Strength Through Misery

Most congressional criticism of the federal anti-poverty program sounds bland and almost timid compared with Saul David Alinsky's views on the subject. Alinsky is a free-lance anti-poverty warrior and self-styled "professional radical" who has spent 27 of his 57 years in the business. "He thinks," says an OEO official, "that he owns the poor." To which Alinsky replies that the Administration program is "the greatest feeding trough that has come along for the welfare industry in years." Ridiculing the paper-sifting public-welfare bureaucracy, he once snorted: "If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, there must be a 36-lane boulevard to hell paved with surveys."

Alinsky's current, and curiously oldfashioned, theory is that the federal war on poverty is being used "to suffocate militant leadership that might threaten the Establishment." Such leadership among the poor themselves, says Alinsky, is their only real solution, and he incites it, as he acknowledges, by "rubbing raw the sores of discontent." Last week, following Alinsky's descent on Kansas City, the Missouri metropolis was sore all over. "Never in the 35 years that I have lived here," said one resident, "have I seen this town so torn by an issue."

Grapes of Wrath. Alinsky works through his Industrial Areas Foundation, a nonprofit organization from which he pays himself $20,000 a year. When he is invited into a community, usually by Protestant and Catholic clergymen, Alinsky immediately declares war on the local powers that be, including the existing anti-poverty program. Opinions differ on his accomplishments.

In Chicago, the Woodlawn Organization, a belligerent, Alinsky-forged army of Negro slum dwellers, employed rent strikes and picketing to win concessions ranging from tenement repairs to honest scales. In California, 30 Alinsky-founded community projects, mainly for Mexican-Americans, have increased their influence; last week an Alinsky disciple was leading a bitter strike of grape pickers in the San Joaquin Valley for better wages. In Rochester, N.Y., Alinsky's predominantly Negro organization FIGHT (an apt acronym for Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today) has severely harassed the already established poverty agency. In Syracuse, N.Y., Alinsky's apprentices trucked mobs to heckle a Republican mayor. In Detroit, his crowd distinguished itself by presenting the president of Wayne State University, of whom the Alinsky-ites disapprove, with a live skunk.

Canceled Checks. As for Kansas City, after a federation of churches signed a $127,350 contract with Alinsky, at least ten leading financial contributors to one of the city's foremost Episcopal parishes refused to sign any more pledge checks; one millionaire eliminated a fat bequest to the parish from his will. Undeterred, Alinsky publicly described the city's Negro area as a "zoo," got embroiled in an acrimonious argy-bargy with Board of Education President Homer Wadsworth, who declared: "Alinsky has the smell of the '30s about him." Retorted Alinsky: "We still have the smell of despair and oppression. Mr. Wadsworth smells nice. It's the smell of bankers and cologne." Whereupon Saul flew away to tend chores elsewhere, leaving Squire Lance, a militant Negro aide imported from Chicago, to scour Kansas City's slums in search of sores.

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