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October 6, 2025 
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By Michael Agger Senior Staff Editor, Opinion Features |
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We’ve been here before. An America with a cresting wave of political violence. An America divided by staggering inequality. An America that has shut the door on immigrants from “undesirable” countries. An America in the grip of a disinformation crisis. An America that puts people in jail for speaking out.
This was the United States of the 1920s. But as the historian John Fabian Witt writes in a guest essay for Times Opinion, “America’s dangerous decade led not to fascism and the end of democracy but to the New Deal and the civil rights era.” What did it take to pull America back from the brink?
Our democratic renewal sprang from an unlikely source: a handsome Harvard dropout who gave away his million-dollar inheritance. That man was Charles Garland, and his money, in the form of one of the first nonprofit foundations of the modern tax code, would supercharge a new generation of reformers. Why were they so effective? And how can we follow their example today?
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