Alinsky's Rules For Radicals

Rules for Radicals: Saul Alinsky's 1971 field manual, subtitled 'A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals,' lays out 13 tactical rules for how the have-nots can take power from the haves, from 'power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have' to 'pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.' Published a year before his death, it became one of the most quoted and most fought-over playbooks in American politics.

Saul Alinsky: Before he ever organized a neighborhood, he was a University of Chicago criminology student who embedded himself with Al Capone's outfit, studying how the mob really ran. He said he learned more about power from Frank Nitti's men than from any textbook.

Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council: Alinsky's first big win in 1939 was in the slum behind Chicago's Union Stock Yards, the same district Upton Sinclair exposed in The Jungle. He did the unthinkable by uniting rival Catholic ethnic parishes with the packinghouse unions into one bloc.

Bernard Sheil: The Chicago auxiliary bishop gave Alinsky's Back of the Yards campaign its moral cover, proving Rule 2 in action: never go outside the experience of your people. For a Catholic neighborhood, a bishop on the platform was worth more than any outside agitator.

Marshall Field III: The department store heir was one of the main bankrollers of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation, meaning one of America's richest men funded the training of organizers built to pressure the rich.

Industrial Areas Foundation: Founded by Alinsky in 1940, the IAF outlived him by decades and still trains organizers who build coalitions of churches, unions and civic groups across dozens of American cities.

Reveille for Radicals: Alinsky's first book, published in 1946, became an unexpected bestseller and set out the core idea he would sharpen 25 years later: that democracy only works when ordinary people are organized enough to make powerful people negotiate.

John L. Lewis: Alinsky studied the fiery mine workers' leader up close and wrote his biography in 1949. Lewis's CIO strikes taught him that confrontation, not politeness, is what brings institutions to the table.

The Woodlawn Organization: In the early 1960s Alinsky helped Black residents on Chicago's South Side organize against the University of Chicago's plan to expand into their neighborhood, forcing one of the country's most powerful institutions to negotiate with the people it planned to displace.

O'Hare International Airport: To pressure Chicago into keeping promises to Woodlawn, Alinsky threatened a 'shit-in,' where activists would occupy every toilet at the world's busiest airport. The plan was deliberately leaked, City Hall caved, and it was never carried out, a textbook case of his rule that the threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

Richard J. Daley: Alinsky's campaigns treated Chicago's machine mayor as the personalized target his Rule 13 demands, refusing to let blame dissolve into a faceless bureaucracy. Daley, a master of power himself, ended up negotiating rather than risking public humiliation.

FIGHT: After the 1964 Rochester riots, local Black churches invited Alinsky in and formed FIGHT (Freedom, Integrity, God, Honor, Today), led by Minister Franklin Florence. Its target was the biggest employer in town.

Eastman Kodak: When Kodak backed out of a 1966 deal to hire and train hundreds of Black workers, Alinsky went outside the company's experience by collecting shareholder proxies from churches and showing up at the 1967 annual meeting. Kodak, never before hit by a stockholder revolt over civil rights, agreed to a jobs program within months.

Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra: Alinsky floated a plan to buy 100 concert tickets for activists who would feast on baked beans beforehand and then fill the hall with flatulence. It was pure Rule 5, ridicule is man's most potent weapon, because no police force can arrest a smell.

Fred Ross: Alinsky's West Coast organizer invented the 'house meeting,' small gatherings in living rooms that built trust one kitchen at a time. In 1952 he knocked on the door of a young farmworker named Cesar Chavez.

Community Service Organization: Built by Ross with IAF backing in Los Angeles, the CSO registered tens of thousands of Mexican American voters and in 1949 helped elect Edward Roybal, the first Latino on the LA City Council since 1881.

Cesar Chavez: Before co-founding the United Farm Workers, Chavez spent a decade on the Alinsky payroll as a CSO organizer. The grape boycott later applied a classic Alinsky move, turning ordinary grocery shoppers into a pressure force growers could not ignore.

Ed Chambers: Alinsky's successor at the IAF shifted the work from loud confrontation toward the 'one-on-one,' a deliberate relational meeting that became the backbone of modern congregation-based organizing.

Jacques Maritain: The famous French Catholic philosopher became Alinsky's close friend and pen pal, calling him one of the few truly great men of the century. An agnostic Jewish radical and a Thomist theologian found common ground on human dignity.

Lucifer: One of the epigraphs of Rules for Radicals tips a hat to Lucifer as 'the very first radical known to man,' who rebelled against the establishment and won his own kingdom. That single line has fueled decades of attacks on the book.

Playboy Magazine: In a long 1972 Playboy interview months before his death, Alinsky joked that if there were an afterlife he would choose hell, because he'd start organizing the have-nots there. 'They're my kind of people.'

Hillary Rodham: As a Wellesley senior in 1969 she wrote her thesis on Alinsky, interviewed him, and was offered a job with his organization. She turned it down to attend Yale Law School, arguing change was possible from inside the system.

Barack Obama: From 1985 to 1988 he worked as a community organizer on Chicago's South Side with the Developing Communities Project, trained in methods descended directly from Alinsky's playbook, decades after Alinsky's death.

FreedomWorks: In 2009 the conservative group led by Dick Armey circulated Alinsky's tactics to Tea Party activists, proof that the rules travel across ideology. Armey argued the methods belonged to anyone outnumbered by the powerful.

Carmel-by-the-Sea: Alinsky died of a heart attack on a street in the wealthy California town in June 1972, aged 63, just one year after Rules for Radicals was published. The book has never gone out of print.