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Saul Alinsky

Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians, bankers and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, Alinsky – in his widely cited Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer (1971) – defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice.

Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party movement and subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticized on the political left for an aversion to broad ideological goals, Alinsky has also been identified as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and campaigns for climate action.

Childhood
Saul Alinsky was born in 1909 in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, the only surviving son of Benjamin Alinsky's marriage to his second wife, Sarah Tannenbaum Alinsky. His father started out as a tailor, then ran a delicatessen and a cleaning shop.

Both parents were strict Orthodox. Alinsky describes himself as being devout until the age of 12, the point at which he began to fear his parents would force him to become a rabbi. Although he had "not personally" encountered "much antisemitism as a child", Alinsky recalled that "it was so pervasive . . . you just accepted it as a fact of life." Called up for retaliating against some Polish boys, Alinsky acknowledged one rabbinical lesson that "sank home." "It's the American way . . . Old Testament . . . They beat us up, so we beat the hell out of them. That's what everybody does." The rabbi looked at him for a moment and said quietly, "You think you're a man because you do what everybody does. But I want to tell you something great: 'where there are no men, be thou a man'". Alinsky considered himself an agnostic,  but when asked about his religion would "always say Jewish."

College studies
In 1926, Alinsky entered the University of Chicago. He studied in America's first sociology department under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park. Overturning the propositions of a still ascendant eugenics movement, Burgess and Park argued that social disorganization, not heredity, was the cause of disease, crime, and other characteristics of slum life. As the passage of successive waves of immigrants through such districts had demonstrated, it is the slum area itself, and not the particular group living there, with which social pathologies were associated. Yet Alinsky claimed to be "astounded by all the horse manure [sociologists] were handing out about poverty and slums, playing down the suffering and deprivation, glossing over the misery and despair. I mean, Christ, I’d lived in a slum, I could see through all their complacent academic jargon to the realities."

The Great Depression put an end to an interest in archaeology: after the stock-market crash "all the guys who funded the field trips were being scraped off Wall Street sidewalks." A chance graduate fellowship moved Alinsky on to criminology. For two years, as a "nonparticipant observer", he claims to have hung out with Chicago's Al Capone mob (he explains that, as they "owned the city", they felt they had little to hide from a "college kid"). Among other things about the exercise of power, he says they taught him was "the terrific importance of personal relationships". Alinsky took a job with the Illinois State Division of Criminology, working with juvenile delinquents and at the Joliet Correctional Center. He recalls it as a dispiriting experience: if he dwelt on the contributing causes of crime, such as poor housing, racial discrimination, or unemployment, he was labelled a "red."

The Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council
In 1938, Alinsky gave up his last employment at the Institute for Juvenile Research, University of Illinois at Chicago, to devote himself full-time as a political activist. In his free time he had been raising funds for the International Brigade (organized by the Communist International) in the Spanish Civil War and for southern sharecroppers, organizing for the Newspaper Guild and other fledgling unions, fighting evictions, and agitating for public housing. He also began to work alongside the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and its president John L. Lewis. (In an "un-authorized biography" of the labor leader Alinsky wrote that he later mediated between Lewis and President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House).

Alinsky's idea was to apply the organizing skills he believed he had mastered "to the worst slums and ghettos, so that the most oppressed and exploited elements could take control of their own communities and their own destinies. Up until then, specific factories and industries had been organized for social change, but never whole communities."

In the belief that if he could trial his approach in these neighborhoods, he could do so successfully anywhere, Alinsky looked to the back of the Chicago Stockyards (the area made infamous by Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel The Jungle). There with Joseph Meegan, a park supervisor, Alinsky set up the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC). Working with the archdiocese, the Council succeeded in rallying a mix of otherwise mutually hostile Catholic ethnics (Irish, Poles, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Croats . . .) as well as African Americans to demand, and win, concessions from local meatpackers (in January 1946 the BYNC threw its support behind the first major walkout of the United Packinghouse Workers), landlords and city hall. This, and other efforts in the city's South Side to "turn scattered, voiceless discontent into a united protest" earned an accolade from Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson: Alinsky's aims "most faithfully reflect our ideals of brotherhood, tolerance, charity and dignity of the individual."

In founding the BYNC, Alinsky and Meegan sought to break a pattern of outside direction established by their predecessors in poor urban areas, most notably the settlement houses. The BYNC would be based on local democracy: "organizers would facilitate, but local people had to lead and participate." Residents had to "control their own destiny" and in doing so not only gain new resources but new confidence as well. "Some of Saul's real genius," according to one observer, was "his sense of timing and understanding how others would perceive something. Saul knew that if I grab you by the shoulders and say do this, do that and the other, you're going to resent it. If you make the discovery yourself, you're going to strut because you made it".

The Industrial Areas Foundation
In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop Bernard James Sheil and Chicago Sun-Times publisher and department-store owner Marshall Field, Alinsky founded the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides. For Alinsky there was also a broader mission.

In what sixty years later, with publication of Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, would have been understood as a concern for the loss of "social capital" (of the organized opportunities for conviviality and deliberation that allow and encourage ordinary people to engage in democratic process), in his own statement of purpose for the IAF, Alinsky wrote: "In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity—to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care for their neighbors. This course of urban anonymity...is one of eroding destruction to the foundations of democracy. For although we profess that we are citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them—that they do not 'count'."

Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work--"rubbing raw", as the New York Times saw it "the sores of discontent" and compelling action through agitation--"from Kansas City and Detroit to the farm-worker barrios of Southern California." Although Alinsky always had rationalizations, his biographer Sanford Horwitt records that "on rare occasions" Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were "unequivocal successes". There was uncertainty about "what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own." Recognizing that the IAF could not be "a holding for People's Organizations", Alinsky thought that one solution would be for community-councils, under their native leadership, to constitute their own inter-city fund-raising and mutual-assistance network. In the early 1950s, Alinsky was talking about "a million-dollar budget to carry us over a three-year plan of organization through the country." The usual corporate and foundation funders proved decidedly cold to the idea.

Successes could also be problematic. In Chicago, the Back of the Yards Council set itself against housing integration and offered no objection to a pattern of "urban renewal" with which Alinsky professed himself "fed-up": "the moving of low-income and, almost without exception, Negro groups and dumping them into other slums," in order to build houses for middle-income whites. There being "no substitute for organized power," Alinsky concluded in 1959 that what the city needed was a powerful black community organization that could "bargain collectively" with other organized groups and agencies, private and public.

Mentoring in The Woodlawn Organization
With the groundwork prepared by his deputy Edward T. Chambers, Alinsky began mentoring The Woodlawn Organization (TWO), based in the Woodlawn community area on Chicago's South Side. Like other IAF organizations, TWO was a coalition of existing community entities, local block clubs, churches, and businesses. These groups paid dues, and the organization was run by an elected board. The TWO moved quickly to establish itself as the "voice" of the black neighborhood, mobilizing, developing and bringing up new leadership. An example was Arthur M. Brazier, the first spokesperson and eventual president of the organization. Starting out as a mail carrier, Brazier became a preacher in a store front church, and then, through TWO, emerged as a national spokesman for the Black Power movement.

In 1961, to show city hall that TWO was a force to be reckoned with, Alinsky combined "two elements—votes, which were the coin of the realm in Chicago politics, and fear of the black mass" by bussing 2,500 black resident citizens, down to city hall to register to vote.

Through TWO, Woodlawn residents challenged the redevelopment plans of the University of Chicago. Alinsky claimed the organization was the first community group not only to plan its own urban renewal but, even more important, to control the letting of contracts to building contractors. Alinsky found it "touching to see how competing contractors suddenly discovered the principles of brotherhood and racial equality." Similar "conversions" were secured from employers elsewhere in the city with mass shop-ins at department stores, tying up bank lines with people exchanging pennies for bills and vice versa, and the threat of a "piss-in" at Chicago O'Hare International Airport.

For Alinsky the "essence of successful tactics" was "originality." When Mayor Daley dragged his heels on building violations and health procedures, TWO threatened to unload a thousand live rats on the steps of city hall: "sort of share-the-rats program, a form of integration": "Any tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag itself. No matter how burning the injustice and how militant your supporters, people get turned off by repetitious and conventional tactics. Your opposition also learns what to expect and how to neutralize you unless you're constantly devising new strategies." Alinsky said that he "knew the day of sit-ins had ended" when the executive of a military contractor showed him blueprints for the new corporate headquarters. "'And here', the executive said, 'is our sit-in-hall. [You will have] plenty of comfortable chairs, two coffee machines and lots of magazines . . . '". "You are not going to get anywhere", Alinsky concluded, unless you are "constantly inventing new and better tactics" that move beyond your opponent's expectations.

FIGHT, Rochester, NY
In the 1960s, Alinsky focused through the IAF on the training of community organizers. The IAF assisted Black community organizing groups in Kansas City and Buffalo, and the Community Service Organization of Mexican Americans in California, training, among others, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

In July 1964, a race riot broke out in Rochester, New York, which Alinsky said was owned "lock stock and barrel" by Eastman Kodak, whose only contribution to race relations was "the invention of color film". In the wake of the riots, the Rochester area churches, together with black civil rights leaders, invited Alinsky and the IAF to help the community organize. With the Reverend Franklin Florence, who had been close to Malcolm X, they established FIGHT (Freedom, Integration, God, Honor, Today).

Concluding that picketing and boycotts would not work, FIGHT began to think of some "far-out tactics along the lines of our O'Hare shit in." This included a "fart-in" at the Rochester Philharmonic, Kodak's "cultural jewel." It was a proposal Alinsky considered "absurd rather than juvenile. But isn't much of life kind of a theater of the absurd?" No tactic that might work was "frivolous." Following a disruption of its annual stockholders' convention in April 1967 assisted by Unitarians and others assigning FIGHT their proxy votes (Alinsky had called on them to "put your stock where your sermons are"), Kodak recognized FIGHT as a broad-based community organization and committed, through a recruitment and training program, to black employment, in June 1967. A retired public affairs officer for Kodak later said, "Alinsky and the people who exploited the situation were looking for attention," and claimed Kodak had already undertaken or was developing a lot of the programs that community activists sought. "We were working on it."

Community action in the federal War on Poverty
While in Rochester, Alinsky had been employed four-days a month at the federally-funded Community Action Training Center at Syracuse University. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, passed as a part of Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, committed the federal government to promoting the "maximum feasible participation" of targeted communities in the design and delivery of anti-poverty programs.

This appeared to acknowledge what Alinsky insisted was the key to social and economic deprivation, "political poverty":"Poverty means not only lacking money, but also lacking power. ... When ... poverty and the lack of power bar you from equal protection, equal equity in the courts, and equal participation in the economic and social life of your society, then you are poor. ... [An] anti-poverty program must recognise that its program has to do something about not only economic poverty but also political poverty" Alinsky was sceptical of Community Action Program (CAP) funding under the Act doing more than provide relief for the "welfare industry": "the use of poverty funds to absorb staff salaries and operating costs by changing the title of programs and putting a new poverty label here and there is an old device". If it was to achieve more than this, there had to be meaningful representation of the poor "through their own organised power".

In practice this would mean that the federal sponsor for community action, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), should bypass city halls and either fund existing militant organisations such as FIGHT in Rochester (although these could never allow the federal government to be their core funder) or, in communities not already organized, seek out local leadership to initiate the process of building a resident organization. Amendments to OEO funding in the summer of 1965 ruled out any such "creative federalism". These gave city halls the right to select the official Community Action Agency (CAA) for their community and reserved two-thirds of the CAA boards for business representative and elected officials. There was no prospect of a federal mandate favoring Alinsky's organizing model.

The one-year OEO grant for the program at Syracuse that had hired Alinsky was not renewed. When the program trainees began organizing residents against city agencies, the mayor withdrew cooperation.

Communism
Alinsky never became a direct target of McCarthyism. He was never called before a congressional investigating committee nor had to endure a determined press campaign to identify and exclude him as a communist “fellow traveler”. Alinsky liked to think this because of his toughness and the ridicule he would have heaped upon his persecutors. Herb March, the most prominent Communist Party member with the Packinghouse Workers in Chicago, said he would "place a little more emphasis ... on the Church influence", but also allowed that, as the government "undoubtedly must have had him under close surveillance", they cannot have had "anything" on him.

Yet Alinsky was not "untouched by the climate of fear, suspicion and innuendo". Rumors of communist associations and Red-baiting would follow him into the 1960s, and, once his name was associated with leading Democratic-Party presidential contenders, would follow his legacy into the new century. For some of his "anti-communist" critics, Alinsky's definition in Reveille for Radicals of what it is to be a "radical" may have been a sufficient indictment:"The Radical believes that all peoples should have a high standard of food, housing, and health … The Radical places human rights far above property rights. He is for universal, free public education and recognizes this as fundamental to the democratic way of life … The Radical believes completely in real equality of opportunity for all peoples regardless of race, color, or creed. He insists on full employment for economic security but is just as insistent that man's work should not only provide economic security but also be such as to satisfy the creative desires within all men."

Alinsky would not apologize for working with communists at a time when, in his opinion, they were doing "a hell of a lot of good work in the vanguard of the labor movement and ... in aiding blacks and Okies and Southern sharecroppers." He also said, "Anyone who was involved in the causes of the thirties and says he didn't know any communists is either a liar or an idiot". They were "all over the place, fighting for the New Deal the CIO and so forth".

Alinsky said he was "sympathetic to Russia at that time [i.e. in the 1930s before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact because it was the one country that seemed to be taking a strong position against Hitler... If you were anti-fascist on the international front in those days you had to stand with Communists". But Alinsky insists he "never joined the party" for reasons "partly philosophic": One of my articles of faith is what Justice Learned Hand called "that ever-gnawing inner doubt as to whether you are right." I've never been sure I'm right but also I'm also sure nobody else has this thing called truth. I hate dogma. People who believed they owned the truth have been responsible for the most terrible things that have happened in our world, whether they were Communist purges or the Spanish Inquisition or the Salem witch hunts.

In Reveille, Alinsky is "as contemptuous of 'top down' centralizing Soviet approaches to social planning as he is of laissez-faire economic policies". The Radical, he says, "will bitterly oppose complete Federal control of education. He will fight for individual rights and against centralized power …The Radical is deeply interested in social planning but just as deeply suspicious of and antagonistic to any idea of plans which work from the top down. Democracy to him is working from the bottom up". With Thomas Jefferson, the Radical believes that the people are "the most honest and safe", if not always the wisest, "depository of the public interest."

On the issue of whether communists should be banned from unions and other social organizations, Alinsky argued that:"[The question is] whether there can be developed an American Progressive Movement in which the Communists are forced to follow along or get out on the basis of the issues--a movement so healthy, so filled with the vitality of real American Radicalism, that the Communists will wear their teeth down to their jaws trying to bore from within. I know that the latter can be done" But in the meantime, Alinsky believed that "certain fascist mentalities" posed a far greater threat to the country than "the damn nuisance of Communism".

The Black Power movement
In the mid-1960s, civil rights activists began to call for "Black Power"—for Stokely Carmichael a "call for black people to define their own goals, to lead their own organizations". Alinsky appeared not to be fazed. "I agree with the concept," he said in the fall of 1966. "We've always called it community power, and if the community is black, it's black power." But a year later he was relating, with evident satisfaction, that when he had asked Carmichael at a Detroit meeting to cite one concrete example of what he meant by Black Power, Carmichael had named the FIGHT project in Rochester. Carmichael, Alinsky suggested, should stop "going round yelling 'Black Power!'" and "really go down and organize."

Alinsky had a sharper response to the more strident black nationalism of Maulana Karenga, mistakenly identified in news reports as a board member of the newly formed Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization. In an angry letter to the Foundation's executive director, Lucius Walker, Alinsky took exception to one of Karenga's "insights," that "blacks are a country and if you support America you are against my community." This Alinsky found "repugnant and nauseous." He and his associates would not only "plead guilty to supporting America" but would "gladly admit that we love our country." Horwitt notes that in 1968 "virtually no leftist dissenter – black or white – was using this kind of patriotic rhetoric."

By 1970, Alinsky had conceded publicly that "all whites should get out of the black ghettos. It's a stage we have to go through."

The Student New Left
At the beginning of the 1960s, in the first postwar generation of college youth Alinsky appeared to win new allies. Disclaiming any "formulas" or "closed theories", Students for a Democratic Society called for a "new left ... committed to deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection." More than this, the New Left seemed to place community organizing at the heart of their vision.

The SDS insisted that students "look outwards" beyond the campus "to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice." "The bridge to political power" would be "built through genuine cooperation, locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies." To stimulate "this kind of social movement, this kind of vision and program in campus and community across the country", in 1963, the SDS launched (with $5000 from United Automobile Workers) the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw white neighborhoods into an "interracial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964, ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers.

In the summer of 1964, Ralph Helstein of the Packinghouse Workers, one of the few labor leaders interested in the emergence of the New Left, arranged for Alinsky to meet SDS founders Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin. To Helstein's dismay Alinsky dismissed Hayden and Gitlin's ideas and work as naive and doomed to failure. The would-be organizers were absurdly romantic in their view of the poor and of what could be achieved by consensus. Horwitt notes that "'Participatory democracy,' the central concept the SDS's Port Huron Statement, meant something fundamentally different . . . to what 'citizen participation' meant to Alinsky." Within community organizations Alinsky "put a premium on strong leadership, structure and centralized decision-making."

When SDS volunteers set up shop, JOIN (Jobs or Income Now), in "Hillbilly Harlem" uptown Chicago, they duly crossed town to meet with Alinsky in Woodlawn. But there was not to be a meeting of minds. The JOINers charged Alinsky with being "stuck in the past", and, perhaps most cutting, to be unwilling to confront white racism. To meet the challenge of growing black dissent following the August 1965 Watts riots, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had sought a victory in the North with the Chicago Freedom Movement (CFM). JOIN later claimed that they pushed whites on the race question "at every opportunity" and "even mobilized members to support Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s campaign to desegregate housing in Chicago in the summer of 1966".

It is not clear that participation by Alinsky in the Chicago Freedom Movement was either offered or invited. Yet "Freedom Summer" in 1965 seemed to follow the Alinsky playbook: "The job of the organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a 'dangerous enemy'. The hysterical instant reaction of the establishment [will] not only validate [the organizer's] credentials of competency but also ensure automatic popular invitation". The difficulty was that Daley's experience was such that that city hall could not be drawn into a sufficiently damaging confrontation. The mayor responded to the brutal reception for Freedom marchers in the white neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park with a judicious expression of sympathy and support. King balked at a further escalation—a march through the red-lined suburb of Cicero, "the Selma of the North"—and he allowed Daley to draw him into the negotiation of an open-housing deal that was to prove toothless. (After King's assassination, Alinsky argued that Woodlawn was the one black area of Chicago that did not "explode into racial violence" because, while their lives were not "idyllic", with TWO people "finally" had a sense of "power and achievement").

At the end of the sixties Alinsky complained that student activists had been more interested in "revelation" than in "revolution," and that their campus politics was little more than street theater. From the perspective of real social change, he regarded their outraging of middle-class sensibilities to have been a tactical mistake.

"The myth of Saul Alinsky" criticism
In the summer of 1967, in an article in Dissent, Frank Riessman summarized a broader left-wing case against Alinsky. Seeking to explode "The Myth of Saul Alinsky", Riessman argued that rather than politicize an area, Alinsky's organizational efforts simply directed people "into a kind of dead-end local activism." Alinsky's opposition to large programs, broad goals, and ideology confused even those who participated in the local organizations because they find no context for their action. As a result, confined to what might be secured by purely local initiative, they achieved, at best, "a better ghetto."

Riessman insisted that it was for the "organizer-strategist-intellectual" to "provide the connections, the larger view that will lead to the development of a movement," but adding—"this is not to suggest that the larger view should be imposed upon the local group." The New Left themselves seemed unable to strike the necessary balance. As they appeared to drift in events of the 1960s, failing above all to stop the war in Vietnam, Gitlin suggests that the SDS constructed their larger view "on the cheap". Far from reconciling neighborhood agendas (welfare, rent, police harassment, garbage pick-up . . .) with radical ambition, their reheated revolutionary dogma prepared a "left exit" from community organizing, something that most New Left groups had effected by 1970.

Alinsky's dismissal of Riessman as "a little whining Pekingese," as someone he "refused to debate with," might suggest that Alinsky was sensitive to the charge that the communities he helped organize were led into a political cul-de-sac. In 1964, he and Hoffman had agreed that The Woodlawn Organization was "stymied." It staggered in the face of deteriorating housing, chronic unemployment, and bad schools in a political environment that was unfriendly-to-hostile. Unless they did something, TWO "would go down." Alinsky was not a community-organizing purist. He saw the possibility of an electoral breakout: of Woodlawn helping mount a challenge to the incumbent in the 1966 Democratic-Party primary for the 2nd Congressional District. But Brazier, his preferred candidate, would not run and the community organization was fearful for its non-political tax-exempt status. In the end Daley's political machine had little difficulty in rolling over the additional support galvanized for the reform-minded state legislator, Abner Mikva.

Playboy interview
It was a measure of his national celebrity that in March 1972, having "elevated the art of the magazine interview" with leaders such as Fidel Castro, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Playboy magazine published a 24,000-word interview with Alinsky.

Alinsky was introduced as "a bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer who looks like an accountant and talks like a stevedore," a figure "hated and feared", according to The New York Times, "in high places from coast to coast", and acknowledged by William F. Buckley Jr., "a bitter ideological foe", as "very close to an organizational genius". Levelling against him the charges of the New Left, the interview effectively invited Alinsky to summarize the lessons he had drawn for the new generation of activists in (a revision of an earlier work) Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.

Life cycle of organizations
Alinsky was confronted with "the tendency" of communities he had helped organize to eventually "join the establishment in return for their piece of the economic action", Back of the Yards, "now one of the most vociferously segregationist areas of Chicago," being cited as a "case in point". For Alinsky, this was only a "challenge." It is "a recurring pattern": "Prosperity makes cowards of us all, and the Back of the Yards is no exception. They've entered the nightfall of their success, and their dreams of a better world have been replaced by nightmares of fear—fear of change, fear of losing their material goods, fear of blacks."

Alinsky explained that the life span of one of his organizations might be five years. After that it was either absorbed into administering programs (rather than building people power) or died. That was something that just had to be accepted, with the understanding that "discrimination and deprivation does not automatically endow [the have-nots] with any special qualities." Perhaps he would move back into the area to organize "a new movement to overthrow the one I built 25 years ago." Did he not find this process of co-optation discouraging? "No. It's the eternal problem." All life is a "relay race of revolutions", each bringing society "a little closer to the ultimate goal of real personal and social freedom."

But what were his "so-called" radical critics "in fact saying"? That when a community comes to him ("we're being shafted in every way") and ask for help, he should say, "sorry . . .if you get power and win, then you'll become, just like Back of the Yards, materialistic and all that, so just go on suffering, it is better for your souls"? "It's kind of like a starving man coming up to you and begging you for a loaf of bread, and your telling him, 'Don't you realize that man doesn't live by bread alone.' What a cop out."

Revolutionary youth may have "few illusions about the system," but in Rules for Radicals Alinsky suggested "they have plenty of illusions about the way to change our world." The "liberal cliché about reconciliation of opposing forces," so often invoked in opposition to radical confrontation, may be "a load of crap." "Reconciliation means just one thing: when one side gets enough power, then the other side gets reconciled to it." But opposition to consensus politics does not mean opposition to compromise — "just the opposite." "In the world as it is, no victory is ever absolute". "There is never nirvana." A "society without compromise is totalitarian." And "in the world as it is, the right things also invariably get done for the wrong reasons."

Organizing the middle class
For Alinsky, the real limitation of his organizing experience was that it had not extended into the middle-class majority: "Christ, even if we could manage to organize all the exploited low-income groups – all the blacks, chicanos, Puerto Ricans, poor whites – and then, through some kind of organizational miracle, weld them all together into a viable coalition, what would you have? At the most optimistic estimate, 55,000,000 people by the end of this decade – but by then the total population will be over 225,000,000, of whom the overwhelming majority will be middle class. . . . Pragmatically, the only hope for genuine minority progress is to seek out allies within the majority and to organize that majority itself as part of a national movement for change."

The middle classes may be "conditioned to look for the safe and easy way, afraid to rock the boat," but Alinsky believed "they're beginning to realize the boat is sinking." On a wide range of issues, they feel "more defeated and lost today than the poor do." They were, Alinsky insisted, "good organizational material:" "more amorphous than some barrio in Southern California", so that "you're going to be organizing all across the country," but "the rules are the same."

In 1968 he secured a year's funding in Chicago from the Midas International Corporation to train white middle class suburban activists. As understood by corporate president Gordon Sherman, the proposition was that "lack of organization in white neighborhoods can be as harmful to the total society as lack of organization in the black community. We all live in our own ghettos". Alinsky, however, never predicted exactly what form or direction middle-class organization would take. In Horwitt's sympathetic view he was "too empirical for that." He did suggest that "the chance for organization for action on pollution, inflation, Vietnam, violence, race, taxes is all about us," making it clear that he envisaged organization based on a community of the interest rather than on the dubious neighborliness of the suburb.

In 1969 in Chicago, Alinsky and his IAF trainees helped initiate a city-wide Campaign Against Pollution (later to become the Citizens Action Program to Stop the Crosstown—a billion-dollar expressway). Alinsky was not beyond believing that such initiatives, scaled-up nationally, could "move on to the larger issues: pollution in the Pentagon and Congress and the board rooms of the megacorporations." Challenging, but the alternative, Alinsky warned, was for the "impotence" of the middle classes to turn into "political paranoia." This would make them "ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday."

Death and family
On June 12, 1972, three months after the publication of the Playboy interview, Alinsky died, aged 63, from a heart attack while walking near his home in Carmel, California.

Alinsky's parents divorced when he was 18. He remained close to his mother, Farah Rice, who survived him. She acknowledged his national notoriety but not his politics. "As a Jewish mother, she begins where other Jewish mothers leave off. . . it was all anticlimatic after I got that college degree."

Alinsky was married three times. His first wife, Helene Simon, whom he had met at the University of Chicago, drowned in 1947 while trying to save two children. Alinsky mourned her passing for many years. His second marriage to Jean Graham was also to take a tragic turn. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis proved to be the onset of serious mental health problems and led to her hospitalization. Alinsky ended the marriage after several years but maintained regular contact. In the year before his death, he married Irene McInnis. He had two children from his first marriage, Kathryn Wilson and Lee David Alinsky.

Industrial Areas Foundation
It has been suggested that "Alinsky is to community organizing as Freud is to analysis." Having written about it, "philosophized about it, and provided the first set of rules", he was the first to call attention to community organizing "as a distinct program, with a life and literature of its own, separate from any particular cause such as the union movement or Populism." His biographer Sanford Horwitt credits Alinsky "more than anybody ... for demonstrating that community organizing could be a lifelong career."

The Industrial Areas Foundation still claims to be "the nation's largest and longest-standing network of local faith and community-based organizations." They report "victories" on, among other issues, housing and neighborhood revitalization, public transport and infrastructure, living-wage jobs and workforce development, support for local labor unions, criminal justice reform, and tackling the opioid crisis.

When Alinsky died, Edward T. Chambers became the IAF's executive director. Hundreds of professional community and labor organizers and thousands of community and labor leaders have been trained at its workshops. Fred Ross, who worked for Alinsky, was the principal mentor for Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. Other organizations following in the tradition of the Congregation-based Community Organizing pioneered by IAF include PICO National Network, Gamaliel Foundation, Brooklyn Ecumenical Cooperatives, founded by former IAF trainer Richard Harmon, and Direct Action and Research Training Center (DART). Such had been their role in the IAF and its projects that on his Firing Line television program William F. Buckley introduced Alinsky as "the pet revolutionary of the church people of America".

People's Action
Chicago-based National People's Action (NPA), a federation of 29 community organizing groups in 18 U.S. states, consciously committed to Alinsky's bottom-up, door-to-door methodologies. It was co-founded in 1972 by Shel Trapp (1935–2010), who trained under Alinsky-trained organizer Tom Gaudet at the IAF. NPA's successful national campaign to pass the Community Reinvestment Act CRA (1977) challenged the assertion that Alinsky-style organizing is only local and confined to winnable single-issue campaigns. In 2016, it coalesced with two other community-organizing networks to create People's Action and the People's Action [training] Institute, dedicated to building "the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas, to win change" not only "through issue campaigns" but also, in clearer distinction to the IAF, through elections.

Citizens UK and L'Institut Alinsky, France
In 1989, following trainee experience with the IAF in Chicago, in England Neil Jameson established the Citizens Organising Foundation. Now Citizens UK, it supports communities in several cities, and since 2001 has been associated with the high-profile campaign for a living wage.

Drawing inspiration from both Citizens UK and the IAF, in 2012 Alinsky's community-organizing methods were tried in France leading to the creation in Grenoble of the Alliance Citoyenne (Citizens Alliance). Similar initiatives followed in Rennes in 2014, in Aubervilliers, in Seine St Denis in 2016 and in the Lyon metropolitan area in 2019.

In October 2017, the leaders of the Alliance Citoyenne and the researchers Julien Talpin and Hélène Balazard founded the Alinsky Institute, a think tank and training organization to develop and promote methods of citizen empowerment in blue-collar and immigrant suburbs (banlieues) which, with the decline in the traditional parties of the left, have had little political voice.

An assessment of Institute's work suggested that a critical problem for "Alinskysim" is the activists’ "need for recognition": "when they practice community organizing, the dozens of hours they devote to political struggle are in fact erased in favor of the inhabitants trained in mobilization". More controversially, because of the alleged political partisanship, critics observe that the Alinsky Institute has trained leading activists in La France insoumise.

In Germany in 1993, two of Alinsky's students and co-workers, Don Elmer (Center for Community Change, San Francisco) and Ed Shurna (Interfaith Organizing Project and Gamaliel Foundation, Chicago) initiated the first training courses in "Community Organizing" (CO), supported by several local projects. Assisted by the Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences, the first community organization (Bürgerplattform) based on Alinsky's principles was established in a Berlin neighborhood in 2002.

"Alinskyism"
Among political activists on the left, Alinsky’s legacy continues to be disputed. Cautions against looking to Alinsky for "a road map" to "rebuild power in the age of Trump" repeat the charge of the New Left: "'Alinskyism' — apolitical 'single-issue' campaigns that focus on 'winnable demands' run by a well-oiled, staff-heavy organization—shut the door to more democratic and transformational forms of working-class mobilization." At the same time, Alinsky has been rediscovered and defended as an inspiration for the Occupy movement and the mobilization for climate action. Activists for Extinction Rebellion (XR), founded in Britain, cite Rules for Radicals as a source of inspiration as to "how we mobilise to cope with emergency", and "strike a balance between disruption and creativity". XR co-founder, Roger Hallam, has been clear that the strategy of public disruption is "heavily influenced" by Alinsky: "The essential element here is disruption. Without disruption, no one is going to give you their eyeballs".

The Israeli journalist and pro-Settler activist David Bedein views Alinsky as a major influence on his work.

In 2020, the Reuters Agency "fact check team" noted that viral images on social media were circulating quotes attributed to Rules for Radicals and Reveille for Radicals, which suggest that Alinsky set out eight fundamental rules for creating a "social state". The text in the images seems to equate this in turn with Soviet communism. The quotes attributed to Alinsky, however, were not found in his writings.

Appropriation by the Tea Party movement
In the 2000s, Rules for Radicals did develop as a primer for middle-class mobilization, but it was of a kind and in a direction—the return to "vanished verities"—that Alinsky had feared. As did William F. Buckley in the 1960s, a new generation of libertarian, right-wing populist, and conservative activists seemed willing to admire Alinsky's disruptive organizing talents while rejecting his social-justice politics. Rules for Radicals, and adaptations of the book, began circulating among Republican Party Tea Party activists. According to spokesman Adam Brandon, the conservative non-profit organization FreedomWorks distributed a short adaptation of Alinsky's work, Rules for Patriots, through its entire network. Former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey is also reported to have given copies of Alinsky's book to leaders of the Tea Party movement. In Rules for Conservative Radicals (2009) Michael Patrick Leahy, an early Tea Party leader, offered "sixteen rules for conservative radicals based on lessons from Saul Alinsky, the Tea Party Movement, and the Apostle Paul".

Linked to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
Once it appeared that links could be drawn between Alinsky and two major Democratic-Party presidential hopefuls, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator, later President, Barack Obama, conservatives were interested less in appropriating from the organizing tactician, than in profiling Alinsky as a far-left radical. Alinsky, it was discovered, had been the subject of then Hillary Rodham's senior college thesis. Clinton had not been uncritical. Alinsky believed that community leaders who generate pressure on the system from the outside could produce more effective change than the lofty lever-pullers on the inside. But Clinton argued that suburbanization and a federal consolidation of power meant change needed to be achieved at levels that Alinsky's model was not designed to target. Nonetheless, her conclusion allowed that Alinsky "has been feared – just as Eugene Debs or Walt Whitman or Martin Luther King has been feared, because each embraced the most radical of political faiths — democracy."

For three years, from June 1985 to May 1988, Obama was the director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization on Chicago's far South Side. Alinsky biographer Sanford Horwitt, saw the influence of Alinsky's teaching not only on Obama's work in Chicago but also on his successful 2008 presidential run. Yet Obama too commented on having seen "the limits of what can be achieved" at the community level. He also expressed the view that "Alinsky understated the degree to which people's hopes and dreams and their ideals and their values were just as important in organizing as people's self-interest." Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), a friend of Obama's, saw another difference. "If you read Alinsky's teachings, there are times he's confrontational. I have not seen that in Barack. He's always looking for ways to connect."

Right-wing controversy
In his 1996 biography of her, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham, David Brock dubbed Hillary Clinton "Alinsky's daughter." Barbara Olson began each chapter of her 1999 book on Clinton, Hell to Pay, with a quote from Alinsky, and argued that his strategic theories directly influenced her behavior during her husband's presidency. In 1993, Clinton asked Wellesley College to seal her thesis on Alinsky for the duration of her husband's presidency.

As his candidacy gained strength, and once he had defeated Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination, attention shifted to Obama's ties to Alinsky. Monica Crowley, Bill O'Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh repeatedly drew a connection, with the latter asking, "Has [Obama] ever had an original idea — by that, I mean something not found in The Communist Manifesto? Has he? Has he simply had an idea not found in Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals?" Glenn Beck produced a four-part radio series to expose Alinsky's "vision for a Godless, centrally controlled utopia." In Barack Obama's Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model (2009) David Horowitz argued "the roots" of his administration's "effort to subject America to a wholesale transformation" were to be found in the teachings of "the guru of Sixties radicals"—an Alinsky admonition to be "flexible and opportunistic and say anything to get power."

Epitaph
As an epitaph for Alinsky, his biographer Sanford Horwitt wrote:"Alinsky was a true believer in the possibilities of American democracy as a means to social justice. He saw it as a great political game among competing interests, a game in which there are few fixed boundaries and where the rules could be changed to help make losers into winners and vice versa. He loved to play the game..."

title: Saul Alinsky


text:
User talk:AngelikaDagmar

Hi Angelika, welcome to Wikipedia, glad you like it! This is your talk page, other users can place comments here; you can reply by editing it like any other page. You can put some information about yourself on your user page (currently empty). Your name sounds German, if you are indeed German, you may want to check out the German Wikipedia as well. --Eloquence 03:01 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User talk:AngelikaDagmar


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Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer (, ; 12 January 1910 – 30 December 2014) was a German-born film actress. She was the first thespian to win multiple Academy Awards, and the first to win back-to-back; at the time of her death, thirteen days shy of her 105th birthday, she was the longest-lived Oscar recipient (and the longest-lived female star from Classic Hollywood), a superlative that has not been exceeded, as of 2024.

Rainer started her acting career in Germany at age 16, under the tutelage of Austria's leading stage director, Max Reinhardt. Within a few years, she had become a distinguished Berlin stage actress with Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Critics highly praised the quality of her acting. After years of acting on stage and in films in Austria and Germany, she was discovered by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer talent scouts, who signed her to a three-year contract in Hollywood in 1935. A number of filmmakers predicted she might become another Greta Garbo, MGM's leading female star at the time.

Her first American film role was in Escapade in 1935. The following year she was given a supporting part in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, where, despite limited appearances, her emotion-filled performance so impressed audiences that she was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was later dubbed the "Viennese teardrop" for her dramatic telephone scene in the film. For her next role, producer Irving Thalberg was convinced, despite the studio's disagreement, that she would also be able to play the part of a poor, plain Chinese farm wife in The Good Earth (1937), based on Pearl Buck's novel about hardship in China. The subdued character role was such a dramatic contrast to her previous vivacious character that she again won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Rainer, Jodie Foster and Hilary Swank are the only actresses ever to win two Oscars by the age of 30.

However, she later stated nothing worse could have happened to her than winning two consecutive Oscars, as audience expectations from then on would be too high to fulfill. After a string of insignificant roles, MGM and Rainer became disappointed, leading her to end her brief three-year film career, soon returning to Europe. Adding to her rapid decline, some feel, was the poor career advice she received from her then-husband, playwright Clifford Odets, along with the unexpected death at age 37 of her producer, Irving Thalberg, whom she greatly admired. Some film historians consider her the "most extreme case of an Oscar victim in Hollywood mythology".

Early life and career
The daughter of Heinrich and Emilie (née Königsberger) Rainer, known familiarly as "Heinz" and "Emmy", Rainer was born on 12 January 1910 in Düsseldorf, Germany and raised in Hamburg and later in Vienna, Austria. Some sources list her birthplace as Vienna. Describing her childhood, she stated, "I was born into a world of destruction. The Vienna of my childhood was one of starvation, poverty and revolution." Her father was a businessman who settled in Europe after spending most of his childhood in Texas, where he was sent at the age of six as an orphan. (Rainer had stated that because of her father, she is an American citizen "by birth".) Rainer's family was upper-class and Jewish.

Rainer had two brothers and was a premature baby, born two months early. She describes her father as being "possessive" and "tempestuous", but whose affections and concern were centered on her. Luise seemed to him as "eternally absent-minded" and "very different". She remembers his "tyrannical possessiveness", and was saddened to see her mother, "a beautiful pianist, and a woman of warmth and intelligence and deeply in love with her husband, suffering similarly". Although generally shy at home, she was immensely athletic in school, becoming a champion runner and a fearless mountain climber. Rainer said she became an actress to help expend her physical and overly emotional energy. It was her father's wish, however, that she attend a good finishing school and "marry the right man." Rainer's rebellious nature made her appear to be more of a "tomboy" and happy to be alone. She also feared she might develop what she saw as her mother's "inferiority complex".

She was only six when she decided to become part of the entertainment world, and recalled being inspired by watching a circus act:

I thought that a man on the wire was marvelous, in his spangles and tights. I wanted to run away and marry him but I never had an opportunity. I am sure, though, that the experience first disclosed to me the entertainment world. For years I longed to be able to walk on a tight wire, too.

At age 16, Rainer chose to follow her dream to become an actress; under the pretext of visiting her mother, she traveled to Düsseldorf for a prearranged audition at the Dumont Theater.

In the 1920s the theatre director Louise Dumont separated from her husband. Dumont was attached to a number of young actresses including Fita Benkhoff, Hanni Hoessrich, and Rainer. It has been presumed that Dumont was bisexual.

Rainer later began studying acting with Max Reinhardt, and, by the time she was 18, there was already an "army of critics" who felt that she had unusual talent for a young actress. She soon became a distinguished Berlin stage actress as a member of Reinhardt's Vienna theater ensemble. Her first stage appearance was at the Dumont Theater in 1928, followed by other appearances, including Jacques Deval's play Mademoiselle, Kingsley's Men in White, George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan, Measure for Measure, and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In 1934, after appearing in several German language films, she was seen performing in the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by MGM talent scout Phil Berg, who offered her a three-year contract in Hollywood. He thought she would appeal to the same audience as Swedish MGM star Greta Garbo. Initially, Rainer had no interest in films, saying in a 1935 interview: "I never wanted to film. I was only for the theater. Then I saw A Farewell to Arms and right away I wanted to film. It was so beautiful."

Early roles
Rainer moved to Hollywood in 1935 as a hopeful new star. Biographer Charles Higham notes that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer and story editor Samuel Marx had seen footage of Rainer before she came to Hollywood, and both felt she had the looks, charm, and especially a "certain tender vulnerability" that Mayer admired in female stars. Because of her poor command of English, Mayer assigned actress Constance Collier to train her in correct speech and dramatic modulation, and Rainer's English improved rapidly.

Her first film role in Hollywood was in Escapade (1935), a remake of one of her Austrian films, co-starring William Powell. She received the part after Myrna Loy gave up her role halfway through filming. After seeing the preview, Rainer ran out of the cinema displeased with how she appeared: "On the screen, I looked so big and full of face, it was awful." The film generated immense publicity for Rainer, who was hailed as "Hollywood's next sensation." However, she did not like giving interviews, explaining:

"Stars are not important, only what they do as a part of their work is important. Artists need quiet in which to grow. It seems Hollywood does not like to give them this quiet. Stardom is bad because Hollywood makes too much of it, there is too much 'bowing down' before stars. Stardom is weight pressing down over the head — and one must grow upward or not at all."

The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
Rainer's next performance was as the real-life character Anna Held in the musical biography The Great Ziegfeld, again co-starring William Powell. Powell, impressed by Rainer's acting skill, had given her equal billing in Escapade.

According to Higham, Irving Thalberg felt that only Rainer, of all the studio's stars, could play the part as he saw it. But Rainer recalled that studio head Mayer did not want her playing the part, seeing it as too small: "You are a star now and can't do it," he insisted. Shortly after shooting began in late 1935, doubts of Rainer's ability to pull off the role emerged in the press. She was criticized for not resembling the Polish-born stage performer. The director admitted that the main reason Rainer was cast was her eyes, claiming that they "are just as large, just as lustrous, and contain the same tantalizing quality of pseudo naughtiness" the part required.

As Thalberg expected, she successfully expressed the "coquettishness, wide-eyed charm, and vulnerability" required. Rainer "so impressed audiences with one highly emotional scene," wrote biographer Charles Affron, that she received the Academy Award for Best Actress. In one scene, for example, her character is speaking to her ex-husband Florenz Ziegfeld over the telephone, attempting to congratulate him on his new marriage: "The camera records her agitation; Ziegfeld hears a voice that hovers between false gaiety and despair; when she hangs up she dissolves into tears."

Powell, having worked with her in two films, gave his impressions of her acting style and quality:

"She is one of the most natural persons I have ever known. Moreover, she is generous, patient and possesses a magnificent sense of humor. She is an extremely sensitive organism and has a great comprehension of human nature. She has judgment and an abiding understanding which make it possible for her to portray human emotion poignantly and truly. Definitely a creative artist, she comprehends life and its significance. Everything she does has been subjected to painstaking analysis. She thinks over every shade of emotion to make it ring true. In Europe she is a great stage star. She deserves to be a star. Unmistakably she has all the qualities."

On the evening of the Academy Award ceremonies, Rainer remained at home, not expecting to win. When Mayer learned she had won, he sent MGM publicity head Howard Strickling racing to her home to get her. When she finally arrived, master of ceremonies George Jessel, during the commotion, made the mistake of introducing Rainer, which Bette Davis had been scheduled to do. She was also awarded the New York Film Critics' Award for the role.

The Good Earth (1937)
Rainer's next film was The Good Earth (1937), in which she co-starred with Paul Muni; she had been picked as the most likely choice for the female lead in September 1935. The role, however, was completely the opposite of her Anna Held character, as she was required to portray a humble Chinese peasant subservient to her husband and speaking little during the entire film. Her comparative muteness, stated historian Andrew Sarris, was "an astounding tour de force after her hysterically chattering telephone scene in The Great Ziegfeld", and contributed to her winning her second Best Actress Oscar.

The award made her the first actress to win two consecutive Oscars, a feat not matched until Katharine Hepburn's two wins thirty years later. In later years, however, Rainer felt that winning the two Oscars so early may have been the "worst possible thing" to befall her career. She said that it made her "work all the harder now to prove the Academy was right."

Rainer later recalled early conflicts even before production. Studio head Louis B. Mayer, for example, did not approve of the film being produced or her part in it, wanting her to remain a glamorous film star: "He was horrified at Irving Thalberg's insistence for me to play O-lan, the poor uncomely little Chinese peasant," she said. "I myself, with the meager dialogue given to me, feared to be a hilarious bore." Rainer remembered hearing Mayer's comments to Thalberg, her producer: "She has to be a dismal-looking slave and grow old; but Luise is a young girl; we just have made her glamorous — what are you doing?" She considered the part as one of the "greatest achievements" in her career, stating that she was allowed to express "realism," even refusing to "wear the rubber mask 'Chinese look,'" suggested by the makeup department. She was allowed to act "genuine, honest, and down-to-earth," she said.

Other serious problems took place during production. Director George W. Hill, who had spent several months in China filming backgrounds and atmospheric scenes, committed suicide soon after returning to Hollywood. The filming was postponed until Sidney Franklin could take over. A few months later, before the film was completed, Irving Thalberg died suddenly at the age of 37. Rainer commented years later, "His dying was a terrible shock to us. He was young and ever so able. Had it not been that he died, I think I may have stayed much longer in films." The film's opening screen credit includes a dedication to Thalberg: "To the Memory of Irving Grant Thalberg – his last greatest achievement – we dedicate this picture."

In late 1936, MGM conceived a script called Maiden Voyage especially for Rainer. The project was shelved and eventually released as Bridal Suite in 1939, starring Annabella as 'Luise'. Another 1936 unrealized film project that involved Rainer was Adventure for Three, which would have co-starred William Powell. In 1938, she played Johann Strauss's long-suffering wife Poldi in the successful Oscar-winning MGM musical biopic The Great Waltz, her last big hit.

Her four other films for MGM, The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937), Big City (1937) with Spencer Tracy, The Toy Wife (1938) and Dramatic School (1938), were ill-advised and not well received, though Rainer continued to receive praise. The Emperor's Candlesticks, in which Rainer was cast in November 1936, reunited Rainer with Powell for the final time. For the film, she wore a red wig and wore costumes designed by Adrian, who claimed that Rainer, by the end of 1937, would become one of Hollywood's most influential people in fashion. On set, she received star treatment, having her own dressing room, diction teacher, secretary, wardrobe woman, hairdresser, and makeup artist. The Emperor's Candlesticks was Rainer's first film for which she received criticism, it being claimed that she did not improve in her acting technique.

Even though reviews of Rainer's performance in Big City were favorable, reviewers agreed that she was miscast in a 'modern role' and looked "too exotic" as Tracy's wife. Despite the criticism and announcements of leaving Hollywood, Rainer renewed her contract for seven years shortly after the film's release.

Most critics agreed Rainer was "at her most appealing" in The Toy Wife. The final MGM film Rainer made was Dramatic School. At the time she was cast in the film, her box office popularity had declined considerably, and she was one of the many well-known stars—along with MGM colleagues Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer, and Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Fred Astaire, Kay Francis and others—dubbed "Box Office Poison" by the Independent Theatre Owners of America.

Rainer refused to be stereotyped or to knuckle under to the studio system, and studio head Mayer was unsympathetic to her demands for serious roles. Furthermore, she began to fight for a higher salary, and was reported as being difficult and temperamental. As a result, she missed out on several roles, including the female lead in the Edward G. Robinson gangster film The Last Gangster (1937), losing out to another Viennese actress, Rose Stradner. Speaking of Mayer decades later, Rainer recalled, "He said, 'We made you and we are going to destroy you.' Well, he tried his best."

Departure from Hollywood
Rainer made her final film appearance for MGM in 1938 and abandoned the film industry. In a 1983 interview, the actress told how she went to Louis B. Mayer's office and said to him: "Mr Mayer, I must stop making films. My source has dried up. I work from the inside out, and there is nothing inside to give." Following this altercation, she traveled to Europe, where she helped get aid to children who were victims of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was not released from her contract and, by 1940, she was still bound to make one more film for the studio.

Disenchanted with Hollywood, where she later said it was impossible to have an intellectual conversation, she moved to New York City in 1940 to live with playwright Clifford Odets, whom she had married in 1937. Rainer had never made it a secret that she felt terrible as Odets' wife, and exclaimed in a 1938 interview: "All the acting I've done on the stage or screen has been nothing compared to the acting I did in New York, when I tried to make everyone think I was happy – and my heart was breaking." She filed for divorce in mid-1938, but proceedings were delayed "to next October" when Odets went to England. The divorce was final on 14 May 1940. Rainer and Odets summered at Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, where numerous other members of the Group Theatre (New York) also spent the summer of 1936, both acting and writing.

Despite the negativity, Rainer was one of the actresses considered for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939), but the idea was not well-received, and she was not given a screen test. She also was unable to persuade MGM bosses to cast her in Johnny Belinda, based on a 1940 play about a deaf-mute rape victim.

In a later interview, Rainer commented about her disappearance from the movie industry:

"I was very young. There were a lot of things I was unprepared for. I was too honest, I talked serious instead of with my eyelashes and Hollywood thought I was cuckoo. I worked in seven big pictures in three years. I have to be inspired to give a good performance. I complained to a studio executive that the source was dried up. The executive told me, 'Why worry about the source. Let the director worry about that.' I didn't run away from anybody in Hollywood. I ran away from myself."

Later life and career
While in Europe, Rainer studied medicine and explained she loved being accepted as "just another student", rather than as a screen actress. She returned to the stage and made her first appearance at the Palace Theatre, Manchester, on 1 May 1939 as Françoise in Jacques Deval's play Behold the Bride; she played the same part in her London debut at the Shaftesbury Theatre on 23 May. Returning to America, she played the lead in George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan on 10 March 1940 at the Belasco Theatre in Washington, D.C. under the direction of German emigrant director Erwin Piscator. She made her first appearance on the New York stage at the Music Box Theatre in May 1942 as Miss Thing in J. M. Barrie's A Kiss for Cinderella.

She made an appearance in Hostages in 1943 and abandoned film making in 1944 after marrying publisher Robert Knittel. She initially did not plan on returning to the screen, but explained her comeback in 1943 by saying:

"All the professor and the other students cared about was whether I could answer the questions, not whether I could come to class looking glamorous. But after that brief return to the stage, I began to realize that all the doors which had been opened to me in Europe, and all the work I had been able to accomplish for refugee children, was due to the fact that people knew me from my screen work. I began to feel a sense of responsibility to a job which I had started and never finished. When I also felt, after that experience at Dennis, that perhaps I did have talent after all, and that my too-sudden stardom was not just a matter of happy accident, I decided to go back."

When Rainer returned to Hollywood, her contract at MGM had long expired and she had no agent. David Rose, head of Paramount Pictures, offered her a starring role in an English film shot on location, but war conditions prevented her from accepting the role. Instead, Rose suggested in 1942 that she make a screen test for the lead role in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), but Ingrid Bergman was cast. Rainer eventually settled on a role in Hostages (1943) and told the press about the role: "It's certainly not an Academy Award part, and thank goodness, my bosses don't expect me to win an award with it. ... No, this is something unspectacular but I hope, a step back in the right direction."

Rainer took her oath of allegiance to the United States in the 1940s, but she and Knittel lived in the UK and Switzerland for most of their marriage. Robert Knittel died in 1989. The couple had one daughter, Francesca Knittel, now known as Francesca Knittel-Bowyer. Rainer had two granddaughters, Luisa and Nicole, and two great-grandchildren, Luca and Hunter.

Federico Fellini enticed her to play the cameo role of Dolores in his 1960 Oscar-winning classic La Dolce Vita, to the point of her travelling to the Rome location, but she quit the production prior to shooting, a fact that has been attributed either to her resistance to an unwanted sex scene or to her insistence on overseeing her own dialogue. The role was later cut from the eventual screenplay. She made sporadic television and stage appearances following her and her husband's move to Britain, appearing in an episode of the World War II television series Combat! in 1965. She took a dual role in a 1984 episode of The Love Boat. For the latter, she received a standing ovation from the crew. She appeared in The Gambler (1997) in a small role, marking her film comeback at the age of 86. She made appearances at the 1998 and 2003 Academy Awards ceremonies as part of special retrospective tributes to past Oscar winners.

On 12 January 2010, Rainer celebrated her centenary in London. Actor Sir Ian McKellen was one of her guests. During that month, she was present at the British Film Institute tribute to her at the National Film Theatre, where she was interviewed by Richard Stirling before screenings of The Good Earth and The Great Waltz. She also appeared onstage at the National Theatre, where she was interviewed by Sir Christopher Frayling. In April 2010, she returned to Hollywood to present a TCM festival screening of The Good Earth, accompanied by an interview with host Robert Osborne.

Rainer has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard.

On 5 September 2011, then 101-year-old Rainer travelled to Berlin to receive a star on the Boulevard der Stars. Her star was among the 21 stars issued in 2011 and followed the 20 that were issued in 2010. The star was issued as an exception and was not without controversy. Rainer had been forgotten when the Boulevard der Stars opened in 2010, despite being Germany's only Academy Award-winning actress. In 2011, she was initially rejected by the jury (Senta Berger, Gero Gandert, Uwe Kammann, Dieter Kosslick and Hans Helmut Prinzler) despite being nominated. A prolonged campaign started in October 2010, led by music executive Paul Baylay, who had noticed Rainer's omission on the Boulevard. Baylay campaigned in Germany, lobbying press and politicians to support the campaign to have the actress and her work recognised. The campaign was supported by the Central Council of Jews. In August 2011, the Boulevard der Stars finally relented, acknowledging the Facebook, email, and letter campaign led by Baylay had been key in their decision to awarding an extra star to Rainer.

Death
Rainer died at her London home on 30 December 2014 at the age of 104 from pneumonia. She was 13 days shy of her 105th birthday. Rainer spent her final years living in a flat formerly occupied by actress Vivien Leigh at 54 Eaton Square, Belgravia, London. Her memorabilia were auctioned in 2015. The auction netted US$489,069 for her heirs.

Acting style
Rainer is best known for winning back-to-back Academy Awards, although she received criticism for being "an excessive actress, larger than life, probably more suited to the Viennese and German stage of her youth than anywhere else."

title: Luise Rainer


text:
Talk:Adverb

Closed Class
"Naturally as a sentential adverb means something like "of course" and as a verb-modifying adverb means "in a natural manner". This "naturally" controversy demonstrates that the class of sentential adverbs is a closed class (there is resistance to adding new words to the class), whereas the class of adverbs that modify verbs isn't."

Exactly how does this show that sentential adverbs are a closed class?

Doghatbeef (talk) 01:04, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I
 * Adverbs which r identical in form to their adjectives are compared the synthetic way. Most others, though forms like wiselier are poetic, are formed analytically with more or most. And all adverbs take as...as or less, least for the diminishing comparatives.

Something to do with comparative and superlative, but I can't follow it. Could be improved by someone who can follow it. Ortolan88

 * I think synthetic="more + adv", and analytic="adv+er". Stephen C. Carlson

 * Oops, got it backwards. Stephen C. Carlson

Sounds reasonable. Wanna rewrite the para? Someone else as dumb as me might read it and be confused. And, if you do, get wiselier outta there. What's that as...as about? Ortolan88

 * "As large as", etc. Patrick 11:13 Feb 9, 2003 (UTC)

 * I took a shot at it. Furture fixes welcomes. Stephen C. Carlson

Hopefully? Hopefully as a sentence adverb is not shunned simply because some purists decided that it should rather be 'I am hopeful + relative clause'. There is more to it. To quote Eric Partridge: "hopefully, besides meaning 'in a hopeful way', now often means 'it is hoped'. This new use seems no odder than the corresponding use of adverbs such as naturally: ' Hopefully/Naturally she'll come', but it has aroused the rage of many purists. Those who do use it should at least beware of ambiguity, since 'He will leave tomorrow hopefully' might be interpreted in either way [This is, 'It is hoped (or indeed, I am hopeful) that he will leave tomorrow.', or 'He will leave tomorrow in a hopeful way.']." (Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, Third Edition, 1999, Penguin Group, London)

 * The ambiguity exists for any sentence adverb. I am aware many purists use this example as an argument for avoiding this usage, but then we should avoid all sentence adverbs. CyborgTosser 00:33, 13 Aug 2004 (UTC)

 * The myth of the "hopefully error" is one of the few things people think they know about adverbs. Granted, the following, which was just removed from the article, is a little strong:

 * == "Hopefully" ==
 * The hopefully controversy is based on the theory that people should say I am hopeful that... instead of hopefully to start and modify a sentence. Yet, there are dozens of adverbs used in this way. Obviously this rule is illogical. So, *Hopefully, grammarians won't trash hopefully as a sentence adverb anymore.

 * but I believe something like this is relevant to the article.Ortolan88 21:54, 8 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * We definitely need something about it in here. Andre (talk) 20:01, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Grammar Mistake?
Near the beginning of the article it says:

"Alternatively, an adverb may be contained within a sentence element.

An extremely small child entered the room. (SUBJECT + ADVERBIAL + OBJECT +VERB)"

Shouldn't it be:

(ADVERBIAL + SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT)

I'm putting this here instead of making the change myself because I consider myself weak at grammar and could be missing something. But if I am missing something -- it looks like something explaining in more depth. Because I can't for the life of me see how the sentence ends in a verb.

 * I think it should be analyzed as (SUBJECT + PREDICATOR (OR VERB) + OBJECT). And then on the phrase level it should be explained that the adverb "extremely" is a premodifier of "small" and together they form an adjectival phrase which is a premodifier of "child". Mixing sentence elements (subject, object) and parts of phrases is in my opinion a very bad option.

 * Besides, I cannot understand how "well" in the sentence "They treated her well." can be analyzed as subject (as it is stated in the article). The subject in this clause is "they"; "well" is an adverbial adjunct of manner. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.143.34.28 (talk) 19:39, 17 January 2009 (UTC)  JAI SHREE RAM  BY

Conditional adverbial
I was sitting around thinking about useless stuff, as usual, and I began to wonder what kind of adverb 'probably', 'possibly', and 'neccessarily' are. It seems to me that they are conditional adverbs, that is, they describe the conditions under which an action will take place. Another cool one may be 'stochastically', but I can see how this may describe in what manner something is done. 'Hopefully' seems conditional, but there's an extra twist of the speaker's desired outcome or result. Is there an "official" list of kinds of adverbs? Arguments for or against adding conditionals to the Groups of adverbs section?

List
Firstly, what does the NB mean? Nota bene?

Secondly, is there a list of irregular adverb construction adjectives, as well is for good (instead of goodly?). Thank you. --Abdull 16:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. Some irregular [mostly, words that we don't recognize as adverbs] adverbs include: very, well, quite, before, usually, a lot, already, rather, really, more, now, not, why etc. It answers the questions: how, when, where, to what extent, or how often.

hello
english class:  i need an easier way to explain adverbs.

(Smillar 17:31, 10 January 2006 (UTC)) goodbye

Sentence modification
I don't understand how an adverb can modify an entire sentence. In the examples listed on the page, it appears (to me) that only the verb is being modified. Isopropyl 21:53, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I gather what is meant by modifying is that adverbs modify the meaning, i.e. express the way how something is done. E.g. if the adverb quickly is added to the sentence He said..., it modifies the meaning of the verb. --Sebesta 22:00, 5 April 2006 (UTC)
 * However, adjectives can certainly be modified by adverbs as well, e.g. extremely good. --Sebesta 22:02, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

 * I understand what an adverb is. I'm just curious as to (4) on the article page, which has the sentence
 * Suddenly, the cat came in.
 * I don't understand why this is a sentence-modifying adverb. Isn't
 * The cat came in suddenly
 * equivalent in this case? Both sentences use "suddenly" to describe how the cat came in. Isopropyl 22:07, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

 * Oh, now I see what you were talking about. :) I would say an adverb is used at the beginning of a sentence to emphasize (intensify) the meaning of the adverb; this position makes the adverb much more important in the sentence.
 * As for the example sentences you have cited—I don't think their meaning are necessarily equivalent.
 * "The cat came in suddenly." You would probably ask, How did the cat come in?
 * "Suddenly, the cat came in." I would feel more like, Oh, what happened?
 * But I do agree that in some cases this difference could be insignificant or arguable.
 * --Sebesta 22:23, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Adverbs
I recently came across a rather strange construction when I was reading a book that explained the usage of adverbs. The sentence was "... a really astronomical figure..." As far as I know, ttwo constructions would be possible: ".... a real astronomical figure..." or " really an astronomical figure.." My question is: which of the two is the correct one? Is it possible to use the first construction?

Teacher Adriano

 * I consider the very first one ("a really astronomical figure") correct. To make sure, I consulted the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and it gives this example for the "really" entry:
 * was a really beautiful morning
 * "real" is not an adverb in standard usage.
 * --Sebesta 18:36, 6 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I think he means a real astronomical figure, where "real" would be an adjective equivalent to "actual". Adriano, in the sense that astronomical means "large", the original sentence is correct in stating that it's "a really large figure". Isopropyl 20:38, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

 * Really is used there as a comparative. It answers: How astronomical? Very. —  r obbiemuffin  page  talk 15:03, 8 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Adverbs of time 196.188.126.74 (talk) 03:16, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Order of Adverbs
Order of Adverbs is needed.

Adverbs modifying adverbs
Is it possible to have one "-ly" adverb modifying another? For example, can we say: "The bus travelled fairly slowly."
 * Yes, in English "fairly slowly" is OK, as is "surprisingly quickly." Other adverbs are more picky, however, so for example, "extremely probably" is very clumsy, as well as "fairly luckily." In other languages, like Italian, adverbs ending in -mente can't be modified by other adverbs, if these also end in -mente. So  in Italian, there is a big difference between "estremamente spesso" (`extremely often'), which is fine, because "spesso" doesn't end in -mente,  and "estremamente frequenatmente" (`extremely frequently'), which is completely impossible. Nobody really knows how to characterize what's going on in English, but a rough rule would be that manner or frequency adverbs, like "often," "frequently," "quickly," etc. can be so modified, while modal adverbs, like "probably" etc. can't. Another test would be whether one can question the adverb with "how" as in How frequently do you visit your mom? This doesn't work at all with modal or evidential adverbs, e.g. "*how usually do you visit your mom?" or "*How probably will the Republicans win?" or "*How evidently is Bob a genius?" Again, nobody really knows why this is, but if you can get the feeling for which adverbs can be questioned in this way, then it's probably safer to abstain from modifying those that can't with an -ly adverb.
 * Neither 02:29, 27 October 2006 (UTC)

Romance Language adverbs/-ment(e)
I remember reading that the construction of adverbs in modern Romance languages (that is, adding -ment(e) to the end of the feminine adjective comes from a form or phrase in  Greek (perhaps early medieval/late Koine) in which one combines the adjective with the word for "mind (ment/e from the Latin mens).  Therefore to do something exactly is do something with and exact mind(exacta+mente).  Is there any validity to this? I know this is not how adverbs were formed in Latin, but I do not speak any form of Greek, ancient or otherwise and it's been bugging me for a while. 201.21.96.49 19:15, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I know that to form adverbs in Spanish you add the "-mente" suffix, but my teacher's bad at explaining the exact properties of it. ~  thesublime514  •  talk  •  sign  20:44, April 10, 2007 (UTC)

Question about usage
Wouldn't it be more correct to say that someone "spelled the word incorrect" rather than "incorrectly", because by saying that person spelled it "incorrectly" is to say that the mechanism which allows he or she to spell is broken (as in, the physical action the person used to spell the word was incorrect)? And no, I couldn't find a simpler way to form that question. ~ thesublime514  •  talk  •  sign  20:17, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Derived from Latin
Whatever the above is all about, I've got an issue with the nonchalant parenthetical claim in the article that English grammar is "derived from Latin". I would call that, at best, misleading and poorly worded. It gives the impression that English would not have grammar if it weren't for Latin. I'm struggling to find anywhere on the Wiki a more substantial claim to this effect (that English grammar is derived from Latin grammar). English is no more derived from Latin than dogs are derived from saber-toothed cats, but in both cases the one is similar to the other because they share a common ancestor. If I don't get some arguments to the contrary pretty soon, I'll remove the clause. Tsunomaru 12:40, 21 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Update: did so. Tsunomaru 11:04, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

Adverbs modifying nouns?
In its current state the article says that adverbs can't modify nouns, but I've seen (outdated?) grammar books that disagree. Think of only in The blade scratched only the boy, which certainly appears to be modifying the boy (the meaning is quite different from The blade only scratched the boy). And it isn't acting like a typical adjective, since it's positioned before the article the. How would modern linguists describe what's happening here? 61.196.81.225 06:38, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
 * It's referring to robust contrasts like quick trip vs. *quickly trip or very wealthy vs. *very wealth. For the major classes of adverbs, such as the ones formed by adding -ly to an adjective, this holds, i.e. they don't combine directly with nouns.

 * In your example, only the boy, the focus-sensitive adverb only is associating with the entire noun phrase the boy and not with the noun itself. The syntax of focus sensitive adverbs is complex and controversial, however, and some linguists -- though not this one -- think these can combine with any grammatical category, including nouns. Perhaps a more plausible candidate for exhibiting direct noun modification would be the phrase the only boy, where only seems to combine with the noun directly. But, here, we see that there is a clear dependency between the adverb and the determiner the:  *every only boy, *each only boy, *some only boy, *no only boy are all bad.  Another case: an only child (less frequent: an only kid; an only car) might a case of only being reanalyzed as an adjective, with a somewhat different meaning than the adverb. In sum, it's doubtful whether the focus-sensitive adverb only can directly modify a noun.  Another case of an "adverb" that seems to be able to modify (mass) nouns directly is more as in John has more money than Bill. But in this case it could be argued that more is the comparative form of the adjective much (John doesn't have much money). Thus there are some isolated cases of adverbs apparently directly modifying nouns, but they are extremely rare, compared to the very common adverbs modifying adjectives, or verb (phrases). Many of those cases, perhaps all, turn out to be disputable. Neither 11:34, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

 * In "The blade scratched only the boy," the word, "only" is a prepositive adverb that modifies the determiner, "the;" it modifies neither "boy" as a noun nor "the boy" as a noun phrase. If it were grammatically consistent for an adverb to modify a noun, then "The blade scratched only boy (i.e., with "only" being an adverb) would be acceptable, but clearly it's unacceptable. Nonetheless, the Tarzans of the world can say "The blade scratched only Boy, where "Boy" is a proper noun for the character's name and "only" is a prepositive adjective. Now you wonder, how about, "The blade scratched only boys "? In that example, too, "only" is a prepositive adjective, not an adverb. Kent Dominic 00:02, 7 March 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic (talk • contribs)

 * Comment on above: Since when have adverbs today not modify nouns? Did adverbs yesterday give it up after being told practically every adverb cannot ignore quite a few rules of academic grammar? (See if you can spot the adverbs and which nouns they modify in the last two sentences.) In practice adverbs have always modified nouns, and the response by the academics, especially secondary school teachers, has usually been enraged denial ("Don't be so stupid, only adjectives do that!")or elaborate subterfuges, usually going on the lines of, "Well that adverb is really not modifying the noun, you see, it is delimiting the parameters of a phrase." Sir, what sort of phrase would that be?" Teacher flushes, faces away to the board, and mutters, "Oh, uh, a noun phrase, I should think." My favorite adverbial waffling occurs in the Harbrace College Handbook, 12th edition, p. 12, where the definition of an adverb begins with certainty, "…adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs…" and then trails off weakly into admitting, "…or even the rest of the sentence." I suppose the rest of the sentence would be where the nouns are. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.76.32.16 (talk) 22:52, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Among the examples of adverbs modifying nouns we have the sentence "There is a shortage internationally of protein for animal feeds." I believe this is not an example of an adverb modifying a noun at all, as it seems clear to me that in this sentence "internationally" is modifying "is". Perhaps it would be better moved to the example group below, for predicative expressions? 71.63.69.193 (talk) 14:48, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Could be analyzed like that, but the source it comes from specifically gives it as an example of an adverb modifying a noun. W. P. Uzer (talk) 16:34, 4 October 2015 (UTC)
 * Dear W. P. Uzer, adverbs absolutely cannot directly modify nouns. However, an adverb can modify a clause together with the clause's noun(s)/noun phrase(s). I've addressed the issue in an edit that I posted earlier today after reading the conflated example that you cited. Kent Dominic 23:33, 6 March 2019 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kent Dominic (talk • contribs)

Adverbs telling why

 * "Adverbs typically answer questions such as how?, when?, where?, why? and to what extent?"

I'm struggling to think of an instance where an adverb answers a why? question. Should that be in the list? If so could someone provide an example? Matt 01:49, 15 February 2008 (UTC).

Lychgate
I modified and ultimately removed this passage (my modified version below):

 * which still shows up in the term Lychgate for the churchyard gate through which the body would be carried during a funeral procession.

I judged that it led too far afield from the topic at hand. Mark Foskey (talk) 17:34, 6 April 2009 (UTC)00:21, 11 May 2009 (UTC)00:21, 11 May 2009 (UTC)68.78.139.90 (talk) 00:21, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

the opening section
My complaint is that whatever it is that this person has written, the meaning is not clear at all. The opening sections should always be written in an easily understood form.

Azerbaijani linguistic school
An editor recently added

""The Azerbaijani linguistic school" did not consider adverb independent part of speech, since that it is adverbializotion version of the other parts of speech. [sic]"

Another editor expanded on this a little more. I am not a linguist by any means. But hunting around Google I don't find any English language mention of this school (I do find mention of it in Russian, though). My question, though, is whether there is a basis for mentioning this school's opinion on the subject. Typically the reason to mention a particular opinion (be it an institution or a person) is that the entity has particular importance relevant to the subject and, either their opinion reflects widespread consensus, or they are so well recognized in the field that even their contrarian opinion deserves mention. It does not look to me like that is the case for this school. Does anybody know more about this?

--Mcorazao (talk) 18:29, 4 June 2010 (UTC)

See: References: ru.wiki.Azerbaijan linguistic school. -- Kiraye (talk) 19:45, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
 * ru (Azerbaijan linguistic school)
 * ru (Azerbaijan linguistic school).
 * ru (Azerbaijan linguistic school).
 * ru (Nеw systеm оf linguistiсs)
 * ru (Systеmаtizаtiоn оf sуntах)
 * ru (Mаmmаdоv Jаbbаr Mаnаf оglu)
 * az.

 * Those are all nice but they don't answer the questions I asked above. --Mcorazao (talk) 20:00, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I do not have other information Kiraye (talk) 20:07, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Errors in Arabic Adverbs
The article says:
 * Modern Standard Arabic forms adverbs by adding the indefinite accusative ending '-an' to the root. For example, kathiir-, "many", becomes kathiiran "much". However, Arabic often avoids adverbs by using a cognate accusative plus an adjective.

This is wrong, you do not create anything by adding the "indefinite accusative ending" to the root for several reasons:
 * 1) The root is not a word to start with, it is only three letters out of which the words are created. for the above example (kathiir) the root is k-th-r.
 * 2) There is not one 'accusative ending', actually, it's not always merely an ending - it's an accusative form.
 * 3) The accusative in Arabic does not only apply to nouns but also to verbs and pronouns, which cannot become adverbs.
 * 4) You can have definite adverbs, in which case you can not use the indefinite accusative ending (noonation).

It's true that the adverb in Arabic is in the accusative form, but only because it's an adverb, it's not an adverb because it's in the accusative!! (then all objects and many other types of words will all become adverbs!!!). Also, Arabic does not avoid the adverb, where did you get that from? there are actually four types of adverbs in Arabic: cognate adverb (مفعول مطلق), locative adverb (مفعول فيه), causative adverb (مفعول له) and the adverb of accompaniment (مفعول معه). I'm not sure what is meant by 'cognate accusative', but it seems like a simple cognate adverb which does not always need an adjective although may be used with one. Mahaodeh (talk) 21:53, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Adverbs modifying numbers
The first paragraph says that adverbs can modify adjectives, including numbers. Modify numbers? In what language? I can't think of any examples in European languages, nor can I find anything online that suggests this is indeed the case. Duga3 (talk) 14:50, 16 July 2011 (UTC)
 * How about: There was only one person there. It cost about five thousand pounds. 90.220.14.240 (talk) 22:24, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Needs references and a rewrite
This page needs work. It needs many more references and may also need to be rewritten in order to sound more credible and professional. Scofield Boy (talk) 23:59, 2 February 2012 (UTC)

Definition of a noun
Maybe if this article does get a rewrite (I agree it needs one) then this observation will be superfluous, but the way a noun is defined - as anything which will fit into "The ___ is red" is obviously very imperfect. A lot of mass nouns, abstract nouns and proper nouns won't go in there at all, mainly because of the "the"; but the semantic weirdness of "red" doesn't help either (*"The neighbourliness is red")... I'd suggest something like "(The) ___ is important", but there may be problems with that that I've not thought of. Knole Jonathan (talk) 13:47, 21 February 2012 (UTC) Also, there are certain non-verbs which will fit into the sentence, admittedly by being a little awkward. The obvious example would be to use an adjective, especially a comparative or superlative, with ellipsis, presuming the noun was in an earlier sentence. "The biggest is red". "The neighbouring is red".JimiQ (talk) 22:44, 13 September 2016 (UTC)

Information about Appalachian English adverb usage has been lost from the article
An IP editor vastly gutted a section this article once had, Adverbs in English, which contained important information as to how the -ly ending used in English came about, which also demonstrated the -like adverb ending used in Appalachian, which demonstrates its roots with other forms of Germanic speech.

The last article old ID containing this information can be found here. I'd restore it myself, but grammar people tend to get rather possessive over such pages (and also regularly engage in cultural prejudice, and try their hardest to eliminate minority dialects...) — ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ (ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ) 00:29, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

 * I think that IP's fairly random gutting was reverted; it was actually I who finally removed this material, in this edit. The reason was noted in the edit summary - for an article that is supposed to be about adverbs in general, across languages, it was overdominated by some tiny etymological detail about English. I think I moved the salient facts to the Adverbs section of the English grammar page. The detail of the etymology of -ly can be found in the -ly article. Victor Yus (talk) 08:58, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

 * I see. That would make sense. But info about Appalachian's -like ending is still absent from those pages. An example would be "the frame was installed crookedlike", instead of "crookedly". I'd demonstrated how -like and -ly are related and ultimately of the same origin. Wodenhelm (Talk) 05:45, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
 * The bit about Appalachian is currently in a footnote in the -ly article; I didn't think it was a particularly significant bit of information. But I won't object if you want to make it a bit more prominent again (and it would be good to give an example, like the one you just mentioned). Victor Yus (talk) 08:54, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

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Adverbs Modifying Noun Phrases
Surely in a construction like ‘There is a shortage internationally…’ in this article, ‘internationally’ modifies not just the clause ‘there is’ as stated but the noun phrase ‘there is a shortage’, which would mean that this article has it wrong saying that adverbs don’t modify noun phrases (unless we consider ‘internationally’ to be an adjective despite ending in -ly, which seems a bit odd).

Perhaps the clearest example of an adverb modifying a noun phrase is ‘whatever’. If I were to say “There is no point whatever telling Bob” then whatever would modify the noun phrase ‘There is no point’ (even the possible refutation that it modifies ‘telling Bob’ fails due to ‘telling Bob’ being a noun phrase.). I don’t even think it can be used in the standard way, to modify a verb (In ‘Do whatever it takes’, ‘whatever’ is short for ‘whatever thing’ and thus classifies as a pronoun). The fact that ‘whatever’ can be used to answer a question beginning with ‘What’ is also evidence it is a pronoun according to this article, though when used in such a way it is in fact being used as a pronoun.

To summarise, we should modify the article to say that adverbs can be used to modify noun phrases and give ‘whatever’ and ‘internationally’ as examples; failing that, we should clarify that we don’t think adverbs can modify noun phrases and explain that ‘internationally’ (in some of its uses) and ‘whatever’ (in all of its uses where it isn’t a pronoun) are adjectives. Overlordnat1 (talk) 09:33, 29 November 2021 (UTC)

title: Talk:Adverb