To the editor:
Regarding my letter (Jan. 30) refuting Newt Gingrich's attempt to make the name "Saul Alinsky" the political equivalent of the skull and crossbones warnings found on labels of potent cleaning agents, I must correct a miscalculation:
My comparison of Alinsky to four leading Labor Movement figures — Gompers, Lewis, Hill, Flynn — fails to consider that those names (save maybe Joe Hill, thanks to Joan Baez's song) are lost to our national memory.
Problem is that the Labor Movement is virtually absent from school curricula because, in the phrase of the state of Texas' board that must approve textbooks for public schools, it "shows free enterprise in a bad light."
Since Texas has long been the largest unified buyer of textbooks distributed all across the USA, some publishers exercise what lawyers call "prior restraint." Some have gone so far as to omit FDR's New Deal from history texts.
This raises a point my first letter omits: Alinsky's funding, a fair question since he organized when charges of "communism" were as knee-jerk and pervasive as today's "class warfare."
Alinsky, an agnostic Jew, was backed largely by the National Conference of Catholic Charities — even as his relationship with the Catholic Church was, according to his top assistant, "complicated."
For example, the rector of the Chicago seminary arranged for Alinsky to hold an annual seminar with the most promising members of the graduating class.
Says Nicholas Von Hoffman in his 2010 portrait, "Radical," Alinsky told them "that they would have to choose between being priests or bishops, between practicing their faith or practicing real estate.
"These talks were not lost on many of them who went on to spend their lives working with minorities and poor people."
Is there any wonder why Gingrich — or any Republican presidential contender in recent memory — would want to demonize this man?
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