THE DEMONIZATION OF SAUL ALINSKY

H. N. Burdett

Nearly as often as Newt Gingrich boasts of his actual or imagined role as Ronald Reagan's consigliere, the Republican presidential hopeful invokes Saul D. Alinsky as the embodiment of all evil.

On the night he won the South Carolina primary, Gingrich asserted, "The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, left-wingers and people who don't like classical America." He went on to claim: "The centerpiece of this campaign, I believe, is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky."

Appearing the next morning on NBC's Meet the Press, Gingrich told host David Gregory: "Nobody's ever gone back and looked at what Saul Alinsky stands for. Nobody ever asks what 'neighborhood organizer' meant. [Obama] wasn't organizing boys and girls clubs. He was teaching political radicalism. It explains his entire administration...the objective fact is he believes in a very radical vision of America's future that is fundamentally different from probably 80 per cent of this country."
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Appearing on CNN's State of the Union, Gingrich added: "The values that [Obama] believes in - the Saul Alinsky radical values that are at the heart of Obama - are a disaster."

Anyone Newt Gingrich, the unregistered lobbyist and only Speaker of the House of Representatives to be found guilty of ethics violations by his congressional colleagues, chooses to demonize is indeed worthy of deeper scrutiny. And that closer look reveals that Alinsky was without doubt radical - but in the same spirit that Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams and Frederick Douglass were radical.

In the 1930s Alinsky was a labor organizer for the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In the 1950s he turned his skills to organizing African American ghettos of Chicago, eventually extending them to Michigan, New York, California and a dozen other trouble spots around the country.

Asked in an interview about the reasoning behind his decision to organize black communities, Alinsky responded, "Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred, feathered, castrated - or killed. Most Southern Democrat politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it."

William F. Buckley, the father of modern American conservatism, said Alinsky was "very close to being an organizational genius." Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, who was twice the Democratic presidential nominee, said Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and the dignity of the individual." Time magazine said that "American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas."

When asked in an interview whether he ever considered joining the Communist party, Alinsky replied: "Not at any time. I've never joined any organization, not even ones I've organized myself. I prize my independence too much. And philosphically, I could never accept any rigid dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism...if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide."

Among the more intriguing rules for radicals Alinsky espoused was that "the threat is often more effective than the tactic itself, but only if you are so organized that the establishment knows not only that you have the power to execute the tactic but that you definitely will. You can't do much bluffing in this game; if you're ever caught bluffing, forget about ever using threats in the future..."

Alinsky cited the example of a department store that hired blacks only for menial jobs. The store attracted customers on the basis of its labels as well as the quality of its merchandise. Economic boycotts had failed to deter even the black middle class from shopping there. Alinsky came up with a tactic whereby on a busy Saturday shopping date, some 3,000 blacks dressed in "their best churchgoing suits and dresses would be bused downtown."

"When you put 3,000 blacks on the main floor of a store," Alinsky wrote in his book, Rules for Radicals, "even one that covers a square block, suddenly the entire color of the store changes. Any white coming through the revolving doors would take one pop-eyed look and assume that somehow he had stepped into Africa. He would keep right on going out of the store. This would end the white trade for the day.

"For a low-income group, shopping is a time-consuming experience, for economy means everything. This would mean that every counter would be occupied by potential customers, carefully examining the quality of merchandise and asking, say, at the shirt counter, about the material, color, style, cuffs, collars and price. As the group occupying the clerk's attention around the shirt counters moved to the underwear section, those at the underwear section would replace them at the shirt counter, and the personnel of the store would be constantly occupied...It is legal. There is no sit-in or unlawful occupation of the premises. Some thousands of people are in the store 'shopping.' The police are powerless and you are operating within the law.

"This operation would go on until an hour before closing time when the group would begin purchasing everything in sight to be delivered C.O.D.! This would tie up truck-delivery service for at least two days - with obvious further heavy financial costs, since all the merchandise would be refused at the time of delivery."

The threat of the tactic was "leaked" to the department store. The next day Alinsky's group received a call from the store "for a meeting to discuss new personnel policies and an urgent request that the meeting take place within the next two or three days, certainly before Saturday!"

Indeed the personnel policies of the store were changed: 186 new jobs were opened and for the first time, blacks were hired for the sales floor and placed in executive training.

In his repeated denunciations of Alinsky's "radical values," Newt Gingrich insinuates that this legendary hell-raiser was a Marxist. A valid enough characterization. Alinsky vigorously and eloquently denied that he ever supported the ideology of Karl Marx, but there is no escaping the fact of his appreciation for Groucho, Chico and Harpo.
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