European bureaucrat or American as apple pie?

Saul Alinsky’s name came up again recently, and again, and again.

Indeed, a Democratic Party activist told me that he heard Newt Gingrich mention him twice in a recent debate.

“It’s a dog whistle,” he said. “It’s an anti-Semitic dog whistle. Nobody knows who Saul Alinsky was, but people hear the name and they think ‘Jewish, foreign-born radical.’”

My Democratic friend is not Jewish; but the Times’ conservative columnist David Brooks, who is, joked that continually mentioning the “Rules for Radicals” author backfired in Florida because many elderly voters likely confused Saul Alinsky with someone they knew. The Jewish Forward, however, was more forthright in using the term “dog whistle.” And veteran African-American columnist Clarence Page commented “it is not what the Republican presidential candidate says that counts; it is what his audiences feel when he says it."

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So you can guess what they feel when the candidate says: “Obama believes in Saul Alinsky and secular European socialist bureaucracy.”

In the recent media commentary on this, much of it blasting Gingrich, at least two people wrote that Alinsky was “as American as apple pie.” It should be pointed out, though, that one of his closest allies in his campaign to organize marginalized people was a foreigner – Fr. John O’Grady who left Ireland in 1909, the year that the organizer was born in Chicago.

I mentioned all of this in a piece (in our pre-Labor Day issue) looking at Nicholas von Hoffman’s wonderfully entertaining memoir about working with Alinsky. But it’s worth repeating. The organizer’s biggest backers financially were Catholic charities and the church itself. He had other individual helpers in an Irish-American dominated church, like Fr. Jack Egan, another close personal friend, and Bishop Bernard Sheil of Chicago.

He was a radical; he described himself as such, but he adhered to no rigid ideological system, and he believed in the Bill of Rights and the open society.

Alinsky, who was born to Jewish immigrant parents, was an agnostic, yet his closest intellectual friendship, von Hoffman reveals, was with Jacques Maritain, arguably the most influential Catholic philosopher of the 20th century.

Former ad agency executive Myles Spicer wrote recently in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that when he was at college, from 1950 to 1954, Alinsky was widely respected by liberals and conservatives alike. He remembered, too, that in the wake of the devastating Detroit riots of the summer of 1967, Michigan’s Republican governor met with Alinsky to discuss the grievances of the urban black poor.

"I think you ought to listen to Alinsky," the governor reported back to his white allies. His name? George Romney.

Spicer concluded: “As summed up by my own personal political hero, Adlai Stevenson, Alinsky's aims ‘most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual.’”

 

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