Saul Alinsky also did not finish his dissertation

But he did hang out with Frank Nitti

Every week I tell myself that next week I will finally turn to economics. And every week it seems something else comes up. This week is no different, but I guarantee the economics will come. The thing that took me off course this week was a small folder in the Ernest Burgess archives, containing correspondence with Saul Alinsky. Burgess was the slightly more traditional professor of sociology who together with Robert Park oversaw the great studies of urban life of the Chicago School of sociology. Alinsky, as you probably know was a self-styled political radical and Chicago community organizer of ‘the back of the yards,’ whose books Rules for Radicals and even more Reveille for Radicals are still read.

The folder contained little correspondence between Alinsky and Burgess, but it nonetheless shed great light on the early explorations of Chicago’s most famous activist. Alinsky had taken several courses with Burgess in the late 1920s, in the first of them, ‘social pathology,’ he was asked to reflect on his own experiences with disorganization. He describes an instance where he lost all self-control after a girl had stepped on the court to tell her boyfriend, Saul’s tennis opponent, that he could not let himself be beat by ‘that Jew.’ Saul was overcome with confusion and rage, and soon stormed and knocked out his opponent. But his stories overall give the impression of a solid and comfortable upbringing, during which the best doctor in the Midwest was called in after he had injured his hip playing football.

This early essay shows that Alinsky felt he had found his calling, he scored his first A’s in university with Burgess, and wanted to study crime and corruption like his professor was doing. Alinsky’s first project, together with the fellow student Constance Weinberger was to visit and observe public dance-halls, a popular past-time for the urban youth but one that was often associated with prostitution. Together they visited several of them, wrote up life-stories of the boys and girls who frequented them, and observed how the dance-halls employed girls who could be hired for a dance. That latter point clearly foreshadowed the famous Chicago study about the Taxi Dance-Halls by Paul Cressey.

Alinsky and partner have clearly not escaped their ‘conventional’ beliefs yet, when they describe a girl of twenty-two as definitely pathological, because she goes to the dance halls not merely for a pick up, but: “She gets a thrill and a sexual reaction out of merely dancing with a man, and it is for this that she goes.”

When they visit an only halfway respectable dancehall they describe the scene as follows:

There is a great deal of immoral dancing at Dreamland. While there are bouncers walking around the floor, either they make it their business to look the other way, or the standard of dancing is much broader than at White City, which is in the same class as Dreamland in the scale of graduation from one dance hall to another. One wonders if at Dreamland, as at White City, there is an agent of the Juvenile Protective Association present almost constantly. One wonders – and looking around one doubts it.

But Alinsky had clearly caught the bug for this kind of research and started a dissertation studying crime in the early 1930s. He had apparently acquired a much better sense of what it takes to hang out with other social groups, aided by the impressive Ford convertible his mother gifted him, because he is soon hanging out with Frank Nitti, one of Al Capone’s enforcers. A little later he was working with Clifford Shaw on a project about prisons, and became entangled in a plot to ensure the transfer of a convicted gangster from the notorious Joliet prison to a more hospitable facility. (Alinsky refuses to cooperate and is left unharmed, but somebody else is willing to accept the bribe and the gangster is moved is the next week.)

That Alinsky was quick to learn to adapt to his circumstances, or at least became aware of its importance is clear from his first published article. It discusses the importance of being able to speak the language of the social group you’re studying:

The usage of delinquent vocabularies characteristic of the inmate’s community is of great value in the establishing of closer rapport. To illustrate, if the question, “Have you ever been chased by the police while you were in a stolen car and have the police shoot at you” is phrased ‘‘Have you ever been in a hot short and got lammed by the heat and have them toss slugs at you,” a warmer and more responsive answer usually results.

The major theme of Sanford Horwitt’s biography, from which I borrowed some of the material in the second half of this post, is the great ability of Alinsky to tell stories. Stories about his upbringing and identity, his time with the Italian gangsters, but also stories to organize communities and to combat injustice. I have no direct evidence that Alinsky learned this from Burgess and Park, but it is very clear that their sociological fieldwork approach is highly congruent with an the importance of seeing the world through the eyes of the other, and the role that language plays in this process.

Saul Alinsky never finished his dissertation, but the reasons were not nearly as dramatic as for Lohman. He simply opted that other types of writing were more to his liking, and he used his experiences to build his credentials in his hometown, and in works of fiction like Prison Bug Ward (unpublished).

P.S.: This past week and a half in Chicago I was frequently reminded of the subtle ways in which people can tell you’re an outsider. I am by now frequently mistaken for a local in Fairfax and around the GMU campus, but in Chicago all the interactions quickly led to the other person asking me where I’m from.