To find out more about why
Alinsky is doing what he's doing, and to probe the private complexities
of the public man, PLAYBOY sent Eric Norden to interview him. The job,
Norden soon discovered, was far from easy: "The problem was that Alinsky's
schedule is enough to drive a professional athlete to a rest home, and
he seems to thrive on it. I accompanied him from the East Coast to the
West and into Canada, snatching tape sessions on planes, in cars and at
airport cocktail lounges between strategy sessions with his local organizers,
which were more like military briefings than bull sessions. My first meeting
with him was in TWA's Ambassador Lounge at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. He
was dressed in a navy-blue blazer, buttondown oxford shirt and black knit
tie. His first words were a growled order for Scotch on the rocks; his
voice was flat and gravelly, and I found it easier to picture him twisting
arms to win Garment District contracts than organizing ghettos. As we traveled
together and I struggled to match his pace, I soon learned that he is,
if nothing else, an original. (Alinsky to stewardess: 'Will you please
tell the captain I don't give a f--- what our wind velocity is, and ask
him to keep his trap shut so I can get some work done?')"
"Nat Hentoff wrote last year,
'At 62, Saul is the youngest man I've met in years,' and I could see what
he meant. There is a tremendous vitality about Alinsky, a raw, combative
ebullience, and a consuming curiosity about everything and everyone around
him. Add to this a mordant wit, a monumental ego coupled with an ability
to laugh at himself and the world in general, and you begin to get the
measure of the man.
"And yet late at night, in a Milwaukee
motel room, his face was gray, haggard and for once he showed the day's
toll (three cities, two speeches, endless press conferences and strategy
sessions). A vague sadness hung around him, as if some barrier had broken
down, and he began to talk -- off the record -- about all the people he's
loved who have died. There were many, and they seemed closer at night,
in airport Holiday Inn rooms, sleeping alone with the air conditioner turned
high to drown out the roar of the planes. He talked on for an hour, fell
abruptly silent for a minute, then sprang to his feet and headed for the
door. 'We'll really f--- 'em tomorrow!' The race was on again."
Norden began the interview by asking
Alinsky about his latest and most ambitious campaign: to organize nothing
less than America's white middle class.
PLAYBOY: Mobilizing middle-class America
would seem quite a departure for you after years of working with poverty-stricken
black and white slum dwellers. Do you expect suburbia to prove fertile
ground for your organizational talents?
ALINSKY: Yes, and it's shaping
up as the most challenging fight of my career, and certainly the one with
the highest stakes. Remember, people are people whether they're living
in ghettos, reservations or barrios, and the suburbs are just another kind
of reservation -- a gilded ghetto. One thing I've come to realize is that
any positive action for radical social change will have to be focused on
the white middle class, for the simple reason that this is where the real
power lies. Today, three fourths of our population is middle class, either
through actual earning power or through value identification. Take the
lower-lower middle class, the blue-collar or hard-hat group; there you've
got over 70,000,000 people earning between $5000 and $10,000 a year, people
who don't consider themselves poor or lower class at all and who espouse
the dominant middle class ethos even more fiercely than the rich do. For
the first time in history, you have a country where the poor are in the
minority, where the majority are dieting while the have-nots are going
to bed hungry every night.
Christ, even if we could manage to organize
all the exploited low-income groups -- all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto
Ricans, poor whites -- and then, through some kind of organizational miracle,
weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At
the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade
-- but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the
overwhelming majority will be middle class. This is the so-called Silent
Majority that our great Greek philosopher in Washington is trying to galvanize,
and it's here that the die will be cast and this country's future decided
for the next 50 years. Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority
progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that
majority itself as part of a national movement for change. If we just give
up and let the middle classes go to the likes of Agnew and Nixon by default,
then you might as well call the whole ball game. But they're still up for
grabs -- and we're gonna grab 'em.
PLAYBOY: The assumption behind
the Administration's Silent Majority thesis is that most of the middle
class is inherently conservative. How can even the most skillful organizational
tactics unite them in support of your radical goals?
ALINSKY: Conservative? That's
a crock of crap. Right now they're nowhere. But they can and will go either
of two ways in the coming years -- to a native American fascism or toward
radical social change. Right now they're frozen, festering in apathy, leading
what Thoreau called "lives of quiet desperation:" They're oppressed by
taxation and inflation, poisoned by pollution, terrorized by urban crime,
frightened by the new youth culture, baffled by the computerized world
around them. They've worked all their lives to get their own little house
in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars, and now the good life seems
to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally
unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they've succumbed to tranquilizers
and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped
in longterm endurance marriages or escape into guilt-ridden divorces. They're
losing their kids and they're losing their dreams. They're alienated, depersonalized,
without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they
feel rejected and hopeless. Their utopia of status and security has become
a tacky-tacky suburb, their split-levels have sprouted prison bars and
their disillusionment is becoming terminal.
They're the first to live in a total
mass-media-oriented world, and every night when they turn on the TV and
the news comes on, they see the almost unbelievable hypocrisy and deceit
and even outright idiocy of our national leaders and the corruption and
disintegration of all our institutions, from the police and courts to the
White House itself. Their society appears to be crumbling and they see
themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All
their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in
a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.
The despair is there; now it's up to
us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent, galvanize them for radical
social change. We'll give them a way to participate in the democratic process,
a way to exercise their rights as citizens and strike back at the establishment
that oppresses them, instead of giving in to apathy. We'll start with specific
issues -- taxes, jobs, consumer problems, pollution -- and from there move
on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and the Congress and
the board rooms of the megacorporations. Once you organize people, they'll
keep advancing from issue to issue toward the ultimate objective: people
power. We'll not only give them a cause, we'll make life goddamn exciting
for them again -- life instead of existence. We'll turn them on.
PLAYBOY: You don't expect them
to beware of radicals bearing gifts?
ALINSKY: Sure, they'll
be suspicious, even hostile at first. That's been my experience with every
community I've ever moved into. My critics are right when they call me
an outside agitator. When a community, any kind of community, is hopeless
and helpless, it requires somebody from outside to come in and stir things
up. That's my job -- to unsettle them, to make them start asking questions,
to teach them to stop talking and start acting, because the fat cats in
charge never hear with their ears, only through their rears. I'm not saying
it's going to be easy; thermopolitically, the middle classes are rooted
in inertia, conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock
the boat. But they're beginning to realize that boat is sinking and unless
they start bailing fast, they're going to go under with it. The middle
class today is really schizoid, torn between its indoctrination and its
objective situation. The instinct of middle-class people is to support
and celebrate the status quo, but the realities of their daily lives drill
it home that the status quo has exploited and betrayed them.
PLAYBOY: In what way?
ALINSKY: In all the ways I've
been talking about, from taxation to pollution. The middle class actually
feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor
do. And this creates a situation that's supercharged with both opportunity
and danger. There's a second revolution seething beneath the surface of
middle-class America -- the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and
as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives
-- for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can
turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right,
making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a
return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them
scapegoats for their misery -- blacks, hippies, Communists -- and if it
wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national
anthem celebrating "the land of the free and the home of the brave." But
we're not going to abandon the field to them without a long, hard fight
-- a fight I think we're going to win. Because we'll show the middle class
their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country
-- the true beneficiaries of Nixon's so-called economic reforms. And when
they swing their sights on that target, the sh-- will really hit the fan.
PLAYBOY: In the past, you've focused
your efforts on specific communities where the problems -- and the solutions
-- were clearly defined. But now you're taking on over 150,000,000 people.
Aren't you at all fazed by the odds against you?
ALINSKY: Are you kidding?
I've been doing this for 30 years now, and the odds haven't bothered me
yet. In fact, I've always taken 100-to-one odds as even money. Sure, it's
true that the middle class is more amorphous than some barrio in Southern
California, and you're going to be organizing all across the country instead
of in one city. But the rules are the same. You start with what you've
got, you build up one community around the issues, and then you use the
organization you've established as an example and a power base to reach
other communities. Once you're successful in, say, Chicago -- one of the
cities where we're organizing the middle class -- then you can go on to
Cincinnati or Boston or Dubuque and say, "OK, you see what we did in Chicago,
let's get movin' here." It's like an ink-blot effect, spreading out from
local focal points of power across the whole country. Once we have our
initial successes, the process will gather momentum and begin to snowball.
It won't be easy and, sure, it's a gamble
-- what in life isn't? Einstein once said God doesn't throw dice, but he
was wrong. God throws dice all the time, and sometimes I wonder if they're
loaded. The art of the organizer is cuttin' in on the action. And believe
me, this time we're really going to screw the bastards, hit 'em where it
hurts. You know, I sort of look at this as the culmination of my career.
I've been in this fight since the Depression; I've been machine-gunned,
beaten up, jailed -- they've even given me honorary degrees -- and in a
way it's all been preparation for this. I love this goddamn country,
and we're going to take it back. I never gave up faith at the worst
times in the past, and I'm sure as hell not going to start now. With some
luck, maybe I've got ten more good productive years ahead of me. So I'm
going to use them where they count the most.
PLAYBOY: How did you ever get
into this line of work?
ALINSKY: I actually started
organizing in the middle Thirties, first with the C.I.O. and then on my
own. But I guess I would have followed the same path if there hadn't been
a Depression. I've always been a natural rebel, ever since I was a kid.
And poverty was no stranger to me, either. My mother and father emigrated
from Russia at the turn of the century and we lived in one of the worst
slums in Chicago; in fact, we lived in the slum district of the slum, on
the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks, about as far down as you
could go. My father started out as a tailor, then he ran a delicatessen
and a cleaning shop, and finally he graduated to operating his own sweatshop.
But whatever business he had, we always lived in the back of a store. I
remember, as a kid, the biggest luxury I ever dreamed of was just to have
a few minutes to myself in the bathroom without my mother hammering on
the door and telling me to get out because a customer wanted to use it.
To this day, it's a real luxury for me to spend time uninterrupted in the
bathroom; it generally takes me a couple of hours to shave and bathe in
the morning -- a real hang-up from the past, although I actually do a lot
of my thinking there. |