PLAYBOY: Were you politically active
in college?
ALINSKY: Not in any organized
sense. I started going to the University of Chicago in 1926, when the campus
was still shook up over the Loeb-Leopold case. I suppose I was a kind of
instinctive rebel -- I got into trouble leading a fight against compulsory
chapel -- but it was strictly a personal rebellion against authority. During
my first few years in school, I didn't have any highly developed social
conscience, and in those placid days before the Depression, it was pretty
easy to delude yourself that we were living in the best of all possible
worlds. But by my junior year, I was beginning to catch glimpses of the
emperor's bare ass. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of courses in sociology,
and I was astounded by all the horse manure they were handing out about
poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing
over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I'd lived in a slum, I could
see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities. It was
at that time that I developed a deep suspicion of academicians in general
and sociologists in particular, with a few notable exceptions.
It was Jimmy Farrell who said at the
time that the University of Chicago's sociology department was an institution
that invests $100,000 on a research program to discover the location of
brothels that any taxi driver could tell them about for nothing. So I realized
how far removed the self-styled social sciences are from the realities
of everyday existence, which is particularly unfortunate today, because
that tribe of head-counters has an inordinate influence on our so-called
antipoverty program. Asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like prescribing
an enema for diarrhea.
PLAYBOY: Was sociology your major in
college?
ALINSKY: God, no. I majored in
archaeology, a subject that fascinated me then and still does. I really
fell in love with it.
PLAYBOY: Did you plan to become a professional
archaeologist?
ALINSKY: Yeah, for a while I
did. But by the time I graduated, the Depression was in full swing and
archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All
the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street
sidewalks. And anyway, much as I loved it, archaeology was beginning to
appear pretty irrelevant in those days. I was starting to get actively
involved in social issues, and during my last year in college, a bunch
of us took up the plight of the Southern Illinois coal workers, who were
in a tough organizational fight -- tough, Christ, the poor bastards were
starving -- and we got some food and supplies together and chartered some
trucks and drove down to help them.
PLAYBOY: Was it at this time that you
became active in radical politics?
ALINSKY: It was at this time
I became a radical -- or recognized that I'd always been a radical and
started to do something concrete about it. But I wasn't a full-time activist;
I remained in school, and I suppose a lot of my ideas about what could
and should be done were as muddled as those of most people in those chaotic
days.
PLAYBOY: What did you do after graduation?
ALINSKY: I went hungry. What
little money my mother had was wiped out in the Crash and, as I've told
you, my old man wasn't exactly showering support on me. I managed to eke
out a subsistence living by doing odd jobs around the university at ten
cents an hour. I suppose I could have gotten some help from a relief project,
but it's funny, I just couldn't do it. I've always been that way: I'd rob
a bank before I accepted charity. Anyway, things were rough for a while
and I got pretty low. I remember sitting in a crummy cafeteria one day
and saying to myself: "Here I am, a smart son of a bitch, I graduated cum
laude and all that shit, but I can't make a living, I can't even feed
myself. What happens now?" And then it came to me; that little light bulb
lit up above my head.
I moved over to the table next
to the cashier, exchanged a few words with her and then finished my coffee
and got up to pay. "Gee, I'm sorry," I said, "I seem to have lost my check."
She'd seen that all I had was a cup of coffee, so she just said, "That's
OK, that'll be a nickel." So I paid and left with my original nickel check
still in my pocket and walked a few blocks to the next cafeteria in the
same chain and ordered a big meal for a buck forty-five -- and, believe
me, in those days, for a buck forty-five I could have practically bought
the fuckin' joint. I ate in a corner far away from the cashier, then switched
checks and paid my nickel bill from the other place and left. So my eating
troubles were taken care of.
But then I began to see other kids around
the campus in the same fix, so I put up a big sign on the bulletin board
and invited anybody who was hungry to a meeting. Some of them thought it
was all a gag, but I stood on the lectern and explained my system in detail,
with the help of a big map of Chicago with all the local branches of the
cafeteria marked on it. Social ecology! I split my recruits up into squads
according to territory; one team would work the South Side for lunch, another
the North Side for dinner, and so on. We got the system down to a science,
and for six months all of us were eating free. Then the bastards brought
in those serial machines at the door where you pull out a ticket that's
only good for that particular cafeteria. That was a low blow. We were the
first victims of automation.
PLAYBOY: Didn't you have any moral qualms
about ripping off the cafeterias?
ALINSKY: Oh, sure, I suffered
all the agonies of the damned-sleepless nights, desperate 'soul-searching,
a tormented conscience that riddled me with guilt -- Are you kidding? I
wouldn't have justified, say, conning free gin from a liquor store just
so I could have a martini before dinner, but when you're hungry, anything
goes -- There's a priority of rights, and the right to eat takes precedence
over the right to make a profit -- And just in case you're getting any
ideas, let me remind you that the statute of limitations has run out.
But you know, that incident was interesting,
because it was actually my first experience as an organizer -- I learned
something else from it, too; after the cafeterias had outflanked us, a
bunch of the kids I'd organized came up to me and said, "OK, Saul, what
do we do next?" And when I told them I didn't have the slightest idea,
they were really pissed off at me. It was then I learned the meaning of
the old adage about how 'favors extended become defined as rights.'
PLAYBOY: Did you continue your life
of crime?
ALINSKY: Crime? That wasn't crime
-- it was survival -- But my Robin Hood days were short-lived; logically
enough, I was awarded the graduate Social Science Fellowship in criminology,
the top one in that field, which took care of my tuition and room and board
-- I still don't know why they gave it to me -- maybe because I hadn't
taken a criminology course in my life and didn't know one goddamn thing
about the subject -- But this was the Depression and I felt like someone
had tossed me a life preserver -- Hell, if it had been in shirt cleaning,
I would have taken it. Anyway, I found out that criminology was just as
removed from actual crime and criminals as sociology was from society,
so I decided to make my doctoral dissertation a study of the Al Capone
mob -- an inside study.
PLAYBOY: What did Capone have to say
about that?
ALINSKY: Well, my reception was
pretty chilly at first -- I went over to the old Lexington Hotel, which
was the gang's headquarters, and I hung around the lobby and the restaurant.
I'd spot one of the mobsters whose picture I'd seen in the papers and go
up to him and say, "I'm Saul Alinsky, I'm studying criminology, do you
mind if I hang around with you?" And he'd look me over and say, "Get lost,
punk." This happened again and again, and I began to feel I'd never get
anywhere. Then one night I was sitting in the restaurant and at the next
table was Big Ed Stash, a professional assassin who was the Capone mob's
top executioner. He was drinking with a bunch of his pals and he was saying,
"Hey, you guys, did I ever tell you about the time I picked up that redhead
in Detroit?" and he was cut off by a chorus of moans. "My God," one guy
said, "do we have to hear that one again?" I saw Big Ed's face fall; mobsters
are very sensitive, you know, very thin-skinned. And I reached over and
plucked his sleeve. "Mr. Stash," I said, "I'd love to hear that story."
His face lit up. "You would, kid?" He slapped me on the shoulder. "Here,
pull up a chair. Now, this broad, see . . ." And that's how it started.
Big Ed had an attentive audience and
we became buddies. He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer,
Capone's number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the
mob because of Al's income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called
him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti's boys took me everywhere,
showed me all the mob's operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and
bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take
over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob
inside out.
PLAYBOY: Why would professional criminals
confide their secrets to an outsider?
ALINSKY: Why not? What harm could
I do them? Even if I told what I'd learned, nobody would listen. They had
Chicago tied up tight as a drum; they owned the city, from the cop on the
beat right up to the mayor. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real
opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger
Touhy. The Federal Government could try to nail 'em on an occasional income
tax rap, but inside Chicago they couldn't touch their power. Capone was
the establishment. When one of his boys got knocked off, there wasn't any
city court in session, because most of the judges were at the funeral and
some of them were pallbearers. So they sure as hell weren't afraid of some
college kid they'd adopted as a mascot causing them any trouble. They never
bothered to hide anything from me; I was their one-man student body and
they were anxious to teach me. It probably appealed to their egos.
Once, when I was looking over their
records, I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer.
I called Nitti over and I said, "Look, Mr. Nitti, I don't understand this.
You've got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money
to bring somebody in from St. Louis?" Frank was really shocked at my ignorance.
"Look, kid," he said patiently, "sometimes our guys might know the guy
they're hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken his
kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together.
But you call in a guy from out of town, all you've got to do is tell him,
'Look, there's this guy in a dark coat on State and Randolph; our boy in
the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly
and fade into the crowd.' So that's a job and he's a professional, he does
it. But one of our boys goes up, the guy turns to face him and it's a friend,
right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there's gonna be a
widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping -- Christ, it'd be murder."
I think Frank was a little disappointed by my even questioning the practice;
he must have thought I was a bit callous. |