John Fabian Witt writes:

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 minds. 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 ’20s, 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, started an anti-lynching campaign in Congress (where it failed) and in the press (where it was much more successful). The 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. [Continue reading…]