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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Social Movements
- Sprache: Englisch
This incisive book provides a critical history and analysis of community organizing, the tradition of bringing groups together to build power and forge grassroots leadership for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. Begun by Saul Alinsky in the 1930s, there are today nearly 200 institution-based groups active in 40 U.S. states, and the movement is spreading internationally.
David Walls charts how community organizing has transcended the neighborhood to seek power and influence at the metropolitan, state, and national levels, together with such allies as unions and human rights advocates. Some organizing networks have embraced these goals while others have been more cautious, and the growing profile of community organizing has even charged political debate. Importantly, Walls engages social movements literature to bring insights to our understanding of community organizing networks, their methods, allies and opponents, and to show how community organizing offers concepts and tools that are indispensable to a democratic strategy of social change.
Community Organizing will be essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of sociology, social movements and social work. It will also inform organizers and grassroots leaders, as well as the elected officials and others who contend with them.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
1 Introduction: Making Change
Barack Obama: The First Organizer President
Community Organizing
Social Movements
Social Movement Analysis
Waves of Reform and the Emergence of Community Organizing
2 Saul Alinsky and the Industrial Areas Foundation
Chicago
The University of Chicago
John L. Lewis and the CIO
Back of the Yards
The Industrial Areas Foundation
California and the Community Service Organization
The IAF Builds a Successful Individual Member Organization
The Woodlawn Organization
The War on Poverty
FIGHT
Alinsky in the Late 1960s and Early 1970s
The IAF after Alinsky
The Modern IAF
A Theology of Organizing: Healing the Body Politic
The IAF in Texas
The IAF in the Northeast
The IAF on the Move
3 An Organizing Worldview
Organization
Power
Organizers and Leaders
Training
4 Tools of the Trade
Tools
Tactics
Skills
5 New Networks Innovate
The SPIN Model of Social Movement Networks
PICO National Network
National People’s Action
From Citizen Action to USAction
ACORN
Generational Shift
Funding Community Organizing
The Catholic Campaign for Human Development
Conservative Critics
6 Organizing and Electoral Politics
Marshall Ganz
OFA
MoveOn
7 Alternative Approaches
Popular Education: The Highlander Center
Horizontalism
Asset-Based Community Development and Consensus Organizing
8 What’s Next?
Integrated Voter Engagement
Bridging Power and Vision
Working Together
Over the Long-Range: Toward a Progressive Strategic Alignment
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1
Two ideal types of social movements
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Social Movements series
Stephanie Luce, Labor Movements:Global Perspectives
David Walls, Community Organizing:Fanning the Flame of Democracy
Community Organizing
Fanning the Flame of Democracy
David Walls
polity
Copyright © David Walls 2015
The right of David Walls to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2015 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8816-9
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Abbreviations
AALC
African American Leadership Commission
ABCD
asset-based community development
ACORN
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
ACT
Allied Communities of Tarrant
AFL
American Federation of Labor
BUILD
Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development
BYNC
Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council
CBA
community benefit agreement
CBCO
congregation-based community organization
(C)CHD
(Catholic) Campaign for Human Development
CDBG
Community Development Block Grant
CDGM
Child Development Group of Mississippi
CIO
Committee on Industrial Organization
CO
council organizer
COPS
Communities Organized for Public Service
CORE
Congress of Racial Equality
CP
Communist Party
CSO
Community Service Organization
CWA
Communication Workers of America
DART
Direct Action and Research Training Center
EBC
East Brooklyn Congregations
ERAP
Economic Research and Action Project
FIGHT
Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today
IAF
Industrial Areas Foundation
IBCO
institution-based community organization
IJR
Institute for Juvenile Research
IMF
International Monetary Fund
IVE
integrated voter engagement
JwJ
Jobs with Justice
LULAC
League of United Latin American Citizens
NAACP
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
NBOP
North Bay Organizing Project
NIRA
National Industrial Recovery Act
NPA
National People’s Action
NTIC
National Training and Information Center
OBA
Organization for a Better Austin
OEO
Office of Economic Opportunity
OFA
Obama for America/Organizing for America/ Organizing for Action
OSR
Occupy Santa Rosa
OWS
Occupy Wall Street
PICO
Pacific Institute for Community Organization/ People Improving Communities through Organizing
PNCC
Pilsen Neighbors Community Council
PWOC
Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee
RO
regional organizer
SCLC
Southern Christian Leadership Conference
SDS
Students for a Democratic Society
SMART
Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit
SMI
social movement industry
SMO
social movement organization
SNCC
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
SPIN
Segmented Polycentric Ideological Networks
TEN
Transportation Equity Network
TMO
The Metropolitan Organization
TWO
The Woodlawn Organization
UFW
United Farm Workers
UMWA
United Mine Workers of America
USCC
United States Catholic Conference
WTO
World Trade Organization
WUNC
worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment
1Introduction: Making Change
Is the world to be changed? How? By whom?
The skeptical “first god” inThe Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht
Can the world be changed? Bertolt Brecht’s challenging question continues to provoke. Community organizers answer with a resounding “Yes!” But exactly how? And who would be the active agents of change?
This book argues that the tradition of community organizing launched by Saul Alinsky, as modified and developed, offers concepts and tools that are indispensable to a democratic strategy of social change that promotes grassroots leadership and power for social, economic, racial, and environmental justice. Some critics have claimed the scale of community organizing is too small for the task of making transformative change in a large and complex society. But it’s no longer just about stop signs, block clubs, and neighborhood associations. Consistent with Alinsky’s original vision, the scope of community organizing has expanded to include cities, metropolitan areas, states, and even national government policy. Alinsky’s approach to organizing, like the man himself, was a product of his time and place, and needed to be modified to thrive in changing circumstances. We will look at the development of this organizing tradition through a framework of social movement analysis, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and examine proposals to modify and develop community organizing to meet its promise of deepening democracy in our challenging times of expanding inequality.
This introductory chapter will define community organizing and social movements, glance at recent controversies about community organizing in national political races, present a typology that distinguishes community organizing from many other examples of social movements, and examine how community organizing figured in twentieth-century social reform. Chapter 2 explores the social, political, and intellectual forces that influenced Alinsky from the 1930s to the 1960s. Following Alinsky’s death in 1972, the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) under Ed Chambers began to systematize the training and practice of community organizing. The approach developed by Chambers and Ernesto Cortes, Jr. in the 1970s – a very different time from Alinsky’s – focused on developing an organization whose members are primarily religious congregations – often termed congregation-based community organizations (CBCOs). Today this approach is itself 40 years old and in need of updating. We will examine the innovations Chambers, Cortes, and others introduced to the IAF, and begin to assess whether they still match the circumstances of our time.
The IAF training programs, launched by Alinsky but developed and standardized by Chambers, have created an organizing culture that brings staff organizers and community leaders together in long-range commitments to one another and to the community organizing process. Chapter 3 outlines the essential features of the Alinsky tradition’s distinctive organizing worldview, which has had much to do with the success of CBCOs.
Chapter 4 surveys the “tools of the trade” of community organizing, many of which have been borrowed to one degree or another by movement organizations not necessarily sharing the worldview or organizational culture of the networks in the Alinsky tradition.
A venerable tool of community organizations in the Alinsky tradition is the public meeting, or accountability session, often an organization’s annual highlight gathering. Rather than simply analyze the elements of these pieces of public theater, Chapter 4 features a case study of the first public meeting, in October 2011, of the North Bay Organizing Project in California. The study tries to communicate a sense of the excitement that can occur at such events when there are genuine victories won that deserve celebration.
Chapter 5 explores the development of some distinctive contributions made by other new networks of community organizations. Of particular interest are the national networks – PICO, Gamaliel, National People’s Action, and ACORN – as they began to influence policy at the national level. Virginia Hine’s SPIN model of network analysis, which we will examine in that chapter, explains the ability of the network form to protect organizations from internal scandal and external attack.
The community organizing approach has been modified to apply to political campaigns, online activism, and mainstream social movement groups. Most notable is the work of Marshall Ganz, who worked with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers (UFW) for many years, served as a political consultant for Democrats from Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama, and now teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Chapter 6 looks at the applications of his approach. Chapter 7 examines other alternatives to the Alinsky tradition, including the popular education work of the Highlander Center, and the efforts to reduce hierarchy in organizational structure that fit under the title of horizontalism – ranging from the participatory democracy of the 1960s New Left, radical feminist groups, anti-nuclear and anti-globalization movements, and the recent Occupy movement. Finally, Chapter 8 considers various critiques of the community organizing tradition, and proposals to increase its power to win structural reforms and transformational change on a national level, particularly in alliance with labor and other social movements.
Barack Obama: The First Organizer President
Barack Obama’s successful 2008 Presidential campaign drew attention to community organizing by highlighting his work as an organizer in Chicago from 1985 to 1988, between completing his undergraduate studies at Columbia University and his decision to attend Harvard Law School. Obama had worked in far-south Chicago with the Developing Communities Project associated with the Gamaliel Foundation, a network of community organizing projects in the Alinsky tradition (Obama 1995: 133–86). He was mentored by Jerry Kellman and Mike Kruglik of the Gamaliel staff.
Conservative critics were vocal. In her Vice-Presidential candidate acceptance speech at the 2008 Republican convention, Alaska governor Sarah Palin commented sarcastically, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities” (Katz 2008–9). Campaigning in the 2012 Republican primary, former Congressman and House majority leader Newt Gingrich asserted, “The centerpiece of this campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.”
Hard-right author David Horowitz used the writings of Alinsky to attack Obama in his polemical pamphlet Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (Horowitz 2009), then promoted tactics similar to those he ascribed to Alinsky in another pamphlet, The Art of Political War for Tea Parties (Horowitz 2010). Some conservatives seemed obsessed with finding deeper connections between Alinsky and President Obama, despite the fact that Alinsky died in 1972 when Obama was 10 years old, and – no surprise – they never met.
The irony in this story is that Obama had come to doubt the efficacy of the Alinsky community organizing approach to make the changes in society that he had hoped to foster. In his 1988 article in Illinois Issues, “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” reprinted in After Alinsky (Obama 1990), Obama noted the contending alternative strategies of political empowerment, economic development, and grassroots organizing. He cited the economic self-help approach of Northwestern University professor John McKnight (see Chapter 7) as one promising supplement to community organizing. Although Obama remained upbeat in this article, it is clear he was becoming disillusioned with what he could accomplish working as a community organizer. In a round-table discussion in September 1989 on “Organizing in the 1990s,” among the authors of the articles collected in After Alinsky, Obama draws a sharper critique of the Alinsky tradition. First, organizing needs to place more emphasis on its long-term vision, based on its values, and less emphasis on people’s short-term self-interest. Second, Alinsky’s criticism of charismatic leaders and social movements, taken up especially by the IAF under Chambers, has been carried too far. And finally, avoidance of direct political involvement is a mistake; in the end politics is essential to obtaining the power to make social changes that can impact low-income communities across the country (Knoepfle 1990: 132–4). As we know, after completing law school Obama entered elective politics, running campaigns that built on his skills as a charismatic speaker and that had some of the feel of a social movement. John Judis may have exaggerated when he argued that Obama’s choice of a political career was more a “wholesale rejection” than an embrace of community organizing in the Alinsky tradition (Judis 2008: 19), but it is clear Obama personally had decided to approach making change from a different direction. The use of some organizing techniques in the Presidential campaign does not make it an example of good community organizing practice (Stout 2010: 260–77).
Community Organizing
By and large, community organizers welcomed the attention the Obama campaign brought to their profession, absurd and distorted as the references often were (Dreier and Moberg 2008–9). More young people were attracted to careers as organizers (Rimer 2009), and more communities were moved to develop broad-based community organizations. Whether these trends continue or not, community organizing has a higher public profile than it did before Obama’s Presidency.
There has been a substantial expansion of institution-based community organizations (IBCOs) over the last 20 years, especially in the last decade, mostly taking place under the radar of the mass media. As of 2011, a comprehensive study of the field by Interfaith Funders identified 189 active IBCOs operating in 40 states. The 178 IBCOs that responded to the survey had some 4,100 member institutions, primarily religious congregations, which represent some 5 million people (Wood et al. 2013: ii–iv). That’s an increase from approximately 133 groups in 1999 and more than double the number of some 90 groups in 1994. Congregation-based community organizing has become a significant expression of religious traditions of working for social justice (Slessarev-Jamir 2011: 67–96). But this success contains a puzzle. Community organizing is, at best, known locally; the major national networks have little national visibility. Political scientist Peter Dreier has caught this paradox in noting that “the whole of the community organizing movement is smaller than the sum of its parts” (Dreier 2007: 221). Why this may be so, and how organizers and leaders can realize the full potential of this movement, we will address over the course of this book.
What exactly is community organizing? Let’s begin with a broad definition from Doran Schrantz, executive director of ISAIAH, an organization of over 100 congregations in the St. Paul–Minneapolis area: “Organizing is a set of strategic disciplines and practices to build the capacity of people to participate in and shape democratic life” (Schrantz 2013). I would add a somewhat more detailed definition:
Community organizing is a process that seeks to build powerful, purposeful, coordinated, and disciplined activity by groups of people who support and challenge each other to affirm, defend and advance their values and self-interests. (Adapted from Mike Miller 1987)
This definition serves to emphasize that participants are serious about building powerful organizations, based on their interests and values, in which they are accountable to one another for their contributions toward the common goals.
The 2013 study by Interfaith Funders drew the following conclusion:
Collectively, IBCOs represent a social movement dedicated to building democratic power, strengthening public life, and improving social conditions in low-income and working-class communities… . They bolster public life by identifying leaders and developing them into effective advocates for their communities. In doing so, they help communities organize and generate power that can be channeled toward shaping public policy to meet needs at the local level and, increasingly, at the state and national level as well. (Wood et al. 2013: 3)
Social Movements
A premise of this book is that the field of community organizing can be considered as a type of social movement, and can be illuminated by applying social movement analysis. My definition of “social movement” is a composite drawing on several theorists who develop insights from the disciplines of sociology, political science, and history:
Collective efforts, on the part of people and organizations with common purposes, to promote or resist changes in the culture or structure of society that often use non-institutional methods in sustained interaction, sometimes over years and decades, with elites, opponents, and authorities (Flacks 2005: 5; McAdam 1982: 25; Moyer 2001: 2; Tarrow 1994: 1). Participants often make “public representations of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment (WUNC)” (Tilly 2004: 3–4).
Here movements are distinguished from interest groups through their willingness to use non-institutional methods – direct action, demonstrations, boycotts, sit-ins, and the like – beyond the usual lobbying of officials in the executive or legislative branches of government or executives of private corporations, or taking legal action through the court system.
Community Organizing as a Social Movement
The claim that community organizing can be considered a social movement is controversial, as leaders of the networks in the Alinsky tradition – particularly the IAF under Chambers – have argued that community organizing has little in common with social movements, and have criticized several features they see as characteristic of such movements. Political scientist Heidi Swarts presents a typology in her 2008 book Organizing Urban America that can reconcile these seemingly opposite positions. She develops two ideal types (as the term is used by Max Weber), which she labels “A” and “B,” but which have more intuitive meaning if we designate them “Protest Movements” and “Strategic Movements” (with community organizing being an example of a Strategic Movement) (see Table 1.1).
“Strategic” in this context means having a method and plan to achieve a specific objective. The two ideal types lie at the extremes of a continuum connecting the pair of opposites, such as instrumental (Strategic) to expressive (Protest). Few movements represent either of the pure types. As Swarts notes, “actual social movements combine elements of both types” (Swarts 2008: xxvii).
Table 1.1 Two ideal types of social movements
Strategic Movements
Protest Movements
Instrumental
Expressive
Power
Virtue
Winning
Speaking truth to power
Self-interest
Altruism
Negotiation and compromise
Purity Hierarchical Horizontalist
Distributed leadership
Charismatic leadership
Majority vote
Consensus
Electoral politics
Direct action
Ongoing
Episodic
Weber’s ethic of responsibility
Weber’s ethic of ultimate ends
Source:
Adapted from Swarts 2008: xxviii.
Nevertheless, identifying the two ideal types by their extremes clarifies their differences. Strategic Movements accept compromise through negotiation; Protest Movements favor purity. Strategic Movements are ongoing; Protest Movements are generally episodic. Protest Movements tend to be egalitarian, with decisions made by consensus; Strategic Movements tend to be hierarchical with decisions made by majority vote. Protest Movements distrust and avoid elective politics; Strategic Movements distrust but embrace politics (Swarts 2008: xxvii–xxx). Examples of Protest Movements include Prohibition, the radical peace movement, women’s liberation, and animal rights. Strategic Movements include the labor movement as well as community organizing (not surprising in light of the close ties between labor and Saul Alinsky, as Chapter 2 will show), as well as mainstream elements of the peace, environmental, women’s, and humane movements.
Social Movement Analysis
Schools of social movement analysis with the greatest application to the study of community organizing include resource mobilization, political process and opportunity, social constructionism, and the recent “new social movements” approaches. The classical “collective behavior” approach would appear to be less useful, for reasons developed below.
Collective Behavior
The contemporary schools of analysis emerged from the study of the social movements of the 1960s. Until the 1970s, the field defined itself primarily as the study of “collective behavior.” This classical explanation of social movements focused on such phenomena as crowds, crazes, cults, mobs, riots, fads, panics, and financial bubbles. Irrational behavior was emphasized by such early works as Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) and Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd (1895). In this view, industrialization, urbanization, and rapid population growth disrupt and break down traditional social life, creating strain in individuals, resulting in alienation, anomie, a sense of relative deprivation, and unmet expectations. A popular critique of mass movements by Eric Hoffer, The True Believer (1951), was widely read in the 1950s and early 1960s. Writing in the wake of the Second World War, Hoffer emphasized the irrational elements of fascism, Nazism, and communism as well as religious fanaticism (Buechler 2004). The exceptions to the focus on the irrationality of movement participants were studies of the labor and socialist movements by writers sympathetic to their objectives (see Laidler 1944), often influenced by Marxism or other forms of structural analysis.
Resource Mobilization
The civil rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s began to erode the appeal of collective behavior theory. Civil rights activists didn’t appear irrational in seeking equal rights under the law. Demonstrators seemed disciplined, courageous, principled in their practice of nonviolence, and rational in their demands. A new emphasis on organization, members, and money emerged, known as resource mobilization theory, identified most strongly with Mayer Zald and his students and colleagues (see Zald and McCarthy 1987). As Steven Buechler writes, resource mobilization understands that social movements consist of “rational actors engaged in instrumental action through formal organization to secure resources and foster mobilization” (Buechler 1995: 441). In the civil rights movement in the South, for example, sociologist Aldon Morris (1984) showed that African Americans organized branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their communities, ministers organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring together the churches, and students at historically black colleges organized into chapters of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
When community organizers point out that power has two sources, organized people and organized money, they are speaking from a resource mobilization perspective (whether they realize it or not). Resource mobilization theory distinguishes between social movements and social movement organizations (SMOs), viewed as the crucial vehicles for social movements. Within a given social movement, the SMOs together constitute a social movement industry, to use an economic metaphor, and can be expected to compete for resources, including members and money, as well as to cooperate (Zald and McCarthy 1987). Social movements thus have multi-organizational fields, including all those organizations movements may interact with, both supportive and antagonistic. Allies and opponents may include political parties, religious congregations, labor unions, advocacy groups, and others (Rucht 2004).
Resource mobilization also points out that external sources of funds, including foundations and government, are increasingly important for contemporary SMOs. Community organizing in the Alinsky tradition emphasizes the independence that results from achieving self-support through membership dues and grassroots fundraising. Foundation grants have nevertheless been important to community organizing, with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development being a leading supporter of congregation-based community organizing. The increasing professionalization of social reform is also highlighted (McCarthy and Zald 1973). Resource mobilization theory helps explain the dynamics of the national community organizing networks described in Chapters 2 and 5.
Political Process and Opportunity
Political process extends resource mobilization theory to account for changes in the political sphere. The political process school (also known as the political opportunity structure approach) analyzes the impact of shifts in political power and structure on the cost of challenging authorities. The capacity or the will of authorities to repress mobilizing may shift over time, making the cost/ benefit calculation for such mobilization more or less attractive. “Windows of political opportunity” may open or close depending on which person or party wins an election, on redistricting, or on changes in the method of elections (e.g. from at-large to district elections for a city council). Factionalism within a governing elite can also provide a “window of opportunity” for an insurgent group (Tarrow 1994: 81–99). This process takes place on the municipal level as well as in state and national politics, as historian J. Mills Thornton III (2002) has shown in his analysis of the civil rights movement in three Alabama cities: Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. The analysis of political opportunities is an element in the power analysis that community organizations should complete as they strategize issues being considered for action.
Social Constructionism
Social constructionist theories look at the active human subject creating the social world, acting upon the world rather than being shaped by it, as in structural theories. The analysis of “framing” activity is an important element of this school of thought (Snow 2004). Movement cycles often emerge with the development of a compelling “master frame,” as the civil rights movement did with the “equal rights” frame. Subsequent movements such as the women’s movement, the gay and lesbian movement, the disability movement, and even the animal rights movement have derived their own collective action frames from the master frame of “equal rights” developed by the civil rights movement (Snow and Benford 1992). The creation of new collective identities is a social construction that is often part of a movement’s work. We get a deeper insight into the perspectives, tools, tactics, and skills taught by the community organizing networks when we see how they help construct new identities for organizers, leaders, and active members of community groups. This perspective on framing will be helpful in understanding the worldviews and organizing tools imparted in the networks’ training programs discussed in Chapter 3.
New Social Movements
A notable feature of many social movements emerging during the 1960s and 1970s was their emphasis on subculture and identity, rather than class (as in the “old” social movements of labor and the socialist left). Black Power, women’s liberation, and Queer Nation are all examples of a new emphasis on race, gender, or sexual orientation as the focus of activist identity. Proponents argue that new social movements are “a product of the shift to a postindustrial economy,” and are fundamentally different from prior industrial-era movements. They generally avoid the political arena, and form organizations that minimize hierarchy and seek consensus. Activists are drawn primarily from the “new” middle class (Pichardo 1997: 411–17). As this emphasis is less characteristic of community organizing, generally speaking, we can understand identity and subculture from the perspective of social constructionist theory, as described above. But if we view the decline of civic associations as a result of modern society’s tendency to produce alienation and isolation of individuals, the “horizontalist fringe” of the community organizing movement could be seen as one of the resulting new social movements.
Waves of Reform and the Emergence of Community Organizing
Students of social movements have long noted the apparent tendency for social reforms in the United States to take place in waves. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1986) saw 30-year cycles in which social policy swung from public purpose to private interest and back again. The Populist and Progressive Eras, the New Deal, and the Great Society are four significant reform periods that continue to be discussed in histories of community organizing. Social movements typically provide a dynamic that drives reform, often to partial rather than complete success of movement goals. Problems of disparities of income and wealth; persistence of poverty; racism and the denial of civil rights; integration of immigrants; rights of labor; industrialization and urban life; public education for civic life and work skills; health care for all; income support in retirement and old age – all are themes from earlier eras that continue to be reflected in the issues of community organizing today.
Populism
Harry Boyte, one of the first activist-academics to study and write extensively on community organizing (see Boyte 1980, 1984, 1989; Boyte and Riessman 1986; Boyte et al. 1986), characterizes community organizing as “the new Populism.” The historic Populist movement in the United States was embodied in the Farmers’ Alliance, first formed in 1877, and the People’s Party, founded in 1891. An agrarian movement, Populism was strongest among cotton farmers in the South and wheat farmers in the Great Plains. The movement had considerable impact on the election of 1892, when the People’s Party ran James Weaver for President on a platform that called for an eight-hour working day, a graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, government ownership of railroads, civil service reform, and abolition of national banks.
In 1896 the People’s Party supported William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate for President, on a fusion ticket (meaning a vote could be cast for Bryan either on the Democratic line or the Populist line). Bryan discarded most of the Populists’ “Omaha Platform” of 1892, but did emphasize his opposition to the gold standard and support for free coinage of silver, a strategy that would lead to monetary inflation, allowing farmers to repay their debts with cheaper money. At the Democratic National Convention in July 1896, Bryan delivered his famous “cross of gold” speech, which concluded with the memorable lines, “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” After Bryan’s loss to Republican William McKinley, the Populist movement declined sharply, and the People’s Party collapsed (Hicks 1931). One Populist Era reform that survives today is the Bank of North Dakota, which serves as a model of what a state-owned bank could do for community economic development. Historian Lawrence Goodwyn summarized the dilemma of the Populists: “the practical shortcoming of the Populist political effort was one the agrarian reformers did not fully comprehend: their attempts to construct a national farmer–labor coalition came before the fledgling American labor movement was internally prepared for mass insurgent politics” (Goodwyn 1978: 297).
Michael Kazin, a contemporary historian of the movement, defines populism as more a rhetoric than an ideology: “a language whose speakers conceive of ordinary people as a noble assemblage not narrowly bounded by class, view their elite opponents as self-serving and undemocratic, and seek to mobilize the former against the latter” (Kazin 1998: 1).
Populism as rhetoric is a double-edged sword, cutting to the right as well as the left. And that’s the difficulty in relying on a “populist” spirit to produce a movement that community organizers could lead in a progressive direction. Examples abound of “populist” programs that could have been progressive but turned to the political right – from the “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s to the Tea Party populists who mobilized to oppose Obama’s health care program and contest the mid-term Congressional elections of 2010.
A few attempts to find common ground between left and right populists have failed on their conflicting analyses of power. Who are the anti-democratic elites? Left populists see corporate executives as an exploitative economic elite, and right populists see government bureaucrats as an unaccountable political elite. The realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties set in motion by the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and 1970s has put the two major parties on different sides of left and right populism. The Republicans welcomed the whites from the Southern, Midwestern, and Rocky Mountains states who were fleeing the Democrats’ positions on racial and gender issues. By the sixth year of the Obama administration, Democrats were no longer split on foreign policy and social issues (such as abortion and birth control, gay marriage, and a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants). Differences among the Democrats were on economic policy, between those who would deregulate Wall Street and those who would increase oversight of the financial industry. Among the Republicans the split was between the Tea Party populists who would shut down the federal government over budget negotiations and the party moderates who fear the consequences of such extreme actions (Meyerson 2013). Given these sharp contrasts, a single populist grassroots social movement uniting left and right would appear to be an elusive strategy for community organizers to pursue.
The Progressive Era
The Progressive Era in American political life is commonly understood as the period between the 1890s and the 1920s. As the historic Populist movement was dominated by issues from rural America, the Progressive movement was largely a response to the problems of urban America. It is often seen as a movement of the middle class and professionals, seeking municipal reform and scientific efficiency. The federal government established the Children’s Bureau in 1912, and the Women’s Bureau in 1920, the year the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, establishing the right to vote for women. Community organizing, broadly considered, traces its roots to this period (Betten and Austin 1990). One noteworthy innovation influencing the development of community organizing was the settlement house movement, a prime example being Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams in 1889. Similar projects were established in New York, Cleveland, and other cities. This era saw the beginnings of the social work profession, and its analysis of urban problems as resulting from social disorganization, particularly among the rapidly growing communities of poor and working-class immigrants. Strategies employed in the social work tradition emphasized consensus, working with the powers that be, and the development of such institutions as community centers, community chest programs, maternal and child health clinics, public kindergartens, and other social services. Addams, like many Progressives, had a broad reform vision; she was a founder and the first president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 (Elshtain 2002).
The Progressive movement is also known for its efforts to reform the industrial system. Immigrant workers were joined by wealthy Progressives from the Women’s Trade Union League to
