[Reprinted from the July 20^th 1997 L.A. Times, with the permission of the author, recalling the importance of Alinsky's ideas twenty-five years after his death and the important, new work the IAF is doing]

Twenty-five years ago today [June 12th], the pioneering Chicago community organizer Saul Alinsky died. But, like one of his heroes, Tom Paine, who also believed in the radical American idea that democracy is for ordinary people, Alinsky’s spirit and importance live on. For me, that’s no small comfort amidst the decay of democracy where voters are vanishing, the special interest money pours in and the president’s bridge to the 21st Century leads to the end of the inheritance tax as we know it.

In recent years, there has been a flood of books lamenting our skewed politics and frayed civil society. When I pick one up, I flip to the index to see if "Alinsky" appears. In the best of the lot, he does. Alinsky is "an important model for contemporary citizen politics," William Greider wrote five years ago in Who Will Tell the People?, his best-selling and gloomy account of "the betrayal of American democracy." And last year in Michael Sandel’s thoughtful Democracy’s Discontent, he cited Alinsky and his successors at the Industrial Areas Foundation (I.A.F.) as representing "one of the most promising expressions" of civic participation and noted that, through a national network of community-based organizations, Alinsky’s direct descendants are "teach[ing] residents of poor communities how to engage in effective political activity."

The scale of the I.A.F.’s work today--there are some 50 church-based, interfaith and interracial organizations stretching from East Brooklyn to the East Side of Los Angeles--is steadily approaching Alinsky’s unfulfilled dream of a large network of "Peoples’ Organizations" that would provide tens-of-thousands of ordinary working and modest-income Americans with a measure of power to shape decisions that affect their lives and communities.

In the 1940s, Alinsky organized the basic model in "the Jungle," the old Chicago stockyards neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraking work. There, he recruited and guided indigenous leaders who identified common interests that brought together previously hostile ethnic groups of Serbs and Croatians, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Lithuanians into a large organization, the Back of The Yards Neighborhood Council. The Council, like the handful of other large-scale organizations Alinsky organized in predominately black communities in the late 50s and 60s, was in part a pressure group, demanding and negotiating with public and private sector institutions on bread and butter issues like better schools and more jobs, and in part a self-help operation that established credit unions, built or rehabbed housing and provided social services. As important as these functions were, the greater significance of Alinsky’s voluntary community organizations is that they provided a connection between the individual and the larger society. This was what made Alinsky’s experiment important, Daniel Bell wrote in 1945, in his review of Alinsky’s book, Reveille for Radicals, because it "attempts to give people a sense of participation and belonging [and] becomes important as a weapon against cynicism and despair . . . ."

A real democracy cannot long endure when half of the people no longer vote and in most every other way have dropped out of the democratic process. But when the opposite occurs, one is afforded a glimpse of the wonderful possibilities of citizenship through collective action. Such was the case last month at a church meeting in Baltimore where Maryland governor Parris N. Glendening announced that he would issue an executive order barring employers from hiring taxpayer-subsidized welfare recipients to replace workers already on the job, making Maryland the first state to take such action on the controversial "worker displacement" issue.

Glendening, who faces a tough re-election challenge next year, made his announcement at a church filled with 300 black, white and Hispanic representatives of the I.A.F.’s three, large Maryland-based community organizations. "It doesn’t do any of us any good to talk about declining welfare rolls if we are forcing other people into unemployment," the governor said. "Our intention is to state very clearly: It’s illegal, . . . and it’s immoral." The fact that a politician can discern morality a lot faster in a roomful of registered voters has little to do with cynicism but says much about how the democratic process works—and has always worked—in our country. On another issue, Glendening rejected the I.A.F. groups’ proposal that the state invest $90 million in a program to create 5,000 public-sector jobs.

But the I.A.F., no doubt, will be back to fight this battle when it is bigger and stronger. Making progress toward a more just society may not be inevitable but it is possible, Alinsky believed-- and, as he once observed: "We’ll see it when we believe it."

Sanford D. Horwitt is the author of Let Them Call Me Rebel, a biography of Saul Alinsky