Reveille for Radicals

205 Pages·2010·1.02 MB·English

by  Saul D. Alinsky

VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1989
Copyright 1946, © 1969 by Saul D. Alinsky
Copyright renewed 1974 by Mrs. Irene M. Alinsky
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in
the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published,
in different form, by the University of Chicago Press in 1946. This edition was originally
published, in hardcover, by Random House, Inc. in 1969.
Library of Congress-in-Publication Data
Alinsky, Saul David, 1909–1972.
Reveille for radicals/Saul D. Alinsky.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30775688-6
1. Community organization—United States.
2. United States—Social conditions. 3. Social action—United States. I. Title.
HN 65.A674 1989
303.48′4–dc20 89-40118
v3.1
To the memory of Helene
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction to the Vintage Edition
Part I
Call Me Rebel
1 What Is a Radical?
2 Where Is the Radical Today?
3 The Crisis
Part II
The Building of People’s Organizations
4 The Program
5 Native Leadership
6 Community Traditions and Organizations
7 Organizational Tactics
8 Conflict Tactics
9 Popular Education
10 Psychological Observations on Mass Organization
11 Reveille for Radicals
Afterword to the Vintage Edition
About the Author
Let them call me a rebel and welcome,
I feel no concern from it; but I should
suffer the misery of devils, were I to
make a whore of my soul.…
—THOMAS PAINE
Introduction to the Vintage Edition
A has passed since I wrote Reveille for Radicals. Reading it after
GENERATION
all that time was an eerie, schizy experience. The angry, defiant, go-for-
broke, irreverent youngster coming through in these pages seemed
almost but not quite another person. At times I found myself saying to
him, “Cool it, kid, you’re taking on a thousand-to-one odds as though it
were an even bet; you’ll learn when you get more experience to watch it
—if the odds are higher than a hundred to one.”
I began to write, “As I look back upon my youth …” but the words
stick, for I don’t feel an hour or year older. I guess that when you are
constantly in the arena of conflict, you just don’t have the time to grow
older. Life is conflict and in conflict you’re alive; action does not admit
age into the arena. Sudden death, yes; but gradual age, no.
As I look at Reveille after twenty years of more experience in many
different battlefields, cities, with many different peoples, issues, religious
institutions and against many different opponents, the question naturally
comes up as to what I would change if I were writing Reveille today. For
me, the question can’t be separated from another: “Have I changed and,
if so, how?” Of course I have changed. It is idiocy to assume that anyone
can be alive and not be changing constantly. There are many who go
through the years without changing but they are the ones who huddle on
a chronological treadmill searching for an illusionary security and
something called status. The senility of security and status even afflicts
many of the so-called young. They never live. Life is an adventure of
passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love, a burning curiosity to go
with the action to see what it is all about, to search for a pattern of
meaning, to burn one’s bridges because you’re never going to go back
anyway, and to live to the end. Terrified by this dramatic vista, most
people just exist; they turn from the turbulence of change and try to hide
in their private make-believe harbors, called in politics conservatism; in
the church, prudence; and in everyday life, being sensible.
It is in chronological youth when time ahead seems endless that one is
tempted to take a chance and live—particularly so if one’s youth takes
place, as did mine, in a period of upheaval and massive dramatic
change, with the collapse of many accepted values and the opening up of
an uncharted future, offering the beckoning adventure of the search for
the new life. The accepted values of security, work, and money as the
way to “happiness” went in the great crash of 1929. In the crisis, life
became polarized and good and evil stood clear and unmistakable.
The years of the 1930’s followed, when I was in my twenties. Days of
the great depression, F.D.R.’s New Deal, John L. Lewis’ organized labor
revolution of the C.I.O. battling the corporate giants of America; times of
compassion which found those in the North and East suffering with the
plight of the sharecroppers and Okies of the South and Midwest. A time
when black and white moved together in their need for strength in face
of the common enemy of unemployment and low wages; the great
depression heightened man’s awareness and concern for his fellow man.
This and more of the same was happening at home while abroad Europe
was boiling up a Wagnerian devil’s brew of unbelievable madness in the
twilight of civilization.
The pillars of the past had become tombstones and those which
survived were suspect and challenged. Disillusionment’s child is
irreverence, and irreverence became one of my major heritages from an
angry, irreverent generation. In this way, I have not changed. I am still
irreverent. I still feel the same contempt for and still reject so-called
objective decisions made without passion and anger. Objectivity, like the
claim that one is nonpartisan or reasonable, is usually a defensive
posture used by those who fear involvement in the passions,
partisanships, conflicts, and changes that make up life; they fear life. An
“objective” decision is generally lifeless. It is academic and the word
“academic” is a synonym for irrelevant.
I have changed in that I have learned to freeze my hot anger into cool
anger and to make my intuitive irreverence conscious, to challenge not
only the opposition but myself, to realize and accept the prime
importance of the Socratic adage about the unexamined life. Through
action, reflection, study, testing, and synthesis I have learned to distill
experience from living. Experience is the integrating of the actions and
events of life so that they arrange themselves into meaningful universal
patterns. Most people distill or digest this product of experience from the
actions and events of their daily lives, so that much of it passes through
their intellectual systems as segmented happenings and separate
memories. I have learned to search for laws of change, to discover for
myself such simple truths as that the real action is in the reaction. These
and other lessons of the past are the basis for my forthcoming book,
Rules for Revolution, which I am now completing. In short, cool anger
and conscious understanding based on experience have made my actions
far more calculated, deliberate, directive, and effective. Now my actions
are designed primarily to induce certain reactions based on an analysis
of circumstances. I have learned not to confuse power patterns with the
personalities of the individuals involved; in other words, to hate
conditions, not individuals. Thus I have learned to become in many ways
the master rather than the servant of my tactics, and to develop far more
effective tactics—economic, political, and social—than the simple, hot,
angry, personalized denunciation. One must learn to see one’s opponent
in the context of circumstances to which one must respond.
Understanding these forces enables one to develop the strategy which
my opponents describe as Alinsky-style mass ju-jitsu. The opposition is
always stronger than you are and so his own strength must be used
against him. I have repeatedly said that the status quo is your best ally if
properly goaded and guided. I have also learned to avoid succumbing to
a rationale which would permit me the escape of becoming a rhetorical
radical and not a radical realist. These are a few of the lessons learned
from continuous action since I wrote Reveille for Radicals.
Through experience you learn to see people not as sellouts and
betrayers of moral principles, but as the result of ongoing processes. In
the past I attacked labor leaders who started out lean, hungry, and
idealistic and as they succeeded became fat-bellied, fat-headed, and
cynical. I now see these people as having moved from the Have-Not’s to
the Have’s, and that morality is largely a rationalization of the point you
happen to occupy in the power pattern at a given time. If you’re a Have-
Not you’re out to get, and your morality is an appeal to a law higher than
man-made laws—the noblest ideals of justice and equality. When you
become a Have then you are out to keep and your morality is one of law,
order, and the rights of property over other rights.
A clear example of this is the story of what happened to a major
organization in what was at one time the worst of America’s slums,
Chicago’s notorious Back of the Yards, the site of Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle.
In the dawn of the Back of the Yards the members—mostly Polish-
Americans—fought discrimination against themselves, and to justify
their cause they had to be men and denounce all discrimination against
anyone. Then they stood and fought as the David of equality for all
mankind against the Goliath of prejudice, segregation, and the
repression of the prevailing Have’s.* Through the years they mounted
victory upon victory and moved steadily up the ladder from the Have-
Not’s to the Have-a-Little-and-Want-More’s.
They then cast their lot with the Have’s, as—with a few burning
individual exceptions—the middle class always does. They moved into
the nightfall of success, and the dreams of achievement which make men
fight were replaced by the restless nightmares of fear: fear of change,
fear of losing material possessions. Today they are part of the city’s
establishment and are desperately trying to keep their community
unchanged. They rationalize thus: they are not trying to keep blacks out
but rather are trying to keep their people in. They are segregationists.
They have experienced the fate of all successful organizations of men:
witness the Christian Church as it evolved from the days of the martyrs
to what it is today, organized labor from the days of rebellion to what it
is today, and so with all victorious revolutionary movements that trade
in their birthrights for a mess of property, power and the grand illusion
of security.
Do I regret my leadership in organizing the Back of the Yards? I do
not. If I could have foreseen what has come to pass I would still do it
again because of the many changes that have at the same time come
about in some 200,000 lives in what had been a jungle of despair and
defeat.
The passing years have not brought disillusionment but, on the
contrary, a firmer and deeper faith in people and the principles stated in
Reveille for Radicals. This is the result of my having learned more about
the world as it is and more about not confusing it with the world as I
would like it to be. To understand the behavior of people as they are in