Reveille For Radicals:
Lessons From the Life of
Saul Alinsky
A Sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

Saul Alinsky, the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in the slums of Chicago's West Side. His mother was only 17 when he was born in 1909; his father was a tailor; they lived in the back of a store. "My idea of luxury," he later recalled, "was to live in an apartment where I could use the bathroom without one of my parents banging on the door for me to get out because a customer wanted to get in."

When he was 12 years old, one of Saul's friends was beaten up by three Polish kids. "So naturally we went on the hunt and found a couple of Poles." But the police arrived, arrested them all, and took them to the station where they were claimed by furious mothers. On their way home, Alinsky's mother took him to the rabbi who lectured him about misbehavior. Saul defended himself, "So we beat them up. That's the American way. It's also in the Old Testament: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Beat the hell out of them. That's what everybody does." The rabbi answered, "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. Now I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said, 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.' I want you to remember that."

Saul never forgot it, and his was a life dedicated to the American way of not doing what everybody else happens to be doing. He was an American original, a radical, an irascible free-thinking visionary. He devoted his life to sharing the struggle of the "have-nots" who would claim - in housing, in jobs, in fair-treatment - their share of the American dream. And, until he died in 1972, Saul Alinsky merrily went on the hunt for the "haves" who would exploit, pollute, discriminate, and otherwise diminish that dream.

I am inspired to preach about Saul Alinsky by my eccentric office calendar which put his picture on February 26th. It's also Jackie Gleason's birthday but I'd much rather celebrate St. Saul! Perhaps it was because I grew up in the 60's in Chicago, the scene of Alinsky's greatest successes, in a Unitarian church where some parishioners had been personally trained in community organization by Alinsky; but the recollection of Alinsky stirs in me feelings of energy and purposeful camaraderie, hopefulness, righteousness and fun - feelings which I know inspired me to ministry - and which for many of us in February of 1995, seem needy of replenishment.

I cannot tell you how refreshing it was to re-read Alinsky's two classic books, Reveille for Radicals and Rules for Radicals. If the present social/political climate has you feeling blue, Alinsky's good medicine.

I know the Alinsky name is familiar to many of you - when I asked one of you if you knew Alinsky, the reply was, "Of course. He was the Jesus of community organization." And I'm particularly glad that my predecessor Jack Mendelsohn is here today because Jack and Saul knew one another well - of course! - and Jack will share some of his personal recollections during our discussion following the service. But I also know that this name is new to many of you also; and so I want to provide a sketch of his life, incorporating some of his "rules for radicals."

Alinsky graduated from the University of Chicago in 1930, having studied archaeology and sociology. He liked archaeology, but archaeologists were not in much demand. As for the sociology, he was cynical: "the University spent $100,000 on research to find out the location of houses of prostitution which any taxi driver could tell them for nothing." Alinsky was always earthy, and usually ribald.

Jobless, he still needed to eat and discovered a method. He'd go to a restaurant, order a nickel cup of coffee, then stick the bill in his pocket and go chat with the cashier. Finished, he'd pretend to have lost the bill. The cashier knew he'd only had coffee, so she'd charge him a nickel. Alinsky would then go down the street, order a full meal at another restaurant, go to the cashier when he was finished and present the original bill for a nickel. He claimed to have organized all his friends and worked most of Chicago's restaurants until they finally caught on. Though his principles became nobler, all his life Alinsky was wily.

He got a job studying crime, introduced himself to the Capone gang, where he listened to stories as well as he would later tell them. With the Capones he learned that "life was pretty mixed up, that you had to strain to tell who was better than whom." All the good people were lined up for booze, for dames, for gambling; the mobsters were also the major contributors to charities!

He also learned the importance of personal relationships, of schmoozing. The mobsters never killed people they personally knew, for example; that was the job of out-of-town hit men. Likewise, when Alinsky later worked in the state prison in Joliet, he observed that "when we had to electrocute an inmate, everybody would be half-tanked, including the warden. It's one thing for a judge and jury to condemn a guy who doesn't even have a personality. But after he'd been in prison, we got to know him. We got to know his kids. By the time he went to the chair we weren't executing a convicted felon. We were murdering a human being."

By the time he was in his mid-20's Alinsky was something of a national authority on criminology - which only contributed to his opinion that criminologists were morons. "All the experts agreed that the major causes of crime were poor housing, discrimination, economic insecurity, unemployment, and disease. So what did we do?" asked Alinsky. "We went in for supervised recreation, camping programs, something mysterious called 'character building.' We tackled everything but the actual issues, because the issues were controversial. Sometimes I'd say, Come on, let's stop this crap.... They'd say, 'Don't be radical.' After a while I saw that the only difference between being in a professional field and in business was the difference between a ten-buck whore and a hundred-dollar call girl."

When he was offered promotions, he turned them down. "Once you're on top, you want to stay there. You learn to eat in very good restaurants, to fly first class. The next thing you know these things are essential to you. You're imprisoned by them. You hear people say, 'After I make my pile I'm going to do all the things I want to do.' It never happens, because by that time, you're a different person. Like the poor executives who put off that trip to Paris for years and years. By the time they get there they have stomach ulcer so they sit in the best French restaurants eating cornflakes."

Later he observed, "Most people spend their lives working their way up. But I seem to have been working my way down. Still, who's to say which is really up or really down?"

Still working for the state of Illinois, he got a job studying juvenile delinquency in the South Side Chicago slum known as "back of the yards" - the stockyards. The unions had been trying to organize the packinghouse workers - without success, mainly because the Catholic Church didn't trust the unions on issues like birth control. Alinsky came in, schmoozed, got to know the people, made friends with the unionizers, made friends with the priests; and out of this gradually emerged a new kind of community coalition. By getting down to the issues that were most immediate in the lives of the people, Alinsky found the unions, the church, and the people had many more agreements than disagreements.

In Alinsky's words: "One says to the other, 'My number one interest is desegregation of the schools, and your number one interest is getting rid of the dope pushers, and you over there, your number one interest is that you're sick and tired of being bulldozed out of neighborhood after neighborhood on this urban renewal which doesn't benefit you. Well, I need your help to desegregate the schools, and you need my help to get rid of the dope pushers, and to make urban renewal a decent program for the poor as well as the others. So, let's make a deal. I'll support each one of you, and you support me.' This is the stuff of which organization is made."

By focusing on the 90% of the issues on which they agreed, the 10% were far less divisive. Alinsky also spoke of the education of local leadership, the use of the question, and the Socratic method:

ORGANIZER: Do you live over in that slummy building?

ANSWER: Yeah. What about it?

ORGANIZER: What the hell do you live there for?

ANSWER: What do you mean, what do I live there for? Where else am I going to live? I'm on welfare.

ORGANIZER: Oh, you mean you pay rent in that place?

ANSWER: Come on, is this a put-on? Very funny! You know where you can live for free?

ORGANIZER: Hmm. That place looks like it's crawling with rats and bugs.

ANSWER: It sure is.

ORGANIZER: Did you ever try to get that landlord to do anything about it?

ANSWER: Try to get him to do anything about anything! If you don't like it, get out. That's all he has to say. There are plenty more waiting.

ORGANIZER: What if you didn't pay your rent?

ANSWER: They'd throw us out in ten minutes.

ORGANIZER: Hmm. What if nobody in that building paid their rent?

ANSWER: Well, they'd start to throw... Hey, you know, they'd have trouble throwing everybody out, wouldn't they?

ORGANIZER: Yeah, I guess they would.

ANSWER: Hey, you know, maybe you got something - say, I'd like you to meet some of my friends. How about a drink?

Alinsky's methods were also influenced by Marxism. Karl sometimes, Groucho just as much: When Catholic/Protestant relations were threatened by the Catholics' decision to ban a movie about the life of Martin Luther, Alinsky suggested - over drinks with the monsignor - that they show the movie backwards. "That way Luther ends up a Catholic!" The ban was lifted.

These are the attributes that Alinsky said made for a good organizer: curiosity, irreverence, imagination, a sense of humor, a bit of a blurred vision of a better world, an organized personality, a well-integrated political schizoid, ego, a free and open mind, political relativity, and a person whose greatest joy is creation.

From his experience in Back of the Yards, Alinsky became a professional activist. The method was tried and refined in other Chicago neighborhoods, and with a new organization he called the Industrial Areas Foundation, the idea of grass roots people's organizations and the method of coalition-building spread to many cities across the country. Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers were a direct product of Alinsky's training, and many of the civil rights workers of the 50's and 60's utilized Alinsky's insights. For his efforts, he became persona non grata in most city halls across the country.

Three firm principles of social action emerged. First, "To hell with charity. The only thing you get is what you're strong enough to get - so you had better organize." Alinsky was clear that social change is foremost about power - and that power ought to be a positive word in our vocabularies. Power, he defined as "the physical, mental, or moral power to act." "Ours is a world not of angels but of angles," he said. "Reconciliation is when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation."

Alinsky was a man of high principles, but he believed that "morality is but rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest." From Gandhian non-violence to the dropping of the atomic bomb in Japan, Alinsky was convinced that adversaries use whatever tactics are available to them (in the case of Gandhi, almost nothing; in the case of the U.S., almost everything). Ethical considerations come later.

Instead of getting all high-brow and philosophical about social change, activists should be realists and that means doing all you can with whatever you've got. "The most unethical of all means," he argued, "is the non-use of any means." (And that's a warning to those who bemoan the hopelessness of our present situation. Remember Alinsky was working in the 40's and 50's, many dark days for progressive causes.)

His second principle of social action was, "You prove to people they can do something, show them how to have a way of life where they can make their own decisions - and then you get out. They don't need a father who stands over them." Alinsky's was always a bottom-up strategy, and he tried to keep community issues focused on the small-scale day-to-day issues of life.

He didn't want to get too general, too ethereal. Let's talk jobs, housing, garbage collection - not philosophy. And keep it to a couple of issues, not a manifesto.

He remembered Sam Adams worrying about the effects of a Boston Massacre. If 3 or 4 colonists were killed, Adams reasoned, they would be martyrs and the Massacre would help the revolution. If there were more than 10, they'd just be a sewage problem. Keep the issues personal, close to home, and focused. Most Americans, he observed, "don't know how many millions there are in a billion."

And the third principle of social action, "It comes down to the basic argument of the Federalist Papers. Either you believe in the people, like James Madison and James Monroe, or you don't, like Alexander Hamilton. I do."

Alinsky was always a radical, by which he meant "that person to whom the common good is the greatest social value." He acknowledged that some of his best friends were liberals ("a person who puts his foot down firmly on thin air"), and he dismissed conservatives by saying, "time itself will take care of them." His faith was in the people.

Always political but never dogmatic, he cited Justice Learned Hand's article of faith, "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you are right." "I've never been sure I'm right," Alinsky said, "but I'm also sure nobody else has this thing called truth. I hate dogma."

In the 60's Alinsky was frequently invited into a city to organize. The clergy and the black community in Rochester, New York asked Alinsky to work with them in 1965 after riots had erupted the summer before. People were fighting unfair hiring practices at the largest employer, Eastman Kodak.

I'll tell the Rochester story, but it's important to understand that Alinsky was never shy about conflict. He believed that conflict and even polarization were absolute prerequisites for change. Jesus was the foremost polarizer: "He that is not with me is against me." (Luke 11:25)

He cited the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Particulars in which colonists named their specific grievances against the Crown. The framers could have listed all the good things about British rule - there were lots of good things - but they didn't. When it's change you want, you have to be convinced that your side is 100% right and your opponent 100% wrong. A 60/40 split just won't do. There's nothing wrong with a good fight, Alinsky counseled. He abhorred "our present Madison Avenue deodorized hygiene, where controversy is blasphemous and the value is being liked and not offending others."

So when he was met at the airport in Rochester and asked what he thought of the city (which took pride in its civility and culture), Alinsky said Rochester looked to him "like a huge southern plantation transplanted north." When asked if Kodak didn't deserve credit for its efforts on behalf of racial understanding, Alinsky said, "Perhaps I'm misinformed, but it seems to me that Kodak's biggest contribution to black people was the invention of colored film."

When the city establishment attacked his vulgarity and the papers started to attack him, he got the same reaction from the ghetto that he had received earlier in Chicago, "If those big fat-cat downtown white papers are calling Alinsky a dangerous, no-good SOB, then he must be all right."

As usual, Alinsky made alliances with the clergy, whom he regarded as closer to the people than were the unions. He did, however, call one Rochester monsignor an "unchristian prehistoric muttonhead").

In a tactic that delighted his supporters and horrified his enemies, Alinsky threatened to purchase a block of 200 tickets to the city's white elite cultural jewel: the Rochester Symphony Orchestra, on an evening when the music was to be especially quiet. These tickets he would give to the city's blacks, who would be invited to a three-hour beans-only dinner immediately prior to the concert.

Think of your senses, Alinsky taught. If you've got power, then parade it so your enemy can see it. If you've got numbers but no power, think of your ears and make a lot of noise. And if you've got no power and no numbers, the least you can do is make a stink!

That this threat was taken seriously is indicative of what Alinsky was capable of, and illustrates several of Alinsky's rules: First, power is what the enemy thinks you have. Second, Never go outside the experience of your people but always go outside the experience of your enemy. Third, a threat is more terrifying than the thing itself. And fourth, A good tactic is one your people enjoy. Alinsky's people couldn't stop laughing for weeks.

It was on account of his principle 'never to go outside the experience of the people' that Alinsky never argued morality with religious people. "Christianity and Judeo-Christianity is outside the experience of organized religion," he argued - and he cited the example of a man who gave away his life's savings to emulate St. Francis. "He was arrested by a Christian police officer, driven to Bellevue by a Christian ambulance doctor, and pronounced non compos mentis by a Christian psychiatrist. Christianity is beyond the experience of a Christian-professing-but-not-practicing population." Talk to them instead, he said, about power.

Still - in Rochester - he was dead serious. And eventually, Kodak changed its policies - partly due to a new organizing tactic, the use of proxy shares of stock. When Alinsky shouted, "Keep your sermons; give us your proxies!" many religious denominations, including the UUA, turned thousands of proxies over to Alinsky who used them at stockholders' meetings to argue for fair hiring practices. And when it was over, Alinsky asked every photographer who took his picture what kind of film he used: "I only allow the use of Kodak film!" Another of his rules: no enemy is your enemy forever.

At the end of his life, Alinsky was convinced that it was not just poor people, but the middle class who were in need of organization. He was disturbed by the wasted energies of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin who, he said, "couldn't organize a garden party."

In the closing chapter of Rules for Radicals, he calls upon radicals to "return to the suburban scene...with its PTA's, League of Women Voters, consumer groups, churches, and clubs. Search out the leaders...identify their major issues, find areas of common agreement, and excite their imagination with tactics that can introduce drama and adventure into the tedium of middle-class life."

And I am sure that he would not be deterred by today's apparent rightward tilt of the middle-class, the so-called November revolution, Newt Gingrich, and the rest. Radicalism has not been repudiated. With a minority of people voting, and only a scant majority of voters opting for unchristian prehistoric muttonhead solutions, we've just been out-organized! Return to your roots, radicals! Identify the issues, make common cause, make it exciting, and organize, organize, organize!

Jack will share some personal recollections of Alinsky, but I want to comment on just one aspect of Alinsky's personal life. Married three times, his first wife Helene died while trying to rescue a child from drowning in the ocean. For a time, he was depressed; he visited Helene's grave daily; he drank heavily. But he came out the other side, saying this:

"I have learned one lesson, I learned it in my belly, the astonishing lesson that I wasn't going to live forever. Now this may sound like a very simple thing, but there are very few people who realize they're going to die someday. Intellectually they know it, but they go on saving for their old age and so forth. ...My whole life changed. I was confronted with the question, 'What's the meaning of my life, since I'm here just so long a period of time?' I've never been able to answer that question. I don't ever expect to be able to answer it. But I know that once you reach that point of accepting your own death, you no longer care much whether you're important or not important. I've frequented the cemeteries too long - I know that that's it."

But there was one more twist. For several months, he thought he'd been visiting his wife's grave; then he discovered he'd been visiting the wrong grave! "What the hell am I doing?" Alinsky roared.

He was propelled back into action, back into the organizer's greatest joy - creativity. And he lived until he died.

And so the question for us is 'what the hell are we doing?' I look around and I know that Ron Green is working to stop the spread of hate on talk radio. And there are a lot of you fighting in areas of housing, and education, and human relations to break the elite captivity of the suburbs. And many of you are trying to instill the radical values of the American dream in your children.

A couple of weeks ago, Jack asked me to a breakfast with urban clergy and Jesse Jackson, and there was talk of a new organization to counter the right-wing Christian Coalition. And it was touching to see how warmly Jack was greeted - Jesse even credited Jack with teaching him how to pray! It was evident that many battles had been fought together side-by-side.

Will anything come of any of these projects? It's hard to tell. But somehow we must carry on, keep fresh our blurred vision of a better world ... because it's February and the world's not going to entertain us, and life is finite, and it is our privilege to create life - and what the hell are we doing, anyway?

This Jewish radical, this American original, called the Prayer of St. Francis the Radical's Prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is sadness, joy.... Amen.