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Not As Sexy As You Think

The Archdiocese in Bed with The Industrial Areas Foundation

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

Is the archdiocese in bed with communists?

Over the years, I have received letters and e-mail correspondence charging that a social action group, the Industrial Areas Foundation, was, at best, a front group for the Communist Party. Since I had always heard the name of its founder, the late Saul Alinsky, linked with Lenin, Stalin, and Castro, I more than half-believed the charge. The fact that Alinsky and his foundation helped César Chavez organize the United Farm Workers made them doubly suspect in the Republican milieu in which I was raised.

So it was that when I learned that the Los Angeles archdiocesan paper, the Tidings, did a very upbeat piece on the greater Los Angeles area branch of the Industrial Areas Foundation, I decided to look into the matter. It turns out that Cardinal Roger Mahony has had very kind words for the group that has been known (until recently) by the mouthful, Los Angeles Metropolitan Organizing Strategy-Industrial Areas Foundation, or more mercifully shortened to L.A. Metro-IAF. In May, said the Tidings, in an address to an L.A. Metro delegates' meeting, Mahony said the work of the group, "whether preserving, reviving or creating a level playing field for all, is both spiritual and democratic work. It is faithful citizenship." And, he added: "Your most important contribution in Los Angeles is fighting isolation and resignation by carefully bringing together Jews, Protestants and Catholics, congregations, schools, unions and community organizations into a powerful force for change."

According to the Tidings, L.A. Metro has 80 member organizations from the entire L.A. County area south of the mountains (and including Upland). Among these are a number of Catholic parishes. In July, when, at a "founding convention," L.A. Metro morphed into a new organization with a new name, One LA, priests and Catholic faithful were in attendance.

Does this mean that the cardinal and some of the faithful are working with communists -- or pinkos or some other kind of undesirable leftists? And since advocacy for abortion, euthanasia, and homosexual "rights" are seen as part and parcel of leftism, is the archdiocese cooperating with a group that promotes these "causes"?

To find out what One LA and its parent, the Industrial Areas Foundation, stood for, I went to the latter's website. I spoke, as well, to an activist with One LA and the southwest regional director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, Ernesto Cortés. This article is based on these sources. Figuring that any treatment of the Industrial Areas Foundation would be incomplete without getting to know Saul Alinsky, I did some research on him as well, even reading his 1971 book, Rules for Radicals. Another article will deal specifically with Alinsky.

The organizational change of name from L.A. Metro-IAF to One LA it seems was not, as one might suppose, an attempt to hide the organization's ties to a communist front organization. Rather, according to an activist, it was, in part, to keep people from confusing the group with the transit authority. Up until July, the group had been in what the activist called a "sponsoring committee phase" under the larger southwest district of the Industrial Areas Foundation; the change of name signified the formation of an independent organization. According to the One LA activist, currently congregations of Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, Baptists, Jews, Mennonites, Lutherans, and others make up One LA

One LA takes on many issues which, though one might oppose them on other grounds, are not against the Faith. The group supports giving drivers licenses to the undocumented, has opposed the extension of the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley (saying it has led to respiratory illnesses in surrounding neighborhoods), worked to get passed the state bonds for school construction through sponsoring get-out-the-vote drives, and fought to keep King Drew Hospital in Los Angeles open. One LA is looking to establish Parent Academies where parents (especially immigrants) can learn how public schools run -- how budgets operate, for instance -- in order to foster greater parent/teacher communication and parent involvement in the running of local schools.

Does One LA involve itself in more controversial social issues, such as the fight over homosexual "rights," euthanasia, abortion, and war? "We're in churches, we're in different kinds of institutions, so there are some who work with us that participate in those issue through their institutions," an activist told me. "But for One LA, we don't go after those issues."

Why?

"Pretty much, because some things are just so polarizing. If our goal is to try and figure out the common interest, how do you do that with euthanasia? How do you do that with abortion? The challenge in building this kind of organization is having All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena -- which is not only very supportive of gay and lesbian rights, but a key player nationally -- having that be part of the same organization as LaVerne Heights Presbyterian, which is very conservative. Controversy is what is hot and what causes people to argue with each other; you can have that or you can think what are the things our families really need, such as healthcare and education and safe neighborhoods, which aren't as sexy and not as dramatic, but in some ways are more important."

Avoidance of the "sexy" issues seems to characterize the Industrial Areas Foundation nationwide. According to its website, foundation affiliates work on such issues as the living wage, job training, smaller and more effective high schools, health and environmental cleanup, affordable housing, expansion of health care coverage, and other issues. And it is the local affiliates that do this -- the Industrial Areas Foundations in Chicago serves as a training institute for organizers and leaders, holding ten-day national training sessions three times a year. The local Industrial Areas Foundation affiliates (such as One LA) choose what issues they wish to address. These issues are ones that affect people at the local level, and thus the affiliates have the character of grass roots organizations.

According to its website, the Industrial Areas Foundation builds "organizations whose primary purpose is power -- the ability to act -- and whose chief product is social change." These organizations are independent, run by the people who form them; but they all follow the Industrial Areas Foundation's modus operandi -- to use "power -- organized people and organized money -- in effective ways." The foundation sees itself as a "radical organization," in the sense that "it has a radical belief in the potential of the vast majority of people to grow and develop as leaders, to be full members of the body politic, to speak and act with others on their own behalf."

What the Industrial Areas Foundation effectively does is form bodies that mediate between the state (and the powerful who use it for their purposes) and the individual. The loss of such bodies in modern times was lamented by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, where he spoke of the "highly developed social life which once flourished in a variety of prosperous institutions organically linked with each other." This social life, he said, had "been damaged and all but ruined, leaving thus virtually only individuals and the state."

I mentioned the Pius XI connection to Ernesto Cortés, the director of the Southwest Industrial Areas Foundation and lead organizer for One LA. He told me the foundation is "very much interested in subsidiarity" -- the principal of social order that, in the words of Pius XI, "it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies."

"We're very much interested in the whole concept of intermediate institutions, how you create those institutions," Cortés said. He hastened to add, though, that he did not favor corporatism -- where the whole of society is organized into legally constituted bodies based on economic interests. Rather, Cortés said, he is "interested in that concept of the Eucharist, properly understood, as a mediating institution through which people's selfhood emerges and is developed. Their identity is shaped through stories and through engagement.

"There's no fixed narrative about who you are," Cortés continued. "The dominant culture tends to say you are Mexican-American or you're African American or you're white, and that's who you are; there's a fixed ideological perspective that that position in life gives you. We reject that. We think that people's story is something that can be socially constructed and emerge through engagement, through relationality."

I asked Cortés about tactics. I had been reading a 1972 interview that appeared originally in Playboy magazine in which Saul Alinsky described some tactics he had come up with in his time as an organizer. In 1964, in order to keep Chicago's Mayor Daly faithful to an agreement with a local group like One LA, Alinsky planned what he called a "shit-in." Members of the group would occupy the bathrooms in O'Hare airport -- Daly's darling -- keeping newly-arrived passengers from using them. "Now, imagine for a second the catastrophic consequences of this tactic," Alinsky said. "Constipated and bladder-bloated passengers would mill about the corridors in anguish and desperation, longing for a place to relieve themselves. O'Hare would become a shambles ... and who would be more mortified than Mayor Daly?" News of this was leaked to the mayor, Alinsky said. Daly promptly said he had no intention of reneging on his commitments to Alinsky's group.

Does, or would, One LA resort to such tactics? First, Cortés said, stories like that of the "shit-in" "were mostly apocryphal. They were ideas [Alinksy] thought about, but they were never seriously considered, to my knowledge." Secondly, "that was a different time, when the whole point of the tactics was to get into relationship with people who had power. We don't think that's necessary at this point -- not that creative non-violence doesn 't have its place; it does. But right now, we think we're in a different situation. But, you never know. We're committed to trying to exhaust whatever existing opportunities there are for creating meaningful relationships with people who have power. To the extent that we can, we will."

Specifically, Cortés said, One LA tries "to organize large groups of people to meet with public officials to demonstrate to them that there is a large constituency that is concerned about" whatever issues the group espouses, as well as "to get participation by people through the whole standing up for the family campaign." One LA also works at voter registration, though it doesn't endorse candidates. "But we do support measures," Cortés said. "We do inform people where candidates do stand on issues."

But in organizing people, does One LA force issues on them? The Tidings article seemed to suggest this; One LA meetings, it said, have "heavily-scripted agendas, prerequisite testimonials, accountability questions for politicians" that "leave little to chance, but also can dilute the passion and power to inspire people to remain involved." Cortés said he thought the description not fully accurate. "Nothing is worse," he said, "than meetings that don't go anywhere, that are all over the place. The meetings are well thought through, but is that something to be objected to? That doesn't mean that you don't leave room for peoples' reactions; but we' re not interested in creating just exuberance; we're interested in getting people to re-aim their energy, focus their energy." Cortés said that One LA meetings have a plan but not a script.

On its website, the Industrial Areas Foundation describes itself as "non-ideological and strictly non-partisan, but proudly, publicly, and persistently political." Given the heavily partisan character of American politics, one might find this self-description perhaps disingenuous. What does it mean to say that Industrial Areas is non-ideological?

"No fixed ideas," said Cortés. "No rigid ideas. We have perspectives and ideas. I have a point of view and a critique of what's going on, but I'm not committed to any ideology. And it's a rejection of the choice between two grand narratives that supposedly exist in this world, of capitalism and socialism. [It is] recognizing that more important than the grand narratives are stories that come out of local communities -- the stories that people develop and struggle with and engage with."

But what of the not uncommon impression that the Industrial Areas Foundation (and consequently, One LA) is "leftist"? "Most people in Los Angeles think I 'm pretty conservative," Cortés said, "but, I'm probably more Catholic than anything else. If I had a frame of reference, it's Catholic social thought, though I don't think that defines it either. I also think very highly of Jewish social thought and of the American political tradition. There are things that I'm conservative about -- I'm very concerned about families. When I have grandchildren, I'm concerned about how they will grow up. I'm concerned about communities. I think property is important for people; there 's nothing like home ownership to restore dignity and self-respect to people. Also people need to feel good about their homes, their communities, and their businesses. There's nothing more devastating to a community than the withdrawal of businesses. In some of the communities in Los Angeles, the biggest problem is that they don't have any enterprises; there are no businesses, so they look like bombed-over areas.

"Is that leftist? Flourishing small businesses, families, and communities? I don't know, maybe it is."

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