Saul Alinsky

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poration and university officials because, as he notes, it's easier to get worked up if it's a person who's persecuting you than something impersonal like a corporation.

"Our organizers often look for the wrong reasons to get the right things done,” he explains.

Alinsky first took on the establishment in the late 1930s by championing the cause of the residents of the Back-of-the-Yards section of Chicago, so-called because of its proximity to the stockyards. "This was not the slam across the tracks," he recalls. "It was the slum across the tracks from across the tracks." Since the packinghouse workers weren't unionized at the time, Alinsky got the Back-of-the-Yards residents to demand better working conditions for meat packing employes. The neighborhood also insisted on health care centers and certain slum improvements, and to put teeth in their demands, Alinsky organized a series of sitdowns and boycotts. Ultimately, he wrested a surrender from the meat packers, slumlords and city politicians.

This

his dramatic triumph attracted the attention of the late publisher Marshall Field and Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard J. Sheil, who backed him in establishing Industrial Areas Foundation, operating on a budget of $150,000 a year. From then on it was full steam ahead for Alinsky as professional troubleshooter. In practically every section of the country he uncovered causes to take up. A fight he relished dearly was one he became embroiled in when he went to Rochester to help out-of-work Negroes obtain jobs and better housing. In the black ghetto, Alinsky created an organization called FIGHT (Freedom, Independence, God, Honor-Today) and zeroed in on Eastman Kodak for the jobs as well as on-the-job training for unskilled blacks. Eastman Kodak resisted at first, but eventually the company had to capitulate to Alinsky's demands. As soon as he felt the community was firmly on its feet, he. cleared out. The faster a community outgrows its need for him, the more successful Alinsky feels he has been.

Alinsky is not above using any tactic which he thinks will work. "If the end doesn't justify the means,' he has said, "what the hell does?" During a fight with a particular corporation, he received information alleging that one of the company's top executives was a homosexual. Alinsky declined to use the informa-tion as blackmail, only because he was convinced that he could win without it. "If I thought the only way we could win was to use this evi-

dence, then, without any reservations, I would have used it. What was my alternative? To draw myself up in righteous moral indignation?”

As a result of tangling with so many powerful individuals, Alinsky frequently winds up on the receiving end of their own barrages. He has been jailed several times. "I've always been treated well, though,” he recalls. "My first book, 'Reveille for Radicals,' was written mostly in jail. I had a private cell and nobody bothered me. I welcomed the isolation. It gave me the time and privacy I needed for writing. I've also been lucky in not being in certain cities at times when the Ku Klux Klan was calling for my blood. That could

at me, I'll point to my heart and say, 'Relax. Shoot straight.' There's a good side to knowing you may be killed. My doctor never lectures me about cutting down on smoking or drinking. Instead, he tells me, 'Well, you could get shot tomorrow. You might as well do what you enjoy.' Anyhow, I don't want to survive my own life." Alinsky was referring to the fact that he hopes to avoid winding up as Norman Thomas did, a feared and hated radical most of his life, who in his declining years ended up a grand old man—that is, respectable and harmless. "John L. Lewis ended up the same way,” he adds ruefully.

have been bad. In a lot of places, A friend of Alinsky's once ob-

I've found that my reputation pro-

tects me.

"During the 1968 Democratic Convention, when the riots were going on, I saw a kid who had been beaten, lying in the street, crying. I went over to help him and two cops, came over and told me to leave him alone and clear out. I told them to bug off, and they were about to club me when another cop came up and said, 'Leave him alone. He's Saul Alinsky.' An attack on me would have been front-page news in Chicago. It would have caused the city more trouble than they wanted.”

In several of Alinsky's roughest fights, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago has been the opponent. When Daley minimized the pollution problem which the I.A.F. has been attacking, Alinsky said, "What the hell does he breathe with his ears?"

Yet on a recent Dick Cavett show, Alinsky noted, "When Daley and I can forget about trying to hit each other below the belt, we can enjoy each other's company." In explaining his fondness for Daley, he added, "He's a Chicagoan, and he respects the fact that I am, too. We're sort of like kids who grew up together."

As he recalled the threats he had received over the years, Alinsky observed that only three persons actually tried to kill him. "The first time was in the '30s when I was organizing Back-of-the-Yards in Chicago. The second time was in the south. The last time was a few years ago on the San Bernardino Freeway in California. The guy followed me for 10 miles and then tried to run me off the road, but I outmaneuvered him and made him crash instead of me. He wasn't killed, which was a damn shame."

Alinsky makes no secret of the fact that he has spurned suggestions by friends that he hire a bodyguard. "Nobody gets out of life alive, so why worry about getting killed?” he says, with no trace of bravado. "What I worry about is some guy who's a lousy shot who'll blind me or cripple me or turn me into a vegetable. I've always thought that if I see a guy with a gun come out of a crowd

served, "Saul will go out of his way to play the stormy petrel. Sometimes it's the only way he can keep from being bored to death." Yet in his private life, Alinsky sheds his gruff, haranguing facade and becomes warm, friendly and a lover of mankind.

Yet more than once Alinsky has had to prove that there is nothing phony about the courage he seems to flaunt when he's onstage. In"Rules for Radicals" he recalls the time he was threatened with blackmail by a man who claimed to have photographs of Alinsky in a motel room with an unmarried woman whom he had registered as his wife. He told the would-be blackmailer to go ahead and give the incriminating photos to the press. "I think she's beautiful," he added, "and I never claimed to be celibate.” He eventually married the woman (she is still his wife) and dedicated his book to her.

Previously, Alinsky's marital life had been marred by tragedy. His first wife by whom he had two children drowned. His second marriage ended in divorce. In recalling the death of his first wife, he says, "That knocked me off my pins for a long time. For a few months all I did was write letters of resignation to the Industrial Areas Foundation. A lot of my friends are psychoanalysts, and they've told me I'm one of the few people who don't need psychiatric help, but I could have used it then.

"I was supposed to have been courageous going into Shreveport, with the Klan-threatening me, but it wasn't courage. I was asking for it. I wanted to be killed. When I got back to Chicago, I went to the cemetery three times a week. My life was all mourning. One day the gatekeeper at the cemetery said to me, 'Mr. Alinsky, I know who you are. I read in the paper what happened to your wife. Would you mind showing me her grave?' I took him to the grave and he said, 'I'm sorry, but that's not your wife's grave.' He pointed down a row and said, 'It's over there.' I'd been laying flowers on the grave of a

complete stranger for three months. It struck me funny. I realized what mattered about the person I'd loved wasn't in the ground but in my head. I gave up the ́ greveyard vigil routine."

To take his mind off his grief Alinsky found comfort from the company of poker companions. "I still play regularly," he says. “It's my kind of game." Whenever he's in Chicago during the baseball and football seasons, he tries to get out to Wrigley Field and Comiskey Park as often as he can. "I'm a Bears fan, but not a Cubs,” he says. “The Sox have been my team all my life. When the Black Sox scandal broke in 1921, I wanted to die. I wasn't the kid who told Shoeless Joe Jackson, 'Say it isn't so, Joe,' but it might as well have been me. That kid was speaking for all of us." According to Alinsky, "If Lenin were alive, he'd say, 'Baseball is the opiate of the American mas-

ses.

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Alinsky has nothing but contempt for liberals whom he describes as "the kind of guys who walk out of the room when the argument turns into a fight.” He also has little use for today's utopian militants of whom he says, "They're just as much dropouts as the hippies. Both refuse to begin with the world as it is.” He feels the liberals' concern over President Nixon's Supreme Court appointees to be premature. "A lot of men change when they're appointed to the Court," he notes. "Warren was a terrible racist with the Japanese in California during the war, and look what he became. Frankfurter started out great and turned completely around in his last years. Blackmun was supposed to be an absolute conservative, but Whizzer White makes Blackmun look great, and White was, appointed by Kennedy. Let's wait and see about Nixon's people."

Alinsky likes to refer to himself as an optimist. "Why the hell do anything if you don't have hope for the future?" he reasons. “That's the definition of an optimist-someone who has hope that things can be changed for the better. How could I have spent my life organizing if I didn't have hope things could be made better?" In describing his past activities, though, Alinsky confessed, "You do things because you want to, and you think of the rational, noble reasons later. I expect to finish my autobiography by November. It's called 'I'll Organize Hell."

Explaining why he chose that title, he refers to "Rules for Radicals" in which he wrote, "Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to . . . the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom... Lucifer.” Lucifer." SUNDAY GROUP