To Understand ACORN, Look To the Early 20th Century

There was one man who paved the way for ACORN, its agenda and its tactics, and he rose to prominence a good twenty years before Saul Alinsky. His name was Arthur Townley.

Please bear with me for a bit of history. A.C., as he was more popularly known, was a member of the Socialist Party in North Dakota. At the time, grain prices were manipulated, in his view, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. What put him over the edge was when he overextended himself in an attempt to reap a hefty profit on flax, only to have the price drop, along with a bad crop. He lost a substantial amount of money.

As a socialist, he naturally blamed the out-of-state capitalists and sought to do something about it. His solution: A state-controlled grain industry. According to “Political Prairie Fire,” written by Robert L. Morlan in 1955, Townley had a multi-point list of demands, including “State ownership of terminal elevators, flour mills, packing houses, and cold-storage plants,” as well as “Rural credit banks operated at cost.”

When his Socialist Party wasn’t interested in his plan, Townley set out and created The Nonpartisan League in 1915, a mode for organizing farmers into a political constituency to be reckoned with. See, Townley lacked one key ingredient: power.

His theory was that in order to enact his plan, he needed to create the sufficient pressure on elected officials in meet his demands or face the consequences. His group also worked to elect candidates that agreed with its views.

Townley crisscrossed the state, signing farmers up as members of his organization. He pled his case of greater effectiveness than the local Chambers of Commerce with success. He soon put the dues dollars he raised towards purchasing more pick-up trucks and hiring more organizers to expand the group and thus its power.

What relevance does this have on what is happening today? According to ACORN co-founder Gary Delgado, the kind-of Third Tenor to the (in)famous Wade Rathke, ACORN used Morlan’s book “as part of the organization’s training materials since 1971.” Delgado said as much in his 1986 book, “Organizing the Movement: The Roots and Growth of ACORN.”

We’ve seen ACORN’s tactics play out in the Townley way for the last 39 years. And we see them play out as such today. Take my recent interview with Rathke as an example. When I asked him what SEIU and ACORN were doing to get health care reform passed, he explained SEIU was/is active in about 15 states and in Louisiana, where we chatted, there “are about 14 people working around the state because Sen. [Mary] Landrieu’s vote is so critical as one of those sort-of mushy Democrats we have to have to make this pass.”

You can see that portion of my interview here.

ACORN adopted the Townley method of creating the power, by registering the voters to elect its candidates or growing the “community” group to act as a hammer against weak-kneed elected officials, just to name a few.

Saul Alinsky is commonly viewed as the father of community organization and with that I have no beef. But I believe perhaps a more accurate patron of ACORN’s tactics would be A.C. Townley, the godfather of community organizing.