Roger Touhy before the parole board that released him
Roger Touhy before the parole board that released him. The writer Saul Alinksy was one of the members of the board
Saul David Alinsky (January 30,
1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is
generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is
often noted for his book Rules for Radicals.
In the course of nearly four
decades of political organizing, Alinsky received much criticism, but also gained
praise from many public figures. His organizing skills were focused on
improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In
the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions in the
African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other
ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other "trouble
spots".
His ideas were adapted in the
1960s by some US college students and other young counterculture-era
organizers, who used them as part of their strategies for organizing on campus
and beyond. Time magazine once wrote that "American democracy is being
altered by Alinsky's ideas," and conservative author William F. Buckley
said he was "very close to being an organizational genius."
Saul David Alinsky was born in
Chicago, Illinois in 1909 to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only
surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah
Tannenbaum Alinsky.
Alinsky stated during an
interview that his parents never became involved in the "new socialist
movement." He added that they were "strict Orthodox, their whole life
revolved around work and synagogue ... I remember as a kid being told how
important it was to study."
Because of his strict Jewish
upbringing, he was asked whether he ever encountered antisemitism while growing
up in Chicago. He replied, "it was so pervasive you didn't really even
think about it; you just accepted it as a fact of life."
He considered himself to be a devout Jew until
the age of 12, after which time he began to fear that his parents would force
him to become a rabbi.
I went through some pretty
rapid withdrawal symptoms and kicked the habit ... But I'll tell you one thing
about religious identity...Whenever anyone asks me my religion, I always
say—and always will say—Jewish.
He worked his way through the
University of Chicago, where he majored in archaeology, a subject that
fascinated him. His plans to become a professional archaeologist were changed
due to the ongoing economic Depression. He later stated, "Archaeologists
were in about as much demand as horses and buggies. All the guys who funded the
field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks."
After attending two years of
graduate school, he dropped out to accept work for the state of Illinois as a
criminologist. On a part-time basis, he also began working as an organizer with
the Congress of Industrial Organizations (C.I.O.). After a few years, by 1939,
he became less active in the labor movement and became more active in general
community organizing, starting with the Back of the Yards and other poor areas
on the South Side of Chicago. His early efforts to "turn scattered,
voiceless discontent into a united protest" aroused the admiration of
Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, who said Alinsky's aims "most
faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of
the individual."
As a result of his efforts and
success at helping slum communities, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating
his organization work across the nation, "from Kansas City and Detroit to
the barrios of Southern California." By 1950 he turned his attention to
the African American ghettos of Chicago. His actions later aroused the hatred
of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who also acknowledged that "Alinsky loves
Chicago the same as I do."
He traveled to California at the request of
the San Francisco Bay Area Presbyterian Churches to help organize the black
ghetto in Oakland. Hearing of his plans, "the panic-stricken Oakland City
Council promptly introduced a resolution banning him from the city."
In the 1930s, Alinsky organized
the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago (made infamous by Upton
Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, which described the horrific working
conditions in the Union Stock Yards). He went on to found the Industrial Areas
Foundation while organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood; IAF trained organizers
and assisted in the founding of community organizations around the country.
In Rules for Radicals (his
final work, published in 1971 one year before his death), Alinsky addressed the
1960s generation of radicals, outlining his views on organizing for mass power.
In the opening paragraph Alinsky writes,
What follows is for those who
want to change the world from what it is to what they believe it should be. The
Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for
Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away."
Alinsky did not join political
parties. When asked during an interview whether he ever considered becoming a
Communist party member, he replied:
Not at any time. I've never
joined any organization—not even the ones I've organized myself. I prize my own
independence too much. And philosophically, I could never accept any rigid
dogma or ideology, whether it's Christianity or Marxism. One of the most
important things in life is what Judge Learned Hand described as 'that
ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you're right.' If you don't have that,
if you think you've got an inside track to absolute truth, you become
doctrinaire, humorless and intellectually constipated. The greatest crimes in
history have been perpetrated by such religious and political and racial fanatics,
from the persecutions of the Inquisition on down to Communist purges and Nazi
genocide.
He did not have much respect
for mainstream political leaders who tried to interfere with growing
black–white unity during the difficult years of the Great Depression. In
Alinsky's view, new voices and new values were being heard in the U.S., and
"people began citing John Donne's 'No man is an island.'"
He observed that the hardship affecting all
classes of the population was causing them to start "banding together to
improve their lives," and discovering how much in common they really had
with their fellow man.
Alinsky once explained that his
reasons for organizing in black communities included:
Negroes were being lynched
regularly in the South as the first stirrings of black opposition began to be
felt, and many of the white civil rights organizers and labor agitators who had
started to work with them were tarred and feathered, castrated—or killed. Most
Southern politicians were members of the Ku Klux Klan and had no compunction
about boasting of it.
Alinsky's tactics were often
unorthodox. In Rules for Radicals he wrote,
[t]he job of the organizer is
to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a
'dangerous enemy.'" According to Alinsky, "the hysterical instant
reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer's]
credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation."
As an example, after organizing
FIGHT (an acronym for Freedom, Independence [subsequently Integration], God,
Honor, Today) in Rochester, New York, Alinsky once threatened to stage a
"fart in" to disrupt the sensibilities of the city's establishment at
a Rochester Philharmonic concert. FIGHT members were to consume large
quantities of baked beans after which, according to author Nicholas von Hoffman,
"FIGHT's increasingly gaseous music-loving members would hide themselves
to the concert hall where they would sit expelling gaseous vapors with such
noisy velocity as to compete with the woodwinds."
Satisfied with his threat yielding action,
Alinsky later threatened a "piss in" at Chicago O'Hare Airport.
Alinsky planned to arrange for large numbers of well-dressed African Americans
to occupy the urinals and toilets at O'Hare for as long as it took to bring the
city to the bargaining table. According to Alinsky, once again the threat alone
was sufficient to produce results.
In Rules for Radicals, he notes that this
tactic fell under two of his rules: Rule #3: Wherever possible, go outside the
experience of the enemy; and Rule #4: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.
Alinsky described his plans for
1972 to begin to organize the white middle class across America, and the
necessity of that project. He believed that what President Richard Nixon and
Vice-President Spiro Agnew then called "The Silent Majority" was
living in frustration and despair, worried about their future, and ripe for a
turn to radical social change, to become politically active citizens. He feared
the middle class could be driven to a right-wing viewpoint, "making them
ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the
vanished verities of yesterday."
His stated motive: "I love this goddamn
country, and we're going to take it back."
The documentary, The Democratic
Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy, states that "Alinsky championed new
ways to organize the poor and powerless that created a backyard revolution in
cities across America."
Based on his organizing in Chicago, Alinsky
formed the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940. After he died, Edward T.
Chambers became its Executive Director. Hundreds of professional community and
labor organizers, and thousands of community and labor leaders have been
trained at its workshops. Fred Ross, who worked for Alinsky, was the principal
mentor for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Other organizations following in
the tradition of the Congregation-based Community Organizing pioneered by IAF
include PICO National Network, Gamaliel Foundation, and Direct Action and
Research Training Center (DART).
Siegel, Robert; Horwitt, Sanford (May 21,
2007). "NPR Democrats and the Legacy of Activist Saul Alinsky". All
Things Considered. Npr.org. Retrieved 2011-09-08. "Robert Siegel talks to
author Sanford Horwitt, who wrote a biography of Saul Alinsky called Let Them
Call Me 'Rebel'. The book traces Alinsky's early activism in Chicago's
meatpacking neighborhood."
Several prominent American
leaders have been influenced by Alinsky's teachings,[16] including Ed Chambers,
Tom Gaudette, Ernesto Cortes, Michael Gecan, Wade Rathke,and Patrick Crowley.
Alinsky is often credited with laying the
foundation for the grassroots political organizing that dominated the 1960s.
Jack Newfield writing in New York magazine
included Alinsky among "the purest Avatars of the populist movement,"
along with Ralph Nader, Cesar Chavez, and Jesse Jackson.[19]
Biographer Sanford Horwitt has
claimed that U.S. President Barack Obama was influenced by Alinsky and followed
in his footsteps as a Chicago-based community organizer. Horwitt asserted that
Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign was influenced by Alinsky's
teachings.
Adam Brandon, a spokesman for
the conservative non-profit organization FreedomWorks, one of several groups
involved in organizing Tea Party protests, says the group gives Alinsky's Rules
for Radicals to its top leadership members. A shortened guide called Rules for
Patriots is distributed to its entire network. In a January 2012 story that
appeared in The Wall Street Journal, citing the organization's tactic of
sending activists to town-hall meetings, Brandon explained, "his
[Alinsky's] tactics when it comes to grass-roots organizing are incredibly
effective." Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey also gives
copies of Alinsky's book Rules for Radicals to Tea Party leaders.
In 1969, Alinsky was awarded
the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award.
Alinsky died at the age of 63
of a sudden, massive heart attack in 1972, on a street corner in Carmel,
California. Two months previously, he had discussed life after death in his
interview with Playboy:
ALINSKY: ... if there is an
afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to
go to hell.
PLAYBOY: Why?
ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven
for me. All my life I've been with the have-nots. Over here, if you're a
have-not, you're short of dough. If you're a have-not in hell, you're short of
virtue. Once I get into hell, I'll start organizing the have-nots over there.
PLAYBOY: Why them?
ALINSKY: They're my kind of
people.
Touhy's home
Roger Touhy's expansive home was on River Road in Des Plains across from the Al Saints Cemetery. As far as I can tell, the home which was surrounded by a stone wall with wrought iron gates and had a full size pool in the back, was torn down in 1952-54 when the cemetery expanded from across the street.
Murders
The Touhy’s killed the following Capone beer
peddlers in retaliation for the murder of Matt Kolb. The suspected gunmen were Tommy Touhy and "Broken Nose" Fogarty
Nicholas Maggio
Anthony Persico
Elmer Russel (described as a waiter)
Fred D’Giovanni (member of the Capone
Organization)
Joe Provenzano (member of the Capone
Organization)
Roger Touhy and Matt Kolb had their own plans for Chicago's labor unions.
Roger Touhy and Matt Kolb had their own plans for Chicago's labor
unions. Prohibition, gambling and the ability to avoid big political payoffs
and long drawn out beer wars had made them rich. By 1932, they had the money,
and the firepower to take over the entire Chicago Teamsters organization
without having to split any of it with Capone.
Unlike Capone, they didn't need to terrorize
their way into each local union before reaching the Teamsters International
office. They had a direct and trusted contact in the International office with
Edward Chicken McFadden, an old time labor terrorist with deep contacts into
the Teamsters International leadership.
McFadden picked up the name Chicken when he
organized a shakedown operation known as the Kosher Chicken Pluckers Union. He
had an arrest record dating back to 1901 that included intent to rob, police
impersonation and labor slugging. He had been a business partner with a labor
mobster named "Big Tim" Lynch, controlling the Chauffeurs and
Teamsters Union together, until Capone had Lynch killed. Capone took over the
union and chased McFadden and his contacts into the waiting arms of Roger and
Tommy Touhy. In early 1932, when Capone started his major push against the
unions, it was McFadden who set up a meeting between the Touhys and Patty
Burrell, the Teamsters International Vice President. Burrell called a meeting
of all the locals threatened by the syndicate and gave them a choice; they
could stand alone against Capone and lose their unions and probably their
lives, or they could band together and move their operations into Touhy's camp.
Most of the bosses already knew Roger and
decided he was the lesser of the two evils. They pitched into a $75,000
protection fund that was handed over to Tommy Touhy. In exchange, the union
bosses were allowed to keep their locals, and the treasuries that came with
them, and live under the Touhys' protection.
Despite the fact that the only new testimony was shaky at best,
Despite the fact that the only new testimony was shaky at
best, the jury took less than four hours to decide their guilt and six hours to
decide the penalty. Half the jurors wanted to impose the death penalty and half
wanted life in prison. Ultimately Roger was sentenced to ninety-nine years in
Joliet State Prison.
When the verdict was read, Roger gagged, coughed
violently, vomited, and had to be carried out by deputies while the courtroom
exploded in cheers.
In a separate trial, Isaac Costner and Basil
Banghart were also found guilty for their role in the Factor kidnapping and
given ninety-nine years each. Costner screamed double-cross and said that the
federal government promised to let him off with five years if he testified
against the Touhys in the Factor case. The government denied any such promise,
saying that they had no interest in making deals for the Cook County States
Attorney's Office. The day Roger Touhy went to prison, the syndicate, led by
Rocco DeGrazio, moved into his section of Cook County and never moved out
again.
Now that Roger and the others were convicted,
John Factor had a problem; he was going to be extradited, or so he thought.
But the U.S. Department of State made no moves
to extradite him and Factor was free. He had beaten deportation. However, the
conviction against him by the English courts was ordered to remain in effect
until he was tried before a Royal Bench in England and that day would come
sooner than he or anyone else realized.
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