By David Moberg
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Hercules and Orenstein decided to collaborate on the film, though they soon discovered that they had different visions for it. Hercules wanted to focus on Alinsky’s life, while Orenstein wanted to examine his political legacy. Orenstein wanted the film to convey something about how organizing succeeds, yet Hercules insisted that the documentary had to tell a story or nobody would watch. Airing on Channel 11 at 9 PM on Labor Day, The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky and His Legacy is a compromise, but the two visions manage to cohere, each ultimately enriching the other. Some important questions about the effectiveness of Alinsky’s strategy are addressed only briefly, but The Democratic Promise offers a hopeful and even inspiring vision of grassroots power in public life.
Hercules, son of a newspaper publisher in Gaylord, Michigan, studied filmmaking at the University of Michigan and in 1984 found work producing film and video in Chicago. Growing up around Ann Arbor’s student movements in the 60s and 70s, Hercules skewed to the left, and in Chicago he became interested in labor unions: an early documentary, The Road to Haymarket, was successful on the cable and educational circuits, and eventually he cofounded Labor Beat, the community-access labor news program on CAN TV. Labor “seemed the most organized movement at the time,” he says. “I’ve always been interested in things that work, creating change rather than being part of something that’s remote. I saw the labor movement as already organized, a natural place for people to go.”
Despite Alinsky’s celebrity, the Industrial Areas Foundation was often a shambles, its small staff of true believers exhausting themselves with only intermittent guidance from their leader. After Alinsky died suddenly at age 63 the key transition figure–who assumes a low profile in the documentary–was Ed Chambers, an ex-seminarian who insisted on a small but reliable staff of professionals that could build and sustain organizations over a long period. In recent years Chambers has brought the IAF from New York back to Chicago, launching the United Power for Action and Justice, an alliance of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim groups as well as several unions and community institutions.
