Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and political writer. Through the Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago, he helped low-income communities band together to push back against landlords, politicians, bankers, and business leaders—work that brought him both fame and controversy. In the 1960s, as a younger generation of New Left activists grew restless, Alinsky wrote *Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer* (1971), arguing that both confrontation and compromise were essential tools in the fight for social justice.

Starting in the 1990s, right-wing commentators revived Alinsky’s reputation, claiming his tactics inspired the Republican Tea Party movement. Later, through loose ties to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he was portrayed as the architect of a radical Democratic agenda. Meanwhile, critics on the left faulted him for avoiding broad ideological goals. Still, activists in the Occupy movement and climate campaigns have also cited him as an influence.

**Early life**

**Childhood** Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago to Lithuanian Jewish parents who had emigrated from Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania). He was the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky and his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. His father worked as a tailor, then ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop. Both parents were strict Orthodox Jews. Alinsky said he was devout until age twelve, when he began to worry his parents would push him to become a rabbi. He claimed he personally faced little antisemitism as a child, but recalled it was “so pervasive … you just accepted it as a fact of life.” After he fought back against some Polish boys, a rabbi told him: “You think you’re a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something great: ‘where there are no men, be thou a man.’” Alinsky considered himself agnostic but, when asked his religion, would “always say Jewish.”

**College studies** In 1926, Alinsky entered the University of Chicago, studying in the country’s first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park. They challenged the then-dominant eugenics movement, arguing that social disorganization—not heredity—caused disease, crime, and other problems in slums. As waves of immigrants passed through these districts, they showed that the slum itself, not any particular group, was linked to social ills. Still, Alinsky said he was “astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities.”

The Great Depression ended his interest in archaeology: after the stock market crash, “all the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks.” A chance graduate fellowship led him to criminology. For two years, as a “nonparticipant observer,” he claimed to have hung out with Chicago’s Al Capone mob, who, he said, felt they had little to hide from a “college kid” since they “owned the city.” Among other lessons about power, he said they taught him “the terrific importance of personal relationships.” He then took a job with the Illinois Division of the State Criminologist, working with juvenile delinquents and at the Joliet Correctional Center. He recalled it as dispiriting: if he pointed to contributing causes of crime like poor housing, racial discrimination, or unemployment, he was called a “red.”

**Organizing**

**The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council** In 1938, Alinsky left his last job at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois Chicago to become a full-time political activist. In his spare time, he had been raising money for the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other unions, fighting evictions, and pushing for public housing. He also worked alongside the Congress of Industrial Organizations and its president, John L. Lewis. (In an unauthorized biography of Lewis, Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House.)

Alinsky’s idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered “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.” Until then, he noted, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities. Believing that if his approach worked in these neighborhoods it could work anywhere, he focused on the back of the Chicago Stockyards—the area made infamous by Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel *The Jungle*. There, with park supervisor Joseph Meegan, Alinsky founded the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. Working with the archdiocese, the Council brought together a mix of otherwise hostile Catholic ethnic groups—Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats—as well as African Americans, to demand and win concessions from local meatpackers. In January 1946, the Council backed the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse workers.