the Left would have queried working with the Catholic Church, which was deeply hostile to the atheistic Communist Party. Alinsky’s self-definition as a radical was reflected, as his biographer notes, in his “inclinations, convictions and rhetoric, and wishes” but less so “in his actions, which took a more pragmatic form.”36 He was prepared to forge coalitions with whosoever appeared appropriate. His role model was not so much the communist agitator but the labor organizer.
This was the heroic age of the American labor movement, led by John Lewis of the United Mineworkers, which had broken away from the sleepy American Federation of Labor, dominated by elitist craft unions, and formed the Confederation of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Lewis combined a strident anti-communism with a belief in a centralized state stabilizing and planning the economy. He provided dynamic leadership to the burgeoning labor movement, with his tough and imaginative negotiating style demonstrated to the full in the sit-down strike at the General Motors Flint plant in 1937. After Flint, other industries were wary of head-on confrontations. He was able to do a deal with U.S. steel without making direct threats. He challenged the racial discrimination of southern mineworkers (who argued that black workers could make do with lower wages to support their more modest lifestyle). Within two years, the CIO had 3.4 million members. Alinsky met Lewis in July 1939 when he spoke on behalf of the Chicago packing workers. Lewis’s daughter Kathryn was on the board of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.
Lewis was Alinsky’s role model. He was egocentric, entered confrontations with relish, and led with nerve and panache. Later, Alinsky would write an admiring biography. From Lewis he learned how to provoke and goad opponents, promote conflict and then negotiate its resolution, using power to best advantage at all stages. Alinsky paid attention to the intellectual justifications for action and their rhetorical expression. He was impressed by the way Lewis managed to pursue a program which menaced the establishment by associating the CIO with American ideals of fairness and justice. “Similarly, Alinsky’s own argumentation sought to place the objectives of his Industrial Areas Foundation firmly within familiar-sounding American political tradition.”37
In 1946, Alinsky published his first book, Reveille for Radicals, which became a surprising bestseller. The basic idea behind this was that the sort of techniques that had been used so effectively by the labor unions in the factories could be used within urban communities—as he put it, “collective bargaining beyond the present confines of the factory gate.” The radical was described as a militant idealist, someone who “believes what he says,” has the common good as the “greatest personal value,” “genuinely and completely believes in mankind,” takes on every struggle as his own, avoids rationalization and superficiality, and deals in “fundamental causes rather than current manifestations.” His goals were described in terms of a utopia—where every individual’s worth was recognized and potentiality realized; all would be truly free politically, economically, and socially; and war, fear, misery, and demoralization would be eradicated. By contrast, liberals attracted Alinsky’s scorn, for flaws in temperament and attitude rather than philosophy. They came over as feckless, hesitant, complacent, lacking the stomach for a fight, combining “radical minds and conservative hearts,” paralyzed by their insistence on seeing both sides of an issue, and fearful of action and partisanship.
The fundamental difference revolved around the “issue of power.” Radicals understood, according to Alinsky, that “only through the achievement and better use of power can people better themselves.” Where liberals protested, radicals rebelled.38 Given the heroic concept of community organization (a “program is limited only by the horizon of humanity itself”), it was not surprising that Alinsky also had a heroic concept of the organizer. “One could envision Alinsky’s organizing flying high in a Superman cape,” observed his biographer, “swooping into a forlorn industrial community, ready to fight for truth, justice and the American Way!” The organizer would lead the “war against the social menaces of mankind.”39
Over the next couple of decades, before his sudden death in 1972, Alinsky’s acolytes were involved in a number of organizational efforts across the United States. Alinsky himself was particularly associated with two: one in the Woodlawn District of Chicago and the other in Rochester, New York. Both involved largely black communities and had as their key demands improved employment and an end to the discriminatory practice of only hiring blacks for the most menial jobs. In Rochester, the target was the town’s dominant corporation, Eastman Kodak. In both cases Alinsky enjoyed a degree of success, though this required negotiations rather than the capitulation of the employers.
Not long before he died, he published another book, Rules for Radicals, which set out his basic philosophy. We shall return later to this book, which is important in terms of how he positioned himself in relationship with the other radical social movements of the 1960s. For the moment, we can consider the “rules” themselves.
He set down eleven. A number were basic to any underdog strategy. The first was pure Sun Tzu: persuade the opponent that you were stronger than was really the case (“If your organization is small, hide your numbers in the dark and raise a din that will make everyone think you have many more people than you do”). The second and third were about staying close to the comfort zone of your own people and going outside that of the opponent in order to “cause confusion, fear, and retreat.” Rule 4 was to use the opponent’s own rulebook against them, and Rule 5 was to use ridicule (“man’s most potent weapon”) because it was hard to counterattack and infuriated the opposition. This led to Rule 6, which was that a good tactic was one your people enjoyed, while a bad tactic was not only not fun but also (Rule 7) dragged on and became hard to sustain. This was because (Rule 8) the essence of a good strategy was to keep the pressure on the opponent. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition. It is this that will cause the opposition to react to your advantage.” Rule 9 was an observation about how threats could be more terrifying than the reality, and Rule 10 was about the need for a constructive alternative, an answer to the question, “Okay, what would you do?” Lastly, Rule 11 commanded: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it. Don’t try to attack abstract corporations or bureaucracies. Identify a responsible individual. Ignore attempts to shift or spread the blame.”
These rules were those of a campaigner and in that respect were different from a form of strategic thinking that consisted largely of worrying about how to relate, if at all, to the local power structure and the principles that should govern any action. Alinsky was all about the campaign and the specific goals that had been set for it. The rules reflected Alinsky’s appreciation of the elemental requirements of strategy in terms of endurance, coalitions, a capacity for surprise, and a need to keep an eye on public perceptions. The sense of community and confidence in the organization must grow with the campaign until it became strong enough to withstand setbacks and was able to move from one issue to another. One of Alinsky’s admirers, Charles Silberman, compared his approach to guerrilla warfare. He explained the need “to avoid a fixed battle where the forces are arrayed and where the new army’s weakness would become visible, and to concentrate instead on hit-and-run tactics designed to gain small but measurable victories. Hence the emphasis on such dramatic actions as parades and rent strikes whose main objective is to create a sense of solidarity and community.”40 The aim was not just to keep pressure on the targets but also to build up the community and its organization at the same time. Certainly Alinsky was clear that violence was a bad idea. This was not a moral issue. He was against actions that almost guaranteed defeat, and resort to arms came into that category.
Some of the
tactics for which Alinsky became best known reflected a sense of mischief and provocation. One was to unnerve a Chicago department store that had discriminatory hiring policies by sending thousands of blacks on a normally busy Saturday for a shopping spree that would lead to very few purchases while deterring normal customers. Another tactic, intended to pressure Chicago’s mayor, was to occupy all the toilets at O’Hare airport so that arriving passengers would be left desperate. The most notorious ploy, though possibly largely intended to amuse his audiences, was a proposed “fart-in” at the Rochester Philharmonic, sponsored by Eastman Kodak. The effect was to be achieved by feeding copious quantities of baked beans to young men prior to their joining the audience. What is notable about these tactics, apart from their dependence to some extent on white stereotypes of blacks, was that none of them were actually implemented, although Alinsky claimed that getting word to the targets had a coercive effect. One of his tactical innovations was the use of share proxies to gain a right to speak at shareholder meetings and put companies on the spot, first achieved with Kodak stock in April 1967. Reports of the meeting suggest little sympathy from other shareholders, but here was a way to embarrass company boards and put them on the spot in a way that might be picked up by the media.
Alinsky’s distrust of liberals and tendency to romanticize the poor were traits he shared with the young radicals who moved into community organizing in the mid-1960s. But there were important differences. He was results oriented. He wanted victories, even if small, which meant that he would form coalitions and cut deals. He knew that his natural constituents were minorities, and this became even more so as a majority of the American people identified with the middle class. He therefore understood the need for support from those who might otherwise be spectators. He was prepared to get his funds from rich liberals, and was always looking to his targets’ vulnerabilities on external support as a source of pressure (for example, customers or stockholders or some higher governmental authority). In terms of tactics, his basic need was to find new ways of sustaining campaigns and keeping them in the public eye (and here his own notoriety could be an advantage). He also understood that the degree of organization required, especially when undertaken by outsiders and professionals, was bound to be an issue in itself. The establishment was quick to point to the malign presence of outside “agitators” (a label Alinsky happily embraced) to delegitimize campaigns, just as the young radicals were wary of strong leaders who could easily set themselves up as an alternative establishment and leave the people as powerless as they had been at the start. Just as the young radicals now hoped, Alinsky had begun assuming that the organizer was drawing out a latent political consciousness, creating awareness not only of injustice but of the possibility of redress. Communities would be self-reliant and self-sustaining not only in their organization but in their consciousness, with a local leadership able to give voice to this consciousness and ensure its long-term authenticity. Alinsky made it a rule, which he only came to question toward the end of his life, that no more than three years’ support should be provided to a community organization, after which they were on their own.41
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