Advertise Rodham closed her thesis by emphasizing that she reserved a place for Alinsky in the pantheon of social action — seated next to Martin Luther King, the poet-humanist Walt Whitman, and Eugene Debs, the labor leader now best remembered as the five-time Socialist Party candidate for president.
Edited by Frank Marafiote for the Internet.
With Hillary Clinton likely to pursue the Democratic nomination for president inquestions about her intellectual and moral education abound. One of the major intellectual influences — perhaps an emotional one was well — was radical social philosopher and activist Saul Alinsky.
As this story shows, Alinsky was both the ladder Hillary climbed to gain new perspectives on society — specifically the poor — and then, once there, a ladder she tossed aside when she no longer needed it. The children of the Sixties combined the typical young adult developmental cycle with a unique cycle in the life of this nation.
They were not only trying to learn about dating, but also about foreign policy, ethics, Hillary rodham thesis racism. Hillary Clinton was quintessentially one of these people — a Sixties person, although we would hardly have recognized her as such.
It was also commonplace. Her generation was mixing private rites of passage with public ones, and it seemed right to do so. Hillary Clinton was a conformist to the extent that she mixed these personal and political levels early, at a time when most of the people did likewise.
She was as marked by her chronological age and the Age of Aquarius as most Sixties people were — and she is probably where she is today because she was even more influenced by it than the rest of us. It is no accident that she chose to write about Saul Alinsky for her senior thesis at Wellesley College.
As a social activist, Alinsky was as much a part of the Sixties as was Kennedy and King. He was in the background creating the foreground of interpretation: Like the headband, Hillary abandoned much of what influenced her back then.
But still this heavy identification with her age and THE age continued in bold form right after she completed her senior thesis. It had to matter to her that the classes before remained in their seats, not quite sure of what had just happened.
This literal order of approval is important to our understanding of Hillary Clinton. She learned early on that people interpret things by their age. No one needs the tag of the Sixties any more. Her repudiation of the tag is one of the reasons that Wellesley Collegeat her request, does not release her senior thesis to the public.
Hillary is socially and personally based in the Sixties, not in its cultural but in its political dimension. Perpetual bad hair days. Thus she needed to leave as much of the Sixties behind her as possible.
This repudiation of the Sixties began early in her life.A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree under the Special Honors Program, Wellesley College, Wellesley, .
doctoral thesis - Hillary Clinton Quarterly. Hillary D.
Rodham Political Science 2 May, [© Hillary D. Rodham] OCR'd by TOMBOY initiativeblog.com OCR'd by TOMBOY teachers who have contributed to the process of thesis-writing.
And I thank them for their tireless help and encouragement. In regard to the paper itself, there are three people who deserve. In , Hillary Rodham wrote a page senior thesis for Wellesley College about community organizer Saul Alinsky entitled "There Is Only the Fight An Analysis of the Alinsky Model." The thesis is now available.
While the work by Rodham as a college student was the subject of much speculation in articles and biographies of Hillary Rodham Clinton in the s, access to the thesis was. Yes, Hillary Rodham did write her senior thesis on Alinsky. Hillary Rodham in , when she was president of Wellesley College's Young Republicans, shown here with the cover page of her senior thesis from on radical organizer Saul D.
Alinsky.