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1962. Bernie Sanders. Speaking at a sit-in. Organizing for civil rights.
John Nichols @NicholsUprising 6h6 hours ago1962.
Bernie Sanders.
Speaking at a sit-in.
Organizing for civil rights.
10 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
In Turmoil of ’68, Clinton Found a New Voice
Clinton’s Thesis on Leftist Icon Reveals Roots
As a former first lady aiming to become America’s first female president, Hillary Clinton has a biography heavy with male influences, including Hugh Rodham, the stern father who raised her as a Republican; Don Jones, the Methodist youth minister who introduced her to the civil rights movement, and former president Bill Clinton, her political and personal partner for more than three decades.
But perhaps more than anyone, it was Alan Schechter, a political science professor who mentored Clinton during her student years at Wellesley College, who had a ringside seat to her intellectual and political transformation amid the turbulent 1960s. A self-described “FDR progressive” raised in Brooklyn by the secular children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Schechter, 71, met Clinton in his capacity as an adviser to the student government and went on to become a beloved professor who wrote her a glowing recommendation to Yale Law School. As her thesis adviser, Schechter steered Clinton to focus her project on Saul Alinsky, the irascible labor and civil rights activist who pioneered the practice of community organizing with his Depression-era campaign to improve conditions in the Chicago slum made notorious by writer Upton Sinclair.
Her approach was “instrumental, pragmatic, how do you get from point A to point B,” said Schechter, who recently discussed with the Forward his most famous pupil and her 1969 senior project. “She wasn’t studying Alinsky because of her interest in Alinsky and not even, I think, because of her interest in community organizing as such. It was much more that he had a particular approach to poverty.”
With a title taken from a T.S. Eliot poem, Clinton’s thesis, “‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model,” takes a pragmatic approach to the issue of poverty alleviation. Her question is how best to help poor people in urban areas, and her approach is empirical rather than normative. The paper often takes a no-nonsense tone, as when Clinton sounds a skeptical note about the usefulness of “psychodramatics” in politics, or reminds her readers that discussing Alinsky “apart from his actions is like discussing current theories of international relations without mentioning Vietnam.”
An undated photograph of Hillary Rodham, center, during her days as a student at Wellesley College, from 1965 to 1969.
In September 1968, Hillary Diane Rodham, role model and student government president, was addressing Wellesley College freshmen girls — back when they were still called “girls” — about methods of protest. It was a hot topic in that overheated year of what she termed “confrontation politics from Chicago to Czechoslovakia.”
“Dynamism is a function of change,” Ms. Rodham said in her speech. “On some campuses, change is effected through nonviolent or even violent means. Although we too have had our demonstrations, change here is usually a product of discussion in the decision-making process.”
As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation.
Clinton’s Thesis on Leftist Icon Reveals Roots
As a former first lady aiming to become America’s first female president, Hillary Clinton has a biography heavy with male influences, including Hugh Rodham, the stern father who raised her as a Republican; Don Jones, the Methodist youth minister who introduced her to the civil rights movement, and former president Bill Clinton, her political and personal partner for more than three decades.
But perhaps more than anyone, it was Alan Schechter, a political science professor who mentored Clinton during her student years at Wellesley College, who had a ringside seat to her intellectual and political transformation amid the turbulent 1960s. A self-described “FDR progressive” raised in Brooklyn by the secular children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Schechter, 71, met Clinton in his capacity as an adviser to the student government and went on to become a beloved professor who wrote her a glowing recommendation to Yale Law School. As her thesis adviser, Schechter steered Clinton to focus her project on Saul Alinsky, the irascible labor and civil rights activist who pioneered the practice of community organizing with his Depression-era campaign to improve conditions in the Chicago slum made notorious by writer Upton Sinclair.
Her approach was “instrumental, pragmatic, how do you get from point A to point B,” said Schechter, who recently discussed with the Forward his most famous pupil and her 1969 senior project. “She wasn’t studying Alinsky because of her interest in Alinsky and not even, I think, because of her interest in community organizing as such. It was much more that he had a particular approach to poverty.”
With a title taken from a T.S. Eliot poem, Clinton’s thesis, “‘There Is Only the Fight…’: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model,” takes a pragmatic approach to the issue of poverty alleviation. Her question is how best to help poor people in urban areas, and her approach is empirical rather than normative. The paper often takes a no-nonsense tone, as when Clinton sounds a skeptical note about the usefulness of “psychodramatics” in politics, or reminds her readers that discussing Alinsky “apart from his actions is like discussing current theories of international relations without mentioning Vietnam.”
An undated photograph of Hillary Rodham, center, during her days as a student at Wellesley College, from 1965 to 1969.
