Obama’s mentor: Saul Alinsky, Chicago’s first community organizer
Posted by Clyde Middleton
on Aug 18 2009 Filed under Politics.
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Saul Alinsky’s name comes up constantly in condemning statements concerning Obama’s “real agenda.” We’ve heard endlessly that Hillary’s undergrad senior paper was written about Alinsky and his philosophy. It seems that the Beautiful People revere this guy. Paraphrasing Arlo Guthrie at the end of “Alice’s Restaurant,” I can write about anything – “I’ve got no pride.” I come from coal cracker roots displaced onto a farm. I can shoot pool and milk a cow without the automatic pumpers; I can play shuffleboard and deal an honest hand of poker. I have no idea who this guy is, and my life has not been compromised by that hole in my social education. The Beautiful People don’t understand my world either. So I’ve done some research. Let’s explore Saul Alinsky.
We need to start at the source. Playboy did an interview with Alinsky in 12 parts.
Here he talks about accepting charity, and then stealing food:
PLAYBOY: What did you do after graduation?
ALINSKY: I went hungry. What little money my mother had was wiped out in the Crash and, as I’ve told you, my old man wasn’t exactly showering support on me. I managed to eke out a subsistence living by doing odd jobs around the university at ten cents an hour. I suppose I could have gotten some help from a relief project, but it’s funny, I just couldn’t do it. I’ve always been that way: I’d rob a bank before I accepted charity. Anyway, things were rough for a while and I got pretty low. I remember sitting in a crummy cafeteria one day and saying to myself: “Here I am, a smart son of a bitch, I graduated cum laude and all that shit, but I can’t make a living, I can’t even feed myself. What happens now?” And then it came to me; that little light bulb lit up above my head.
I moved over to the table next to the cashier, exchanged a few words with her and then finished my coffee and got up to pay. “Gee, I’m sorry,” I said, “I seem to have lost my check.” She’d seen that all I had was a cup of coffee, so she just said, “That’s OK, that’ll be a nickel.” So I paid and left with my original nickel check still in my pocket and walked a few blocks to the next cafeteria in the same chain and ordered a big meal for a buck forty-five — and, believe me, in those days, for a buck forty-five I could have practically bought the fuckin’ joint. I ate in a corner far away from the cashier, then switched checks and paid my nickel bill from the other place and left. So my eating troubles were taken care of.
I was doing fine at the start of his answer, thinking “Somehow the message of accepting charity got lost along the way,” but then his theft of services and products came to the fore. Interesting fellow. I remember in my own undergrad, a student described to me how he would go into town to eat at a fast food restaurant. He would consume 3/4′s or so of his Big Mac or Whopper, place one of his hairs in the remainder, and then march to the counter screaming. He used the same words, oddly enough: “The trick is to eat in a corner far away from the cashier.” His tirade would always get him a coupon for a free meal. “Fifty percent off dining!” he’d tell me. I thought he was an a-hole, too.
Was this just a lark, something he did a few times and then his conscious caught up with him? Seems not:
But then I began to see other kids around the campus in the same fix, so I put up a big sign on the bulletin board and invited anybody who was hungry to a meeting. Some of them thought it was all a gag, but I stood on the lectern and explained my system in detail, with the help of a big map of Chicago with all the local branches of the cafeteria marked on it. Social ecology! I split my recruits up into squads according to territory; one team would work the South Side for lunch, another the North Side for dinner, and so on. We got the system down to a science, and for six months all of us were eating free. Then the bastards brought in those serial machines at the door where you pull out a ticket that’s only good for that particular cafeteria. That was a low blow. We were the first victims of automation.
My farm background seems more and more apt. I was taught not to steal. Did it bother him at all? He says it did, but then justifies it:
There’s a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence over the right to make a profit.
So there we have the foundations of Saul Alinsky: Some rights can be achieved by any means necessary because the infringed rights are seen as less important.
Alinsky was studying criminology in college. In further evidence of his specious morality, he decided to get a view of Al Capone’s gang from the inside:
Big Ed had an attentive audience [in Alinsky] and we became buddies. He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al’s income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti’s boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob’s operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.
PLAYBOY: Why would professional criminals confide their secrets to an outsider?
ALINSKY: Why not? What harm could I do them? Even if I told what I’d learned, nobody would listen. They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail ‘em on an occasional income tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn’t touch their power. Capone was the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn’t any city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren’t afraid of some college kid they’d adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.
Once, when I was looking over their records, I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer. I called Nitti over and I said, “Look, Mr. Nitti, I don’t understand this. You’ve got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?” Frank was really shocked at my ignorance. “Look, kid,” he said patiently, “sometimes our guys might know the guy they’re hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together. But you call in a guy from out of town, all you’ve got to do is tell him, ‘Look, there’s this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.’ So that’s a job and he’s a professional, he does it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it’s a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there’s gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping — Christ, it’d be murder.” I think Frank was a little disappointed by my even questioning the practice; he must have thought I was a bit callous.
Alinsky’s life seems to read more like a petty mobster than the vaulted community organizer and liberal deity the Beautiful People make him out to be. Rather interesting.
But, but, but …
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.
Guess it didn’t bother him. What an interesting man. But it gets better. it seems that a young thug was shot and killed during a drug-store robbery. Alinsky went to the decedent’s neighborhood:
By a stroke of luck, though, I heard Mrs. Massina, Dumas’ mother, weeping and wailing, repeating the same thing over and over in Italian. I asked one of the kids what she was saying and he said she was bemoaning the fact that she didn’t have any pictures of Dumas since he was a baby, nothing to remember him by. So I left right away, picked up a photographer friend of mine and rushed down to the morgue. I showed my credentials and the attendant took us in to the icebox, where Dumas was laid out on a slab. We took a photograph, opening his eyes first, then rushed back to the studio to develop it. We carefully retouched it to eliminate all the bullet holes, and then had it hand-tinted. The next morning, I went back to the wake and presented the photograph to Mrs. Massina. “Dumas gave this to me just last week,” I said, “and I’d like you to have it.” She cried and thanked me, and pretty soon word of the incident spread throughout the gang. “That Alinsky, he’s an all-right motherfucker,” the kids would say, and from that moment on they began to trust me and I was able to work with them, all because of the photograph. It was an improvised tactic and it worked.
Playboy nails him, but check out his response:
PLAYBOY: It was also pretty cynical and manipulative.
ALINSKY: It was a simple example of good organizing. And what’s wrong with it? Everybody got what they wanted. Mrs. Massina got something to hold onto in her grief and I got in good with the kids. I got to be good friends with some of them. And some of them I was able to help go straight.
So once again, Alinsky exhibits quite the Utilitarian bent: Whatever it takes to achieve the end result is perfectly fine – by any means necessary.
He worked for a while at a prison in Joliet. He shares his views of capital punishment and those that support it:
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.
So he can steal from restaurants and cavort with murdering mobsters, but not have any understanding of people that may different from his views on capital punishment. To him, supporters of capital punishment are all living some sexual fantasy. Nice icon you libs got here.
And now we view the Depression through his eyes, what he saw as a social movement, and perhaps how Obama sees FDR in himself:
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.
Now, in America, new voices and new values began to be heard, people began citing John Donne’s “No man is an island,” and as they started banding together to improve their lives, they found how much in common they had with their fellow man. It was the first time since the abolitionist movement, for example, that there was any significant black-white unity, as elements of both races began to move together to confront the common enemies of unemployment and starvation wages. This was one of the most important aspects of the Thirties: not just the political struggles and reforms but the sudden discovery of a common destiny and a common bond of humanity among millions of people. It was a very moving experience to witness and be part of it.
And from this solidarity of Alinsky’s views to Obama’s vision comes what could be asserted as a common view of corporate America:
The giant corporations were unbelievably arrogant and oppressive and would go to any lengths to protect their freedom — the freedom to exploit and the freedom to crush any obstacle blocking the golden road to mammon. Not one American corporation — oil, steel, auto, rubber, meat packing — would allow its workers to organize; labor unions were branded subversive and communistic and any worker who didn’t toe the line was summarily fired and then blacklisted throughout the industry. When they defied their bosses, they were beaten up or murdered by company strikebreakers or gunned down by the police of corrupt big-city bosses allied with the corporations, like in the infamous Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago when dozens of peaceful pickets were shot in the back.
It was at this time in his life that Alinsky went into community organizing in Chicago. If you wish to continue reading, begin at Part Seven in the Playboy interview. For our purposes, we understand some aspects of the man that before he took to the streets.
In Hillary’s thesis, she summarizes a consistent theme from his background to this community organizer work:
Alinsky staved off the expansion by creating and guiding a group called the Temporary Woodlawn Organization. Hillary wrote, “Alinsky argues that those who wish to change circumstances must develop a mass-based organization and be prepared for conflict….for him, conflict is the route to power.”
It seems the road is straight from Al Capone’s gang to organizing the streets of Chicago.
Showing how deeply she took the bait, Hillary compared Alinsky to others who had been feared:
“… as the proponent of a dangerous socio/political philosophy…just as Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King had been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy.” Ms. Rodham apparently admired those three in the same manner and degree that she admired Alinsky.
From Alinsky to Hillary to Rahm Emanuel to Axelrod to Obama to all the others with whom Obama surrounds himself, the delusion of achieving the agenda by any means necessary and of demonizing all those that disagree runs deeply.
Related Posts
- O’s homeboy Saul Alinsky: Satan was the first radical
- NEA Recommended Reading: Saul Alinsky, The American Organizer
- Obama can’t be community organizer for the world
- Voight: Is Obama creating a Civil War in America?
- Happy 100th Birthday…Saul Alinsky.
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