Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

====Organizing the middle class====
For Alinsky, the real limitation of his organizing experience was that it had not extended into the middle-class majority:{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}
<blockquote>Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income groups – all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites – and then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade – but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the overwhelming majority will be middle class. . . . Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for change.</blockquote>

The middle classes may be "conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock the boat," but Alinsky believed "they're beginning to realize the boat is sinking." On a wide range of issues, they feel "more defeated and lost today than the poor do." They were, Alinsky insisted, "good organizational material:" "more amorphous than some barrio in Southern California", so that "you're going to be organizing all across the country," but "the rules are the same."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}

In 1968 he secured a year's funding in Chicago from the [[Midas (automotive service)|Midas International Corporation]] to train white middle class suburban activists. As understood by corporate president Gordon Sherman, the proposition was that "lack of organization in white neighborhoods can be as harmful to the total society as lack of organization in the black community. We all live in our own ghettos".<ref>{{Cite news|last=Janson|first=Donald|date=7 August 1968|title=Alinsky to Train White Militants|page=27|work=New York Times|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1968/08/07/76959744.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0|access-date=8 January 2022}}</ref> Alinsky, however, never predicted exactly what form or direction middle-class organization would take. In Horwitt's sympathetic view he was "too empirical for that." He did suggest that "the chance for organization for action on pollution, inflation, Vietnam, violence, race, taxes is all about us," making it clear that he envisaged organization based on a community of the interest rather than on the dubious neighborliness of the suburb.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=534}}

In 1969 in Chicago, Alinsky and his IAF trainees helped initiate a city-wide Campaign Against Pollution (later to become the Citizens Action Program to Stop the [[Crosstown Expressway (Chicago)|Crosstown]]—a billion-dollar expressway).{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=531–532}} Alinsky was not beyond believing that such initiatives, scaled-up nationally, could "move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations." Challenging, but the alternative, Alinsky warned, was for the "impotence" of the middle classes to turn into "political paranoia." This would make them "ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|p=60}}