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Mamdani’s Momentum, plus ‘The Radical Fund’ | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner.
0:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Later in the show, how a band of visionaries in a million dollars upended America in the 1920s, which had some remarkable similarities to our own era.
0:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Historian John Fabian Whitt will explain his new book is The Radical Fund.
0:40
[SPEAKER_01]: Starting January 1st, New York City will have a socialist mayor for the first time ever.
0:46
[SPEAKER_01]: Soren Mamdani.
0:47
[SPEAKER_01]: For comment we turned to Boskarsun Kara, he is 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.
1:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Boskar, welcome back.
1:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much, Radme, it's an exciting, exciting time to be a socialist and one can't always say that's the case in that brand's game of US history.
1:18
[SPEAKER_00]: We are smiling.
1:20
[SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, mom, Danny will be the first socialist to hold significant power in American history.
1:26
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a huge opportunity.
1:28
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a huge responsibility.
1:30
[SPEAKER_01]: He knows it.
1:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You say he's the real deal.
1:33
[SPEAKER_01]: His politics are not the Progressivism of the liberal Democrats.
1:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about that.
1:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, first of all, I will I have one maybe Correction to your statement, which is burning.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, through the ways of means committee certainly had a lot of power.
1:47
[SPEAKER_00]: I would say he's the first socialist to hold real executive power in the US
1:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And this kind of gets to the point of what makes Mundani different than other nominal DSA members like major Dickens before New York's first black mayor and also a member of the Democratic Socialists America.
2:08
[SPEAKER_00]: A briefly, what makes indifference from even Alexandria Acasio Patez, who's a DSA member, what makes indifference even some of the Bernie Sanders, you know, my kind of political icon when it comes to socialism, I would say,
2:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The differences are on really came up as a kind of cadre activist member of the Democratic Socialist of America.
2:30
[SPEAKER_00]: He's someone with a relatively deep Marxist world view, someone who is very active in DSA, socials and office, committee, someone who's who really sought out the DSA endorsement and rely very heavily on DSA volunteers, even more than AOC did because AOC's first congressional
2:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, as a joint project, you could say of groups like Justice Democrats and the DSA, so much of Mombani's campaign and his staff around his campaign came out of the DSA New York City they'll use.
3:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not a sectarian, I don't think this makes them better or worse than any of the others, but I do think it is particularly remarkable.
3:15
[SPEAKER_01]: So the punitive in saying New York City is special.
3:19
[SPEAKER_01]: What works to elect a mayor in New York won't work in most other places.
3:24
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
3:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I think when people refer to what makes New York City special,
3:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're referring a lot to social and cultural issues that are less salient here, at least with working class voters.
3:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So you can convince a lot of working class voters purely on the message of affordability and you can sidestep past positions, like I said, is there a lot on this position, which is rightfully moved away from supporting their beef on the police?
3:51
[SPEAKER_00]: is not a huge long standing liability in New York as long as it says those positions are in the past.
3:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So initiatives that are light in rods and other parts of the country are less so in New York.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do think that it is important to can see that different parts of the country will need different rhetoric, particularly on social and cultural issues.
4:12
[SPEAKER_00]: someone like Dan Osborne when he talks about immigration, he's thinking out of progressive stance on immigration.
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Dan Osborne, Nebraska independent candidate for Senator who we have high hopes for.
4:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, I think Dan Osborne is an excellent candidate, boy, he's in Nebraska in a deep red state and he's asked about immigration, he'll say something like, you know, I support Donald Trump when it comes to making sure our borders harder,
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't believe that we should be separating mothers from their children.
4:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe in a pathway for citizenship for those who are falling in the rules and aren't on our hair.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: 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.
4:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Zoram, I'm not even taking a very different approach in New York.
5:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You can say, I'm going to do battle with Donald Trump.
5:04
[SPEAKER_00]: If you try to deploy ISIS in the National Guard on our city, we're a city of immigrants, we stand up for our neighbors and forever runs.
5:16
[SPEAKER_00]: But I don't think it would be wise for him to articulate it and quite that way if he was running for Senate and Nebraska.
5:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm objectively the Osborne stance is for any part of the country, but particularly for a point-of-port red state, it's a very good stance.
5:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a host of issues where we need to translate to where voters are.
5:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the lesson from Zorim on Battis campaign is in part, he both challenged people to think,
5:43
[SPEAKER_00]: and kind of more left-wing, more yelling, egalitarian terms about solidarity, about the role of government in the state, but you also kind of met people halfway where they are.
5:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And I see that within other areas, with candidates a grand partner, with candidates like Dan Osborn, meeting people halfway and trying to engage with them and push them in a more popular economic direction.
6:07
[SPEAKER_01]: The campaign and the victory were thrilling.
6:11
[SPEAKER_01]: What he proposed to do is very limited, sharply focused, a rant freeze, free buses, and faster buses, universal childcare.
6:21
[SPEAKER_01]: It all costs money.
6:22
[SPEAKER_01]: He proposes to raise taxes on incomes above a million dollars by 2%.
6:28
[SPEAKER_01]: and raise the corporate tax rate to equal new jerseys.
6:32
[SPEAKER_01]: I want to talk about the nuts and bolts of each part of this.
6:36
[SPEAKER_01]: First of all, housing.
6:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody agrees rent control is an essential part of life in New York, but it isn't enough.
6:44
[SPEAKER_01]: New York City needs lots of new housing construction.
6:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Mondani's role model, Fierrello LaGuardia, who is mayor for a decade in the 30s and 40s.
6:55
[SPEAKER_01]: was the first to undertake this task.
6:58
[SPEAKER_01]: He built 17,000 apartments.
7:01
[SPEAKER_01]: The first public housing in America funded by the federal government.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Momsdani has proposed the construction of 200,000 new rent stabilized apartments over the next 10 years.
7:14
[SPEAKER_01]: This would be housing for low-income households, seniors, working families that earned less than 70,000 a year, which is the median.
7:23
[SPEAKER_01]: income for families in rent stabilized housing.
7:27
[SPEAKER_01]: He says this would cost a hundred billion dollars, and it could be paid for by the sale of municipal bonds.
7:34
[SPEAKER_01]: New York City really needs this.
7:37
[SPEAKER_01]: What will it take to make it work?
7:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that a lot of these plans will take aid from the very least the state, a very least the governor.
7:47
[SPEAKER_00]: 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 and other copper-free size policies would be able to do.
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Mumbani's relationship with Governor Kathy Hockel will be very important and Hockel to her credit
8:07
[SPEAKER_00]: campaigning with Zoram Amdani, earlier than he came draft for his 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 Amdani or if he voted for Andrew Cuomo, I had seen very obvious if he voted for Andrew Cuomo.
8:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So part of I think what Zoram is doing with his housing proposals,
8:32
[SPEAKER_00]: is he's putting out there the idea that there needs to be direct public construction once again of housing.
8:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this combines with something that mayor Adams and the city council pushed through the city of yes proposals that make it easier for the private sector to build.
8:50
[SPEAKER_00]: In the end, though, he hedged a little bit on this during the debate stage, so there aren't actually came out and said that he voted yes on our ballot measures two through five in New York City, and these ballot measures make him easy to build private housing.
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: I personally agree with that decision.
9:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very glad that you openly said that he voted for it.
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: It gives him a little bit more power.
9:11
[SPEAKER_00]: It reduces some of the veto points that the city council has in new housing construction.
9:20
[SPEAKER_00]: 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 on the table.
9:33
[SPEAKER_00]: I think is very important and it doesn't even necessarily have to be a deeply ideological thing to say the New York City should have a lot of public housing and the one thing he has been talking about their rent freeze.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: In and of itself, doesn't actually cost money.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: You could argue that the city will need to, and the recent article on Jacob and has done this, the city might need to subsidize building upkeep and show that certain, unprofitable buildings don't fall into disrepair, if land will stop.
10:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Basically, you're up in those buildings.
10:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But in general, that part of the plant doesn't cost money.
10:10
[SPEAKER_00]: There is that additional part of the plant
10:14
[SPEAKER_00]: by bar and through finance and long-term debt that seems feasible to me.
10:20
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a few mechanisms that is disposal.
10:23
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's talk about the buses.
10:25
[SPEAKER_01]: The New York Times opposes making the buses free.
10:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They say free buses will turn buses into homeless shelters.
10:33
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you think?
10:34
[SPEAKER_00]: To be perfectly honest, I did not prioritize the free buses proposal and not for the reasons why
10:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Washington Post and others have have opposed it, but simply because a solid portion of the MTA budget is dependent on fair revenue, buses collect around 700 million per year in revenue, I think that free buses for areas that in which
11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: pluses are absolutely necessary, and there's no other transit model, kind of like what Zaron has already proposed, the piloting of robustness in certain areas made perfect sense.
11:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that one has to think about the trade-offs in terms of,
11:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, New York City is a place where a lot of the people using public transit for instance are tourists or their people who are coming to the city for work but live out of town and otherwise not directly contributed to the tax base.
11:26
[SPEAKER_00]: The city would be better off mean-stested programs like free transit.
11:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I think there's all legitimate points for what is worth.
11:36
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of people who take the bus in New York City, like when I take the bus, I always take it to subway transit or out of the subway.
11:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't actually pay for the leg that's on the bus, it's a free transfer.
11:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Buses are often used for that last mile.
11:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, some portion of that 700 million.
11:52
[SPEAKER_00]: All that being said, I could actually see a social democratic argument saying, this isn't quite the best way to spend 700 million dollars.
12:04
[SPEAKER_00]: over 20, 30, 40 years, that 700 billion dollars can actually be invested in greater service, maybe a new subway line or something like that that will actually help work in the past people more.
12:16
[SPEAKER_00]: That being said, he ran on it and there was an election and elections have consequences.
12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: and he needs to deliver on free buses.
12:24
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to figure out a way to make a work.
12:26
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to sell the benefits of it.
12:28
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to actually make sure that the buses are, in fact, faster, because that was the second half of his appeal.
12:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk about faster.
12:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Right now, the buses in New York City, I read average eight miles an hour.
12:39
[SPEAKER_01]: The New York Times says the goal should be 10 miles an hour.
12:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that the best socialism can do?
12:45
[SPEAKER_01]: 10 miles an hour?
12:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, there needs to be certain things that can be done as far as, obviously, dedicated bus lanes are important.
12:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Buses also need signal priorities.
12:56
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, if a bus with 60 people is rolling up to a
13:05
[SPEAKER_01]: free child care huge thing for working class and poor families right now the city has pre school for all four year olds free full day high quality programs is called pre K for three year olds in New York city there's a similar program three K but it's not really universal and the next frontier.
13:27
[SPEAKER_01]: is a universal childcare program for two year olds with classes close to where everybody lives.
13:34
[SPEAKER_01]: What's it going to take for the city to do this?
13:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the key thing to keep in mind is that this program already exists.
13:41
[SPEAKER_00]: for age four or five and six year olds of this pre-K program, age three, like you mentioned, is means tested.
13:48
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that the first and immediate step is to make sure that age three is universal.
13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's something that Zoraan needs to do and I think this is something where there needs to be help from the governor.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now the program only applies on, as far as I know,
14:06
[SPEAKER_00]: on certain school days, you know, again, it's not guaranteed in all places, but, you know, the mechanism already exists, and I think Zoran just needs to make a small incremental gain.
14:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We're working with a governor and figure out how to finance age 3 being universal, and then selling that as a big success.
14:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in the ideal universe, we would like to have the first six months being covered by the state, you know, pay parental leave.
14:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Right now in New York State does offer 12 weeks, which is better than in most places, 12 weeks at least 50% your salary.
14:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think in our ideal source of democratic universe would be something like six weeks of paid leave, and then after that child care started at the very least at six months onward.
14:56
[SPEAKER_00]: but there's only so much you could do in one city, you know, I think there's there's been this dream of social democracy in one city for a long time in New York City, and to a large extent, you know, we kind of have it.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: We have 30 plus percent unionization rates in New York.
15:10
[SPEAKER_00]: We have our New York City Health and Hospital Corporation that, you know, for emergencies, kind of functions as a mini national health service.
15:20
[SPEAKER_00]: We have very cheap Q&A, our university university system.
15:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have
15:26
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a history of delivering successful social programs like this in New York.
15:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the goal is to just work with a governor and figure out how we can make the finance and work.
15:35
[SPEAKER_01]: The Mumbdani campaign, the Mumbdani victory we're thrilling, governing is going to be much more prosaic.
15:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Mumbdani's campaign ended up with 100,000 volunteers.
15:48
[SPEAKER_01]: The question now is how to organize them into a group that can continue the fight.
15:55
[SPEAKER_01]: We have examples of promising leaders who had huge volunteer organizations that they disbanded.
16:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Obama being kind of number one.
16:04
[SPEAKER_01]: But now we have the announcement of a new nonprofit group called Our Time for an Affordable New York City.
16:11
[SPEAKER_01]: This organization stated aim is to put the energy of Mondani's volunteer base toward getting his agenda enacted.
16:21
[SPEAKER_01]: They're officially an independent organization not run by Mondani, not part of the mayor's office.
16:28
[SPEAKER_01]: They say at their website, quote, we will organize to win and defend the agenda that resonated with voters.
16:34
[SPEAKER_01]: What do you know about this new organization our time?
16:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think our time is a very promising effort.
16:39
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm in New York City.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: There are certain legal restrictions about campaign finances and where it goes and who can stop the kind of post campaign C4s.
16:51
[SPEAKER_00]: But as far as I know our time will be using a lot of the as it could can legally, using a lot of the lists accumulated during the on-downing campaign.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it will be a very useful mobilization all.
17:05
[SPEAKER_00]: platform for reaching out to supporters.
17:09
[SPEAKER_00]: 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 past our mum bodies.
17:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Agenda, we want you to learn about this effort for the mayor's office is doing that will make the city more affordable.
17:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But here are the roadblocks we're getting into.
17:32
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think
17:33
[SPEAKER_00]: these efforts are ways to send allow the movement that some merchants are on to both be one foot in power and one foot foot out of power and not kind of fully demoblas.
17:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I think in addition to efforts like our time, it is important that I think the most dedicated
17:50
[SPEAKER_00]: organizers for Zoran Mamdani.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I joined groups like the Democratic Socialism of America.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I myself have the Democratic Socialism of America member.
17:59
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope to be involved with our time as well, helping to do kind of grassroots work along those lines, but that's not a membership organization.
18:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I do think that the most dedicated to three, four, five percent of these cadre people that would benefit from what
18:16
[SPEAKER_00]: in my opinion, you know, I am a Democratic Socialist with the Democratic Socialist World View officer, a way to really contextualize the forces standing in the way of people like Zoran Maldani.
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And also to take part in campaigns that go beyond electoral politics and go beyond the mayor's office.
18:34
[SPEAKER_00]: like the labor campaigns and other things.
18:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So I know this is where I'm, you know, hopes to use his platform as mayor, his bully pulpit to support all sorts of progressive causes, but nationally and of course, the local labor causes and others.
18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think the combination of our time and membership organization, like the Democratic Socialism of America and New York City, are great combinations.
18:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Best guy, Sunkara, read a myth, the Guardian, read a myth, the nation.
19:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Baskar.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Great, take care, John.
19:16
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
19:25
[SPEAKER_01]: For that history, we turned to John Fabian Whitt.
19:28
[SPEAKER_01]: He teaches law and history at Yale.
19:30
[SPEAKER_01]: He's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic and the nation.
19:35
[SPEAKER_01]: He's won the Bank Roth Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
19:38
[SPEAKER_01]: His new book is The Radical Fund.
19:41
[SPEAKER_01]: John Whitt, welcome to the program.
19:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, John.
19:44
[SPEAKER_02]: It's really nice to be here.
19:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you say that the 1920s had some striking things in common with our own ominous political world today.
19:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Please explain, maybe let's start with the issue of immigration.
19:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Great.
19:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the gates being shut after several decades of
20:02
[SPEAKER_02]: really extraordinary immigration to the United States and an immigration, a nationalist immigration backlash in 1920, 20 legislation, 1924 legislation.
20:13
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, lots of parallels with the immigration.
20:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's just the beginning.
20:17
[SPEAKER_02]: As you know, we can talk about economic inequality and I think of the
20:22
[SPEAKER_02]: really legendary Thomas Piketty, U-shaped curves that take you from the inequality of the 1920s to the inequality of the 1920s with a big dip in inequality during the intervening century.
20:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Immigration inequality, but that's just the beginning, a resurgence of white nationalism, think of the Ku Kloss Plan, as a conformant of Christian nationalism.
20:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Think too of the crisis that people like Walter Lippman and Upton Sinclair are talking
20:50
[SPEAKER_02]: which is the crisis of journalism and misinformation and the crisis of the relationship between the press and American democracy.
20:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So a whole bunch of confounding crises.
21:01
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's also mention dissenting speech under attack.
21:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, well, for sure.
21:06
[SPEAKER_02]: In not only ideological deportations, that's the story of 1919-1920, that's the story of the pulverades and it's the story of our world on places like College
21:19
[SPEAKER_02]: So in the 1920s, the US Supreme Court had not yet once, not once in its history, recognized a right to free speech, such as would keep someone out of prison for saying dissenting things.
21:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Racial violence, and it's another bleak feature of this period.
21:36
[SPEAKER_02]: In ways that are just, you know, caused me to gasp.
21:40
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, we're talking about pogrom-like forms of violence, in which whole black communities are destroyed, East St. Louis, Elaine Arkansas.
21:48
[SPEAKER_02]: That's also Oklahoma.
21:49
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, really horrific things.
21:50
[SPEAKER_02]: That's 1917, 1919, 1921 in sequence.
21:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And what about presidential politics?
21:57
[SPEAKER_01]: Surely, 2024 was unique and there was nothing like it in the 20s.
22:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Or is there going to be disadvantages, but it is for sure true that in 2016 and 2024, we elected in the United States of President promising to bring something like what Warren Harding promised in 1920, restoration of normal seed, said Harding, greatness American greatness, so that make America great again says Trump, a nostalgic presidential election is another commonality.
22:25
[SPEAKER_01]: and an ailing incumbent Democrat in the White House gives way to a Republican trifecta.
22:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
22:34
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, famously, a Woodrow Wilson stroke and, you know, limping along at the end and, um, and giving way to Republican control of Supreme Court Congress and White House in the 1920s and the 2020s.
22:49
[SPEAKER_01]: 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 20s, we were significantly farther down the road toward fascism away from democracy than we are today.
23:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, that's obviously true for black American in the 1920s, but what about white America?
23:14
[SPEAKER_01]: What about political violence and state repression?
23:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, let's do it three ways.
23:18
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, one is, we should just revisit.
23:20
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
23:34
[SPEAKER_02]: That's one piece of authoritarianism in the 1920s.
23:38
[SPEAKER_02]: But think about labor.
23:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And labor unions in 1919 are crushed in a series of post-war strikes.
23:45
[SPEAKER_02]: and the crushing of labor involves the use of state force, it involves a 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 in more effective in many ways,
24:05
[SPEAKER_02]: breakout all through the 1920s.
24:07
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a second form of authoritarianism in 1920s USA and then third, the complete absence of free speech protections.
24:16
[SPEAKER_02]: 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 um, because and in the 1920s there are rallying cries but the ACLU has just been found and has not yet
24:33
[SPEAKER_02]: at the US Supreme Court level.
24:36
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would add, there are hundreds of people in federal prison for speaking out against the World War 1, hundreds, including, well, tell us, including presidential candidate Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate in the 1920 election, is in prison.
24:52
[SPEAKER_02]: while running for office.
24:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the end of the war, there's more than 1,000 prisoners in federal prisons alone.
24:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And then all through the 20s, John, there's a series of criminal syndicism laws passed in states around the country that banned dissenting speech.
25:08
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, organized around the ideas of stamping out the wobbly, the industrial workers of the world, but those statutes go much further.
25:15
[SPEAKER_02]: And make it possible for state authorities to put in state prisons.
25:19
[SPEAKER_02]: dissenters all around the country and much of the history of the first women in the 20s is the story of dissenters prosecuted under those criminal cynicism laws.
25:28
[SPEAKER_01]: This picture you are painting of the 20s is not really the roaring 20s, the jazz age.
25:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Scott Fitzgerald, the great Gatsby, how do you count for this gap in the public image of what the 20s were?
25:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, you know, partly it's that the media writes about things that are entertaining in the 20s and so the records and the first histories of the 20s focus on the astonishing cultural things going on in the 20s and you know a lot of really interesting things other than what we've just had 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,
26:11
[SPEAKER_02]: have led us to forget just how bad it was.
26:15
[SPEAKER_02]: So when we remember the horrors of the interwar period, we go across the Atlantic.
26:20
[SPEAKER_02]: We go to Vymar and think about the horrors that lead to national socialists and totalitarianism's Germany, Soviet Union and the like.
26:30
[SPEAKER_02]: But we actually could see similar authoritarianisms right here.
26:34
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just that a group of social movements
26:37
[SPEAKER_02]: managed to figure out paths that when crisis came, let us to a better place.
26:43
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's the story you tell in your book, The Radical Fund.
26:47
[SPEAKER_01]: The story begins in 1922, one of a man I had never heard of named Charles Garland.
26:54
[SPEAKER_01]: You describe him as a handsome Harvard dropout, gave away his million dollar inheritance.
27:00
[SPEAKER_01]: So tell us about this guy.
27:02
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so he's the child of a wealthy family that's living in Cape Cod.
27:08
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
27:18
[SPEAKER_02]: He says, I didn't earn this, I didn't work for it.
27:21
[SPEAKER_02]: He cites H.G.
27:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Wells when he loves to read.
27:23
[SPEAKER_02]: He cites Tolstoy, who he reads.
27:25
[SPEAKER_02]: He cites the New Testament.
27:27
[SPEAKER_02]: He says the example of Jesus would lead him to say no.
27:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And John it causes a huge scandal and people come from 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've now they can now put photographs and newspapers really easily and so they're photographs of him all over the place
27:50
[SPEAKER_02]: He has a beautiful young wife, who is herself a debutant, and they have a baby, their 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.
28:05
[SPEAKER_01]: And up then, Sinclair writes him a letter.
28:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Updance and Claire says, you know Charles, this is one hell of a stunt you've pulled, but I'm the expert in stunts.
28:14
[SPEAKER_02]: You're the single they're talking.
28:16
[SPEAKER_02]: And I've got one better for you, except the money and give it to me, and I'll give it away to the kind of causes that you like.
28:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And that will solve your problem, and also the reporters will come to your lawn anymore.
28:30
[SPEAKER_02]: You'll be done having to deal with all the news stories.
28:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And eventually young Charles gives into this and gives them anyway just a simpler head proposed.
28:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, he was not the first millionaire to give away his money in this period.
28:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Andrew Carnegie gave away $350 million.
28:48
[SPEAKER_01]: We are told this is the equivalent of 7 billion today.
28:51
[SPEAKER_01]: That created a lot of public libraries.
28:53
[SPEAKER_01]: 2,500 it says here, but it didn't really transform class or racial relations in America.
29:02
[SPEAKER_01]: What did Charles Garland do with his money that was
29:05
[SPEAKER_01]: different from a rich philanthropist like Andrew Carnegie.
29:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, a Carnegie Rockefeller.
29:10
[SPEAKER_02]: The foundation that is created, I'll say more word about that in a second, but the foundation created with this money, self-consciously understands itself as an anti Rockefeller project.
29:22
[SPEAKER_02]: The Rockefeller foundations are up and running, and through the 20s they're helping to launch some of the human resources projects and propaganda projects that are especially anti-union,
29:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Garland Fund, the American Fund for Public Service, sets out to provide money to causes that cannot get resources from the Rockefeller's, the Carnegie's, the Rosenwald's, a lot of black schools being built by Rosenwald, money during this period Russell Sage, lots of foundations starting up at just this moment.
29:52
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the moment of the beginning of the modern income tax advantage for philanthropic institutions.
29:57
[SPEAKER_02]: So a lot of,
29:58
[SPEAKER_02]: a new philanthropic industrial complex stuff going on here in the 20s, and the American Fund for Public Service sets out to do it differently.
30:08
[SPEAKER_02]: They don't want to be like the big foundations, and that's their project.
30:14
[SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about some of the people involved here.
30:16
[SPEAKER_01]: We mentioned Updance and Clare.
30:18
[SPEAKER_01]: We also need to talk about Roger Baldwin in Sydney, Hillman.
30:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Updance and Clare drops out of the story.
30:24
[SPEAKER_02]: He's not a sustained organization man.
30:27
[SPEAKER_02]: And so St. Clare 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.
30:39
[SPEAKER_02]: found of the ACLU in 1920 and in 22 becomes what his friends called 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.
30:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So the ACLU is doing right stock on with it with Baldwin's right hand and Baldwin's left hand is doing affirmative projects and producing things with resources.
31:04
[SPEAKER_02]: And Sidney Heldman, as you say, is one of the founding directors.
31:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Heldman is a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant.
31:11
[SPEAKER_02]: It 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 20s and into the 30s.
31:30
[SPEAKER_02]: By the mid late 1930s, he's going to be one of the right-hand men of Franklin Roosevelt.
31:35
[SPEAKER_02]: He's a core figure in the New Deal Coalition.
31:38
[SPEAKER_02]: And Hillman is on the founding board in 1922.
31:41
[SPEAKER_02]: He drops off relatively quickly because he's a busy guy.
31:45
[SPEAKER_02]: He's got a lot to do, but he puts on the board in his place.
31:49
[SPEAKER_02]: the lutenants of his and recruits to the board a series of people who are industrial Democrats, industrial democracy was there watchward and they were committed to reorganizing capitals 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
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: The second front of the Garland Funds where is civil rights, especially in the South, I was especially interested in the role of W.E.B.
32:29
[SPEAKER_01]: Dubois, who eventually proposes a grant that would fuse civil rights in labor.
32:36
[SPEAKER_02]: Dubois is never on the funds board and Dubois through his good friend James Walden Johnson who is running NAACP and is on the board of his foundation proposed in 1924 to begin to study schooling inequality in the American South.
32:54
[SPEAKER_02]: That is the beginning.
32:56
[SPEAKER_02]: of when eventually will become a litigation campaign that the fund will finance, which will eventually get us to proud against Board of Education.
33:04
[SPEAKER_02]: But it starts just as you said, John, with the idea that fighting Jim Crow is a crucial precondition to organizing the industrial
33:14
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
33:26
[SPEAKER_02]: 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 six million black Americans moving from south to north.
33:39
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
33:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, Uptonson Claire, 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, you know, supplies the middle space between the pictures and people's heads and the world outside.
34:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And the Garland Fund's observation is that it's one thing to claim rights to free speech.
34:12
[SPEAKER_02]: and it's another thing to supply the content.
34:15
[SPEAKER_02]: 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, W.E.V.D.
34:29
[SPEAKER_02]: in New York City.
34:30
[SPEAKER_02]: in the 20s and into the 30s, and they make media and the information environment, a central piece of their work.
34:39
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
34:51
[SPEAKER_02]: The funding they give to the NAACP, which is their legacy, their claim to fame, their connection to Brownig and Board of Education, that pales by comparison to the amount of funding they give for newspapers, magazines, publishers, and education efforts for the working class, labor education in particular.
35:12
[SPEAKER_02]: So the intellectual space, the information space, the communication spaces,
35:19
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
35:44
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
35:53
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us why you think they played an important role.
35:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Great, well yeah, let's talk about the world of the Garland Fund in that moment.
36:00
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
36:12
[SPEAKER_02]: 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
36:26
[SPEAKER_02]: large labor unions capable of existing at scale to reorganize capitalism around an industrial democracy project.
36:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I don't want to exaggerate the role of $1 million in the fund.
36:39
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not that a million dollars change the world.
36:42
[SPEAKER_02]: It's that the social movements that came together, those are things that tipped history.
36:53
[SPEAKER_02]: like World War II that's right around the corner, those are the huge propulsive forces that are driving change, but change could happen in lots of different ways.
37:04
[SPEAKER_02]: 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.
37:15
[SPEAKER_02]: We talked about how Jim Crow is a form of authoritarianism, they would get described in his fascism, but of course there are people who self-described
37:23
[SPEAKER_02]: It's 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.
37:40
[SPEAKER_02]: That that's what allows for a different future for the United States.
37:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Of course, we're all wondering, can we take a step forward a significant as that?
37:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, if we look at today, we do have very big time progressive philanthropy.
37:58
[SPEAKER_01]: You mentioned the Gates Foundation, we've heard of George Soros.
38:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Michael Bloomberg, McKenzie Scott, after divorcing Jeff Bezos in 2019, she's donated $19 billion in five years to progressive organizations.
38:16
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
38:28
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, in some ways, and there are others that are a little more under the radar screen you know, an amazing outfit called Freedom Together that's doing really interesting philanthropic work in this base of democracy, and that's just one among a number.
38:43
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's money in some ways, you know, in some ways liberal philanthropy is a victim of its own prosperity.
38:50
[SPEAKER_02]: There are lots of games in town in 2025, in a way that was only one game in town in 1925.
38:57
[SPEAKER_02]: And that, I think, has made it a little bit harder to have the hard conversations among the, among the many groups from center left to left about how to manage a strategy from moving forward.
39:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that is scarcity produced new strategies.
39:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Another part of it that I'm a child is that the economic landscape of 2020's capitalism is so radically different.
39:27
[SPEAKER_02]: tens of millions of Americans to remake and engage with and remake capitalism.
39:33
[SPEAKER_02]: It's much less, it's a much less promising unit for organizing.
39:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And I don't think we have found or identified the unit for organizing at scale and a new, a new 21st century economic democracy.
39:49
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the
39:50
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the question.
39:51
[SPEAKER_02]: There are also some interesting experiments underway and many of them watched and supported by some of the philanthropic foundations that you named, but we haven't quite, well, I guess it's an understatement.
40:02
[SPEAKER_02]: We haven't quite found it yet, have we?
40:04
[SPEAKER_01]: 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.
40:21
[SPEAKER_01]: And in that respect, they provide,
40:23
[SPEAKER_01]: lots of lessons for us today.
40:26
[SPEAKER_01]: John Whits' new book is The Radical Fund, our band of visionaries in a million dollars upended America.
40:33
[SPEAKER_02]: John, thanks for talking with us today.
40:46
[SPEAKER_01]: You've been listening to start making sense, a podcast from the Nation Magazine, recorded in Los Angeles at our Blithe Avenue Studios.
40:54
[SPEAKER_01]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minski is our producer, Ludwig Hurtado is executive producer.
41:02
[SPEAKER_01]: Dee Dee Guttenham is editor of the Nation, Bosca Shunkara is president of the Nation, and Katrina Vandenhuvul is publisher and editorial director of the Nation.
41:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobeat, License by Creative Commons.
41:17
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at thenation.com and you can subscribe to Start Making Sense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
41:30
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weener, thanks for listening.