Advertise Rodham closed her thesis by emphasizing that she reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social action — seated next to Martin Luther King, the poet-humanist Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the labor leader now best remembered as the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president. In a very important way he is.
He added that they were "strict Orthodox, their whole life revolved around work and synagogue I remember as a kid being told how important it was to study. Because of his strict Jewish upbringing, he was asked whether he ever encountered antisemitism while growing up in Chicago.
I went through some pretty rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always say—and always will say—Jewish. He later stated, "Archaeologists were in about as much demand as horses and buggies.
All the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks.
Byhe became less active in the labor movement and became more active in general community organizing, starting with the Back of the Yards and other poor areas on the South Side of Chicago. His actions aroused the ire of Mayor Richard J. Daleywho also acknowledged that "Alinsky loves Chicago the same as I do.
Hearing of his plans, "the panic-stricken Oakland City Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city. In Rules for Radicals his final work, published in one year before his deathAlinsky wrote at the end of his personal acknowledgements: Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: In the opening paragraph Alinsky writes: What follows is for those who want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be.
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. When asked during an interview whether he ever considered becoming a Communist Party member, he replied: Not at any time.
I prize my own independence too much. The greatest crimes in history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics, from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi genocide.
Negroes were being lynched regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had started to work with them were tarred and feathered, castrated—or killed.
Most Southern politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction about boasting of it. In Rules for Radicals he wrote: According to Alinsky, once again the threat alone was sufficient to produce results. Wherever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy; and Rule 4: Alinsky described his plans for to begin to organize the white middle-class across the United States, and the necessity of that project.
He believed that many Americans were living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a turn to radical social change, to become politically active citizens. He feared the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, "making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday".
He was cremated in Carmel and his ashes were interred at Mt. Hell would be heaven for me. He is buried next to his first wife. Personal Life[ edit ] Alinsky was married three times.
His first marriage, which was to Helene Simon, was a very happy one which lasted until her death from accidental drowning in Alinsky mourned her passing for years after her death. Although the two were initially close, she started suffering from various illnesses in the s which affected her mental health, and she eventually began to verbally abuse Alinsky and act irrationally.
Alinsky, who was opposed to divorce due to his religion and believed that leaving a mentally ill spouse was unfaithful, eventually agreed to a divorce at the urging of his friends after conditions at home became unbearable.In , Hillary wrote her undergraduate thesis at Wellesley on — of all subjects — Saul Alinsky and his tactics.
She quite literally studied Alinsky. Rodham’s thesis describes trying to pin him down on his personal philosophy: “Alinsky, cringing at the use of labels, ruefully admitted that he might be called an existentialist,” she wrote.
The thesis in and of itself is limited to whether or not “social justice” can be attained through the tactics described by Alinsky in “Reveille For Radicals,” and the numerous speeches he gave on hundreds of college campuses in the s and s. Saul David Alinsky was born in in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky.
Alinsky stated during an interview that his parents never became involved in the "new socialist movement". Watch video · Now, one of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors was Saul Alinsky. And her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky.
This was someone that she greatly admired and that affected all of her philosophies subsequently. Now, interestingly enough, let me tell you something about . “Now, one of the things that I have learned about Hillary Clinton is that one of her heroes, her mentors, was Saul Alinsky,” said Carson.
“And her senior thesis was about Saul Alinsky.