Strategy (69 page)

Dick Flacks, a young academic closely involved with the Port Huron Statement, observed the tension between the developing movement as a way of life and as an agency of change. The way of life he called “existential humanism,” which required no more than acting according to core beliefs, constantly striving “to approach an ethical existence,” but he saw that this could be irresponsible, searching “for a personally satisfying mode of life while abandoning the possibility of helping others to change theirs; of placing tremendous hope in the movement of the immediate community
for achieving personal salvation and gratification—then realizing that these possibilities are, after all, limited and, consequently suffering disillusionment.” As did Weber, Flacks sought to reconcile convictions with responsibility. This meant acting “politically because our values cannot be realized in any durable sense without a reconstruction of the political and social system.” Politics, however, apart from an existential ethic would be “increasingly manipulative, power-oriented, sacrificial of human lives and souls,”—in short, “corrupted.” The answer, suggested Flacks, was “strategic analysis,” though he acknowledged the prevailing suspicion of an “explicit and systematic preoccupation with strategy” as imposing artificial constraints, restricting spontaneity, and reducing responsiveness to what people really wanted. As it was the property of a few, “acting in terms of strategy is elitist.” Unfortunately, without strategy there would be no sense of priorities, inarticulateness, and “almost random behavior among students who want to do effective social action.”
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This described the problem rather than identified solutions. As with previous generations of radicals, the only way out of the dilemma appeared to be to get among the people, working with them to address their issues without claiming that they had all the answers. So it was that Hayden joined a community program, the Economic Research and Action Project, in Newark. The prohibition on elitism was limiting. There were other “liberal forces” in the area with whom it might be advisable to coalesce, but Hayden found them “extremely self-serving,” with “wide community contact but no active and radical membership base” and programs that “would do very little to change the real lives of the poor.” Entering into “political bartering” would violate “the basic trust we have with the neighborhood people. Our place is at the bottom.”
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Liberal strategies assumed that the “masses are apathetic and can only be roused because of simple material needs or during short periods of great enthusiasm.” Because of this, “they need skilled and responsible leaders.” The complaint then followed a familiar path: leaders presumed that only they could maintain the organization. Because people reacted with “disinterest or suspicion” to such elitism, the leadership was able to call the masses apathetic, although he also acknowledged a worrying tendency to “think subserviently.”

Hayden was considering not the broad masses of Marxist mythology but a minority underclass.
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He recoiled from the obvious answer, which was to form coalitions or at least make temporary arrangements with the powerful. This was rejected because no more than “welfare-state reforms” would be on offer, bound to fail because they were “not conceived by the poor people they are designed for” and allowed the middle class to relax “into the comfortable
sense that everything is being managed well.” His focus was so relentlessly about power, and avoiding appearing to want it, that the assumption had to be that if those at the bottom had power they would do well by themselves and others. But would they want the things that the activist believed they ought to want? If their minds had been turned by years of powerlessness and a consumerist culture, might their demands and the efforts they were prepared to put behind be disappointing?

Unsurprisingly, he was left with a “mystery” when looking for a “workable strategy.” His aim was “a thoroughly democratic revolution,” reversing the abdication of power to “top-down organizational units,” out of which a “new kind of man” might emerge who could not be manipulated because it was “precisely against manipulation that he has defined his rebellion.” The poor would transform decision-making by acting on their aspirations, working against the grain of “an affluent and coercive society.” As he later accepted, the flaw in this analysis was assuming that the aspirations of the poor would be any different from the middle-class society whose values he personally derided. He already was aware of the difficulty of finding leaders who could forswear an interest in the organization for its own sake or a rank and file who understood and committed themselves to the movement's goals.
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While Hayden was struggling to sustain his commitment to participatory democracy, SNCC was in the process of abandoning it. James Forman, as executive secretary, had argued in 1964 for a proper mass organization rather than uncoordinated activists to compete with other civil rights organizations. To the centralizers, this simply required individuals to subordinate their own issues to the needs of the collective.

This was hard for many activists to take. They were afraid that a distant center would be insensitive to local concerns and indulge in empire-building. Moreover, it went against SNCC's founding ethos. Participatory democracy in practice, however, had been found frustrating and exhausting. There were the familiar problems of finding local people able to commit time and energy to the cause, and the tendency for the principle to paralyze decision-making with constant discussions which nobody dared bring to a conclusion, as every attempt to take an initiative was challenged as usurpation of democratic rights. In her book,
Freedom Is an Endless Meeting
, Francesca Polletta recounts how demands to “let the people decide” came up against the exasperating tendency of the people to be moderate and risk averse, seeking social services rather than revolution. This led to the conviction that people needed to have their real interests explained to them. There were also deeper factors at work. There was an issue with educated northerners who
were often seen by the local southerners as being self-serving, with a patronizing reverence for the untutored wisdom of the poor and ignorance of local culture. According to Polletta, this was more about class and education than race, though there were concerns about white liabilities as black community organizers. By 1966, however, black power had taken over and the new leadership of SNCC wanted to distinguish themselves from northern liberals by something tougher and more militant.
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It is worth comparing the experience of community organization as an exercise in participatory democracy with that of the man who did more than most to develop the idea of organizing local communities to take on local power structures. Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and joined the University of Chicago's sociology department as an undergraduate in 1926. The department was then under the leadership of Robert Park. Park, who had come to sociology later in his career after starting off as a reporter, was attuned to city life in all its forms and studied it with an almost voyeuristic curiosity.
Introduction to the Science of Sociology
, the book he published in 1921 with his close colleague Edwin Burgess, was for two decades a core text in the field. Burgess, a diffident man and in Parks's shadow, was more of a social reformer. He viewed “social research as the solutions to society's ills,” but less in terms of elite prescriptions and more in democratic terms, as a means of “harnessing social change.”
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Park and Burgess took students on field trips to explore Chicago, from the dance halls to the schools, the churches, and the families. The city was large and diverse, with distinctive immigrant communities. Organized criminal gangs, of which Al Capone's was the most famous, flourished during the Prohibition Era. The proximity to Canada meant that Chicago was a natural base for smuggling illicit liquor into the United States, and vicious competition developed over the control of the trade. The city should be a focus of study, Park argued, for it showed “the good and evil in human nature in excess. It is this fact, perhaps, more than any other which justifies the view that would make of the city a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be most conveniently and profitably studied.”
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Critical to this school of thought was the conviction, bolstered by research, that social problems had social rather than personal causes. Burgess took this a step further than Park, arguing that the role of researchers was to “organize the community for self-investigation.” The community should survey its own
problems, educate themselves about social issues, and develop a core group of leaders prepared to organize for “social advance.”

Burgess became a major influence on Alinsky, not least because he recognized in his student an ability that his academic record had obscured.
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Alinsky was drawn to criminology and upon graduation, he got a fellowship with Burgess's support. He decided to make a study of the Capone gang, if possible from the inside. Eventually he made contact by hanging around the gangsters and listening to their stories.
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For a while he worked as a criminologist in a state prison. Then, in 1936 he joined the Chicago Area Project designed to show how delinquency could be addressed socially. The cause of criminality was not individual feeble-mindedness but neighborhoods marked by multiple and reinforcing problems of poverty and unemployment. Burgess set the principles for the organizers. The program should be for the neighborhood as a whole, with local people autonomous in planning and operations. This required an emphasis on training and local leadership, strengthening established neighborhood institutions, and using activities as a device to create participation.
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He argued that local organizers, preferably former delinquents, could help show their own people a way to more acceptable behavior. This approach was controversial. He was directly challenging paternalistic social work and was accused of tolerating criminality, encouraging populist agitators to stir up local people against those who were trying to help them and had their best interests at heart.

In 1938, Alinsky was assigned to the tough Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, already notorious as the jungle of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel. He was a natural in the organizer's role. Clever, street-wise, and brash, Alinsky had a knack of gaining the confidence of people who might otherwise feel neglected and marginalized. His approach was more political than the project allowed, however. Not only did he use the issue of delinquency to move into virtually all problems facing the neighborhood, but he also put together a community organization based on representatives of key groups who had clout because of who they represented and not just as individuals. Alinsky also drew organized labor into his campaign, well exceeding his brief by getting involved in a struggle against the meatpacking industry. By 1940 he had left the project and struck out on his own.

Over time he became more scathing in his critique of the social sciences as remote from the realities of everyday existence. Quoting a description of the University of Chicago's sociology department as “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,” he added his own observation that “asking a sociologist to solve a problem is like
prescribing an enema for diarrhea.”
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Certainly tendencies in sociology had moved on since the Park/Burgess era at Chicago. Nonetheless, Alinsky's initial trajectory reflected the preoccupations of the discipline during the interwar years.

In an article published in the
American Journal of Sociology
in 1941, Alinsky provided a clear account of his approach. He described the wretched lives of those working in the slaughter houses and packing-houses of the Back of the Yards area. The neighborhood was a “byword for disease, delinquency, deterioration, dirt, and dependency.” The traditional community organization would be of little value in such an area because it considered individual problems in isolation from each other and the community in isolation from the “general social scene.” Instead, by placing each community within its broad context, its limited ability to “elevate itself by means of its own bootstraps” could be acknowledged. He identified “two basic social forces which might serve as the cornerstone of any effective community organization.” These were the Catholic Church and organized labor: “The same people that comprise the membership of a parish also form the membership of a union local.” He got local organizations to come together to form the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. Membership did not just involve the church and the unions, but also the local chamber of commerce, the American Legion post, as well as “the leading businessmen, the social, the nationality, the fraternal, and the athletic organizations.”

Through the council, problems such as unemployment and disease were shown to be threats to all the people, both labor unions and businesses dependent upon local purchasing power. The various leaders “learned to know one another as human beings rather than as impersonal symbols of groups which, in many cases, appeared to be of a hostile nature.” Behind this was a “people's philosophy” that emphasized rights rather than favors and the need to rely on an organization “built, owned, and operated by themselves” to get their rights.
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This was obviously a completely different philosophy to Hayden's. Alinsky went out of his way to draw in local organizations; Hayden was worried that this kept ordinary people excluded and reinforced local power structures. At the time, many on the Left would have queried working with the Catholic Church, which was deeply hostile to the atheistic Communist Party. Alinsky's self-definition as a radical was reflected, as his biographer notes, in his “inclinations, convictions and rhetoric, and wishes” but less so “in his actions, which took a more pragmatic form.”
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He was prepared to forge coalitions with whosoever appeared appropriate. His role model was not so much the communist agitator but the labor organizer.