exercise. Perhaps the two traditions were clearest at the founding in the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the first written in an open spirit of equality and rebellion as a call to arms; the second composed in secret session by men who explicitly set out to construct a republic that would minimize the threat of popular power.
Where does Alinsky fit in those conflicting traditions? He wants it both ways. Tom Paine is an Alinsky hero because of his call to patriotic sacrifice and his attack on the privileges of the aristocracy. But James Madison is also a hero because he was hard-headed, like Alinsky himself, and started with the proposition that people act only out of self-interest. Alinsky often described himself as a Jeffersonian, but in Reveille for Radicals he cites only Jefferson’s division of the world into aristocrats and democrats, and joins Jefferson on the side of the democrats. Trying to find Alinsky’s exact place within the American democratic tradition, we come up against the philosophical poverty of the first pages of Reveille for Radicals, a list of contradictory propositions in which the contradictions are ignored.
Alinsky’s conflation of conflicting ideas of democracy was partly an expression of the times. For him, and for many of Popular Fronters inside and outside the New Deal, democracy was a list and a magic charm. It included both the call—the reveille—to the people to shake off their apathy and participate in politics and a celebration of political institutions that were set up to blunt popular participation. That is a subtle trap, and a problem that Alinsky simply ignored. One will find no criticism anywhere in Alinsky of American political institutions as such. He never questions an institutional structure that places political power far from where people actually live and work. He has no problem with the two-party system and winner-take-all elections. He does not challenge the particular way that U.S. politics divides the public from the private; he is not worried that the elaborate system of checks and balances that were put into the Constitution as protection against popular power help protect corporate control of the U.S. government. Alinsky’s hero Madison was afraid of the political participation of ordinary people. Madison and his Federalist buddies consciously built a polity that they hoped would make direct political participation both difficult and unnecessary. Alinsky has nothing to say about that—as far as he’s concerned, American political institutions are just fine. Nor does he ever ask how there can be a democratic society without a democratic economy—that is, how capitalism can be compatible with democracy. For Alinsky, the problem—the essential problem of American democracy—is the people’s lack of participation. It ends up being our own fault.
Attacking Alinsky for his lack of ideology instead of exploring his ideas about democracy obscures what is perhaps Alinsky’s main addition to democratic theory: not the building of community coalitions but the particular role of the outside organizer. Alinsky has no confidence that individuals can learn, through their own leadership, to measure their interests against the community interest, and to think of the good of the whole as well as of themselves. Blinded by their own ambitions, indigenous leaders will never find a way to unite a neighborhood, or a city, or a region. This problem, the problem Madison called factionalism, is solved by the organizer. Organizers alone do not want power for themselves. Masters of restraint, they guide without dominating. They are the ones who help the people achieve a collective understanding of themselves, the understanding that makes democratic action possible. It is the organizers, not the indigenous leaders or the people, who are the heroes in all of the stories Alinsky loved to tell.
Consistent with Alinsky’s view, Cesar Chavez remained a CSO organizer—not its leader—for ten years, for as long as Alinsky signed the checks. But soon after Chavez left CSO and launched his own career, he blurred the line between organizer and leader. Within Alinskyism, that was heresy. Merging the position of organizer and leader was dangerous because what the organizer knew, what he had learned through his special training, might be used to build power not for others but for himself. That would lead not to internal democracy but to some form of corruption or autocratic power. Chavez explained his decision to a group of SNCC organizers in 1965:
People say, “I’m just an organizer.” An organizer is an outsider in many cases—there’s nothing wrong in that. But then he assumes a sort of special position in that program. First thing he says is “I’m not going to be an officer; it’s a people’s program.” What he’s saying is he’s something special, not an integral part of that group. I think that’s a mistake. If you organize a good group, pretty soon you find yourself hoping, “I wish I had a vote in this outfit.”14
Talking to his SNCC supporters, Chavez did not acknowledge any danger. All he wants, he humbly argues, is a vote in his own outfit. Those who would deny him that vote, he says, make too much of the difference between the organizer and the indigenous leaders; they think that the organizer is too special, so different from the others that he cannot be a regular part of the group. Ten years an organizer, Chavez had a good sense of how artificial it can be for the organizer to remain in the background, supposedly leaving the important decisions up to others. Didn’t that often become a kind of charade? Why wasn’t it possible for the organizer to become a full member of the group and still maintain his capacity to guide and to lead in a respectful, democratic manner? If that was apostasy, so be it. That’s what he was setting out to do.
It was a great departure. Alinsky had started with Madison and an exclusively self-interested humanity, so it was awfully hard for him to end with community and participatory democracy. The way to get there, the Alinsky way, was to introduce the idea of a superhuman who would manipulate competitors into a community—and then leave. But why is the organizer the one person who is not captive to Madisonian self-interest? If the organizer can learn to think of the whole, why can’t each member of the divided neighborhood? And if they can all learn together, what makes the organizer so different? Why can’t he settle down and stay? Understood this way, Chavez’s decision is an act of democratic faith, a statement that he is right down here with the rest of us, like all ordinary human beings, who are not Madison’s self-interest machines but a mixture of self-interest and connection to others, selfishness and idealism, regular people, capable of democratic politics.
But does this really happen? When Chavez assumed the role of leader, did he leave behind all the assumed superiority of the juggler, the catalyst, the alchemist, the essential human ingredient who could transform the factions into the united community? Or was Chavez still the only one who could truly think of the whole, the only one who could rise above the battle for personal power, the living embodiment of the community’s best version of itself?
Throughout his political life Cesar Chavez, the leader-organizer, continued to believe that organizers rather than local leaders were the crucial people who made politics happen. The organizers were, he said in 1969, “the heroes of the farm worker movement.” Without the guidance of skilled organizers, ultimately without his own direction and management, rank-and-file leaders would be forever trapped in a competitive individualism, incapable of building their own movement. That idea came from Saul Alinsky.
* In the sixty-three years since Alinsky wrote Reveille for Radicals, unions have lost much of what strength they had as well as much of their attraction for would-be radicals; most contemporary Alinskyites no longer place them at the center of their concerns. They still build People’s Organizations, but most often the core groups of a PO are religious congregations rather than unions.
September ’58 to June ’59
John Soria, at six foot two and 220 pounds, was eight inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than his traveling companion, Cesar Chavez. Big John and Little Cesar, some people playfully dubbed them in Oxnard, California, in 1958. They both came from farm worker families, where Soria had once been Juan, and Cesar’s name had been pronounced as the softer, more melodious “Sáyzar.” Chavez, thirty-one, was the senior organizer who had been making a living doing Mexican American community politics for
