As democracy in the United States spirals into a widening gyre of distrust, demagogy and violence, a question has been loosed in minds across America: How does this all end? The historical analogies seem bleak. Germany’s interwar political dysfunction looms largest because of its descent into fascism. Yet there is a more hopeful example, overlooked though much closer at hand: the United States of a century ago.
At the outset of the 1920s, a wave of attempted assassinations and political violence crested alongside new barriers to immigration, a campaign of deportations and a government crackdown on dissenting speech. America was fresh off a pandemic in which divisive public health measures yielded widespread anger and distrust. Staggering levels of economic inequality underlaid a fast-changing industrial landscape and rapidly evolving racial demographics. Influential voices in the press warned that a crisis of misinformation in the media had wrecked the most basic democratic processes.
Even presidential elections eerily converge. In 1920, national frustration over an infirm and aging president helped sweep the Democratic Party out of the White House in favor of a Republican candidate offering the nostalgic promise of returning America to greatness, or at least to normalcy. A faltering President Woodrow Wilson gave way to Warren Harding and one-party control over all three branches of the federal government.
Yet what is striking about the 1920s is that, unlike the German interwar crisis, America’s dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era. Across the sequence of emergencies that followed — the Great Depression and eventually World War II — the United States ushered in an era of working-class political empowerment and prosperity. The nation ended Jim Crow in the South and established free speech with court-backed protections for the first time in its history.
The story of how Americans built a new infrastructure for modern democracy does not offer a step-by-step map for 2025. But it does suggest a way out of our destructive spiral.
The fiery intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois and the young columnist Walter Lippmann were among the first to grasp a core feature of modern mass politics: Information and a crisis of trust in the news had deformed American political life in the aftermath of World War I, just as they do in our current age of media disarray.
Du Bois, the brilliant Black writer and editor who founded the N.A.A.C.P. in 1909, watched as propaganda campaigns, some led by the very newspapers that should have been the wellsprings of an informed citizenry, whipped politics into frenzied race riots. In places ranging from Elaine, Ark., to Washington, D.C., the angry white rioters of what came to be known as the Red Summer of 1919 ripped through Black communities, killing hundreds.
Lippmann, who was emerging as America’s most influential liberal journalist, understood information and propaganda to be the fundamental democratic problem under conditions of a mass population and a mass press. The crisis of democracy, he wrote, was in its essence “a crisis in journalism.” The distance between what he called “the world outside and the pictures in our heads” afforded vast power to those who managed information flows.
A full century before today’s distorting power of the internet and social media, Lippmann wrote that the sheer scale of modern life separated citizens from the information required for self-rule. The “stream of news that reaches the public,” he discerned, was democracy’s most glaring vulnerability.
Deep inequality came hand-in-hand with widespread economic dislocation for working people. Giant industrial behemoths like Ford, General Electric and U.S. Steel promised new affluence in the mass consumer economy. But the scientific management of factories and farms produced economic vulnerabilities for workers. Old mechanisms of working-class power proved as outmatched by mass production as unions today seem to be overwhelmed by virtual work, the gig economy and generative A.I.
In some respects, 1920s America was much further down the road of political distrust and internal hatred than where we find ourselves today. Formal state-sponsored racial subordination in the form of Jim Crow blocked political participation by most Black people in the South. Political violence reached heights not seen since. A bombing campaign by hard-left anarchists roiled the country. Mail bombs were targeted at roughly 30 of the nation’s most prominent figures. A horse-drawn wagon filled with dynamite and loaded with shrapnel blew up on Wall Street in 1920, where its damage can still be seen.
State repression at the opening of the 1920s was also far-reaching. Hundreds of political prisoners (including the presidential candidate Eugene Debs) moldered in federal prisons, many of them serving long sentences under wartime espionage and sedition acts for speaking their mind. States passed sweeping new laws prohibiting advocacy of crime, sabotage or violence as a means of accomplishing political change, and used the laws to prosecute hundreds of people.
Courts offered no relief. Until the early 1930s, the Supreme Court had never once used the First Amendment to block the imprisonment of dissenters.
Many Americans simply abandoned politics in the 1920s, surrendering to the long odds stacked against decent change. A younger generation led by the Jazz Age celebrity F. Scott Fitzgerald announced that it had grown tired of “great causes” like war and social uplift. But beneath the surface of the Roaring Twenties, a generation of social innovators began experiments that laid the basis for a democratic flourishing.
New organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union sprang up to defend jailed opponents of World War I and radical dissenters. The still-fledgling N.A.A.C.P., led by James Weldon Johnson, launched an anti-lynching campaign in Congress (where it failed) and in the press (where it was much more successful). Super lawyer Clarence Darrow threw himself into the defense of First Amendment freedoms (John Scopes in Tennessee) and Black people’s freedom to live where they liked (Ossian Sweet in Detroit).
But a second development shaped the era in a more profound way. In 1922, a handsome Harvard dropout named Charles Garland gave away his million-dollar inheritance. Citing the injustice of vast economic inequalities, and crediting both Jesus and the Russian Revolution, Garland took money derived from what is now the Citibank empire and gave it to the muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and the A.C.L.U. founder, Roger Baldwin. Those two men used the windfall to establish the first liberal philanthropic foundation of the age: the American Fund for Public Service, or the Garland Fund, as it was sometimes known.
The modern income tax, enacted in 1913, created unprecedented subsidies for charitable and social welfare organizations. Garland’s original million, doubling in the boom stock market of the 1920s, amounted to nearly $40 million in 2025 dollars. Scaled to the size of an economy that today is more than 20 times as large as it was in 1922, we might say that the Garland Fund was equivalent to a 2020s foundation with $800 million to give away.
Distrustful of perpetual foundations, Baldwin and Sinclair committed to a spend-down structure that accelerated the money’s impact. And over the subsequent two decades (the same length Bill Gates chose this past May for his own spend-down at the Gates Foundation), the fund invested in causes designed to spark democratic renewal in America.
Dozens of ambitious 1920s start-ups received precious incubator funding. Beneficiaries included heterodox unions, innovative publishers and media outlets, as well as iconoclastic civil rights organizations. The fund sponsored research, education and news sources that would be outside the influence of the wealthy few. It supported Black civil rights, helping to start the campaign that culminated decades later in Brown v. Board of Education.
The fund eschewed demoralizing cycles of outrage at the oppressions of the age. It aimed instead to renew the fundamental institutions that shaped everyday people’s lives, structured their interests and animated their dreams.
Above all, this meant supporting an emerging new model of economic organization — the industrial union — as a novel way to connect large numbers of Americans to power and prosperity in the mass-production economy. Sidney Hillman, a Jewish political refugee from the Russian Empire who became a Chicago clothing worker, served on the fund’s founding board. Hillman saw how the companies of the mass-production age had deskilled the production process and broken down the power of old, guild-like unions. Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers union responded with a relatively new organizational structure of its own. The A.C.W. collected men’s clothing workers into one big union, not many unions divided by trade, task or occupation.
The 1920s project was to apply Hillman’s idea to bigger firms, too. The fund financed a labor college in the Hudson Valley to train union leaders in the practice of industrial unions. Mine workers joined the new movement, in no small part because John Lewis’s United Mine Workers had long organized labor in the coal mines without regard to specialty. (The first Garland Fund grant went to dissident coal miners in West Virginia.)
Soon, with Hillman’s influence, bands of fund-supported labor intellectuals and organizers emerged to spread the gospel of the industrial union to fast-growing sectors of the economy, such as automobile manufacturing, electrical work and rubber production. By the middle of the 1930s, the industrial union project would even take on the mammoth steel industry.
The industrial union holds lessons for organizing a decent economic order in our own very different time. Here was an institution tailored by Hillman and his brain trust to match the economic conditions of the moment and to marshal the interests of the working class in the service of a common project.
With Garland Fund support, Hillman and his lieutenants broke from the left’s longstanding commitment to a war against capital and reconceived labor as an equal partner in the joint activity of the industrial firms with which it entered into collective bargaining arrangements. Labor, as Hillman’s group saw it, was entitled to both a decent share in the prosperity of the mass-production economy and a role in the economy’s direction. Industrial democracy, not class warfare, was their powerful watchword.
The industrial union raised the salience of two other pressing democratic crises of the decade. The racism of white labor unions and the white working class, as Du Bois bitterly observed, was one. By their nature, industrial unions needed to unite workers in many occupations. It was therefore imperative to organize people across racial, ethnic and religious divides. In the age of the Great Migration, this meant organizing labor in such a way as to include Black workers moving from the South to the North.
The path to Brown v. Board of Education began in the late 1920s, when Du Bois and Johnson of the N.A.A.C.P. came together with Hillman’s engineers of industrial democracy in the heady workshop of the Garland Fund. Black workers could hardly stand up for their class interests, said Johnson, if they had no civil rights their bosses were bound to respect. Black workers, he observed, were “the largest group of unorganized workers in America” — the “most significant and at present most ineffective bloc of the producing class.” Du Bois added that “a campaign of education among American Negroes” would lead “the race into industrial democracy.” Fighting Jim Crow seemed necessary to protect workers, Black and white alike.
The same industrial democracy laboratories that helped develop new civil rights efforts also crafted efforts to democratize information flows in the press. Campaigns for freedom of speech in the 1920s aimed to assert rights of free expression, but not only that. While the A.C.L.U. pursued speech rights, the same people drew on the Garland Fund’s resources to support Lippmann’s project of financing new channels of communication: news syndication services, magazines, newspapers, publishers and radio stations. It was one thing to have a legal right to speak, but it was also vital that the vehicles of communication convey truth instead of lies.
Private foundations could do what political parties could not. The Democratic Party, out of power for the entire decade, found itself paralyzed between its Southern white supremacist wing and its Northern urban immigrant constituency. The Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln became the lily-white party of big business. Short-term electoral imperatives blocked political parties from deep innovation like the industrial union and civil rights.
But civil society and social movements cannot change the world in a vacuum. Historically, disaster or cataclysm has been required to jolt nations out of downward spirals of inequality and distrust. The 1920s ended in a cascade of catastrophes. The 1929 crash on Wall Street was followed by a Great Depression and then a Second World War that began even before the economic calamities had fully come to a close. These supplied the vast energies propelling change in a country of 130 million people.
Yet if forces like economic collapse and war supply momentum to big social change, they don’t dictate the shape of history. Human beings, their projects and their institutions carve grooves into the future that structure the direction of change. In the United States, a set of social formations emerged around the core of the industrial union. Quietly sustained in its fledgling years by the era’s leading liberal foundation, the industrial union helped steer American democracy down better pathways into the future.
In the 2020s, plenty of Americans who might be in a position to do otherwise opted to live as modern-day Fitzgeralds, leading Gatsby lives fueled by a 1920s-like stock market that rises to new heights each passing week on a Magnificent Seven bubble of data centers and G.P.U.s.
We, too, have our resistance, organized into groups built on the model of the 1920s. Some, like the A.C.L.U. and the N.A.A.C.P., are legacy organizations from the democratic crises of the past. But where are the parallels to the deeper, more innovative efforts of a century ago, the experiments that aimed to go to the heart of our social life and create new institutions for a more decent and democratic future? Where are the new organizational forms for connecting great masses of Americans to one another and to the society in which we live? Where are the movements that promise to craft new institutions adequate to the task of aligning the people’s interests with the structure and scale of the contemporary world?
The generation of Du Bois, Hillman and Lippmann refused to let crisis go to waste. In the midst of tumult, they offered new experiments that wrought seismic changes on the landscape of American life. Today, the institutions of working-class organization inherited from Hillman’s mass-production generation are badly mismatched to the economy. Free speech rights, won at such cost a century ago, are once again at risk, but also outmoded in a world in which attention, not speech, is the scarce commodity. Never before have the pictures in our heads, as Lippmann described them, been more sharply divorced from the world outside; never before have the propaganda powers Du Bois diagnosed been more powerful.
Efforts to manage divisions of race and ethnicity in our democratic life lie in tatters, too. The triumphs of the past generation’s civil rights victories now draw scorn from some critics for their futility and from other critics for their excesses.
What American democracy needs now is grand experiments like those of a century ago: new institutional forms that provide a way for tens of millions of increasingly alienated Americans to connect to one another and to the prosperity of the richest nation in the world.
Recent entrants to the field hold promise. Fierce debates, for example, between abundance liberals and the debt collective left reprise struggles of a century ago between prosperity unionists in the Hillman tradition and their left-wing opponents. Other plausible efforts wait in the wings. For parts of the economy like home health care and gig work, union bargaining by sector rather than by employer augurs a next-generation advance on the industrial unions of the mass-production era. Some forward-looking actors are trying to turn the end of affirmative action into an occasion for a new coalition united by class-based policies, in place of the race-based ones that generated bitter divisions among American working families.
Many leading candidates for new ordering institutions come from the right. MAGA’s America First ethic bids, fitfully, to establish a cross-ethnicity and cross-race nationalist solidarity — an effort that 2024 exit polls among Black and Latin voters seemed to boost and that has surprising overlap with the cross-race efforts of Du Bois and the Garland Fund. Controversial new Republican-backed rules to extend tax exemptions for churches pose risks of politicizing religious faith, but also promise to connect political engagement to institutions where tens of millions of Americans gather.
Indeed, closer to our own time, right-leaning funders have exploited the same tax-exempt strategies pioneered by the Garland Fund. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 came out of a long-term, massively funded effort that matches in scale and insurgent energy the ambitions of its left-wing predecessors.
Given the successes of change backed by conservative foundations, there are figures on the right who worry about the Trump administration’s threats to stamp out the foundations that have been sources of inspiration for a century. The promises to strip liberal foundations of their tax status and to launch investigations of George Soros-connected funding, renewed after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, come out of an old playbook — one put together a hundred years ago by the Coolidge administration to eliminate the Garland Fund’s tax-exempt status.
Such efforts risk being badly counterproductive for reasons both conservatives and liberals understand. Civil society institutions like the Garland Fund have been a source for creative democratic renewal. Freed of the short-term constraints of state officials and of political parties, civil society organizations can exercise experimental agenda-setting power in moments of crisis for existing institutions.
For all the talk of red lines and points of no return, the modern United States has had democratic crises and authoritarian turmoil before. The language of break-glass, fire-alarm emergencies looks at our increasingly brittle existing modes of political organization and cannot see beyond them. But the way through will be to craft new modes of renewal adequate to the landscape of the world in which we find ourselves — forms analogous to the industrial union of the 20s, and perhaps fueled by the generative civil society engine of the now vast nonprofit world. A century ago, in the forgotten history of a decade just barely out of living memory, we found pathways to a better place. The answer to how this all ends turns on experiments we have only barely begun to launch.
John Fabian Witt is a professor at Yale Law School and author of “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.”
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