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

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

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

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

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

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In my last post, I noted the millions of taxpayer dollars flowing into ACORN’s housing corporation and that at least twice, Democratic administrations have caught ACORN misusing taxpayer money allocated for community work. To understand ACORN’s repeated scams, it’s important to know that the group has again and again been accused of funneling government grants to ACORN’s political and labor activism (in effect using our money to fund their growth).

It didn’t take long after the group’s founding in 1970 to work its way into the radical Left and sign up for government largess. After Jimmy Carter took office, the group used its connections to win a contract worth almost $500,000 to train community volunteers under the VISTA program.

It took virtually no time for the group to show its true colors. The grant was no small thing; the Heritage Foundation concluded, “It appears that the VISTA grant was crucial to the survival of ACORN.” The money may have helped the far-left group, but the results, as you might imagine, were not pleasant:

Under the ACORN/CORAP grant, VISTAs engaged-in blatantly political activity in Arkansas and Missouri, while five VISTAs were active in a labor organizing campaign in New Orleans.

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