Diaspora View: Community calumny

The stupidity or mendacity in caricaturing community organizing deserves some corrective truth.

By SAMUEL FREEDMAN
saul alinsky 88 (photo credit: )
saul alinsky 88
(photo credit: )
During the cavalcade of calumnies that was her speech to the Republican convention, Sarah Palin added a new item to the conservative litany of resentments. Recalling her own political background and alluding to Barack Obama's, the vice presidential nominee declared, "I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities." Her sneering comment echoed one from an earlier speaker, Rudolph Giuliani. Preaching to the partisan choir, he said of Obama, "Maybe this is the first problem on the resume. He worked as a community organizer. He immersed himself in Chicago machine politics." Giuliani's words betray him as a hypocrite and a liar; during his two terms as mayor of New York, he enjoyed a productive working relationship with the Industrial Areas Foundation, one of the nation's most prominent and successful groups of community organizers. As for Sarah Palin, when it comes to community organizing, she knows a lot about dogsled races. One is tempted to disregard the Republican smear against community organizers as the same old same old, the latest twist in attacking the "elite" - the media, academia, trial lawyers, Hollywood. But the stupidity or mendacity, or both, in caricaturing the gritty work of community organizing as ethereal do-gooderism, or social engineering, or ward-heeler hackery deserves some corrective truth. PART OF the purpose of explaining the reality of community organizing to the uninformed, which means the easily deluded, is to illustrate the life and legacy of Saul Alinsky, the Chicago Jew who invented and popularized the tough-minded model of community organizing that Barack Obama among tens of thousands of other staff members and volunteers learned and practiced. The Alinsky mode of community organizing, as carried on since his death in 1972 by the Industrial Areas Foundation, represents a third way between the warring poles of welfare-state liberalism and free-market capitalism. It marries idealism to pragmatism, scrupulously avoids partisan alliances or endorsements, and combines elements of the New Deal's social compact with the socially conservative mores of religious congregations. The results, as I have seen firsthand over the past 30 years, are as literally concrete as the thousands of affordable, owner-occupied houses that have restored life to the most ravaged sections of Brooklyn, the South Bronx, and Baltimore, among other cities. These houses are formally known as the Nehemiah Homes, and it would be hard to conceive of a finer manifestation of the prophets. It would be a stretch to say that Alinsky was only or primarily applying Jewish values in doing his work. From the time he founded his first "citizens' organization" among the Slavic immigrants of Chicago's Back of the Yards slum, the Alinsky groups have formed their strongest bonds among white-ethnic and Hispanic Catholics and black Christians. Only in the last decade have a notable number of Jewish congregations begun joining the affiliates of the Industrial Areas Foundation, in part because issues like education and public health led the foundation to start organizing in suburbs. Yet neither can one avoid the Jewishness in Alinsky. The son of a tailor and seamstress, both of them Orthodox, Alinsky grew up first in the Maxwell Street area of Chicago, the city's overcrowded equivalent of the Lower East Side, and then in the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Douglas Park. Typical of American Jews of his generation, Alinsky moved away from religious observance while holding onto Jewish pride and Jewish ethics. Importantly, though, Alinsky was a street Jew, too, someone who from the alley brawls of his childhood was a fighter, not a supplicant. One particular incident in Alinsky's youth, as recounted in Sanford Horwitt's excellent biography Let Them Call Me Rebel, distills the organizer's combination of morality and pugnacity. After a Jewish friend had been jumped and beaten by Polish kids, Alinsky went out on a retaliatory attack, which ended with his arrest. Sarah Alinsky took Saul from the police station to the synagogue, where the boy informed his rabbi that he had simply been following the biblical formula of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The rabbi, in turn, told Alinsky, "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does? I want to tell you something the great Rabbi Hillel said: 'Where there are no men, be thou a man.'" ALINSKY'S APPLICATION of the rabbinical lesson included rolled-up sleeves and a zest for confrontation. Unlike so many liberals, Jewish and otherwise, he never expected right to prevail simply because it is right. He insisted on perceiving "the world as it is" rather than the world as we wish it to be. His connections went from Hyde Park professors to Capone syndicate gangsters to labor priests. "Alinsky took a phrase from the dull vocabulary of social work - 'community organization' - and turned it into something controversial, important, even romantic," Horwitt writes. "'We the people will work out our own destiny' was the rallying cry and motto." In theory and practice alike, Alinskyism stayed simple. Organize around the genuine institutions of a neighborhood. Find "specific, immediate, and realizable" issues. Then win the battles over them with "the constructive use of power." Not only can the poor beat City Hall, Alinsky maintained, they can "have a ball doing it." His groups picketed slumlords at their suburban homes and dumped uncollected garbage on the doorsteps of lazy ward bosses. "Someone once asked me whether I believed in reconciliation," Alinsky observed at one point. "Sure I do. When our side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it." During the 1960s, Alinsky did falter. His organization in Back of the Yards resisted racial integration. His attempt to work with blacks in the Woodlawn neighborhood got him entangled with the violent fringe. It fell to his protégés - among them Cesar Chavez, Nicholas Von Hoffman and Edward Chambers - to perpetuate Alinskyism through unions, investigative journalism, and a revived and expanded Industrial Areas Foundation. THE SAME week when Sarah Palin and Rudolph Giuliani made sport of community organizers, I happened to be in Baltimore with Arnie Graf, a Jewish son of the Lower East Side who has been with the Industrial Areas Foundation for more than 30 years. We were chatting with one of the black ministers in the local organization, known by the acronym BUILD, and he remembered a protest Arnie had undertaken in the early 1980s against a bank that refused to make loans in black neighborhoods. Arnie had residents of the afflicted areas line up in the bank lobby to ask tellers to make change, tying up the whole operation until the bank president agreed to meet with BUILD. Ultimately, the bank did change its policy. The episode was vintage Alinsky. Most recently, Arnie has helped raise about $2.5 million from black churches and Jewish philanthropies, and gotten the state to subsidize mortgages, so that more than a thousand Nehemiah homes can be built on the ruined streets of the Oliver neighborhood, the place that the cable series The Wire turned into a national symbol of nihilism. In the Torah according to Saul Alinsky, Moses was a community organizer and God a tough guy who had to be approached pragmatically. Alinsky once offered his version of Moses convincing God not to destroy the Jewish people for worshipping the Golden Calf. In this account, Moses doesn't plead for mercy. He says that everybody else - the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Egyptians - has heard about this covenant with the Jews. And if God wipes them out, then people are going to say, "There goes God; you can't make a deal with him. His word isn't even worth the stone it's written on." Whether or not the conversation went quite that way, God stayed his hand, the Jewish people survived, and Saul Alinsky was born and lived and worked and influenced others to carry on. And if Palin and Giuliani think he's some kind of punchline, the joke is on them. www.samuelfreedman.com