Reveille for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Author:Saul Alinsky [Alinsky, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9780307756886
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

The recognition and understanding by the organizer of the tremendous significance of personal identification is fundamental to the building of People’s Organizations. Personal identification is the crux and heart of the People’s Organization and will be discussed at greater length later, but we are concerned here with its importance in organizational work. The principle of personal identification, when used consciously and deliberately, provides an enormously important setting wherein the organizer can create and project an infinite variety of tactics. The following report was illustrative:

“The organization had made a lot of headway and from the point of view of its leaders every important part of the community life had been brought into the organization excepting one big business which was owned and operated by Old Man Jones. Old Man Jones was known by that name only to those people in the neighborhood who felt that regardless of how bad anyone was ‘we ought to be Christian and tolerant in our outlook.’ To everyone else in the neighborhood he was called ‘that lousy blankety blankety slimy hypocrite called Jones.’

“I hadn’t spent my first hour in the neighborhood before I was told about Old Man Jones. His name was the worst epithet a person could use in insulting an enemy. If you really hated anyone you would describe him as being so foul that he was almost as bad as Old Man Jones. Jones was in his middle sixties, a silent, sour-faced person who, if he had one friend, it was a well-kept secret. He was a bachelor, and this fact was always mentioned with the accompanying statement that ‘Old Man Jones was descended from a long line of bachelors.’ Jones was the kind of person who would make a reactionary look like the reddest of radicals. He had not voted since the days of Calvin Coolidge because of his conviction that both the Republican and Democratic Presidential candidates were much too radical and ‘dangerous.’ Even the children, in their annual Christmas presentation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol would muff their lines and refer to Scrooge as ‘Old Man Jones.’

“However, Old Man Jones was important in the community in that his business interests represented a significant part of the economic structure of that area. By dint of considerable and persistent work I finally convinced Old Man Jones that he should join the People’s Organization. It is true that Jones’s reasons were not of the best and were purely self-protection. I remember Jones’s looking at me and saying, ‘Well, I think things have come to a pretty pass when a man has to get into these things just to make sure that he can keep half his money if the common scum ever take over the country.’ I felt that considerable progress had been made in getting Old Man Jones to agree to come along halfway with the organization.

“I hurried to the officers of the organization to inform them that Old Man Jones ‘had finally given up and was joining.’ My announcement of Jones’s capitulation to the organization’s officials was greeted by an ominous silence.

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