I came across a very long interview with Saul Alinsky (24,000 words),
conducted by Playboy in 1972, in a
FireDogLake thread
about the book 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Fight the Right.
Saul Alinsky
was a longtime radical activist, starting in the Great Depression.
He moved from labor organizing to social organizing in the late 1930s,
working in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago that was made
famous by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle. He is generally considered the
father of community organizing.
Shortly before he died, he published his most famous book,
Rules for Radicals
As a graduate student in criminology, he spent a couple of years hobnobbing
with Al Capone's mob in Chicago:
PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any compunction about consorting with -- if
not actually assisting -- murderers?
ALINSKY: None at all, since there was nothing I could do to stop them
from murdering, practically all of which was done inside the family. I
was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities,
although I joined their social life of food, drink and women: Boy, I
sure participated in that side of things -- it was heaven. And let me
tell you something, I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses
of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on,
when I was organizing.
Another thing you've got to remember about Capone is that he didn't
spring out of a vacuum. The Capone gang was actually a public utility;
it supplied what the people wanted and demanded. The man in the street
wanted girls: Capone gave him girls. He wanted booze during
Prohibition: Capone gave him booze. He wanted to bet on a horse: Capone
let him bet. It all operated according to the old laws of supply and
demand, and if there weren't people who wanted the services provided by
the gangsters, the gangsters wouldn't be in business. Everybody owned
stock in the Capone mob; in a way, he was a public benefactor. I
remember one time when he arrived at his box seat in Dyche Stadium for
a Northwestern football game on Boy Scout Day and 8000 scouts got up in
the stands and screamed in cadence, "Yea, yea, Big Al. Yea, yea, Big
Al." Capone didn't create the corruption, he just grew fat on it, as
did the political parties, the police and the overall municipal
economy.
Later, he worked as a criminologist at the state prison in Joliet:
'll tell you something, though, the three years I spent at Joliet were
worth while, because I continued the education in human relationships
I'd begun in the Capone mob. For one thing, I learned that the state
has the same mentality about murder as Frank Nitti. You know, whenever
we electrocuted an inmate, everybody on the staff would get drunk,
including the warden. It's one thing for a judge and a jury to condemn
a man to death; he's just a defendant, an abstraction, an impersonal
face in a box for two or three weeks. But once the poor bastard has
been in prison for seven or eight months -- waiting for his appeals or
for a stay -- you get to know him as a human being, you get to know his
wife and kids and his mother when they visit him, and he becomes real,
a person. And all the time you know that pretty soon you're going to be
strapping him into the chair and juicing him with 30,000 volts for the
time it takes to fry him alive while his bowels void and he keeps
straining against the straps. So then you can't take it as just another
day's work. If you can get out of being an official witness, you sit
around killing a fifth of whiskey until the lights dim and then maybe,
just maybe, you can get to sleep. That might be a good lesson for the
defenders of capital punishment: Let them witness an execution. But I
guess it wouldn't do much good for most of them, who are probably like
one of the guards at Joliet when I was there -- a sadistic son of a
bitch who I could swear had an orgasm when the switch was thrown.
The Great Depression:
PLAYBOY: How close was the country to revolution during the Depression?
ALINSKY: A lot closer than some people think. It was really Roosevelt's
reforms that saved the system from itself and averted total
catastrophe. You've got to remember, it wasn't only people's money that
went down the drain in 1929; it was also their whole traditional system
of values. Americans had learned to celebrate their society as an
earthly way station to paradise, with all the cherished virtues of hard
work and thrift as their tickets to security, success and happiness.
Then suddenly, in just a few days, those tickets were canceled and
apparently unredeemable, and the bottom fell out of everything. The
American dream became a nightmare overnight for the overwhelming
majority of citizens, and the pleasant, open-ended world they knew
suddenly began to close in on them as their savings disappeared behind
the locked doors of insolvent banks, their jobs vanished in closed
factories and their homes and farms were lost to foreclosed mortgages
and forcible eviction. Suddenly the smokestacks were cold and lifeless,
the machinery ground to a halt and a chill seemed to hang over the
whole country.
People tried to delude themselves and say, "None of this is real, we'll
just sleep through it all and wake up back in the sunlight of the
Twenties, back in our homes and jobs, with a chicken in every pot, two
cars in every garage." But they opened their eyes to the reality of
poverty and hopelessness, something they had never thought possible for
themselves, not for people who worked hard and long and saved their
money and went to church every Sunday. Oh, sure, poverty might exist,
far off in the dim shadowy corners of society, among blacks and
sharecroppers and people with funny names who couldn't speak English
yet, but it couldn't happen to them, not to God's people. But not only
did the darkness fail to pass away, it grew worse. At first people
surrendered to a numbing despair, but then slowly they began to look
around at the new and frightening world in which they found themselves
and began to rethink their values and priorities.
We'll always have poor people, they'd been taught to believe from
pulpit and classroom, because there will always be a certain number of
misfits who are too stupid and lazy to make it. But now that most of us
were poor, were we all dumb and shiftless and incompetent? A new mood
began stirring in the land and a mutual misery began to eat away the
traditional American virtues of rugged individualism, dog-eat-dog
competition and sanctimonious charity. People began reaching out for
something, anything, to hang on to -- and they found one another. We
suddenly began to discover that the ruthless law of the survival of the
fittest no longer held true, that it was possible for other people to
care about our plight and for us to care about theirs. On a smaller
scale, something similar occurred in London during the blitz, when all
the traditional English class barriers broke down in the face of a
common peril.
On getting people on to your side:
Now, it's always been a cardinal principle of organizing for me never
to appeal to people on.the basis of abstract values, as too many civil
rights leaders do today. Suppose I walked into the office of the
average religious leader of any denomination and said, "Look, I'm
asking you to live up to your Christian principles, to, make Jesus'
words about brotherhood and social justice realities." What do you
think would happen? He'd shake my hand warmly, say, "God bless you, my
son," and after I was gone he'd tell his secretary, "If that crackpot
comes around again, tell him I'm out."
So in order to involve the Catholic priests in Back of the Yards, I
didn't give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to
their self-interest. I'd say, "Look, you're telling your people to stay
out of the Communist-dominated unions and action groups, right?" He'd
nod. So I'd go on: "And what do they do? They say, 'Yes, Father,' and
walk out of the church and join the C.I.O. Why? Because it's their
bread and butter, because the C.I.O. is doing something about their
problems while you're sitting here on your tail in the sacristy." That
stirred 'em up, which is just what I wanted to do, and then I'd say,
"Look, if you go on like that you're gonna alienate your parishioners,
turn them from the Church, maybe drive them into the arms of the Reds.
Your only hope is to move first, to beat the Communists at their own
game, to show the people you're more interested in their living
conditions than the contents of your collection plate. And not only
will you get them back again by supporting their struggle, but when
they win they'll be more prosperous and your donations will go up and
the welfare of the Church will be enhanced." Now I'm talking their
language and we can sit down and hammer out a deal. That was what
happened in Back of the Yards, and within a few months the overwhelming
majority of the parish priests were backing us, and we were holding our
organizational meetings in their churches. To fuck your enemies, you've
first got to seduce your allies.
PLAYBOY: How did you win the backing of the community at large?
ALINSKY: The first step was getting the priests; that gave us the right
imprimatur with the average resident. But we still had to convince them
we could deliver what we promised, that we weren't just another
do-gooder social agency strong on rhetoric and short on action. But the
biggest obstacles we faced were the apathy and despair and hopelessness
of most of the slum dwellers. You've got to remember that when
injustice is complete and crushing, people very seldom rebel; they just
give up. A small percentage crack and blow their brains out, but the
other, 99 percent say, "Sure, it's bad, but what can we do? You can't
fight city hall. It's a rotten world for everybody, and anyway, who
knows, maybe I'll win at numbers or my lottery ticket will come
through. And the guy down the block is probably worse off than me."
The first thing we have to do when we come into a community is to break
down those justifications for inertia. We tell people, "Look, you don't
have to put up with all this shit. There's something concrete you can
do about it. But to accomplish anything you've got to have power, and
you'll only get it through organization. Now, power comes in two forms
-- money and people. You haven't got any money, but you do have people,
and here's what you can do with them." And we showed the workers in the
packing houses how they could organize a union and get higher wages and
benefits, and we showed the local merchants how their profits would go
up with higher wages in the community, and we showed the exploited
tenants how they could fight back against their landlords. Pretty soon
we'd established a community-wide coalition of workers, local
businessmen, labor leaders and housewives -- our power base -- and we
were ready to do battle.
PLAYBOY: What tactics did you use?
ALINSKY: Everything at our disposal in those days -- boycotts of
stores, strikes against the meat packers, rent strikes against the
slumlords, picketing of exploitive businesses, sit-downs in City Hall
and the offices of the corrupt local machine bosses. We'd turn the
politicians against each other, splitting them up and then taking them
on one at a time. At first the establishment dismissed us with a sneer,
but pretty soon we had them worried, because they saw how unified we
were and that we were capable of exerting potent economic and political
pressure. Finally the concessions began trickling in -- reduced rents,
public housing, more and better municipal services, school
improvements, more equitable mortgages and bank loans, fairer food
prices.
I'll give you an example here of the vital importance of personal
relationships in organizing. The linchpin of our struggle in Back of
the Yards was unionization of the packing-house workers, because most
of the local residents who worked had jobs in the stockyards, and
unless their wages and living standards were improved, the community as
a whole could never move forward. Now, at that time the meat barons
treated their workers like serfs, and they had a squad of vicious
strikebreakers to terrorize any worker who even opened his mouth about
a union. In fact, two of their goons submachined my car one night at
the height of the struggle. They missed me and, goddamn it, I missed
them when I shot back. So anyway, we knew that the success or failure
of the whole effort really hinged on the packing-house union. We
picketed, we sat down, we agitated; but the industry wouldn't budge. I
said, "OK, we can't hurt 'em head on, so we'll outflank 'em and put
heat on the downtown banks that control huge loans to the industry and
force them to exert pressure on the packers to accept our demands." We
directed a whole series of tactics against the banks, and they were a
little wobbly at first, but then they formed a solid front with the
packers and refused to give in or even to negotiate.
We were getting nowhere on the key issue of the whole struggle, and I
was getting worried. I racked my brain for some new means of applying
pressure on the banks and finally I came up with the answer. In those
days, the uncontested ruler of Chicago was the old-line political boss
Mayor Kelly, who made Daley's machine look like the League of Women
Voters. When Kelly whistled, everybody jumped to attention, from the
local ward heeler to the leading businessman in town. Now, there were
four big-city machines in the country at that time -- Kelly's in
Chicago, Pendergast's in Kansas City, Curley's in Boston and Hague's in
Jersey City -- and between them they exercised a hell of a political
clout, because they were the guys who delivered the swing states to the
Democrats at election time. This meant that Roosevelt had to deal with
them, but they were all pretty disreputable in the public eye and
whenever he met with them he smuggled them through the back door of the
White House and conferred in secret in some smoke-filled room. This was
particularly true in Kelly's case, since he was hated by liberals and
radicals all across the country because of his reactionary anti-labor
stand and his responsibility for the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago
in 1937. In fact, the left despised Kelly as intensely in those days as
they did Daley after the Chicago Democratic Convention [1968].
Now, Kelly was a funny guy; he was a mass of contradictions -- like
most people -- and despite his antilabor actions he really admired
F.D.R.; in fact, he worshiped him, and nothing hurt him more than the
way he was forced to sneak into the White House like a pariah -- no
dinner parties, none of those little Sunday soirees that Eleanor used
to throw, not even a public testimonial. He desperately wanted
acceptance by F.D.R. and the intellectuals in his brain trust, and he
really smarted under the second-class status the President conferred on
him. I'd studied his personality carefully, and I knew I'd get nowhere
appealing to him over labor's rights, but I figured I might just be
able to use this personal Achilles' heel to our advantage.
Finally I got an audience with Kelly and I started my spiel. "Look,
Mayor," I said, "I know I can't deliver you any more votes than you've
already got" -- in those days they didn't even bother to count the
ballots, they weighed 'em, and every cemetery in town voted; there was
a real afterlife in Chicago -- "but I'm going to make a deal with you."
Kelly just looked bored; he was probably asking himself why he'd even
bothered to see this little pip-squeak radical. "What've you got to
deal with, kid?" he asked me. I told him, "Right now you've got a
reputation as the number-one enemy of organized labor in the country.
But I'll make you a liberal overnight. I'll deliver the national C.I.O.
endorsement for you and the public support of every union in Chicago.
I've arranged for two of the guys who were wounded in the Memorial Day
Massacre to go on the radio and applaud you as a true friend of the
workingman. Within forty-eight hours I'll have turned you into a
champion of liberalism" -- Kelly still looked bored -- "and that'll
make you completely acceptable to F.D.R. on all occasions, social and
political."
Suddenly he sat bolt upright in his chair and his eyes bored into mine.
"How do I know you can deliver?" he asked. I handed him a slip of
paper. "That's the unlisted number of John L. Lewis in Alexandria,
Virginia. Call him, tell him I'm here in your office, tell him what I
said, and then ask him if I can deliver." Kelly leaned back in his
chair and said, "What do you want?" I said, "I want you to put the
screws on the meat packers to sign a contract with the union." He said,
"It's a deal. You'll get your contract tomorrow." We did, and from that
time on victory for Back of the Yards was ensured. And I came out of
that fight convinced that the organizational techniques we used in Back
of the Yards could be employed successfully anywhere across the nation.
PLAYBOY: Were you right?
ALINSKY: Absolutely. Our tactics have to vary according to the needs
and problems of each particular area we're organizing, but we've been
very successful with an overall strategy that we adhere to pretty
closely. For example, the central principle of all our organizational
efforts is self-determination; the community we're dealing with must
first want us to come in, and once we're in we insist they choose their
own objectives and leaders. It's the organizer's job to provide the
technical know-how, not to impose his wishes or his attitudes on the
community; we're not there to lead, but to help and to teach. We want
the local people to use us, drain our experience and expertise, and
then throw us away and continue doing the job themselves. Otherwise
they'd grow overly dependent on us and the moment we moved out the
situation would start to revert to the status quo ante. This is why
I've set a three-year limit on the time one of our organizers remains
within any particular area. This has been our operating procedure in
all our efforts; we're outside agitators, all right, but by invitation
only. And we never overstay our welcome.
...
PLAYBOY: How does a self-styled outside agitator like yourself get
accepted in the community he plans to organize?
ALINSKY: The first and most important thing you can do to win this
acceptance is to bait the power structure into publicly attacking you.
In Back of the Yards, when I was first establishing my credentials, I
deliberately maneuvered to provoke criticism. I made outrageous
statements to the press, I attacked every civic and business leader I
could think of, and I goaded the establishment to strike back.
...
But over and above all these devices, the ultimate key to acceptance by
a community is respect for the dignity of the individual you're dealing
with. If you feel smug or arrogant or condescending, he'll sense it
right away, and you might as well take the next plane out. The first
thing you've got to do in a community is listen, not talk, and learn to
eat, sleep, breathe only one thing: the problems and aspirations of the
community. Because no matter how imaginative your tactics, how shrewd
your strategy, you're doomed before you even start if you don't win the
trust and respect of the people; and the only way to get that is for
you to trust and respect them. And without that respect there's no
communication, no mutual confidence and no action. That's the first
lesson any good organizer has to learn, and I learned it in Back of the
Yards.
On co-optation:
ALINSKY: No. It's the eternal problem, but it must be accepted with the
understanding that all life is a series of revolutions, one following
the other, each bringing society a little bit closer to the ultimate
goal of real personal and social freedom. I certainly don't regret for
one minute what I did in the Back of the Yards. Over 200,000 people
were given decent lives, hope for the future and new dignity because of
what we did in that cesspool. Sure, today they've grown fat and
comfortable and smug, and they need to be kicked in the ass again, but
if I had a choice between seeing those same people festering in filth
and poverty and despair, and living a decent life within the confines
of the establishment's prejudices, I'd do it all over again. One of the
problems here, and the reason some people just give up when they see
that economic improvements don't make Albert Schweitzers out of
everybody, is that too many liberals and radicals have a tender-minded,
overly romantic image of the poor; they glamorize the povertystricken
slum dweller as a paragon of justice and expect him to behave like an
angel the minute his shackles are removed. That's crud. Poverty is
ugly, evil and degrading, and the fact that have-nots exist in despair,
discrimination and deprivation does not automatically endow them with
any special qualities of charity, justice, wisdom, mercy or moral
purity. They are people, with all the faults of people -- greed, envy,
suspicion, intolerance -- and once they get on top they can be just as
bigoted as the people who once oppressed them. But that doesn't mean
you leave them to rot. You just keep on fighting.
...
Over and over again, the firebrand revolutionary freedom fighter is the
first to destroy the rights and even the lives of the next generation
of rebels.
But recognizing this isn't cause for despair. All life is warfare, and
it's the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes
society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual
progress. The struggle itself is the victory. History is like a relay
race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of
revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the
torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new
generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the
way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take
shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even
as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of
the prevailing status quo.
On dogmatism:
I prize my own independence too much. And philosophically, I could
never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or
Marxism. One of the most important things in life is what judge Learned
Hand described as "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're
right." If you don't have that, if you think you've got an inside track
to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually
constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by
such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions
of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide. The
great atomic physicist Niels Bohr summed it up pretty well when he
said, "Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation,
but as a question." Nobody owns the truth, and dogma, whatever form it
takes, is the ultimate enemy of human freedom.
Now, this doesn't mean that I'm rudderless; I think I have a much
keener sense of direction and purpose than the true believer with his
rigid ideology, because I'm free to be loose, resilient and
independent, able to respond to any situation as it arises without
getting trapped by articles of faith. My only fixed truth is a belief
in people, a conviction that if people have the opportunity to act
freely and the power to control their own destinies, they'll generally
reach the right decisions. The only alternative to that belief is rule
by an elite, whether it's a Communist bureaucracy or our own
present-day corporate establishment. You should never have an ideology
more specific than that of the founding fathers: "For the general
welfare." That's where I parted company with the Communists in the
Thirties, and that's where I stay parted from them today.
I'll let you read the story of the O'Hare "shit-in" for yourselves.
Not to mention the "fart-in".
Almost by accident, he invented the tactic of getting proxy votes to attend
(and disrupt) shareholder meetings, and as a means of social and political
pressures against the megacorporations.