From the Back of the Yards

Answer: Saul Alinsky.

Question: What mid-century radical activist and community organizer deeply affected the early political education of both Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton?

This is a story I just learned a couple days ago, though it has been chronicled in various places, for instance this report on “All Things Considered” last May.

A year after Barack Obama finished college at Columbia, he took a job as a community organizer in Chicago, and thereby fell in with with several old-time Chicago activists who taught Obama the ways and tactics of community organizing. These old-timers had in turn been mentored by Saul Alinsky, who had started off his career as an organizer in the Back of the Yards district in Chicago in the 1930s.

Obama has never left his identity as a community organizer behind. After his U.S. Senate win his wife Michelle said “Barack is not a politician first and foremost. He’s a community activist exploring the viability of politics to make change.” To which he later responded “I take that observation as a compliment.”

The interesting twist is that a decade-and-a-half earlier, Hillary Rodham studied and came to know Alinsky. Rodham started off at Wellesley College as a Goldwater Republican, and ended up a supporter of the anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy. When she was scouting around for a senior thesis topic, her professor suggested Alinsky, whom she had met earlier on a youth church outing to inner-city Chicago. Her senior thesis was titled “ ‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.”

Rodham was quite taken by Alinsky himself, calling him “a man of exceptional charm”, but in the end felt that Alinsky-style actions were too small-scale to lead to widespread change, and instead believed one could effectively change the system from inside. After graduation she had the options of going to India on a Fulbright, entering law school at Harvard or Yale, or taking a job offered to her by Alinsky at his new training institute. She chose law school.