That was a large misunderstanding. In the tradition of Catholic Social Action there is little contradiction between a full engagement in the game of politics and a deep sense of religious faith. The good Christian can be, in the ancient counsel of St. Matthew that was Chavez’s favorite biblical citation, “as wise as the serpent and as gentle as the dove.” Chavez was precisely that, serpent and dove. Ultimately he worked out the contradictions that do exist between piety and politics in his own unique, dramatic way, but only after a long series of secular political battles. He was taught how to wage those battles by Fred Ross and by Ross’s boss in the CSO years, a man who was a master at bringing religious people into the world of power politics, the political wizard, Saul Alinsky.
Saul Alinsky started doing politics in the late 1930s amid the enthusiasm of the Popular Front and CIO organizing. His ability to thrive despite a series of attacks from Chicago’s political bosses during World War II, plus the eventual antifascist victory in Europe and Japan, deepened his optimism and patriotism. Strike victories by his close allies in the United Packing House Workers of America at most of Chicago’s slaughterhouses right after the war confirmed the value of the work he had been doing in the city’s white ethnic Back of the Yards district. His 1946 best seller, Reveille for Radicals, propelled him to national prominence. When the Popular Front collapsed in the early years of the cold war, Alinsky refused to cooperate with government repression of the Communist Party or the persecution of individual reds, but promoted his own political ideas as the best way to combat Communism, once even traveling to the Vatican to advise the Catholic hierarchy on how to defeat Communist Party trade unions in Italy.
By the early fifties, Alinsky had found an idiosyncratic non-Communist niche, and he continued to be the chief theoretician and sometimes active protagonist of several community organizing projects. The early New Left was attracted by his non-Communist stance and emphasis on democratic values. Later, however, as the student and black movements of the 1960s shifted away from community organizing, Alinskyism positioned itself as an alternative to New Left politics. Eventually, in the late 1970s and ’80s, Alinsky’s followers and his left (both old and new) antagonists would all wonder whether the Alinskyite community organizations that continued to flourish after his death, in 1972, were even a part of the left tradition.
That debate has not weakened Alinsky’s influence on American politics, which remains strong. More than 150 community organizations throughout the country were originally sponsored, promoted, and organized by openly Alinskyite organizing centers. Alinsky’s fingerprints are also all over the progressive movements within the Protestant and Catholic churches. His voice still echoes in the strategy sessions of activist officials in contemporary organized labor. Finally, famously, the first African American president had his first taste of big-city politics while working for an Alinsky-inspired organization.
For any set of ideas, eighty years of political relevance is quite an achievement and cannot be dismissed as merely a reflection of the particular pragmatic adaptability of Alinskyism. And there is an “Alinskyism.” With Saul as the fountainhead, community organizing has become a codified discipline, with core theoretical propositions, recognized heresies, disciples, fallen neophytes, and splits. It is a political theory, with the emphasis on the political, and Alinsky is the grand theorist.
Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy, one of the many Alinskyite centers where organizers are trained, calls Alinsky “our Sigmund Freud.” What Booth means is that both Freud and Alinsky founded schools of thought, but there is another, deeper link: the role of training and lineage. Just as psychoanalysts trace their pedigree back to the grand master (they were either analyzed by Freud or by someone who was analyzed by Freud, or by someone who was analyzed by someone who . . . ), so Alinskyite and neo-Alinskyite organizers trace their training back to Alinsky himself. And just as the psychoanalyst in training gains knowledge of the discipline through an examination of his or her own personal experience, guided by the skillful questioning of the analyst and a consideration of case histories, the ideal Alinskyite training places a would-be organizer out in the field, systematically analyzing his or her own political experience, with the help of the more experienced, theoretically advanced trainer, who teaches through a combination of stories and questions. Although there are some schools of neo-Alinskyism that attempt to train novice organizers in six weeks, arming them with neat, codified summations of Alinskyite technique, traditionalists, such as Mike Miller of San Francisco, continue to insist that it takes at least three years to train a professional organizer.
Cesar Chavez was trained for ten years. His chief teacher, Fred Ross, although not exactly an Alinsky trainee, was one of the first people on Alinsky’s payroll and an early practitioner of Alinsky-style community organizing. Chavez watched Ross work and was watched by him; he filed weekly and sometimes daily reports to Ross and to Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). He studied Reveille for Radicals. He read and reread Alinsky’s 1949 biography of John L. Lewis.1 The group Chavez worked for, the Community Service Organization, was Alinsky’s most successful early project outside Chicago. During Alinsky’s regular visits to California, which often lasted several weeks, Chavez worked alongside the master in formal trainings, conferences, and fundraising events.
There was no training manual, but the training was systematic and included written critiques of the obligatory work reports. These were serious people doing serious work, making their living doing politics. Not a fabulous living, but after 1953, a respectable one. Alinsky signed both Fred Ross’s and Cesar Chavez’s checks. Not everything that Alinsky and Ross taught Chavez in the years between his twenty-fifth and thirty-fifth birthdays stuck, but understanding Alinskyism is one way of making sense of Cesar Chavez and the foundational architecture of the United Farm Workers.
Alinsky could sign the checks for Ross and Chavez because Alinskyism was funded—no small matter for promoting a political discipline. The money came from liquor. Alinsky’s first major benefactor was the Emil Schwarzhaupt Foundation, especially its executive director, Carl Tjerandsen. Schwarzhaupt was a German-Jewish immigrant who had made his fortune in Chicago. He had worked as a clerk in the liquor industry, and made some money buying and selling warehouse inventories. Anticipating Prohibition, he stockpiled those inventories before 1919 and then sold them through some “partners” for “medicinal purposes” during the 1920s. He came out of Prohibition with enough capital to set up the National Distillers Corporation, which he eventually sold to the Schenley Corporation. When setting up his foundation, Schwarzhaupt stipulated that his money be given away within twenty-five years of his death, as it was incumbent upon each generation to solve its own political problems, including its funding challenges.2
Schwarzhaupt died in 1950, and Tjerandsen, the executive secretary of the foundation, gave most of the old man’s money away so fast that almost all of the $3.5 million was gone before 1962. Tjerandsen gave fairly large chunks to just a few groups, relatively unknown at the time, among them the Highlander Folk School, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Migrant Ministry; but the main recipient was Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Starting in April 1953, the IAF received a direct grant of $150,000, which in the next ten years expanded to $608,486. More money went to other organizations and groups that had ties to Alinsky but were not directly funded by the IAF. Add it all up, and over a twelve-year period of intense giving nearly $3 million of Schwarzhaupt’s fortune went to fund Alinskyism.3
Fortuna also played her part. Carl Tjerandsen was a graduate student at the University of Chicago when he was appointed to the Committee on Education for American Citizenship, which had been created to decide, in the most general terms, how to spend Schwarzhaupt’s money. The sociologist Louis Wirth headed the