Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

==Political contentions==
===Communism===
{{Socialism in the United States}}
Alinsky never became a direct target of [[McCarthyism]]. He was never called before a congressional investigating committee nor had to endure a determined press campaign to identify and exclude him as a communist "[[fellow traveler]]". Alinsky liked to think this because of his toughness and the ridicule he would have heaped upon his persecutors. Herb March, the most prominent [[Communist Party USA]] member with the [[United Packinghouse Workers of America|Packinghouse Workers]] in Chicago, said he would "place a little more emphasis ... on the Church influence", but also allowed that, as the government "undoubtedly must have had him under close surveillance", they cannot have had "anything" on him.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=240-24}}

Yet Alinsky was not "untouched by the climate of fear, suspicion and innuendo". Rumors of [[communist]] associations and [[red-baiting]] would follow him into the 1960s,{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=24}} and, once his name was associated with leading Democratic Party presidential contenders, would follow his legacy into the new century. For some of his "anti-communist" critics, Alinsky's definition in ''Reveille for Radicals'' of what it is to be a "radical" may have been a sufficient indictment:<blockquote>The Radical believes that all peoples should have a high standard of food, housing, and health … The Radical places human rights far above property rights. He is for universal, free public education and recognizes this as fundamental to the democratic way of life … The Radical believes completely in real equality of opportunity for all peoples regardless of race, color, or creed. He insists on full employment for economic security but is just as insistent that man's work should not only provide economic security but also be such as to satisfy the creative desires within all men.<ref name="Alinsky 1945">{{cite book |last1=Alinsky |first1=Saul |title=Reveille for Radicals |date=1945 |publisher=University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago |pages=16, 24|url=https://historyofsocialwork.org/1946_Alinsky/1946%20-%20Saul%20Alinsky%20-%20Reveille%20for%20Radicals.pdf |access-date=9 December 2020}}</ref></blockquote>

Alinsky would not apologize for working with communists at a time when, in his opinion, they were doing "a hell of a lot of good work in the vanguard of the labor movement and ... in aiding blacks and [[Okie]]s and Southern [[Sharecropping|sharecroppers]]."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=79}} He also said, "Anyone who was involved in the causes of the thirties and says he didn't know any communists is either a liar or an idiot". They were "all over the place, fighting for the [[New Deal]] the [[Congress of Industrial Organizations|CIO]] and so forth".<ref name="Sanders" />

Alinsky said he was "sympathetic to [[Soviet Union|Russia]] at that time [i.e. in the 1930s before the [[Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact]]] because it was the one country that seemed to be taking a strong position against [[Hitler]]... If you were [[anti-fascism|anti-fascist]] on the international front in those days you had to stand with Communists". But Alinsky insists he "never joined the party" for reasons "partly philosophic":<blockquote>One of my articles of faith is what Justice [[Learned Hand]] called "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you are right." I've never been sure
I'm right but also I'm also sure nobody else has this thing called truth. I hate dogma. People who believed they owned the truth have been responsible for the most terrible things that have happened in our world, whether they were Communist purges or the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch hunts.<ref name="Sanders" /></blockquote>

In ''Reveille'', Alinsky is "as contemptuous of 'top down' [[Soviet-type economic planning|centralizing Soviet approaches]] to social planning as he is of [[laissez-faire]] economic policies".<ref>{{cite news |last1=Matthews |first1=Dylan |title=Who is Saul Alinsky, and why does the right hate him so much? |url=https://www.vox.com/2014/10/6/6829675/saul-alinsky-explain-obama-hillary-clinton-rodham-organizing |access-date=9 December 2020 |agency=Vox |date=19 July 2016}}</ref> The Radical, he says, "will bitterly oppose complete Federal control of education. He will fight for individual rights and against centralized power …The Radical is deeply interested in social planning but just as deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to any idea of plans which work from the top down. Democracy to him is working from the bottom up". With [[Thomas Jefferson]], the Radical believes that the people are "the most honest and safe", if not always the wisest, "depository of the public interest."<ref name="Alinsky 1945" />

On the issue of whether communists should be banned from unions and other social organizations, Alinsky argued that:<blockquote>[The question is] whether there can be developed an American Progressive Movement in which the Communists are forced to follow along or get out on the basis of the issues--a movement so healthy, so filled with the vitality of real American Radicalism, that the Communists will wear their teeth down to their jaws trying to bore from within. I know that the latter can be done</blockquote> But in the meantime, Alinsky believed that "certain [[Fascism|fascist]] mentalities" posed a far greater threat to the country than "the damn nuisance of Communism".{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=24}}

In 2020, the [[Reuters|Reuters Agency]] "fact check team" noted that viral images on social media were circulating quotes attributed to ''Rules for Radicals'' and ''Reveille for Radicals'', which suggest that Alinsky set out an aggressive plan "social state" essentially equated to Soviet communism. The quotes attributed to Alinsky, however, were not found in his writings.<ref>{{cite news |date=April 23, 2020 |title=False claim: Saul Alinsky listed a scheme for world conquest, creation of the "social state" |url=https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-alinsky-social-state-idUSKCN2252LY |access-date=20 February 2021 |work=[[Reuters]]}}</ref>

===The Black Power movement===
In the mid-1960s, civil rights activists began to call for "[[Black power|Black Power]]"—for [[Stokely Carmichael]] a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations".<ref>{{Cite web |date=2009 |title=Stokely Carmichael |url=https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/stokely-carmichael |access-date=2 April 2023 |website=History.com}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last1=Hamilton |first1=Charles V. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Eu2Ez9K8cQEC |title=Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America |last2=Ture |first2=Kwame |year=2011 |orig-date=First published |publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |isbn=978-0-307-79527-4 |pages=44 |language=en}}</ref> Alinsky appeared not to be fazed. "I agree with the concept," he said in the fall of 1966. "We've always called it community power, and if the community is black, it's black power." But a year later he was relating, with evident satisfaction, that when he had asked Carmichael at a Detroit meeting to cite one concrete example of what he meant by Black Power, Carmichael had named the FIGHT project in Rochester. Carmichael, Alinsky suggested, should stop "going round yelling 'Black Power!'" and "really go down and organize."{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=508}}

Alinsky had a sharper response to the more strident black nationalism of [[Maulana Karenga]], mistakenly identified in news reports as a board member of the newly formed [[Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization]]. In an angry letter to the Foundation's executive director, [[Lucius Walker]], Alinsky took exception to one of Karenga's "insights," that "blacks are a country and if you support America you are against my community." This Alinsky found "repugnant and nauseous." He and his associates would not only "plead guilty to supporting America" but would "gladly admit that we love our country." Horwitt notes that in 1968 "virtually no leftist dissenter – black or white – was using this kind of patriotic rhetoric."{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=509}}

By 1970, Alinsky had conceded publicly that "all whites should get out of the black ghettos. It's a stage we have to go through."{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=533}}

===The Student New Left===
{{Progressivism sidebar|expanded=activists}}At the beginning of the 1960s, in the first postwar generation of college youth, Alinsky appeared to win new allies. Disclaiming any "formulas" or "closed theories," [[Students for a Democratic Society]] called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection."<ref name="SDS_Port_Huron">{{cite web |url=http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDS_Port_Huron.html |title=The Port Huron Statement |author=[[Students for a Democratic Society]] |date=1962 |via=The Sixties Project |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref> More than this, the New Left seemed to place community organizing at the heart of their vision.

The SDS insisted that students "look outwards" beyond the campus "to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice." "The bridge to political power" would be "built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies." To stimulate "this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country,"<ref name="SDS_Port_Huron"/> in 1963, the SDS launched (with $5000 from [[United Automobile Workers]]) the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw white neighborhoods into an "interracial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964, ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers.<ref>{{cite book |url=https://libcom.org/files/sds.pdf |last=Sale |first=Kirkpatrick |author-link=Kirkpatrick Sale |date=1973 |title=SDS: The Rise and Development of The Students for a Democratic Society |location=New York |publisher=[[Vintage Books]] |pages=86–87 |via=Libcom.org}}</ref>

In the summer of 1964, [[Ralph Helstein]] of the [[United Packinghouse Workers of America|Packinghouse Workers]], one of the few labor leaders interested in the emergence of the New Left, arranged for Alinsky to meet SDS founders [[Tom Hayden]] and [[Todd Gitlin]]. To Helstein's dismay Alinsky dismissed Hayden and Gitlin's ideas and work as naive and doomed to failure. The would-be organizers were absurdly romantic in their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus. Horwitt notes that "'[[Participatory democracy]],' the central concept the SDS's [[Port Huron Statement]], meant something fundamentally different . . . to what 'citizen participation' meant to Alinsky." Within community organizations Alinsky "put a premium on strong leadership, structure and centralized decision-making."{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=525}} 

When SDS volunteers set up shop in the "Hillbilly Harlem" of uptown Chicago, they crossed town to meet with Alinsky in Woodlawn.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Sonnie |first=Amy |url= |title=Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times |last2=Tracy |first2=James |date=2011 |publisher=Melville House |isbn=978-1-61219-008-2 |pages=33 |language=en}}</ref> They charged Alinsky with being "stuck in the past," and unwilling to confront white racism. To meet the challenge of growing black dissent following the August 1965 [[Watts riots]], King and his [[Southern Christian Leadership Conference]] (SCLC) had sought a victory in the North with the [[Chicago Freedom Movement]] (CFM). JOIN later claimed that they pushed whites on the race question "at every opportunity" and "even mobilized members to support Rev. [[Martin Luther King Jr.]]'s campaign to desegregate housing in Chicago in the summer of 1966".<ref>Sonnie & Tracy (2011), p. 44.</ref>

It is not clear that participation by Alinsky in the Chicago Freedom Movement was either offered or invited. Yet "Freedom Summer" in 1965 seemed to follow the Alinsky playbook: "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy'. The hysterical instant reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer's] credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation".{{sfnp|Alinsky|1971|p=100}} The difficulty was that Daley's experience was such that that city hall could not be drawn into a sufficiently damaging confrontation. The mayor responded to the brutal reception for Freedom marchers in the white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park with a judicious expression of sympathy and support. King balked at a further escalation—a march through the red-lined suburb of Cicero, "the Selma of the North"—and he allowed Daley to draw him into the negotiation of an open-housing deal<ref>{{cite book |last=Ralph |first=James R. |date=1993 |title=Northern Protest: Martin Luther King Jr., Chicago, and the Civil Rights Movement |location=Cambridge, Massachusetts |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-67462-687-4 |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/northernprotestm00ralp }}</ref> that was to prove toothless.<ref>{{cite book |last=Royko |first=Mike |date=1971 |title=Boss: Richard J. Daley of Chicago |location=New York |publisher=[[New American Library]] |page=158}}</ref> (After [[Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.|King's assassination]], Alinsky argued that Woodlawn was the one black area of Chicago that did not "explode into racial violence" because, while their lives were not "idyllic", with TWO people "finally" had a sense of "power and achievement").{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=176}}

At the end of the sixties Alinsky complained that student activists had been more interested in "revelation" than in "revolution," and that their campus politics was little more than street theater.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=528}} From the perspective of real social change, he regarded their outraging of middle-class sensibilities to have been a tactical mistake.<ref name="dedman">{{cite web |last=Dedman |first=Bill |author-link=Bill Dedman |date=March 2, 2007 |title=Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis |url=https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna17388372 |access-date=January 21, 2020 |website=NBC News}}</ref>