Beginning Oct. 16, I will be reading John Fabian Witt’s book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I ordered the book after reading his guest essay in Monday’s New York Times, “How to Save the American Experiment.” The graphics caught my eye, a drawing of a big red hand pushing down on a platform and a group of people pushing from below. The Big Red Hand looked like it belonged to a marble statue or a giant, ponderous and huge. During other times, the resisters might be labeled “the people” or “the masses,” The Masses being one of the leftist mags of the 19-teens (later New Masses).
In
any case, Witt’s essay grabbed my attention. How do we save the American experiment?
I’ve been asking that very question since Trump took office for the second
time. I have good days and bad. This essay gave me some hope.
Witt
captured me when he talked about how a messy war and a pandemic bred a decade
of strife that ended in a failed economy and then to a surprising resurgence.
Yes,
the 1920s. A time of race riots and red-baiting and the Insurrection Act.
Unions pushed workers to organize and the workers protested and were clubbed by
guys that acted a lot like 2025 ICE Storm Troopers.
Hard
times followed by harder times followed by a global war that birthed the U.S.
as a global power. Until it lost its way.
I
am obsessed with the 1920s. I just finished writing a historical novel set in
1919 Colorado. It will soon be published by Michigan’s Ridgeway Press. Its
characters come to Colorado to start anew after war and sickness and failed
dreams. They come to reinvent themselves. Colorado, Denver in particular, has
always been a place for people to find themselves. Find gold, too, whether it
be the actual metal or penny stocks or pot farms or the fresh powder of mountain
ski slopes. As a native Denverite, I admire the magic but know the shortcomings.
Historians such as the late David Halaas and Tom Noel have helped me delve into
the past. I was a childhood fan of the Denver Public Library and spent many adult
years in the Denver History Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.
A wonderful place. I don’t live there any more. Why? I’m, an American. I move
on. It’s what we do. I’m now back to Florida. As you know from late-night comedians,
Florida has its own problems.
Witt’s
message is not so much “move on” but dig in, into those entities that make a
difference. He writes about Charles Garland, a millionaire who used his fortune
to fund the American Fund for Public Service or the Garland Fund. It was overseen by muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin. They
funded entities that pushed for civil rights, a living wage, and, in the 1930s,
Social Security. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency petered out and led to the
totalitarian tendencies of Harding and then to rich-boy Democrat Roosevelt who surprised
us all, both hard-right Wyoming ranchers and big-city liberal labor agitators.
America,
the Arsenal of Democracy, helped win the war and reaped the fruits of its labor
and good fortune to bring prosperity in the 1950s and its most annoying
demographic cohort, the Boomers. Say what you will about us but we helped the
good times roll and now, well, we face the same political shitstorm as our offspring.
So,
I write scathing letters that seem to fall on deaf ears. I support organizations
such as the ACLU and the Florida Democrats and Wikipedia which is now under
attack by the MAGA crowd. I support the independent WyoFile in Wyoming and
the Independent Florida Alligator at UF, my alma mater. They are all
under attack and need us. Protests are great but pointless if you don’t act and
then vote in 2026 and 2028.
As the actor astronauts in “Galaxy Quest say: “Never give up…and never surrender.”
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