Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: How a band of visionaries and a million dollars upended America – in the 1920s, which had some remarkable similarities to our own era. Historian John Fabian Witt will explain; his new book is ‘The Radical Fund.” But first: the tasks facing Zohran Mamdani. Bhaskar Sunkara will comment – in a minute.
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Starting January 1st, New York City will have a socialist mayor — for the first time ever. For comment, we turn to Bhaskar Sunkara. He’s president of The Nation Magazine, founding editor of Jacobin, a columnist for The Guardian, a contributor to the New York Times, and author of ‘The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities.’ Bhaskar, welcome back.
BS: Thanks so much for having me. It’s an exciting time to be a socialist, and one can’t always say that’s the case in the grand scheme of US history.
JW: We are smiling. So yeah, Mamdani will be the first socialist to hold significant power in American history. It’s a huge opportunity. It’s a huge responsibility. He knows it. You say ‘he’s the real deal.’ His politics are not the progressivism of the liberal Democrats. Tell us about that.
BS: Well, first of all, I will add one maybe correction to your statement, which is Bernie, through the Ways and Means Committee, certainly had a lot of power. I would say he’s the first socialist to hold real executive power in the US, and this kind of gets to the point of what makes Mamdani different than other nominal DSA members — like Mayor Dinkins, before, New York’s first black mayor and also a member of the Democratic Socialist of America briefly. What makes him different from even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’s a DSA member. What makes him different than even someone like Bernie Sanders, my kind of political icon:
When it comes to his socialism, I would say the difference is that Zohran really came up as a cadre activist member of the Democratic Socialist of America. He’s someone with a relatively deep Marxist worldview, someone who is very active in DSA, someone who really sought out the DSA endorsement and relied very heavily on DSA volunteers, even more than AOC did, because AOC’s first congressional bid, of course, was a joint project, you could say, of groups like Justice Democrats and the DSA. So much of Mamdani’s campaign and his staff around his campaign came out of the DSA-New York City milieu. I’m not a sectarian. I don’t think this makes him better or worse than any of the others. But I do think it is particularly remarkable.
JW: The pundits have been saying New York City is special. What works to elect a mayor in New York won’t work in most other places. What do you think?
BS: I think when people refer to what makes New York City special, I think they’re referring a lot to social and cultural issues that are less salient here, at least with working class voters. So you could convince a lot of working class voters purely on the message of affordability, and you can sidestep past positions like say Zohran’s position, which he rightfully moved away from: supporting ‘defund the police.’ That is not a huge, longstanding liability in New York as long as he says those positions are in the past. Certain issues that are lightning rods in other parts of the country are less so in New York. So I do think that it is important to concede that different parts of the country will need different rhetoric, particularly on social and cultural issues. Someone like Dan Osborne, when he talks about immigration, he’s staking out a progressive stance on immigration.
JW: Dan Osborne, Nebraska independent candidate for senator who we have high hopes for.
BS: Yes, I think Dan Osborne is an excellent candidate, but when he’s in Nebraska, in a deep red state, and he’s asked about immigration, he’ll say something like, ‘I support Donald Trump when it comes to making sure our border is harder. But I don’t believe that we should be separating mothers from their children. I believe in a pathway for citizenship for those who are following the rules and are here.’ That is an objectively progressive position anywhere in this country, but particularly in an area that was plus 14 for Donald Trump, like Nebraska was in the last election.
Now, Mamdani can take a very different approach In New York. He can say, ‘I’m going to do battle with Donald Trump if he tries to deploy ICE and the National Guard in our city. We’re a city of immigrants, we stand up for our neighbors and for immigrants.’
First of all, in an abstract sense, I’m with Zohran on this particular issue, but I don’t think it would be wise for him to articulate it in quite that way if he was running for Senate in Nebraska.
And objectively, the Osborne stance is, for any part of the country, but particularly for a unquote red state, it’s a very good stance. So I think there’s a host of issues where we need to translate to where voters are. And I think the lesson from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign is in part he both challenged people to think in more left wing, more egalitarian terms about solidarity, about the role of government in the state, but he also kind of met people halfway where they are. And I see that in other areas with candidates like Graham Platner, with candidates like Dan Osborne meeting people halfway and trying to engage with them and push them in a more populist economic direction.
JW: The campaign and the victory were thrilling. What he proposed to do is very limited and sharply focused: a rent freeze, free buses and faster buses, universal childcare. It all costs money. He proposes to raise taxes on incomes above a million dollars by 2%, and raise the corporate tax rate to equal New Jersey’s. I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of each part of this.
First of all, housing. Everybody agrees rent control is an essential part of life in New York, but it isn’t enough. New York City needs lots of new housing construction. Mamdani’s role model, Fiorello LaGuardia, who was mayor for a decade in the thirties and forties, was the first to undertake this task. He built 17,000 apartments, the first public housing in America, funded by the federal government. Mamdani has proposed the construction of 200,000 new rent stabilized apartments over the next 10 years. This would be housing for low income households, seniors, and working families that earn less than 70,000 a year, which is the median income for families in rent-stabilized housing. He says this would cost a hundred billion dollars, and it could be paid for by the sale of municipal bonds. New York City really needs this. What will it take to make it work?
BS: Yeah, I think that a lot of these plans will take aid from, at the very least, from the state, at very least from the governor. It’s a very complicated story, but New York City has limited fiscal means to deficit finance and to do a variety of other things that other comparably sized polities would be able to do. Mamdani’s relationship with Governor Kathy Hochel will be very important, and Hochel to her credit actually started campaigning with Zohran Mamdani earlier than Hakeem Jeffries and others endorsed him, to the very end, to even the day after the election.
Chuck Schumer would not say whether or not he voted for Mamdani or if he voted for Andrew Cuomo. It seemed very obvious that he voted for Andrew Cuomo.
So part of, I think, what Zohran’s doing with his housing proposals is he’s putting out there the idea that there needs to be direct public construction once again of housing. And I think this combines with something that Mayor Adams and the city council pushed through – ‘the City of Yes’ proposals to make it easier for the private sector to build. In the end, though, he hedged a little bit on this in the debate stage.
Zohran actually came out and said that he voted yes on our ballot measures two through five in New York City, these ballots measures making it easier to build private housing. I personally agree with that decision. I’m very glad that he openly said that he voted for it. It gives the mayor a little bit more power. It reduces some of the veto points that the city council has in new housing construction.
So this combination of making it easy to build private housing, making sure that a portion of that public housing stock at least is affordable, and making it so that at least the horizon of public housing is on the table, I think is very important. And it doesn’t even necessarily have to be a deeply ideological thing to say that New York City should have a lot of public housing.
And the one thing he has been talking about — the rent freeze — in and of itself doesn’t actually cost money. You could argue that the city will need to, the recent article in Jacobin has done this, the city might need to subsidize building upkeep so that certain unprofitable buildings don’t fall into disrepair if landlords stop, basically give up in those buildings. But in general, that part of the plan doesn’t cost money.
There is that additional part of the plan to build 200,000 units by borrowing, through financing long-term debt — that seems feasible to me. There’s a few mechanisms at his disposal.
JW: And let’s talk about the buses. The New York Times opposes making the buses free. They say free buses will ‘turn buses into homeless shelters.’ What do you think?
BS: To be perfectly honest, I did not prioritize the free buses proposal — and not for the reasons why I think Washington Post and others have opposed it; but simply because a solid portion of the MTA budget is dependent on fare revenue. Buses collect around $700 million per year in revenue. I think that free buses for areas in which buses are absolutely necessary, there’s no other transit model, kind of like what’s around has already proposed the piloting free buses in certain areas, made perfect sense.
I think that one has to think about the trade-offs in terms of, okay, New York City is a place where a lot of the people using public transit, for instance, are tourists, or they’re people who are coming to the city for work but live out of town and otherwise are not directly contributing to the tax base of the city. Would we be better off with means testing programs for free transit? I think these are all legitimate points.
For what it’s worth, a lot of people who take the bus in New York City, when I take the bus, I always take it to a subway transfer or out of the subway, so I don’t actually pay for the leg that’s on the bus. It’s a free transfer. Buses are often used for that last mile.
Obviously some portion of that 700 million — All that being said, I could actually see a social democratic argument saying, this isn’t quite the best way to spend $700 million, and in fact spread off over 20, 30, 40 years, that $700 million can actually be invested in greater service — Maybe a new subway line or something like that that’ll actually help working class people more.
That being said, he ran on it, and there was an election, and elections have consequences, and he needs to deliver on free buses. We have to figure out a way to make it work. We have to sell the benefits of it. We have to actually make sure that the buses are in fact faster. That was the second half of his appeal.
JW: Let’s talk about faster. Right now the buses in New York City, I read, average eight miles an hour. The New York Times says the goal should be 10 miles an hour. Is that the best socialism can do? 10 miles an hour?
BS: Yeah, I mean there needs to be certain things that can be done as far as — obviously dedicated bus lanes are important. Buses also need signal priorities. In other words, if a bus with 60 people is rolling up to a traffic light, that light needs to turn green.
JW: Free childcare: a huge thing for working class and poor families. Right now, the city has preschool for all four year olds: free, full day, high quality programs. It’s called ‘pre-K.’ For three year olds in New York City, there’s a similar program, ‘3-K,’ but it’s not really universal. And the next frontier is universal childcare program for two year olds, with classes close to where everybody lives. What’s it going to take for the city to do this?
BS: I think the key thing to keep in mind is that this program already exists for age four, five and six year olds. This pre-K program, age three, like you mentioned, is means tested. I think that the first and immediate step is to make sure that age three is universal. I think that’s something that Zohran needs to do, and I think this is something where there needs to be help from the governor. Right now, the program only applies on as far as I know on certain school days. Again, it’s not guaranteed in all places, but the mechanism already exists, and I think Zohran just needs to make a small incremental gain. Working with the governor and figuring out how to finance age three being universal and then selling that as a big success.
I think in the ideal universe, we would like to have the first six months being covered by state-paid parental leave. Right now, New York State does offer 12 weeks, which is better than most places, 12 weeks, at least 50% your salary. But I think, in our ideal social democratic universe, it’d be something like six weeks of paid leave, and then after that, childcare starting at the very least at six months onward.
But there’s only so much you could do in one city. I think there’s been this dream of social democracy in one city for a long time in New York City, and to a large extent we kind of have it. We have 30 plus percent unionization rates in New York. We have our New York City Health and Hospital Corporation that for emergencies kind of functions as a mini national health service. We have a very cheap CUNY, our city university system. So we have lots of these systems in place. We have a history of delivering successful social programs like this in New York. I think the goal is to just work with the governor and figure out how we can make the financing work.
JW: The Mamdani campaign and the Mamdani victory were thrilling. Governing is going to be much more prosaic. Mamdani’s campaign ended up with a hundred thousand volunteers. The question now is how to organize them into a group that can continue the fight. We have examples of promising leaders who had huge volunteer organizations that they disbanded, Obama being number one.
But now we have the announcement of a new nonprofit group called Our Time for an Affordable New York City. This organization’s stated aim is to put the energy of Mamdani’s volunteer base toward getting his agenda enacted. They’re officially an independent organization, not run by Mamdani, not part of the mayor’s office. They say at their website, quote, ‘we will organize to win and defend the agenda that resonated with voters.’ What do you know about this new organization, Our Time?
BS: Yeah, I think Our Time is a very promising effort. In New York City there are certain legal restrictions about campaign finances and where it goes and who can staff the kind of post-campaign c-4’s. But as far as I know, Our Time will be using a lot of what it can legally use — a lot of the lists accumulated during the Mamdani campaign. I think it will be a very useful mobilizational platform for reaching out to supporters, and basically saying, ‘Hey, we want you to phone bank. We want you to call your state representative because we want your state representative in Albany helping us in New York City pass on Mamdani’s agenda. We want you to learn about this effort that the mayor’s office is doing that will make the city more affordable. But here are the roadblocks we’re getting into.’ So I think these efforts are ways to then allow the movement that’s emerging around Zohran to both be one foot in power and one foot out of power and not kind of fully demobilized.
I think in addition to efforts like Our Time, it is important that, I think, the most dedicated organizers for Zohran Mamdani join groups like the Democratic Socialists of America. I myself am a Democratic Socialists of America member. I hope to be involved with Our Time as well, helping to do grassroots work along those lines. But that’s not a membership organization. I do think that the most dedicated 2, 3, 4 or 5 per cent of these cadre are people that would benefit from what, in my opinion – I’m a democratic socialist — what the democratic socialist worldview offers: a way to really contextualize the forces standing in the way of people like Zohran Mandani, and also to take part in campaigns that go beyond electoral politics and go beyond the mayor’s office, like labor campaigns and other things.
So I know that Zohran hopes to use his platform as mayor, his bully pulpit, to support all sorts of progressive causes, both nationally and of course local labor causes and others. But I think the combination of Our Time and a membership organization like the Democratic Sources of America-New York City are great combinations.
JW: Bhaskar Sunkara – read him at the Guardian, read him at The Nation. Thank you, Bhaskar.
BS: Great. Take care, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk about how a band of visionaries and a million dollars changed America – a hundred years ago, in the 1920s. For that history, we turn to John Fabian Witt. He teaches law and history at Yale. He’s written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Nation. He’s won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His new book is The Radical Fund. John Witt, welcome to the program.
John Fabian Witt: Thank you, Jon. It’s really nice to be here.
JW: You say that the 1920s had some striking things in common with our own ominous political world today. Please explain; maybe let’s start with the issue of immigration.
JFW: Great. Well, gates being shut after several decades of really extraordinary immigration to the United States, and a nationalist immigration backlash in 1920, 1924 legislation. So yeah, lots of parallels to the immigration side, but that’s just the beginning. As you know, we could talk about economic inequality and I think of the really legendary Thomas Piketty U-shaped curves that take you from the inequality of the 1920s to the inequality of the 2020s with a big dip in inequality during the intervening century. Immigration; inequality; but that’s just the beginning. A resurgence of white nationalism. Think of the Ku Klux Klan as a form of Christian nationalism. Think too of the crisis that people like Walter Lipman and Upton Sinclair are talking about, which is the crisis of journalism and misinformation, and the crisis of the relationship between the press and American democracy. So a whole bunch of confounding crises.
JW: And let’s also mention dissenting speech under attack.
JFW: Yes. Well, for sure is there not only ideological deportations, that’s the story of 1919 to 1920. That’s the story of the Palmer Raids, and it’s the story of our world on places like college campuses in 2025. So in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court had not yet once in its history recognized a right to free speech such as would keep someone out of prison for saying dissenting things. Racial violence is another bleak feature of this period in ways that are just cause me to gasp. I mean, we’re talking about pogrom like forms of violence in which whole Black communities are destroyed East St. Louis, Elaine, Arkansas, Tulsa, Oklahoma, I mean really horrific things – that’s 1917, 1919, 1921 in sequence.
JW: And what about presidential politics? Surely 2024 was unique and there was nothing like it in the twenties.
JFW: Of course, there’re going to be disanalogies, but it is for sure true that in 2016 and 2024, we elected in the United States a president promising to bring something like what Warren Harding promised in 1920: ‘restoration of normalcy,’ said Harding, ‘greatness, American greatness’; ‘make America great again,’ says Trump. A nostalgic presidential election is another commonality.
JW: And an ailing incumbent Democrat in the White House gives way to a Republican trifecta.
JFW: Right? I mean, famously Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and limping along at the end and giving way to Republican control of Supreme Court, Congress and White House in the 1920s and the 2020s.
JW: A lot of people, including a lot of historians, say the authoritarian forces ruling America today are stronger than ever before. But you say that in the twenties, we were significantly farther down the road toward fascism, away from democracy, than we are today. Now, that’s obviously true for Black America in the 1920s, but what about white America? What about political violence and state repression?
JFW: Well, let’s do it three ways. One we should just revisit, this does involve Black America, but the American South is an apartheid regime, a whole region of the country in the 1920s that’s run by a Jim Crow apartheid regime backed by force and violence and a whole legal apparatus. That’s one piece of authoritarianism in the twenties.
But think about labor. Labor unions in 1919 are crushed in a series of post-war strikes, and the crushing of labor involves the use of state force, it involves the use of private militias. And for a decade and more thereafter, labor unions are back on their heels, hemorrhaging members a whole series of anti-labor campaigns, sometimes less violent but more effective in many ways, break out all through the 1920s. That’s a second form of authoritarianism in 1920s, USA.
And then third, the complete absence of free speech protections. We in the 2020s have recourse at the very least to a set of claims that are rallying cries and that can organize the defense of speakers. And in the 1920s, there are rallying cries. But the ACLU has just been founded and has not yet had successes at the US Supreme Court level.
JW: And I would add there are hundreds of people in federal prison for speaking out against World War I. Hundreds, including, well, tell us, including—
JFW: Presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the socialist candidate in the 1920 election, is in prison while running for office. And at the end of the war, there’s more than a thousand prisoners in federal prisons alone. And then all through the twenties, Jon, there’s a series of criminal syndicalism laws passed in states around the country that banned dissenting speech, organized around the idea of stamping out the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World. But those statutes go much further and make it possible for state authorities to put in state prisons, dissenters from all around the country. And much of the history of the First Amendment in the twenties is the story of dissenters prosecuted under those criminal syndicalism laws.
JW: This picture you are painting of the twenties is not really the Roaring Twenties, the jazz age, Scott Fitzgerald, the Great Gatsby. How do you account for this gap in the public image of what the twenties were?
JFW: Well, partly it’s that the media write about things that are entertaining in the twenties. And so the records, and the first histories of the twenties, focus on the astonishing cultural things going on in the twenties. And a lot of really interesting things other than what we’ve just said for sure. But I think also that some of our successes, some of the successes of progressives and radicals in building paths out of these forms of authoritarianism, have led us to forget just how bad it was.
So when we remember the horrors of the interwar period, we go across the Atlantic, we go to Weimar and think about the horrors that lead to National Socialists and totalitarianisms — Germany, the Soviet Union, and the like. But we actually could see similar authoritarianism right here. It’s just that a group of social movements managed to figure out paths that when crisis came, led us to a better place.
JW: And that’s the story you tell in your book, The Radical Fund. The story begins in 1922 when a man I had never heard of named Charles Garland, you describe him as ‘a handsome Harvard dropout,’ gave away his million-dollar inheritance. Tell us about this guy.
JFW: Yeah, so he’s the child of a wealthy family that’s living on Cape Cod. He has a fascinating mother who’s a patron of artists like Georgia O’Keefe and others. And he inherits a million dollars and refuses it. He says, ‘I didn’t earn this. I didn’t work for it.’ He cites HG Wells, whom he loves to read. He cites Tolstoy, who he reads. He cites the New Testament. He says the example of Jesus would lead him to say no. And Jon, it causes a huge scandal. And people, reporters come, from society pages mostly. It’s not hard news guys. It’s society page reporters from all over the country who come to write about this beautiful photogenic guy. And they can now put photographs in newspapers really easily, and so there are photographs of him all over the place. He has a beautiful young wife who is herself a debutante, and they have a baby, they’re photogenic, they look good, and they ask him about this rejection, and it gets all over the country such that some interesting people start to hear about it.
JW: And Upton Sinclair writes him a letter.
JFW: Upton Sinclair says, ‘you know, Charles, this is one hell of a stunt you’ve pulled, but I’m the expert in stunts,’ Sinclair talking, ‘and I’ve got one better for you. Accept the money and give it to me and I’ll give it away to the kind of causes that you like, and that’ll solve your problem. And also, Charles, the reporters won’t come to your lawn anymore. You’ll be done with having to deal with all the news stories.’ And eventually young Charles gives into this and gives the money away, just as Sinclair had proposed.
JW: Of course, he was not the first millionaire to give away his money in this period. Andrew Carnegie gave away $350 million. We are told this is the equivalent of $7 billion today. It created a lot of public libraries, 2,500 it says here, but it didn’t really transform class or racial relations in America. What did Charles Garland do with his money that was different from a rich philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie?
JFW: Yeah, Carnegie, Rockefeller, the foundation that is created, I’ll say more a word about that in a second, but the foundation created with this money, self-consciously understands itself as an anti-Rockefeller project. The Rockefeller Foundations are up and running, and through the twenties, they’re helping to launch some of the human resources projects and propaganda projects that are especially anti-union – that’s the Rockefeller Foundation Project. And the Garland Fund, the American Fund for Public Service, sets out to provide money to causes that cannot get resources from the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Rosenwald, a lot of Black schools being built by Rosenwald money during this period. Russell Sage, lots of foundations starting up at just this moment. This is the moment of the beginning of the modern income tax advantage for philanthropic institutions. So a lot of new philanthropic industrial complex stuff is going on here in the twenties. And the American Fund for Public Service sets out to do it differently. They don’t want to be like the big foundations, and that’s their project.
JW: Let’s talk about some of the people involved here. We mentioned Upton Sinclair. We also need to talk about Roger Baldwin and Sydney Hillman.
JFW: Upton Sinclair drops out of the story. He’s not a sustained organization man. And so Sinclair hands young Charles Garland off to someone who’s the ultimate organization man of the American liberal sphere in the middle of the 20th century, who’s Roger Baldwin, founded the ACLU in 1920 and in ‘22 becomes what his friends call the kingpin, the kingpin of the Garland Fund, and runs the Garland Fund for the next 19 years as a kind of sidelight to the ACLU. So the ACLU is doing rights talk with Baldwin’s right hand, and Baldwin’s left hand is doing affirmative projects and producing things with resources.
And Sidney Hillman, as you say, is one of the founding directors. Hillman, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, becomes an organizer and leader at the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, starting in Chicago, and becomes one of the key intellectual and organizing architects for the industrial union as an approach to organizing capitalism and labor’s role in capitalism in the twenties and into the thirties.
By the mid, late 1930s, he’s going to be one of the right hand men of Franklin Roosevelt. He’s a core figure in the New Deal Coalition, and Hillman is on the founding board in 1922. He drops off relatively quickly because he’s a busy guy. He’s got a lot to do. But he puts on the board in his place, lieutenants of his, and recruits to the board a series of people who are industrial Democrats. ‘Industrial democracy’ was their watchword, and they were committed to reorganizing capitalism in a way that would allow workers to have a say in governing their own lives. And that move in labor, which is a contentious one, he has critics on the left and on the right, and that move becomes the centerpiece of the Garland Fund’s work.
JW: A second front of the Garland Funds work is civil rights, especially in the South. I was especially interested in the role of WEB Du Bois who eventually proposes a grant that would fuse civil rights and labor.
JFW: Du Bois is never on the fund’s board. Du Bois through his good friend James Weldon Johnson, who is running NAACP and is on the board of this foundation, proposed in 1924 to begin to study schooling inequality in the American South. That is the beginning of what eventually will become a litigation campaign that the fund will finance, which will eventually get us to Brown versus Board of Education. But it starts just as you said, Jon, with the idea that fighting Jim Crow is a crucial precondition to organizing the industrial working class. That Jim Crow and the absence of civil rights is going to make it impossible to do the kind of union organizing that Sidney Hillman thinks needs to happen across the working class. That means Black workers and white workers, especially in a world of the great migration in which the industrial working class is being integrated by the sheer fact of 6 million Black Americans moving from South to North.
JW: The one thing we have not yet talked about is the critique of media that the Garland Fund was involved in and tried to do something about.
JFW: Yeah, I mean, Upton Sinclair, who launches this foundation, is writing alongside people like Walter Lipman right after the war, right after World War I, about the power of propaganda and the way in which the media, to use Lipman’s terms, supplies ‘the middle space between the pictures in people’s heads and the world outside.’ And the Garland Fund’s observation is that it’s one thing to claim rights to free speech, and it’s another thing to supply the content. And so they finance news, syndication services, a publishing house, they get into the business of helping to make film, they flirt with and are around the support for a radio station named after Eugene Victor Debs, WEVD in New York City, in the twenties and into the thirties. And they make media and the information environment a central piece of their work. They’re convinced that it’s a central, a central question in democracy, and they invest in it heavily.
In fact, if you look at the funding they do over the course of their life, the funding they give to the NAACP, which is their legacy, their claim to fame, their connection to Brown against Board of Education, that pales by comparison to the amount of funding they give for newspapers, magazines, publishers, and education, education efforts for the working class, labor education in particular. So the intellectual space, the information space, the communication space is at the core of their work.
JW: 1929, 1930, world crisis of capitalism, Germany heads into fascism. You think that the activities that the Garland Fund had been engaging in for the previous decade helped us avoid fascism and helped us instead to get the New Deal, an era of working-class political empowerment, a court that protected freedom of speech for the first time in history. Most people don’t attribute these to the work of the Garland Fund. Tell us why you think they played an important role.
JFW: Great. Well, yeah, let’s talk about the world of the Garland Fund in that moment. It’s a world committed to new forms of civil liberties that it’s been working on for a decade plus, by the time we get to the crash of ‘29 and the Depression that follows. It’s a world that’s been fighting against and designing a plan to organize social movements against Jim Crow, the authoritarianism of the South. And it’s a world that’s been putting into place institutions, large labor unions, capable of existing at scale to reorganize capitalism around an industrial democracy project.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate the role of $1 million and the fund. It’s not that a million dollars changed the world. It’s that the social movements that came together, those are things that tipped history, a history whose energy came from things like the economic crash, like World War II, that’s right around the corner. Those are the huge propulsive forces that are driving change. But change can happen in lots of different ways. I mean, economic crisis in other places in the world at the same time produces political crisis and forms of fascism, which of course are on the ground here in the United States too. We talked about how Jim Crow is a form of authoritarianism. Maybe we could describe it as fascism, but of course, there are people who self-describe as fascist in Madison Square Garden in just a couple years. So there’s fascism here too. And I think that it’s the social movements that help to craft the grooves into which tens of millions of Americans find it appealing to organize their lives, that that’s what allows for a different future for the United States.
JW: Of course, we’re all wondering, can we today take a step forward as significant as that? Again, if we look at today, we do have very big-time progressive philanthropy. You mentioned the Gates Foundation. We’ve heard of George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Mackenzie Scott – after divorcing Jeff Bezos in 2019, she’s donated $19 billion in five years to progressive organizations. Is what they are doing, the liberal billionaires, parallel to the innovative efforts of a century ago, the experiments that you described the Garland Fund undertaking?
JFW: Well, in some ways there are others that are a little more under the radar screen: an amazing outfit called Freedom Together that’s doing really interesting philanthropic work in the space of democracy. And that’s just one among a number. So there’s money.
In some ways, liberal philanthropy is a victim of its own prosperity. There are lots of games in town in 2025 in a way that was only one game in town in 1925, and that I think has made it a little bit harder to have the hard conversations among the many groups from center left to left about how to manage a strategy for moving forward. I mean, that scarcity produced new strategies.
Another part of the dilemma, Jon, is that the economic landscape of 2020s capitalism is so radically different. I mean, the industrial union as a way of organizing tens of millions of Americans to remake and engage, to engage with and remake capitalism, it’s much less promising unit for organizing. And I don’t think we have found or identified the unit for organizing at scale a new 21st century economic democracy. That’s the question. There are all sorts of interesting experiments underway, and many of them launched and supported by some of the philanthropic foundations that you named, but we haven’t quite, well, I guess it’s an understatement, we haven’t quite found it yet, have we?
JW: So the Garland Fund did not give away vast amounts of money, but it did create a network that provided a model for addressing the fundamental problems of modern capitalism as they existed in the 1920s. And in that respect, they provide lots of lessons for us today. John Witt’s new book is The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America. John, thanks for talking with us today.
JFW: Jon, It’s been a delight.
