Let Them Call Me Rebel:
Clark, Jack
Reveille lor Alinsky From building the CIO in the 1930s among Chicago's packinghouse workers through the struggles of Northern blacks in the late 1960s, Saul Alinksy provided energy and...
...Some respectable opinion still blamed urban crime and blight on the racial inferiority of the immigrants who lived in the poor and crowded slums...
...Through it all, Alinsky was a bold and brilliant tactician...
...The packinghouse workers anticipated police brutality on their 1946 picket line...
...lack Clark prove their case, they dispatched students like Saul Alinsky out to learn more about youth gangs, prisoners, even the Capone mob...
...Alinsky remained a nationally known figure until his sudden death in 1972...
...In Woodlawn, residents could not get their buildings fixed up...
...career in the 1930s...
...The goal was not to impose a structure on the community but to strengthen institutions and leaders within the community who could provide the necessary social cohesion to fight delinquency and other antisocial impulses...
...His family did not participate much in the larger community...
...Saul had to act all at once as an intellectual, a reformer, and a tough street-corner character...
...The bluff, overstatement, and bluster which served Alinsky so well could often be a fault...
...Reveille lor Alinsky From building the CIO in the 1930s among Chicago's packinghouse workers through the struggles of Northern blacks in the late 1960s, Saul Alinksy provided energy and organizational savvy to the great causes of the American Left...
...Unlike traditional settlement house efforts, CAP placed trained professionals like Alinsky in support, not leadership, roles...
...Alinsky broke from the implicit agreement and chose to use and expand vastly upon Shaw's techniques to challenge the poverty and powerlessness that created the slums...
...Settlement house workers and other social workers sought to make the slum more tolerable through their services to the poor...
...Horwitt's biography and Alinsky's ideas deserve a wide audience...
...not so with Alinsky...
...He confidently called for the creation of a national network of people's organizations in Reveille for Radicals, for example...
...Similarly, Alinsky's wife, Helene, was a professional and active social worker...
...He also pioneered new forms of community organization which have thrived in the nearly two decades since his death...
...Alinsky's early experiences centered on wanting to be strong and respected enough to join in the neighborhood expeditions to "beat up the Polacks" who beat up the Jews in an endless cycle...
...Shaw's work was controversial...
...The problems of powerlessness, poverty, and social disorganization we see today have probably not been so evident in American life since Saul Alinsky began his flamboyant career in the 1930s...
...we get no glimpse of what this meant in their relationship, even though Horwitt goes to great lengths to explain, for example, how Alinsky's skepticism of psychiatry affected his friendship with Max Gitelson...
...The sudden ending of their friendship as Sheil lost power in the church is inadequately explained...
...Yet, Alinsky already knew the difficulty of transferring his success from the Back of the Yards to packinghouse neighborhoods in Kansas City and South St...
...That, combined with the energy and enthusiasm of the local parks administrator, James Meegan, gave Alinsky the openings he needed...
...The Back of the Yards was organized in 1939...
...Politically quiescent in the 1920s, the campus didn't engage Alinsky politically or academically until he enrolled in his junior-year sociology courses...
...the persona fit him for life...
...Alinsky brought the fight to Kodak's annual board meeting and used the proxies of religious groups holding stock to confront the corporation...
...Both the union and the neighborhood council organized successfully, and Saul Alinsky's career as the premier radical community organizer had begun...
...The book suffers some minor flaws...
...Many Jewish sons of immigrants picked up radical politics with their mother's milk...
...Ralph Helstein, the president of the Packinghouse Workers and a close friend and neighbor of Alinsky's, tried to get Alinsky working with Martin Luther King, Jr., a partnership Helstein was certain would benefit both men...
...Paul...
...Poles probably had a plurality, but Czechs, Lithuanians, and Slovaks were numerous, and even a few Irish and Germans remained, all with parishes and turf of their own...
...Shaw, nonetheless, shared overall objectives with his professional critics...
...The University of Chicago sociologists theorized that social disorganization lay at the root of juvenile delinquency and other social disorders...
...Sociologist Clifford Shaw at the Institute for Juvenile Research hired Alinsky to help put together the Chicago Area Project (CAP), an effort to fight delinquency by restoring to poor communities some of the social structure and organization that was missing...
...The Back of the Yards Council functioned well, and Alinsky was a good publicist, so soon the controversy turned to praise...
...Sanford Horwitt has provided us with a superb biography of this fascinating man...
...These courses brought Alinsky face-to-face with his city's problems...
...Shaw hoped to achieve social peace by developing stronger community institutions...
...He spent his entire life attacking the profession...
...appropriate to the seriousness of both Alinsky and Horwitt, the book takes the time and trouble to trace the intellectual roots of Alinsky's activism...
...Organizing meant building up the indi-geneous institutions...
...What's more, the social work profession found the idea of developing indigenous leaders rather than relying on trained professionals abhorrent...
...for most Chicago ethnic neighborhoods in the 1930s, that meant the local Catholic parish...
...To LET THEM CALL ME REBEL Saul Alinsky-His Life and Legacy Sanford D. Horwitt Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95, 595 pp...
...bus loads of blacks headed out to picket the suburban and segregated homes of slumlords...
...Rochester's blacks were stymied in their effort to get Eastman Kodak to hire more blacks...
...He got his chance-and earned his fame-in the infamous "Back of the Yards" neighborhood, adjacent to the meatpacking plants...
...social workers charged that CAP tolerated criminal behavior in order to win trust...
...Although he was not an exceptional student, Saul did well enough to win admission to the University of Chicago...
...Alinsky ridiculed the idea, because- in Helstein's view-Alinsky could not stand being second banana...
...With that base, Alinsky was free to part company with Shaw, who had no desire to keep this controversial figure on the CAP staff...
...For example, the relationship between Bishop Sheil and Alinsky was pivotal for both...
...Alinsky made support of the efforts to organize the packinghouses that dominated the Back of the Yards a centerpiece of his effort...
...Appropriate to Alinksy's life of action, the narrative moves quickly...
...Some younger priests, and, very significantly, some liberals in the hierarchy were sympathetic...
...The Washingon Post and the New York Herald Tribune were citing Alinsky's work as a national model for revitalizing democracy...
...The Back of the Yards differed from previous CAP efforts in that no single ethnic group dominated...
...Horwitt shows no hesitation in giving us a full picture of Alinksy, complete with blemishes...
...What's more, the older ethnic pastors tended to be hostile to any organization outside their control...
...he even managed t orchestrate having Chicago's Auxiliar Bishop Bernard Sheil speak with John L. Lewis at the union's rally...
...Bishop Sheil arranged an introduction to Marshall Field, III, who provided a grant to start the Industrial Areas Foundation...
...Shaw meticulously avoided controversial issues like union organizing drives...
...a substantial body of thought, connected to the social work profession, held that delinquency and crimes were individual problems best treated through case work...
...In that period, he played a role in battling McCarthyism, helped launch the first effort to empower California's large Chicano population (Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers got his first organizing job in that effort), worked with church leaders to battle white flight in Chicago, and successfully organized in black ghettos in Rochester and Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood...
...There, Alinsky outgrew his CAP staff role...
...As large as his accomplishments were, Alinsky had to embellish them further (a trait not unknown among his many disciples in the diverse world of current community organizing...
...the picket line was led by Catholic priests...
...He timed the formal founding oi the Back of the Yards Neighborhooc Council to coincide with a major rally fo the union drive...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 11
