Saul Alinsky

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Lore & Background

Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Lithuanian Jewish emigrant parents from what was then Vilna in Russian Empire (today Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania). He was the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky and his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. Both parents were strict and observant Orthodox. Alinsky considered himself an agnostic, but when asked about his religion would 'always say Jewish.' In 1926, he entered the University of Chicago, studying in America's first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park. The Great Depression ended an interest in archaeology; a chance graduate fellowship moved him on to criminology. For two years, as a 'nonparticipant observer,' he claims to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob, who taught him 'the terrific importance of personal relationships.' In 1938, Alinsky gave up his last employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research to devote himself full-time as a political activist. In his free time he had been raising funds for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, fighting evictions, and agitating for public housing. He also began to work alongside the CIO and its president John L. Lewis. (In an 'un-authorized biography' of the labor leader Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House.) In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network.

Reader's Guide

Alinsky's idea was to apply organizing skills 'to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies.' He looked to the back of the Chicago Stockyards (the area made infamous by Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel *The Jungle*). There with Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, Alinsky set up the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC). Working with the archdiocese, the Council succeeded in rallying a mix of otherwise mutually hostile Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats) as well as African Americans to demand, and win, concessions from local meatpackers (in January 1946 the BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers), landlords and city hall. In founding the BYNC, Alinsky and Meegan sought to break a pattern of outside direction: 'organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate.' Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work—'from Kansas City and Detroit to the farm-worker barrios of Southern California.' His biographer Sanford Horwitt records that 'on rare occasions' Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were 'unequivocal successes.' There was uncertainty about 'what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own.' Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party movement and subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticized on the political left for an aversion to broad ideological goals, Alinsky has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action.

Did You Know?

• Alinsky studied in America's first sociology department at the University of Chicago under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park.
• For two years as a 'nonparticipant observer,' Alinsky claims to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob, who taught him 'the terrific importance of personal relationships.'
• In 1940, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation with support from Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher Marshall Field.
• Alinsky wrote an 'un-authorized biography' of labor leader John L. Lewis and claimed to have mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House.
• In January 1946, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers.