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5 The Alchemist

Saul Alinsky started doing politics in the late 1930s amid the enthusiasm of the Popular Front and CIO organizing. His ability to thrive despite a series of attacks from Chicago’s political bosses during World War II, plus the eventual antifascist victory in Europe and Japan, deepened his optimism and patriotism. Strike victories by his close allies in the United Packing House Workers of America at most of Chicago’s slaughterhouses right after the war confirmed the value of the work he had been doing in the city’s white ethnic Back of the Yards district. His 1946 best seller, Reveille for Radicals, propelled him to national prominence. When the Popular Front collapsed in the early years of the cold war, Alinsky refused to cooperate with government repression of the Communist Party or the persecution of individual reds, but promoted his own political ideas as the best way to combat Communism, once even traveling to the Vatican to advise the Catholic hierarchy on how to defeat Communist Party trade unions in Italy.

By the early fifties, Alinsky had found an idiosyncratic non-Communist niche, and he continued to be the chief theoretician and sometimes active protagonist of several community organizing projects. The early New Left was attracted by his non-Communist stance and emphasis on democratic values. Later, however, as the student and black movements of the 1960s shifted away from community organizing, Alinskyism positioned itself as an alternative to New Left politics. Eventually, in the late 1970s and ’80s, Alinsky’s followers and his left (both old and new) antagonists would all wonder whether the Alinskyite community organizations that continued to flourish after his death, in 1972, were even a part of the left tradition.

That debate has not weakened Alinsky’s influence on American politics, which remains strong. More than 150 community organizations throughout the country were originally sponsored, promoted, and organized by openly Alinskyite organizing centers. Alinsky’s fingerprints are also all over the progressive movements within the Protestant and Catholic churches. His voice still echoes in the strategy sessions of activist officials in contemporary organized labor. Finally, famously, the first African American president had his first taste of big-city politics while working for an Alinsky-inspired organization.

For any set of ideas, eighty years of political relevance is quite an achievement and cannot be dismissed as merely a reflection of the particular pragmatic adaptability of Alinskyism. And there is an “Alinskyism.” With Saul as the fountainhead, community organizing has become a codified discipline, with core theoretical propositions, recognized heresies, disciples, fallen neophytes, and splits. It is a political theory, with the emphasis on the political, and Alinsky is the grand theorist.

Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, one of the many Alinskyite centers where organizers are trained, calls Alinsky “our Sigmund Freud.” What Booth means is that both Freud and Alinsky founded schools of thought, but there is another, deeper link: the role of training and lineage. Just as psychoanalysts trace their pedigree back to the grand master (they were either analyzed by Freud or by someone who was analyzed by Freud, or by someone who was analyzed by someone who . . . ), so Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizers trace their training back to Alinsky himself. And just as the psychoanalyst in training gains knowledge of the discipline through an examination of his or her own personal experience, guided by the skillful questioning of the analyst and a consideration of case histories, the ideal Alinskyite training places a would-be organizer out in the field, systematically analyzing his or her own political experience, with the help of the more experienced, theoretically advanced trainer, who teaches through a combination of stories and questions. Although there are some schools of neo-Alinskyism that attempt to train novice organizers in six weeks, arming them with neat, codified summations of Alinskyite technique, traditionalists, such as Mike Miller of San Francisco, continue to insist that it takes at least three years to train a professional organizer.

Cesar Chavez was trained for ten years. His chief teacher, Fred Ross, although not exactly an Alinsky trainee, was one of the first people on Alinsky’s payroll and an early practitioner of Alinsky-style community organizing. Chavez watched Ross work and was watched by him; he filed weekly and sometimes daily reports to Ross and to Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). He studied Reveille for Radicals. He read and reread Alinsky’s 1949 biography of John L. Lewis.¹ The group Chavez worked for, the Community Service Organization, was Alinsky’s most successful early project outside Chicago. During Alinsky’s regular visits to California, which often lasted several weeks, Chavez worked alongside the master in formal trainings, conferences, and fundraising events.

There was no training manual, but the training was systematic and included written critiques of the obligatory work reports. These were serious people doing serious work, making their living doing politics. Not a fabulous living, but after 1953, a respectable one. Alinsky signed both Fred Ross’s and Cesar Chavez’s checks. Not everything that Alinsky and Ross taught Chavez in the years between his twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth birthdays stuck, but understanding Alinskyism is one way of making sense of Cesar Chavez and the foundational architecture of the United Farm Workers.

Alinsky could sign the checks for Ross and Chavez because Alinskyism was funded—no small matter for promoting a political discipline. The money came from liquor. Alinsky’s first major benefactor was the Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation, especially its executive director, Carl Tjerandsen. Schwarzhaupt was a German-Jewish immigrant who had made his fortune in Chicago. He had worked as a clerk in the liquor industry, and made some money buying and selling warehouse inventories. Anticipating Prohibition, he stockpiled those inventories before 1919 and then sold them through some “partners” for “medicinal purposes” during the 1920s. He came out of Prohibition with enough capital to set up the National Distillers Corporation, which he eventually sold to the Schenley Corporation. When setting up his foundation, Schwarzhaupt stipulated that his money be given away within twenty-five years of his death, as it was incumbent upon each generation to solve its own political problems, including its funding challenges.²

Schwarzhaupt died in 1950, and Tjerandsen, the executive secretary of the foundation, gave most of the old man’s money away so fast that almost all of the $3.5 million was gone before 1962. Tjerandsen gave fairly large chunks to just a few groups, relatively unknown at the time, among them the Highlander Folk School, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Migrant Ministry; but the main recipient was Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Starting in April 1953, the IAF received a direct grant of $150,000, which in the next ten years expanded to $608,486. More money went to other organizations and groups that had ties to Alinsky but were not directly funded by the IAF. Add it all up, and over a twelve-year period of intense giving nearly $3 million of Schwarzhaupt’s fortune went to fund Alinskyism.³

Fortuna also played her part. Carl Tjerandsen was a graduate student at the University of Chicago when he was appointed to the Committee on Education for American Citizenship, which had been created to decide, in the most general terms, how to spend Schwarzhaupt’s money. The sociologist Louis Wirth headed the committee. Alinsky and Wirth played poker together. Tjerandsen was a friend of both. Without both Wirth and Tjerandsen, Alinsky might not have made his way to the money. He had already been turned down by a dozen potential funders, including the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. He was neither a social worker nor an academic, and in the early fifties, liberal, corporate foundation money primarily went to institutional intellectuals or charity operations.

After Tjerandsen had given away most of the money, he remained a part-time director of the foundation and moved on to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he kept up his interest in questions of democratic political participation, sponsoring conferences and retreats where the people who had received Schwarzhaupt Foundation funds were encouraged to discuss their work. Alinsky came to most of those events, established a second residence in the nearby Carmel Highlands, and made California one of his regular stops. Chavez had plenty of direct contact with him, much of it sponsored by Tjerandsen. Those connections made others possible, between Chavez and the young Protestant clergy who made up the Migrant Ministry, Chavez and the New York Union Theological Seminary, Chavez and the United Packing House Workers, Chavez and the National Council of Churches. All of them would be important to him for the rest of his life. But it wasn’t just, or even mainly, the infrastructure of Alinskyism that secured for Saul Alinsky a place in Chavez’s small pantheon of heroes; it was Alinsky’s ideas.

Born to immigrant, working-class Russian Orthodox Jews in 1909, Saul Alinsky begins Reveille for Radicals with a hymn to multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic working-class America. Written between the summers of 1944 and ’45, the first pages have the feel of triumphant World War II movies, where the heroic Army platoon includes representatives of various ethnicities: GIs and full-fledged Americans all. Alinsky adds to that mix Negroes, whom the army had segregated and the Hollywood movies had left out. Among this nation of beautiful cultural complexity are a few radicals who belong, according to the Jeffersonian typology that Alinsky affectionately quotes, to one of the two opposing parties that have existed throughout world history: the democrats, who trust the people and want to spread political power among them, and the aristocrats, who fear and distrust the people and want power to remain in the hands of the upper classes.⁴

Although Alinsky often merges the radical and the democrat, for him they are theoretically distinct: radicals are the politically active democrats, who historically have led the struggles—sometimes revolutionary, sometimes not—for democratic power. The essential Alinsky argument is that in the postwar period the radical must become a new kind of leader, a community organizer, who creates but does not exactly lead a new kind of organization. What happens between the organizer and the community is an art, which cannot be reduced to method, but when it works it produces a successful organization, and an organization is the key to power. Without organization there is no power. Without the organizer, there is no organization.

Who is this contemporary radical and what does he believe? In the first pages of Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky describes the principles of the radical democrat, a hodge-podge of Popular Front and Enlightenment ideas, with an emphasis on “trusting” or even “loving” real people in all their complexities, plus the insistence that democracy comes from “the bottom up.” The list of the radical’s convictions begins with the belief that all people should have high standards of “food, housing, and health,” that “human rights” are more important than “property rights,” and goes on to mention “full employment,” “real equality of opportunity,” “local rights” (so long as they don’t become a cover for “Tory reaction”), “social planning” (so long as it is not “top down”), and various New Deal slogans of the left variety. Early in the book he lists as a radical democratic belief the “hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of just a comparative handful,” yet in the book’s last pages he calls for a new American democracy based on a rejuvenated “organized labor, organized business, and organized religion.” The contradiction between “owned by all the people” and a central role for organized business doesn’t count for much. What the radical believes is just an incantation; there is no real attempt to analyze the connections, or possible contradictions, between its various goals and principles. And even if it is possible to characterize the early Alinsky as some kind of social democrat, the “social” part of the formulation was always secondary, always the adjective. Democrat was the noun, the central idea.

Of more consequence to him is the line separating the radical from the liberal. Although he doesn’t argue the point explicitly, he identifies liberalism with an effete middle-class approach to politics, while radicalism is real, rough, plain-talking, unadorned working-class democracy. Nevertheless the difference is not primarily an issue of class or belief but the fact that the radical, unlike the liberal, is a political fighter and that liberals are afraid of power, while radicals know that ordinary people wielding power is what democracy is all about.

After this cursory attempt to establish a philosophical basis to his politics, Alinsky gets down to what he does best: strategy. American radicals, he argues, have joined the rest of the world’s radicals in throwing their main energy into organizing the labor movement. That is sensible, he argues, because the constituency of the American labor movement is not just another “interest” but the overwhelming majority of the American people. Nonetheless, there is a problem: “As labor unions have become strong, wealthy, fat, and respectable, they have behaved more like organized business,” and are in danger of losing their original democratic purpose.⁵

This formulation, unlike Alinsky’s earlier list of radical beliefs, was in 1946 an important departure within Popular Front thinking. Reveille for Radicals was published before New Men of Power, C. Wright Mills’s critique of top union leaders, and although Alinsky’s ideas share some similarities to earlier Communist critiques of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), this was not the way most of his left contemporaries talked and wrote about the CIO. During World War II Alinsky had worked with the War Manpower Commission in what his principal biographer, Stanford Horwitt, calls “efforts to maintain worker morale and harmony in key industries, such as in defense plants.”⁶ In the course of that work, Alinsky got a firsthand view of the new collaboration between industry managers, union leaders, and government officials, who often fought a united battle against rank-and-file initiative and shop-floor control of production, at the same time as they were imposing union contracts in some industries and helping unions become thoroughly institutionalized in others.⁷ This collaboration was a first step in the remaking of much of the top CIO leadership into “new men of power,” who by the time the war ended had lost what little contact they once had with the rank and file. Alinsky was astute enough to see this as it was happening, and to raise a warning cry.

What to do about a labor movement that is becoming corrupt and antidemocratic? Abandon it? Alinsky answers that suggestion with a quip: “The fault with the American radical is not that he chose to make his bed in the labor movement but that he fell asleep in it.”⁸ The radical’s job is to reawaken the democratic promise of unionism by building community organizations, made up of labor unions and other community groups, whose own struggles for power in the neighborhood will renew union (and American) democracy. How to do this is what Reveille for Radicals is all about. Another obvious alternative—for workers to fight within their unions for democratic unionism—is not even mentioned. Instead, the solution to union corruption is to build a new kind of community organization, what Alinsky dubbed, using capital letters, a People’s Organization.^*

Unions, Alinsky argues, are languishing precisely because they have institutional power. Through ritualized contract negotiations they can win higher wages without the active participation of their members. The People’s Organization, or PO—an organization of pre-existing organizations, including local unions—is designed to resolve that. To fight for the community’s agenda, it must propel people into action because, unlike the unions, the PO does not have established, formal power. It can win new parks or youth recreation programs or rent control or some other demand only if people are willing to become politically active. Since the unions are a part of the PO, the community battles involve union members, too. Political activity in the community then carries over into the unions, restores internal democracy, and saves them from corruption. Argument complete.

Despite Alinsky’s rhetorical accent on democracy, this approach left Cesar Chavez ill-equipped to think about the actual dynamics of union democracy. In making his case, Alinsky does not go beyond the idea that civic participation in the PO will spill over into nearby unions. Just as Alinsky never considered the idea that union members would wage a direct battle for union democracy, he is uninterested in the kinds of internal union structures that might make democratic unionism more likely. That was a road Alinsky chose not to take in either his book or his political practice, perhaps because it would have upset the few union chiefs who were among his early supporters. Alinsky has no discussion of the potential power of independent union locals; nothing about encouraging rank-and-file debate, political education, and contested elections; no comment on how union conventions might take up issues of real concern to their members. None of that was in Cesar Chavez’s intellectual arsenal; all of it was missing from the UFW.

In his biography of John L. Lewis, the book he wrote right after he finished Reveille for Radicals, Alinsky was even worse on the question of internal union democracy. Here, in a book that Chavez read and reread and gave as a gift, Alinsky championed Lewis’s destruction of independent locals in the United Mine Workers of America, arguing that eliminating their power was essential to all that Lewis accomplished on the national scene.

Part II of Reveille for Radicals is mostly a string of Alinsky stories, highly fictionalized tales of how he organized the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council and a few other partly real, mostly imaginary People’s Organizations. The stories make good reading, but they are not as delectable as the storyteller seems to believe. Most of Alinsky’s friends would agree with Fred Ross’s assessment: “Saul could tell a better story than he could write it. He gave it certain inflections and body language, and he was great with a deadpan delivery.” Also, harsher standards apply to the written word. Alinsky’s publisher insisted that he leave out most of the real names, thus denying the reader part of what made the spoken stories so enjoyable: the inside dope on some famous people, and how the wily community organizer outwitted them.

Alinsky’s stories were not merely enjoyable, however. They were the essential vehicle through which he conveyed his political knowledge. Alinsky insisted on a few general principles of organizing, but beyond those principles and guidelines about the structure of a PO, there are just his stories and whatever lessons they might suggest. Alinsky is a political actor more than a grand theorist; he is immersed in particular, specific problems, and his knowledge of the complexity of those problems seems to overwhelm his capacity to make big theories about what he is doing. He would rather just tell us a few aphorisms and describe some of his tricks.

Not that Alinsky is unable to theorize; rather, he is unwilling. Overtheorizing, coming into a community with a full set of abstract notions about what the people should do, is both a violation of his democratic principles and monumentally impractical. It won’t work. The people have to set their own agenda; they will not fight for someone else’s. The Alinsky organizer in a working-class community, like the Leninist organizer, is there to combat “straight trade unionism.” (Alinsky no doubt borrowed the term from his CP friends.) But the community organizer, unlike the Leninist, is not the bearer of scientific socialism or any other complete set of ideas that the workers must learn. Alinsky’s organizer has a ton of techniques, but he has only two main ideas to teach: popular participation, and a specific form of organization. And his brief is not to teach those ideas—it is to get people to try them out. As they do, and win power as a result, they can almost teach the ideas to themselves.

According to Alinskyite theory, stories do just fine for teaching democratic politics. Alinsky, Ross, and Chavez were all storytellers, masters of the art of conversation. They knew how to talk, and they knew how to listen. This is no accident of personality. It is a consciously acknowledged element of the theory. All of the various Alinskyite training centers teach conversation, which requires, first, listening, and among the Alinskyites, Chavez is the most famous listener. His ability to give his full attention to the person with whom he was talking is the stuff of legend, and in this case the legend is firmly grounded.

But Chavez and Ross and Alinsky didn’t just listen—they told stories that made points, specific ones. “You want higher wages, better working conditions, rent control, an end to police brutality? Let me tell you what happened over in Los Angeles, where the people got together and won some of those things.” And a story would follow. Probably an exaggeration, as most good stories are. But that was okay, because the story was intended to inspire and instruct, not be an accurate historical account. What did the stories teach? If you build an organization and get active in it, you can improve your world. And if you want to do that, the organizer can show you how. It is that simple.

The emphasis on small, intimate conversation as the essential political discourse starts with Alinsky, builds with Ross, and becomes perhaps Chavez’s supreme contribution to organizational theory and practice. “One-on-one” organizing, like the feminist consciousness-raising groups to which it is related, was promoted not just as another way of talking politics but as the way of doing it. Its enemy, its opposite, is political oratory: the great transforming speech delivered to a gathering of listeners, which inspires, instructs, and gives historical meaning to that which the audience has just done or is about to do. This is an enormous departure in democratic theory. So much for the great speeches and speechmakers who helped define democracy: the big boys like Pericles, Danton, Lincoln, Debs, and King; and adios to all the soap-boxers whose ability to hold and inspire a crowd has for so long been a touchstone of popular politics. In this new view, such speeches, and the people who make them, are suspect, perhaps even essentially antidemocratic, because they are so often full of bombast and rhetoric, and are talking at the people instead of listening to them.

It would be wrong to give full credit (or blame) to Alinsky for this departure. It is part of his idea of how the community organizer operates, but it is not his primary emphasis. It is Chavez, the shy, ineffective public speaker, who mastered small-scale conversation, who ultimately developed it into a full-blown theory. Throughout his telling of the story of the UFW—the story of the founding, the grape boycott, the union contracts—the tale that was then retold by most of Chavez’s chroniclers, the success of the union depended on overcoming the error of grand speeches and radical rhetoric. Beware the inspiring speech, Chavez learned and taught. Trust only direct, personal contact.

Part II of Reveille for Radicals does contain a few general principles about how to form a People’s Organization, basically how to weave the essential elements of the neighborhood together to make a community. These essential elements are what the organizer tries to identify as he listens to people talk. He listens in order to help them find their own agendas, to identify the “native leadership,” to familiarize himself with preexisting community organizations (and the divisions within those organizations), and to understand and appreciate community traditions. Sometimes Alinsky—and Ross and Chavez, too—compare the organizer to a juggler, a performer who already has six plates in the air and must add a seventh. Organizers do their work through the proper juggling of local leaders, preexisting organizations, and community traditions. They must keep all of the elements coordinated, happily in the air at once, without dropping a single one. But jugglers don’t change the character of what they toss. The plates remain plates. Here Alinsky underestimates the organizer’s powers, because the organizer can change the character of the plates. When the juggled elements become an organization of elements, they are transformed. They are no longer just local leaders, preexisting community groups, and community traditions. Through the magic of organization they become political power. The juggler analogy does not do the organizer justice. A better image—and one that Alinsky also used—is the wizard, the alchemist. Through the philosopher’s stone of organization, the alchemist transmutes an apathetic, powerless, divided neighborhood into a powerful community, fighting for its own agenda.

In Reveille for Radicals, as well as in most Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizations, the community organizer must be an outsider. Generally this is an uncontested and unsupported assumption. Alinsky makes but a single partial argument in Reveille about the necessity of the organizer’s otherness.In three brief paragraphs toward the end of the book, Alinsky asserts “one simple maxim: in order to be part of all, you must be part of none.” The organizer must stand above all the “innumerable rivalries, fears, jealousies, and suspicions within a community.” It is hard to do that if one is already part of the community. Here, characteristically, Alinsky tells a story (one he probably made up for the purpose), which concludes with the crucial lesson:

In one Western community an organizer who held an official position within the CIO was Protestant by religion and a leader in his church club, and his wife was the president of a local women’s club. Shortly after beginning his organizational drive this organizer discovered that he had to resign from his church in order to remove certain barriers between himself and representatives of other Protestant churches in the community. He had to resign from the CIO because of suspicion on the part of the American Federation of Labor and the Railroad Brotherhood. His wife had to resign from her women’s club because of the rivalry of another women’s society. Very shortly this organizer found that he could not be an official member of any of the community agencies. These circumstances do not apply in the same severe fashion to an organizer who comes into the community from the outside.

Coming from the outside is so essential to the organizer that if by chance he were originally an insider, he would have to replicate the condition of outsider by cutting off all of his (and his wife’s!) organizational connections to fellow workers, worshipers, friends, and neighbors. “In a sense” the organizer “is selfless,” Alinsky says elsewhere in Reveille for Radicals, standing above all the victories and defeats, the ordinary hopes and fears of the local community leaders. Here Alinsky quotes Schiller: “Know this, a mind sublime puts greatness into life, yet seeks it not therein.”⁹ Organizers are not, and must not be, caught up in the ordinary life of the community. They are outside it, above it.

That is a rather peculiar view of democratic leadership—yet the outside organizer is both leader and not leader. Like a movie cowboy he rides into a troubled town alone, reconstructs legitimate authority, and then rides out again; he never stays to become sheriff or mayor. This is a view of politics that has attracted any number of talented, ambitious, would-be American political heroes, including many of the founding fathers of the New Left who were so audacious in their conception of themselves as “new” that they could not acknowledge their debt to Alinsky. Not just New Leftists but all sorts of young people—especially men, and often religious ones—fell victim to this particular siren’s call. The future journalist Nicholas von Hoffman captured the essence of Alinsky’s challenge and romantic allure:

You drive up in a car, and you know nobody, and you’ve got to organize it into something that it’s never been before. You know, you’re not a Democrat or Republican. You don’t have much going for you. You don’t have prestige, you don’t have muscle, you’ve got no money to give away. All you have are your wits. You’ve just got your wits, charm, and whatever you can put together. So you [had] better form a very accurate picture of what’s going on, and you had better not bring in too many a priori maps [because] if you do, you’re just not going to get anywhere.¹⁰

No fast six gun, no maps, just your wits and charm. So how is it done? By what magic does the organizer transform people who are divided among themselves by ethnic and other rivalries, as well as by their own self-interested scheming designs on power, into the united leadership of the People’s Organization? Alinsky’s particular kind of political knowledge is the answer to this question, and he delivers it through a series of stories that illustrate his hard-headed, practical political art. Hard-headed because it accepts self-interest as the basic human motivator and does not wish it away into what Alinsky considers the mushy-headed idea that people will do good because they believe in the good. Practical because, although it might do violence to some too-easy ethical standards of action, it actually works.

The hero-organizer is also a trickster. Alinsky gives the reader a series of small deceptions, little lies through which the organizer uses his knowledge of human psychology and his understanding of society to maneuver the local leadership into the newly formed PO. He tells two rival leaders that the other one has joined the PO, and thereby tricks them both into joining; he gives one leader a letter to deliver knowing that he will open it and read the contents; he and a few other people spend a whole day with a crucial but recalcitrant leader, acting out a complicated charade about their supposed important but secret business, which forces the confused victim to join the PO so he will know what’s going on. Pretty mild stuff, and used almost exclusively at the beginning of the organizer’s work within a neighborhood.

Later, tricks become less necessary because the divided neighborhood changes after a few early political victories. These victories, no matter how small, teach the local leaders and their followers that they all need each other, and that united political action is in the self-interest of all. That precept helps explain why Alinsky, a self-described “revolutionary,” would attract support from some distinctly nonrevolutionary figures and institutions: Alinsky didn’t just promise a non-Communist radicalism during the fifties and an “orderly” revolution during the disorderly sixties. In addition, in his plain-talking and deceptively simple theorizing, competing interests are manipulated in such a way that they create community, and thus the “radical democrat” solves a main paradox of interest-based liberal pluralism.

But not without some sleight of hand. Alinsky recognizes that he is in the middle of a dilemma of ends and means, and he faces it straight on. He has little patience with moral compunction about his tricks. The People’s Organization is in a permanent war, and must operate in a world of “smashing forces, clashing struggles, sweeping cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos.”¹¹ Go into such a world without your bag of tricks and you are sure to lose. And early defeats will doom the organization. This was so obvious to Alinsky that he spent little time arguing the point in Reveille for Radicals. But twenty-six years later it became the dominant theme of Alinsky’s second political handbook, Rules for Radicals, which was directed toward what he considered the overly moralistic New Left.

Alinsky’s disdain for “moral quibbling” is perhaps responsible for his failure to consider in either work one of the most elementary problems of the ends-versus-means debate: Is there any difference between the tactics that can be used among friends and the tactics that can be used against enemies? After Alinsky demonstrates how the organizer uses questionable techniques among friends to put the PO together, he then shows how to use a whole arsenal of dirty tricks against the community’s external enemies. Do both set of techniques come out of the same bag? Alinsky ignored this question, as did Chavez, who would eventually dissolve all doubts about ends and means into rituals of religious faith, while allowing his lieutenants to use all manner of dirty tricks both inside and outside the UFW.

But one of the corollaries of the ends and means debate did interest both Alinsky and Chavez. They knew that political knowledge was dangerous stuff. What was to prevent a person from using Alinskyite tactics to pursue “undemocratic objectives”? Since the successful organizer must use an arsenal of dirty tricks to achieve the good, why wouldn’t such a person (one who can trick, cheat, and steal) use those techniques for some ultimately dirty end?

Alinsky’s answer is based on the hero’s democratic faith. Behind the petty, dirty tactics of the organizer is a bigger, nobler one: “The fundamental tactic is the organizer’s own complete faith in people and his complete devotion to that faith.”¹² The organizer cannot fake it, Alinsky says. If he has the faith, the people will know it; if he doesn’t, the people will know that, too. Therefore, Alinsky’s tactics cannot be used by an undemocratic politician, as people cannot be tricked into doing things by someone who they know doesn’t believe in them.

Chavez was not so sure. In his early political career, in the midst of being trained by Ross and Alinsky, he worried that people could be organized for anything, even the worst of causes. He also believed that some very bad people had been very good organizers. He read Goebbels, and told colleagues on several occasions that the Nazi propagandist was, after all, a good organizer.¹³ In this case, as in many others, Chavez seems to have looked a little deeper into the face of evil than did his mentors, and his answer would have to be tougher, harder.

Alinsky has been accused of lacking a coherent ideology, but this charge misses the point. Alinsky’s ideas may not explain everything that happens in the world; he does not have a total system such as Catholicism or some closed versions of Marxism, yet Alinskyism certainly meets the first requirement of a political ideology: it provides a guide to action. Moreover, the main reason that Alinsky appears nonideological is because so many of his ideas are taken straight from the almost invisible ideology that we live and breathe: the ideology of American democracy. The dilemmas of Alinskyism, then, are similar to the problems of the whole American political tradition, where the core confusion resides in the various vague, often conflicting ideas of what democracy is.

This is not just a popular misunderstanding, a confusion among the folk. It goes as far back as the founding of the country and is as deep as our political roots. We are originally a mixture of two contradictory Old World impulses: the political optimism of the European Enlightenment, which culminated in the French Revolution, and the political pessimism of English liberalism as it defined itself against the radical implications of the English revolution. Theoretical revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries mixed together in the New World. It was a true blend in which each tradition was changed by the encounter, and then reformulated over the course of American history. By now the jumble is difficult to separate back into its original ingredients, even as an intellectual exercise. Perhaps the two traditions were clearest at the founding in the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the first written in an open spirit of equality and rebellion as a call to arms; the second composed in secret session by men who explicitly set out to construct a republic that would minimize the threat of popular power.

Where does Alinsky fit in those conflicting traditions? He wants it both ways. Tom Paine is an Alinsky hero because of his call to patriotic sacrifice and his attack on the privileges of the aristocracy. But James Madison is also a hero because he was hard-headed, like Alinsky himself, and started with the proposition that people act only out of self-interest. Alinsky often described himself as a Jeffersonian, but in Reveille for Radicals he cites only Jefferson’s division of the world into aristocrats and democrats, and joins Jefferson on the side of the democrats. Trying to find Alinsky’s exact place within the American democratic tradition, we come up against the philosophical poverty of the first pages of Reveille for Radicals, a list of contradictory propositions in which the contradictions are ignored.

Alinsky’s conflation of conflicting ideas of democracy was partly an expression of the times. For him, and for many of Popular Fronters inside and outside the New Deal, democracy was a list and a magic charm. It included both the call—the reveille—to the people to shake off their apathy and participate in politics and a celebration of political institutions that were set up to blunt popular participation. That is a subtle trap, and a problem that Alinsky simply ignored. One will find no criticism anywhere in Alinsky of American political institutions as such. He never questions an institutional structure that places political power far from where people actually live and work. He has no problem with the two-party system and winner-take-all elections. He does not challenge the particular way that U.S. politics divides the public from the private; he is not worried that the elaborate system of checks and balances that were put into the Constitution as protection against popular power help protect corporate control of the U.S. government. Alinsky’s hero Madison was afraid of the political participation of ordinary people. Madison and his Federalist buddies consciously built a polity that they hoped would make direct political participation both difficult and unnecessary. Alinsky has nothing to say about that—as far as he’s concerned, American political institutions are just fine. Nor does he ever ask how there can be a democratic society without a democratic economy—that is, how capitalism can be compatible with democracy. For Alinsky, the problem—the essential problem of American democracy—is the people’s lack of participation. It ends up being our own fault.

Attacking Alinsky for his lack of ideology instead of exploring his ideas about democracy obscures what is perhaps Alinsky’s main addition to democratic theory: not the building of community coalitions but the particular role of the outside organizer. Alinsky has no confidence that individuals can learn, through their own leadership, to measure their interests against the community interest, and to think of the good of the whole as well as of themselves. Blinded by their own ambitions, indigenous leaders will never find a way to unite a neighborhood, or a city, or a region. This problem, the problem Madison called factionalism, is solved by the organizer. Organizers alone do not want power for themselves. Masters of restraint, they guide without dominating. They are the ones who help the people achieve a collective understanding of themselves, the understanding that makes democratic action possible. It is the organizers, not the indigenous leaders or the people, who are the heroes in all of the stories Alinsky loved to tell.

Consistent with Alinsky’s view, Cesar Chavez remained a CSO organizer—not its leader—for ten years, for as long as Alinsky signed the checks. But soon after Chavez left CSO and launched his own career, he blurred the line between organizer and leader. Within Alinskyism, that was heresy. Merging the position of organizer and leader was dangerous because what the organizer knew, what he had learned through his special training, might be used to build power not for others but for himself. That would lead not to internal democracy but to some form of corruption or autocratic power. Chavez explained his decision to a group of SNCC organizers in 1965:

People say, “I’m just an organizer.” An organizer is an outsider in many cases—there’s nothing wrong in that. But then he assumes a sort of special position in that program. First thing he says is “I’m not going to be an officer; it’s a people’s program.” What he’s saying is he’s something special, not an integral part of that group. I think that’s a mistake. If you organize a good group, pretty soon you find yourself hoping, “I wish I had a vote in this outfit.”¹⁴

Talking to his SNCC supporters, Chavez did not acknowledge any danger. All he wants, he humbly argues, is a vote in his own outfit. Those who would deny him that vote, he says, make too much of the difference between the organizer and the indigenous leaders; they think that the organizer is too special, so different from the others that he cannot be a regular part of the group. Ten years an organizer, Chavez had a good sense of how artificial it can be for the organizer to remain in the background, supposedly leaving the important decisions up to others. Didn’t that often become a kind of charade? Why wasn’t it possible for the organizer to become a full member of the group and still maintain his capacity to guide and to lead in a respectful, democratic manner? If that was apostasy, so be it. That’s what he was setting out to do.

It was a great departure. Alinsky had started with Madison and an exclusively self-interested humanity, so it was awfully hard for him to end with community and participatory democracy. The way to get there, the Alinsky way, was to introduce the idea of a superhuman who would manipulate competitors into a community—and then leave. But why is the organizer the one person who is not captive to Madisonian self-interest? If the organizer can learn to think of the whole, why can’t each member of the divided neighborhood? And if they can all learn together, what makes the organizer so different? Why can’t he settle down and stay? Understood this way, Chavez’s decision is an act of democratic faith, a statement that he is right down here with the rest of us, like all ordinary human beings, who are not Madison’s self-interest machines but a mixture of self-interest and connection to others, selfishness and idealism, regular people, capable of democratic politics.

But does this really happen? When Chavez assumed the role of leader, did he leave behind all the assumed superiority of the juggler, the catalyst, the alchemist, the essential human ingredient who could transform the factions into the united community? Or was Chavez still the only one who could truly think of the whole, the only one who could rise above the battle for personal power, the living embodiment of the community’s best version of itself?

Throughout his political life Cesar Chavez, the leader-organizer, continued to believe that organizers rather than local leaders were the crucial people who made politics happen. The organizers were, he said in 1969, “the heroes of the farm worker movement.” Without the guidance of skilled organizers, ultimately without his own direction and management, rank-and-file leaders would be forever trapped in a competitive individualism, incapable of building their own movement. That idea came from Saul Alinsky.

* In the sixty-three years since Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, unions have lost much of what strength they had as well as much of their attraction for would-be radicals; most contemporary Alinskyites no longer place them at the center of their concerns. They still build People’s Organizations, but most often the core groups of a PO are religious congregations rather than unions.