I feel confident that I could persuade a millionaire on a Friday to subsidize a revolution on Saturday out of which he would make a huge profit on Sunday even though he was certain to be executed on Monday.”
— Saul D. Alinsky.
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born in 1909 to Jewish Russian immigrants in a Chicago ghetto. .. Saul’s father instilled in his son a distrust of capitalism and minimized the connection between hard work and economic reward.
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Alinsky .. achieved entrée into Al Capone’s inner circle: ...
Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al’s income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti’s boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob’s operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.”
Alinsky spent two years as a “nonparticipating observer” of Capone’s mob. “I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob .. lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.” Alinsky may have also learned that a community’s political arena is as ripe an environment for mob tactics as the Chicago streets.
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a Wellesley College coed submitted a thesis titled, “There is Only the Fight … An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In her thesis’s acknowledgments, Hillary D. Rodham thanks Alinsky for his ideas, assistance and even a job offer. She then evaluates three Alinsky community organizing efforts, one of which was Rochester.
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— Hillary D. Rodham, “There is Only the Fight,”
(Excerpt) Read more at postindependent.com ...
