January 30: Rules for Radicals

Saul Alinsky, the founder of modern community organizing in America, was born in Chicago on this date in 1909 in an Orthodox Jewish family. “I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit” of Judaism, he said, “but I’ll tell you one thing about religious identity. Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say — and always will say — Jewish.” Alinsky was founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and wrote Rules for Radicals (1971), which proposed effective strategies for organizing powerful grassroots movements. Jack Newfield described him as one of “the purest avatars of the populist movement,” ranking him with Ralph Nader, Cesar Chavez and Jesse Jackson. In the 1930s, Alinsky worked in the labor movement and in criminology; in the 1950s he worked primarily in black ghettos in Chicago, Michigan, New York, California and other locations; before his death in 1972 he was turning his attention to the white “Silent Majority” of Richard Nixon. “I love this goddamn country,” he said, “and we’re going to take it back.”

“The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.” —Saul Alinsky

Watch Part One of The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy, a 1999 sixty-minute documentary about Saul Alinsky by Bob Hercules & Bruce Orenstein, narrated by Alec Baldwin.