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Biography

Dorothy Day: Saint Radical

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Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect

Posted in Health and Social Policy

The incredible life and times of the Catholic who served the poor and gave hell to everyone else

Maureen Tkacikby Maureen Tkacik August 6, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

The process of evaluating canonization for Dorothy Day had its 25th anniversary last year, which might seem inauspicious if it did not require a thorough evaluation of all the books, journals, newspaper stories, diary entries, personal letters, and FBI intelligence memos composed by and about her and her closest associates for all 83 years of her life. Day’s FBI file alone, admittedly duplicative, is 830 pages long. There’s a whole book dedicated to her letters to and from Thomas Merton, who like just about every one of Day’s good friends spent considerable time under intelligence agency surveillance. Her granddaughter wrote a tell-all family memoir detailing her mother’s decision to divorce her gay husband and leave the Church, and the horrific sex abuse cult that emerged from a breakaway faction at a farm owned by the Catholic Worker. And she spent the most thoroughly documented period of her life, between her 1916 arrival in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and her 1927 conversion to Catholicism, in the company of other alcohol-abusing communist writers, nearly all of whom also wrote dishy memoirs detailing their youthful indiscretions, scandals, and flames. Day wrote a roman à clef detailing posing as a nude model and her destructive romance with a womanizing writer. She was arrested for prostitution and received an abortion from a greasy-haired hobo doctor who was famously one of Emma Goldman’s lovers.

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There is, in short, just too much tea on this woman, the whole glorious Catholic Worker Movement she founded, and the left-wing icons who traveled around them: John Dos Passos, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and more. Two of Day’s Jewish ex-boyfriends sparred with Ernest Hemingway. Day left the first to become a kind of complicated, mostly platonic muse and drinking companion to Eugene O’Neill; Day could drink him and any other man under the table, at least according to poet Malcolm Cowley, who was at the time married to Day’s best friend, sex-positive late-in-life Catholic convert Peggy Baird Johns. Another poet, W.H. Auden, paid a delinquent fine from the city on Day’s behalf.

You can feel the canonization council wondering, how is there no prestige TV epic on these people? And yet even during those years, Day emerged with her saintliness intact. The night she got arrested for prostitution, for example, she was ministering to a sick woman who happened to be the side chick of her Mr. Big figure, Lionel Moise. She watched a woman experience severe morphine withdrawal and ruminated on the tragedy of sin. She broke it off with Moise soon afterward, though he nearly killed her first. She was 108 pounds when she moved back to New York, where Peggy nursed her back to health and convinced her to buy a small cottage on Staten Island, where her friend Mike Gold bought a place down the road and the journey finally began.

IT WAS MIKE GOLD who first noticed that Dorothy Day had a thing for God, back when he still wrote under his given name, Itzok Granich, and the two started dating after bonding over labor rights and Dostoyevsky and their differing views on the Lower East Side, Day’s adopted neighborhood where Gold had spent his whole impoverished life. Both Gold and Day had downwardly mobile parents: His father had been injured working as a painter, and hers had lost everything in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, moving the family to a drab gray apartment complex on the South Side of Chicago. Day still owned nice things and presented like “a well-bred young woman,” but there was something she envied in her immigrant neighbors’ fire escapes, vegetable gardens, and glorious kitchen smells, a fortitude drawn from old-world culture and religion that contrasted with someone like her father—a person whom modern right-wingers would deem a “heritage American”—steeped in Calvinism and regularly gambling away the family’s money.

Day’s grandfathers had fought on opposing sides in the Civil War, and her father’s mom still seethed with resentment about it. No one on either end of her family had any memory of a life before America, a Calvinist experiment whose identity was too inextricably intertwined with the vulgar profit maximization logic to have imbued its natives with anything profound. Catholicism seemed to her a part of this, as she’d thought ever since accidentally barging in as a child on her friend Kathryn’s mother kneeling down in prayer in her ghastly tenement apartment.

Dorothy Day (center) holding copies of The New York Call, a socialist daily newspaper, with Rose Cohn and Charlotte Margolies, February 9, 1917. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries

Gold assured Day that Catholicism wasn’t everything she fantasized about; after all, Orthodox Judaism was even older than the Church, and the pointless version of it his robotic Hebrew school teacher feebly attempted to indoctrinate him into was wholly devoid of meaning or beauty, in his estimation. But he understood what Day was searching for because he loved Tolstoy too, just as she gravitated toward the “Marxists, the IWWs who looked upon religion as the opiate of the people, who thought they had only this one life to live and then oblivion,” precisely because they were so “eager to sacrifice themselves here and now, thus doing without now and for all eternity the good things of the world they were fighting to obtain for their brothers.” Gold was, she would always say, the only one of Day’s “bohemian friends” who instantly understood and accepted her need to devote more time to God.

Seven years after their brief engagement, Day and Gold became neighbors, using the proceeds of their respective “novels” to buy cottages on the same Staten Island block, where Gold’s mother visited Day with occasional home-cooked kosher meals. Gold’s book had been such a success that he’d adapted his John Brown biography as a play, and Day’s relative lack of success was eclipsed by the fact that she was now Catholic, pregnant, and blissfully happy. And yet Gold hadn’t been entirely wrong about the Church. The congregations were full of second- and third-generation parishioners trained to “cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington, all part of a pattern, all prospering if we are good, and going down in the world if we are bad. These are attitudes the Irish, the Italian, the Lithuanian, the Slovak and all races begin to acquire in school. So they change their names, forget their birthplace, their language, and no longer listen to their mothers when they say, ‘when I was a little girl in Russia, or Hungary, or Sicily’” and “try to be something which they call ‘an American.’”

Gold was after something different. As the dedication of his 1930 novel Jews Without Money rhapsodized:

O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely, suicidal boy. You are the true Messiah. You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.
O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to live.
O great Beginning!

At the time, the highest-profile American Catholic was Detroit-based priest Father Coughlin, a conspiracy-minded, increasingly fascist-leaning populist whose syndicated radio show drew 30 million weekly listeners throughout the Depression. Fatefully, Gold’s brother, who was living in the Staten Island place, invited Day to the event that would change her life: the first “hunger march” the Communist Party and unions were holding in Washington on behalf of unemployed workers, who at that point comprised nearly 20 percent of the workforce. The protest attracted 3,000 marchers, most in rusted jalopies out of The Grapes of Wrath, she later recalled. As they began to approach the border of the city, cops barricaded the highway, trapping the marchers in their freezing cold cars for three nights. Day watched with “joy and pride in the courage of this band of men and women” as they were finally given permission to march and they streamed out into the streets.

Day’s Catholic Worker advocated strongly for the poor, but its fierce anti-war stance alienated some subscribers. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries

“How our dear Lord must love them, I kept thinking to myself,” she would write later, musing: “Where are all the Catholics?” She stopped at the newly built shrine at Catholic University for Mass and contemplated the fact that years after her baptism, she still didn’t really know any fellow Catholics.

THEN PETER MAURIN—a well-dressed and highly educated crank from a big French farming family in Languedoc who had spent some time in the Christian Brothers—began showing up at Day’s door on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, and often talked at her for hours until he returned to a flophouse, or later, whatever bed was free in one of the holdings in the Catholic Worker’s small portfolio of barely habitable real estate. He proposed she launch a newspaper and call it the Catholic Radical. She found a press that agreed to print 2,500 copies for $57, but she preferred The Catholic Worker, which hurt Maurin’s feelings just enough that he stopped coming to her apartment every day, but not enough to stay away very long or stop submitting the short poems he called “Easy Essays” for publication.

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The newspaper debuted on May Day 1933, the same spring that unemployment hit its all-time high of 25.6 percent, with a front-page story on the suppression and censorship of two investigations into a Mississippi flood control project overseen by the Department of War where the working conditions had been deemed sub-slavery: 120-degree heat, beatings from foremen, ten-cent-an-hour wages docked for egregiously marked-up gruel, men sleeping in airless tents on the mud. Another story detailed the complaints of a garment worker who went from making $35 a week to being unable to find the same work for $8. A column inside excerpted a Paulist priest’s recent speech opining that the Church was “pregnant with promise, but Catholics still-born with prejudice … not so much because we are Catholics as because we are Americans.”

With a bottomless supply of down-and-out volunteers looking to help write or distribute the newspaper, the Catholic Worker office quickly turned into a de facto soup kitchen and boardinghouse, and soon enough they found a larger space in Little Italy that enabled them to feed a thousand souls each day. Almost instantly, it became easy for the newspaper to detail a squadron of supporters to any picket line or protest, and Day was especially emphatic about showing up for causes often derided in the newspapers as “communist.”

In 1935, the Worker began hosting anti-Nazi protests outside the German consulate and the church of a priest known to support Hitler’s agenda, with Maurin carrying a sign that read, “Spiritually we are all Semites.” Catholic antisemitism was overheating at the time, thanks in part to the monstrous radio-fueled popularity of Father Coughlin, whose own newspaper Social Justice employed subway-platform hawkers who’d occasionally get in street fights with the volunteers who sold The Catholic Worker. When Coughlin published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion just months before Kristallnacht, Day teamed up with the Jesuits to publish 100,000 copies of a detailed rebuttal of the legendary antisemitic hoax and demand the Roosevelt administration begin accepting Jewish refugees.

As with so many bastions of the American left, The Catholic Worker’s power and reach peaked in the 1930s, when its circulation approached 200,000 and most of the souls it fed and housed were merely unemployed workers. As World War II approached, the men and women who frequented the breadlines and boardinghouses became less palatable, as did Day’s principled opposition to all war, and the alleged hotbed of “subversion” that was her network of soup kitchens. All this occasioned J. Edgar Hoover’s 1943 FBI inquiry, which wasn’t quite razor-sharp: The Bureau’s trusted informants seem to have believed Day was a recent Russian émigré. But hundreds of churches and Catholic organizations canceled their subscriptions to the Worker over its anti-war absolutism.

Still, the Church itself—and specifically, New York’s often villainous warmongering Cardinal Francis Spellman—protected Dorothy Day, even through her scathing condemnations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment camps, the gravediggers’ strike of 1949, and the McCarthy-era show trials that nuked the careers of so many of her old colleagues and friends. She was constantly on the road preaching the Catholic Worker gospel against napalm, CIA assassination campaigns, segregation, voter suppression, the blockade of Cuba; and for radical love, liberation theology, the dignity of all humans, and Vatican II.

Though it was not so easy to find a physical copy of The Catholic Worker in the 1950s, its sentences could be rare gems. (The designated obituary writer’s account of an alcoholic named Jim Connors who had been sleeping in a coffin-sized chicken coop before he found a bed at the Catholic Worker, from whose roof he subsequently fell to a ghastly death, was one of the more affecting works of literature I’ve consumed in a long time.)

Despite her irrepressible radicalism, Day has been considered for canonization by the Catholic Church for a lifetime of faith and meaning. Credit: Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries; Bob Fitch/Bob Fitch photography archive/Stanford University Libraries
Credit: Bob Fitch/Bob Fitch photography archive/Stanford University Libraries

Day lived until Thanksgiving weekend, 1980. On the day she was buried, three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker in El Salvador were abducted, raped, and murdered at the hands of a fascist death squad backed by the United States, their mutilated bodies left to rot on a roadside as a warning to the thoroughly terrorized peasantry. The following year, longtime Catholic Worker staffer Jane Sammon, who had met another murdered El Salvadoran activist just a few months earlier, described the shock and nausea of learning all over again “what the Church in Latin America had known for more than a decade: The Gospel brings death to those who preach it.”

They were not the first martyrs for Day’s radical Catholicism. A 22-year-old Catholic Worker staffer set himself on fire outside the United Nations building in 1965 in solidarity with the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, who had done the same to protest the Cardinal Spellman–promoted South Vietnamese government’s persecution and periodic massacring of Buddhists a few years prior. And some followers of Day’s disciple Thomas Merton are convinced that the CIA was behind his bizarre “electrocution” in 1968. But the price of practicing Dorothy Day–style Catholicism would rise considerably in the era of Reagan and John Paul II. President Reagan staunchly backed the openly Hitlerian El Salvadoran junta who ordered the nuns’ assassinations, along with those of Archbishop (now Saint) Oscar Romero, six Jesuit priests, and at least a dozen other members of the Catholic clergy for the sin of “spreading communism.” Pope John Paul II chose to respond to the bloodbath by forcing one of American foreign policy’s fiercest critics in the American government, the Jesuit priest and Democratic congressman from Massachusetts Fr. Robert Drinan, to resign from public office.

As global communism fizzled and the fascist Catholicism of the Francoist project Opus Dei flourished, the radical Catholicism of Day entered a period of near hibernation almost akin to that imposed upon such subversives as Mike Gold, who worked as a janitor in the 1950s as the circulation of his columns dropped to 5,000.

NEARLY A CENTURY after his heyday, even Mike Gold is in the throes of a resurrection. It turns out the villain of Jews Without Money, who sets in action the protagonist’s slide into destitution when he scams his father out of his ownership stake in a small zipper factory, is a hard-line Zionist, whose ideology is cast as an extension of the same virulent racism that leads him to return to the tenements to sell fractional investments in a segregated housing development in the New Jersey suburbs. Gold later edited New Masses when it published a 1935 prophetic takedown of “Jewish Hitler” Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of the bloodthirsty Zionist fascism that currently terrorizes the Middle East; and he was an early advocate of a “binational Arab-Jewish” one-state solution in Palestine championed by the beloved new mayor of New York, who appears to have cribbed his political identity from Fiorello La Guardia, the “one-man melting pot” who led the city when Gold and Day were at the pinnacle of their political powers.

Day’s own return to relevance was championed by no less than the deeply reactionary Pope Benedict, in one of his last speeches before the mysterious resignation that unleashed the Vatican’s first Jesuit pontiff, the irrepressible Pope Francis, who inspired this deeply lapsed Catholic to belatedly have her own sons baptized in a small, historically Black Catholic church about a mile down the road from the basilica where Day tearfully prayed for the answer that became the Catholic Worker Movement. I only began attending weekly Mass there, however, during the early weeks of Pope Leo XIV, which coincided with the breathtaking evil unleashed by the second term of Donald Trump, whose institutional death squads staffed by Palantir hackers and anarcho-capitalist legal theorists waged dirty war on every remaining American organization designed to promote the public interest: hospitals and schools, infectious disease trackers and air traffic controllers, weather balloons and disaster responders, IRS auditors and taxation watchdogs.

Day came of age in an America that lacked most of those things, that used the awesome powers of its federal government to break strikes and massacre Bonus Marchers and execute Sacco and Vanzetti and colonize Cuba for the slaveholder class and employ the goons who’d beaten and tortured her during her first stint in prison for protesting World War I. She achieved national fame during the governance of progressive men like FDR and La Guardia, but she harbored no illusions that a state founded to promote capitalist greed or an ideology developed in service of said greed’s eradication could nurture the radical, indefatigable love she sought to spread through humankind.

She famously inspired the conversion of one Catholic Worker subway hawker when she returned to the office after Mass in a huff that the organist had started pounding out “The Star-Spangled Banner” immediately following Communion; as the whole congregation obediently stood, Day herself, much to the awe of her disciple, had knelt back down and prayed for a laity that would rebel against that warmongering song. In 1975, The Catholic Worker published a column suggesting that on the occasion of the American bicentennial, readers should “repent” for their nation’s murderous subjugations and genocides of Native and Black Americans, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the “plundering of our resources to build up the monstrous stockpiles of diabolic weapons,” “lies and plots and murders of the FBI and CIA,” and finally of “our own indifference to the starving millions of the world.” Day was the last Catholic who would have been surprised by that same state’s facilitation of the liquidation of Gaza and the quarter-century campaign to lay waste to the Middle East, its harrowing crackdowns on anti-genocide protesters and its systematic imprisonment and torture of vast swaths of brown-skinned Americans for the crime of standing in the Home Depot parking lot.

In a decade of unprecedented populist state reform, Dorothy Day cast her lot with the Catholic Church—of all things!—purely on the basis of a kind of spiritual hunch that for all the Vatican’s hypocrisy and duplicity, the revolutionary philosophy it was designed to sustain still meant something in the hearts of its believers, and that those believers would change the world if they heeded the call.

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David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Maureen Tkacik

moetkacik@gmail.com

Maureen Tkacik is investigations editor at the Prospect and a senior fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. More by Maureen Tkacik

Biography

The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

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By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of revelation.” Walt Whitman saw it as something “independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal.” Complexity theory traces it to the quantum foam.

The best shorthand we have for it is soul.

“One can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes,” Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) lamented in her diary. But writing directly about the soul, and with tremendous insight, is precisely what she does in a wonderful essay about the essays of Montaigne — his epochal “attempt to communicate a soul,” a “miraculous adjustment of all these wayward parts that constitute the human soul” — included in her classic Common Reader (public library).

Virginia Woolf

Contemplating the soul — that most private part of us — as “so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public,” she writes:

Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

That courage is what Whitman celebrated when he decreed to “dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.” Only by listening to the voice of the soul — a voice by definition nonconformist, rising above the din of convention and expectation and should — do we become fully and happily ourselves. To be aware of ourselves is to hear that voice. To be content in ourselves is to listen to it. Woolf writes:

The man* who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare 1913 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)

Observing that the souls we most wish to resemble “are always the supplest” — for “a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” — Woolf arrives at what it takes to be fully oneself:

Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of impulses, our perpetual miracle — for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says.

Complement with E.E. Cummings on the courage to be yourself, Tracy K. Smith’s short, splendid poem “The Everlasting Self,” and the poetic science of how we went from cells to souls, then revisit Woolf on self-knowledge, the remedy for self-doubt, the relationship between loneliness and creativity, what makes love last, the consolations of growing older, and her epiphany about the meaning of creativity.

Biography

Philip K. Dick on his nonfiction fiction

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Be Inspired Oct 7, 2025 In 1977, a famous sci-fi author attended a conference in Metz, France. What he said that day shocked everyone in the audience — he spoke about reality,. After that conference, his life took a strange turn…

Philip Kindred Dick was an American science fiction short story writer and novelist. He wrote 45 novels and about 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines. Wikipedia

Born December 16, 1928, Chicago, IL

Died March 2, 1982 (age 53 years), Santa Ana, CA

(Contributed by Steve Hines)

Biography

Thomas Paine: The Consistent Revolutionary

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Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect.

Posted in Politics

Thomas Paine’s lifelong battle for freedom

by Thor Benson July 27, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

When Americans discuss the Founders, there’s always a cloud of shame hanging overhead. One might like many things about Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, but it’s impossible to forget that these men participated in the horrific system of human bondage. A few of the Founders, though, stand out for opposing it outright.

Thomas Paine was one such figure. Paine—an author and political philosopher—was born in Thetford, England. His friend Benjamin Franklin helped him get established in Philadelphia upon his arrival to the colonies in 1774. There, he wrote the 47-page pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in 1776 and swept early America. The pamphlet became the defining argument for America’s independence—for many Americans, both the first and the most persuasive argument for severing allegiance to the British king, or to any king.

In many ways, Paine was a fiercer supporter of democracy than many of the more celebrated Founding Fathers, whose mistrust of the “common people” led them to put limits on voting rights and popular representation in the halls of government. Those were limits that Paine also opposed outright.

Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today.

“I think most people know him largely because of his pamphlet Common Sense, which came out in 1776 and had an impact on galvanizing Americans in favor of independence from Britain,” William Hogeland, an author and historian who focuses on the founding era, told The American Prospect. “It was dramatic because he attacked the idea of the British Constitution and said, basically, they have no constitution. Where is this constitution? Because it wasn’t written down. He attacked the idea that the Crown was part of a constitutional, balanced government.”

Paine portrayed the king as a “royal brute,” Hogeland says. This was seen as somewhat extreme at the time, because even colonists who favored independence weren’t that critical of the king. For that reason, Common Sense helped lay the groundwork for the Declaration of Independence, which also excoriated King George at length.

“The pamphlet sells extremely well, whether it’s in Charleston or Boston. Maybe … the idea is not completely alien. It’s more that he finds a way to make the case, and the case looks pretty appealing in his hands,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Prospect. “It’s less than six months before the Declaration of Independence becomes the actualization of what he’s proposed in his little pamphlet.”

Paine became quite influential in early America. He also seems to have had a personality that was sometimes difficult for people to accept. He knew what he believed and was not willing to waver from those beliefs. To read about him is to envision a passionate, stubborn man who might have had a hard time keeping friends.

“We gather from reading about him that he was very intense in his personality, but also he had a friendly, casual quality,” Hogeland says. “I think a lot of people see Paine as just like a very adroit propagandist for new ideas because he was such a good writer. But I disagree. I think he did have original ideas. In fact, you can sort of tell [that] from the degree to which a lot of the other Founders kind of recoil from his thinking.”

Both John Adams and Alexander Hamilton—future Federalists with a disinclination to popular democracy—regarded Paine as extreme. Adams famously wrote his pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, in response to Paine’s ideas. He wrote in favor of independence but was not comfortable with the hyper-democratic government Paine was proposing.

Paine’s Common Sense was a defining argument for America’s independence from monarchy; Rights of Man extended it to the whole world. Credit: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

The country was still years away from the writing and adoption of the Constitution when these pamphlets were being released, but they did set a foundation for what would eventually go into that document.

“There’s no way Paine knew that he was setting up the mechanism for a constitution,” Rosenfeld says. “But I think in times of disorder and dismay, sometimes a text can articulate clearly the discontent people are feeling. A very similar thing happens at the start of the French Revolution, when What Is the Third Estate?, Abbé Sieyès’s little pamphlet, similarly gives an agenda to people who would go on to be revolutionaries.”

Paine wanted a government that was more representative than the one we have today. He didn’t want anything like the Senate or the Electoral College, which might act as bulwarks against popular majorities and the will of the people. He wanted judges to be elected by the public. He didn’t want a solo executive but rather something of a committee. While many of the Founders feared what might happen if you gave the people too much power, Paine (like Franklin) did not.

“He really doesn’t come from the aristocratic worlds of people like Hamilton or Madison,” Rosenfeld says. “He’s kind of anti-elitist.”

During the Revolutionary War, Paine was a volunteer for the Continental Army, and he ended up writing The American Crisis about what he was observing. He famously wrote the line “These are the times that try men’s souls.” Paine was essentially cheerleading the war effort and trying to convince his fellow patriots to keep fighting, and that, as difficult as the struggle appeared, it would all be worth it in the end. The American Crisis also found a wide, appreciative, and strategically important readership.

Once the war had concluded, despite his successes and his fame, Paine was broke. He ended up having to argue for compensation from individual states and the newly forming American government. He was eventually awarded $3,000 from Congress for his contributions to the American Revolution.

“He did get some money in the end from Congress, but he wasn’t making it here,” Hogeland says. “He felt he had to leave. And so then he becomes kind of a citizen of the world type.”

Paine was also becoming something of an inventor at this point, pitching an innovative bridge concept to investors and governmental officials, but to no avail. In April of 1787, he decided to take his ideas elsewhere. He returned to Britain, but he failed to raise the investment needed to fully realize his project. He eventually left for France, arriving just as the French Revolution was commencing. Once again, a revolutionary was surrounded by other revolutionaries.

“He goes on to play a pivotal role in the French Revolution,” Rosenfeld says. “He becomes perhaps the first international revolutionary, in that sense.”

Credit: Library of Congress/British Cartoon Prints Collection

In 1791, Paine authored Rights of Man, one of the most influential defenses and manifestos of the Revolution published at that time. Again, he put pen to his democratic impulses and his rejection of monarchy. Again, Paine synthesized ideas that were circulating at the time. On both sides of the Atlantic, he had a preternatural ability to put those ideas into words that resonated with the people. In Britain, Rights of Man sold some 100,000 copies in three months of publication.

“He ends up in France as a hero of the French Revolution, and they wanted him partly because he was a hero of the American Revolution,” Hogeland says. “Paine spoke across France and was even made a member of the revolutionary government.”

As anyone familiar with the French Revolution would suspect, that was not the safest place to be. Paine ended up facing condemnation for opposing the execution of the king: It was wrong, he insisted, and a mistake to turn the king into a martyr. Eventually, like many of his fellow revolutionists, he was arrested and spent ten months in prison. He almost ended up being executed by Robespierre and his lieutenants, but narrowly escaped that fate.

“He barely missed being guillotined himself in France,” Hogeland says. “Because he had such an idiosyncratic personality and such an idiosyncratic way of looking at the world and politics, he was often at odds with allies as well as with enemies.”

The American government didn’t do much of anything to assist Paine in his time of need in France. The U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, did not seem interested in securing Paine’s release from prison or helping him escape the guillotine. Later, after Paine had been released, James Monroe became the minister to France and came to his aid.

With America badly divided over the French Revolution, and the administration of John Adams resolutely set against it and its Jeffersonian allies in the States, Paine didn’t return to the United States until 1802—one year after Jefferson assumed the presidency.

“He thought, ‘Oh, now our guys are in. Now the more democratic people are in,’” Hogeland said. “But he had been writing all this stuff that was so controversial, especially The Age of Reason, which was very anti–organized religion. It became so controversial that even the Jeffersonians thought he was too hot to handle.”

He certainly didn’t return a hero. He still had those who celebrated his work and appreciated his contributions to the country’s independence, but he was now seen as a polarizing figure. Many hated him for his criticisms of organized religion.

New York had granted Paine some land in New Rochelle for his contributions to the American Revolution, so Paine decided to settle there. He continued to write and was a supporter of the Jefferson administration, but his relevance had severely dwindled. Paine died at the age of 72 in 1809. “Very few people came to his funeral, and nobody who was still around from the glory days of 1776 showed up,” Hogeland says.

His reputation, for better and worse, outlived him. Theodore Roosevelt famously called him “a filthy little atheist,” though Paine was in fact a deist. As the 20th century proceeded, however, Paine became a hero to liberals and the left, who found him to be both the most democratic and the most modern of the Founding Fathers.

“His ideas don’t seem that radical to us now, because they’ve become, in a way, our common sense,” Rosenfeld says. “His style and his ideas have become so ordinary to us that it’s hard to actually see that he was advocating for things that were rather radical in their moment, whether it was about race or religion or economics or political rights.”

Today, most of us understand the limits that the Founders placed on the democratic and egalitarian sentiments in our foundational documents. Hogeland pointed out, though, that “in 1776, the anti-democratic, elitist impulse wasn’t the only American impulse. There were radically democratic and populist ideas in play too, and Paine was maybe their most articulate and thoughtful spokesperson.”

You won’t find many statues of Thomas Paine in town squares or abutting county courthouses around the country. It was his ideas, however, that both made this country possible and tilted it, over time, toward the genuine popular democracy we still struggle to create.

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David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Thor Benson

Thor Benson is an independent journalist who has contributed to The American Prospect, Wired, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. He’s currently based in Chicago. More by Thor Benson

Biography

Frederick Douglass: Indefatigable American

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Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect.

Posted in Politics

If Frederick Douglass, a former slave who saw the dream of emancipation drown in Jim Crow, didn’t give up on this country, then we have no excuse.

Ryan Cooper by Ryan Cooper July 28, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

America is suffering a crisis of faith. The president, rapidly losing control of his faculties, is leading a coterie of degenerate cronies, literal malefactors of great wealth, who are destroying whole wings of the White House when they’re not gorging themselves on the public treasury with corrupt contracts and giveaways.

Many Americans, particularly in elite circles, seem stunned and bewildered. The worst people in the country are in power, again, and laying waste to everything. Every week, Trump does something an order of magnitude worse than Watergate, and it’s a two-day story at most. It’s hard to muster the energy to care about so many scandals.

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I frankly share the stunned feeling, sometimes. Is a nation stupid enough to elect Donald Trump twice worth saving? Maybe the American people deserve to get what they voted for, good and hard.

At those times, I think about Frederick Douglass. There was someone who had a mountain of reasons to give up entirely on the United States. Instead, he poured out a lifetime of grueling effort to end slavery and secure civil rights for African Americans. He lived long enough to see slavery ended, but also to see the resurgence of white supremacy that violently destroyed the brief Reconstruction experiment with multiracial democracy in the South. Yet even with so much of his life’s work in ruins, he never gave up on America or freedom. So how can we?

DOUGLASS’S LIFE STORY SEEMS designed to embody all the contradictions and possibilities of 19th-century America. Born not just a slave, but a mixed-race slave likely fathered by one of his enslavers or one of his enslaver’s sons, he was the product of arguably the single most appalling feature of antebellum slavery: the widespread habit among male Southern slave owners of raping their female slaves and then enslaving their own resulting children.

He successfully escaped bondage from eastern Maryland in 1838, at age 20. After a few years working odd jobs, he was discovered by the abolitionist movement. The discovery of Douglass’s immense oratorical talent was instantly appealing to abolitionist organizers for obvious reasons. He would prove that a Black person can succeed at the highest level, even if he were a result of the dreaded race-mixing, without any formal education, inherited wealth, or powerful family connections. Nobody has ever come closer to the impossible idea of lifting himself by his own bootstraps.

Abolitionists like Douglass toured the northern United States tirelessly, speaking at thousands of abolitionist rallies. This was a dangerous business even in New England, and he was repeatedly the victim of discrimination, heckling, threats, and assaults. One particularly violent brawl left him with a permanently disfigured right hand.

Eventually, he wrote an autobiography, which became an instant classic, and went on extensive international tours. By the mid-1850s, he was a world-famous speaker, writer, journalist, newspaper editor, and all-around celebrity. He ended up being the most-photographed American of the 19th century, and certainly the most important civil rights activist in the world.

In a sense, he was the 19th century’s version of an influencer—except instead of producing short-form video optimized to catch the attention of “masses” of individuals scrolling on their phones, Douglass brought the show to the actual masses, day after day, for decades. Through years of practice, he honed his routine and technique to a mirror finish; a reliable crowd-pleaser was his bitterly sarcastic “Slaveholder’s Sermon,” in which he parodied the sanctimonious hypocrisy of Southern Christianity.

“Oh, consider the wonderful goodness of God! Look at your hard, horny hands, your strong muscular frames, and see how mercifully he has adapted you to the duties you are to fulfill!” Douglass had the pastor say to his slaves. “While to your masters, who have slender frames and long delicate fingers, he has given brilliant intellects, that they may do the thinking, while you do the working” (emphasis in original).

From a modern standpoint, it is almost unbelievable that Douglass could get huge crowds of people, most of whom did not have even a high school education, to pay rapt attention to flowery, hours-long speeches, often full of learned citations and elaborate arguments. But they kept coming back for more. There may be something to the idea that television and cellphones have ruined the national attention span; professor friends of mine relate that if they assign any Douglass speech, it must be heavily abridged or students simply will not read it.

Credit: Southworth & Hawes/Onondaga Historical Association Museum; National Portrait Gallery; George Francis Schreiber/Library of Congress; Library of Congress/Brady-Handy photograph collection.

DOUGLASS’S FIRST MENTOR was William Lloyd Garrison, one of the classic American-style utopian idealists, disgusted by the grubby realities of politics. Garrisonians hated political parties, lambasted the Constitution as a pro-slavery document, advocated pure “moral suasion,” and, as so often with political radicals, were highly prone to sectarian infighting.

After a few years, Douglass came to understand that such a naïve, hyper-moralistic approach—Garrison argued that government itself was essentially always wrong—could never abolish slavery. Abolitionists would have to descend into the political muck and get dirty grappling for power.

Navigating the pitfalls of politics without losing sight of one’s moral principles is always the most difficult part of radicalism, and Douglass managed it with rare dexterity. After having briefly fled the country for fear of prosecution over his involvement with John Brown, Douglass debated the British abolitionist George Thompson in 1860 about whether the Constitution was pro- or anti-slavery. Douglass made the latter case, and while the argument was sophisticated and clever, it was also a little tendentious.

He argued, for instance, that the infamous three-fifths clause was a “downright disability” because it “deprives those States of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation … Therefore, instead of encouraging slavery, the Constitution encourages freedom by giving an increase of ‘two-fifths’ of political power to free over slave States.” Mathematically correct, but something of an evasion of how the clause gave extra political power to slave owners in proportion to how many people they owned, and quite obviously done to enlist reverence for the Constitution and the cult of the Founding Fathers on behalf of abolition.

If the argument was something of a cynical expedient in 1860, it became an open-and-shut case when the Radical Republicans added the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. That’s one way to win a debate about constitutional law.

Though he never quite reached the heights of national power, Douglass was not some bit player amid the enormous tumult of the Civil War. When fighting began, Black men were not allowed in the United States military, which Douglass attacked as unjust and counterproductive. “This is no time to fight only with your white hand, and allow your black hand to remain tied,” he argued.

When this ban was removed, thanks partly to his own influence, Douglass became a tireless military recruiter, and two of his own sons enlisted. He quickly stopped, however, when it became clear that Black troops were being abused, paid much less, denied promotions, and, worst of all, denied prisoner-of-war protections, making it more likely for them to be murdered by racist Confederate forces after capture.

Douglass met with President Lincoln in the White House and argued once more that this racist treatment was immoral and holding back the war effort. Lincoln took the complaints seriously, some rules were removed, and Douglass returned to recruiting, though the personal military position he thought was coming never arrived.

Historians have argued that the Civil War was a fairly close-run thing in 1864. Union losses were appalling during the Overland Campaign, as Gen. Ulysses S. Grant went on a sustained, grueling offensive to force the Confederacy into submission and end the war quickly. The resulting carnage and repeated setbacks were extremely unpopular, and Lincoln assumed that unless the tide turned quickly, he was going to lose the election that November. He even met with Douglass to plan a possible effort to covertly free the remaining slaves in the South, should the election be lost.

“Men of Color” recruitment broadside, authored by Frederick Douglass et al., 1863. Credit: Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

But by this time, there were roughly 200,000 Black men in the United States military, about 10 percent of the total. Without this influx of new recruits, many of whom fought and died in the bloodiest battles of 1864, Grant’s harrying of Lee might have dragged on a critical few months, leading Lincoln to lose the election to would-be Confederate appeaser George B. McClellan. In short, it is entirely possible that without Douglass’s actions to enable and then bolster Black enlistment, the Confederacy would have won its independence.

When African Americans from around the country consecrated a statue of Lincoln in 1876 (known as the Emancipation Statue, it can still be seen in Washington, D.C., today), Douglass delivered a famous oration to practically the entire national political establishment, from President Grant to the Supreme Court to congressional leaders. (As biographer David W. Blight notes, no Black person would do this again until Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.)

There, Douglass delivered a considered political verdict on Lincoln’s legacy. He stated forthrightly that Lincoln “was preeminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” and that African Americans “are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.” Still, “we were able to take a comprehensive view … and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position … we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln.”

Douglass pointed out that even Lincoln’s prejudice was a necessary precondition for his political success. “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.” Few have delivered a better summary of how to ride the edge of the politically possible.

The North Star, founded by Frederick Douglass, merged with the Liberty Party Paper of Syracuse and was renamed the Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

DOUGLASS’S MOST MARKED CHARACTERISTIC was his astounding capacity for empathy. Brilliant minds are not uncommon. Much rarer is the genius with a sound moral sense—one which persists even when that person has suffered terrible injustice. Someone with Douglass’s background would have had every right to cultivate a bilious resentment against white people. But a repeated theme in his anti-slavery work was how the institution gravely harmed everyone, regardless of race.

This extended even to his unknown father. “Cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so,” Douglass wrote in his first autobiography. “Unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself, but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.”

No doubt this was partly rhetorical—by demonstrating insight into the human motivations even of his own brutal enslaver, Douglass demonstrated his own humanity, and his superior virtue to boot—but it was also true.

Douglass maintained this largeness of spirit throughout his life. He was one of a handful of men—and the only Black person of any gender—at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the first women’s rights conference in American history. There he argued strongly for women’s suffrage against more moderate factions who worried it would discredit the group, and he helped carry the day. He continued to advocate for women’s rights his whole life, even as many white feminists, embittered by the fact that Black men had gotten the vote first, and drawn into the vortex of racism that gradually consumed the post–Civil War North, welcomed segregation and Jim Crow.

“Let those who want argument examine the ground upon which they base their claim to the right to vote,” Douglass said in an 1888 speech at an International Council of Women conference. “They will find that there is not one reason, not one consideration, which they can urge in support of man’s claim to vote, which does not equally support the right of woman to vote.”

In 1867, as a xenophobic anti-Chinese panic built up, Douglass argued powerfully that the United States is a “composite nation,” and Chinese immigrants should be welcomed and granted all the benefits of citizenship. “There are such things in the world as human rights,” he said. Later, he strenuously opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Douglass was, of course, far from perfect. He was vain, egotistical, proud, touchy (particularly about racial slights), and treated his first wife quite poorly. He ended up, somewhat by accident, as the patriarch of an enormous family and coterie of hangers-on, and was forced to keep an arduous touring schedule long into his old age to make ends meet. He took over the Freedman’s Savings Bank just a few months before it collapsed, perhaps unwittingly persuading Black depositors to open accounts that were almost immediately wiped out.

Such flaws were hardly surprising in a man of his time and background. On the contrary, it is surprising that they weren’t much worse. A man who endured such a traumatic upbringing and then found his way into so much privilege could be expected to develop a severe case of megalomania, if not substance abuse. That he did not is certainly partly the result of his own noble character, but I think also because Douglass had a great moral crusade for which to fight. Struggle against injustice can give one’s life a powerful sense of purpose.

That same purpose exists today, as white supremacists once more have the upper hand. Pete Hegseth is resegregating the military, and the Republican Party is rebuilding a new Jim Crow, enabled by the Supreme Court. Just as in Douglass’s day, the voting rights of Black people in the South are being stolen by force and fraud.

In 1878, as Reconstruction was being destroyed, Douglass gave a speech remembering what the Civil War was about. “Though freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South, and, the party of slavery is now in the ascendant, we need bate no jot of heart or hope,” he said. “The heart of the nation is still sound and strong, and as in the past, so in the future, patriotic millions, with able captains to lead them, will stand as a wall of fire around the Republic, and in the end see Liberty, Equality, and Justice triumphant.”

Douglass made such a political prophecy come true in his own time, and we can do the same again.

Before you go.

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work. 

The Prospect doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. 

Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. 

If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you’ll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.

Donate Now

David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Ryan Cooper

rcooper@prospect.org

Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at The American Prospect, and author of How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics. He was previously a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs. More by Ryan Cooper

Biography

Louis Brandeis: The Empiricist

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Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect

Posted in Law and Justice

Louis Brandeis believed that facts could change lives and break excessive power where it accumulated.

David Dayen by David Dayen July 30, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

“Iam no theorist,” Louis Brandeis stated bluntly in the Hastings, Nebraska, Daily Republican on February 3, 1912. “I have had a large experience and I know what I am talking about.”

It’s rare to unearth a quote that gives you the full measure of a man, especially someone as varied in his interests as Brandeis. His biographer, historian Melvin Urofsky, segments his life into four careers: attorney, Progressive reformer, Zionist (out of nowhere as he approached the age of 60), and Supreme Court justice. He practically invented the concept of pro bono legal work; he revolutionized operations in the insurance, railroad, utility, and textile industries; he was a leading critic of Gilded Age monopoly trusts and the financial machinery behind them; he inspired and substantially wrote Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” economic agenda; and his landmark dissents on free speech and the right to privacy eventually became the prevailing standard in American law. But throughout all of this, Brandeis relied upon what he could see—often barely, as he had such vision trouble that fellow students had to read to him at Harvard Law so he could keep up with the workload—with his own two eyes.

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Brandeis’s upbringing in Louisville, Kentucky, where his family traded grain, gave him insight into how honest businesses and farmers could achieve economic freedom. The family business was liquidated before the Panic of 1873 sent the country into a deep recession, seeding his distrust of financial engineering. His early career as a corporate lawyer taught him how well-meaning regulation could be defeated with armies of loophole hunters. He often won reforms by learning more about corporate titans’ businesses than even they knew. And his major contribution to America’s courtrooms, the Brandeis brief, was nothing more than a recitation of facts as a basis for applying law. “He called the Brandeis brief ‘what any fool knows,’” said Jeffrey Rosen, George Washington University law professor and author of Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet.

The radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.

A statue on the campus of the university outside Boston that bears his name includes a quote Brandeis delivered in a dissent in Jay Burns Baking Co. v. Bryan (1924), a case about regulation of standard bread weights in Nebraska that feels trivial for such a definitive proclamation: “If we would guide by the light of reason, we must let our minds be bold.” The line before that in the dissent is even more on point: “Knowledge is essential to understanding, and understanding should precede judging.”

The knowledge in that instance, which Brandeis laboriously chronicled with legislative testimony, World War I Food Administration reports, and excerpts from the trade publication Bakers Weekly, involved the schemes for “short-weighting” bread loaves by a few ounces to overcharge unsuspecting customers, the numerous ways state and federal regulators had sought to outlaw such villainy, and why scrupulous bread makers suffered no appreciable cost from the rules, and indeed were relieved of the chore of “constantly watching the juggling of weight by their competitors” rather than producing quality products at a fair price.

Brandeis was as concerned with the realities of breadmaking as he was with any realities, but this recounting had a point: to admonish the Court for substituting their own judgment about the burdens of regulations over that of officials elected by the people. This offended him as “an exercise of the powers of a super-legislature—not the performance of the constitutional function of judicial review.”

Sound familiar?

AMERICA AT ITS BIRTH REBELLED at the centralized nature of the British Empire and embraced—at least rhetorically—a new form of political organization, where artisans and farmers and small merchants could exercise self-governance, take charge of their own lives, and reach their full potential. Brandeis, with his faith in democracy and trust in the people, was an heir to this tradition and to one Founder’s vision in particular. “I see him as the Jewish Jefferson,” said Rosen, who somewhat amazingly studied under one of Brandeis’s last law clerks, David Riesman.

Even Brandeis’s Zionism, a surprise given that he was never a practicing Jew, was more about building a model society than religiously inspired. He imagined a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a small-unit, agrarian collection of kibbutzim, removed from the social discord that industrialization had brought to Gilded Age America. In his naïveté, he declared that the economic benefits of this organization would bring the two peoples together. “I don’t think he would be very happy with Israel now,” Urofsky told me.

Portraits of Brandeis as a younger man (left) and as a Supreme Court justice. Credit: Library of Congress/George Grantham Bain Collection; Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress

As a young attorney in Boston, Brandeis merged his Jeffersonianism with relentless practicality. He was hired to resolve a shoe manufacturer’s labor dispute: He ended up restructuring the regional shoe business so workers received more consistent pay. When the Boston Consolidated Gas Co. formed a monopoly, Brandeis proposed a “sliding scale” plan where the company’s dividend could only increase if it lowered prices for customers. He proved that railroads could save $1 million a day through scientific management—reorganizing their repair shops, more efficiently laying track—which regulators used as justification for lowering rates. When insurance policyholders hired Brandeis to protect them from the abuses of term life companies, which funneled 40 cents out of every dollar in premiums to executive salaries, agent commissions, and shareholder dividends, he came up with having savings banks sell the product, which drove commercial insurance prices down through competition.

“A lot of reformers complained about things,” Urofsky explained. “But once Brandeis identified a problem he came up with a solution.”

In working out these compromises, Brandeis referred to himself as “counsel to the situation.” In exchange, he asked for no money, which burnished his reputation as The People’s Lawyer. He could work pro bono because his law firm was extraordinarily lucrative; his partner’s family owned a successful paper mill and became the firm’s first client. Attending to the needs of the public was kind of Brandeis’s hobby. “I don’t want money or property most,” he said once to an interviewer. “I want to be free.”

This experience also gave him understanding of how even careful compromises could falter. “He thought that as an attorney … he could work out contractual relations that were mutually satisfying across the gulf of power,” said Gerald Berk, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Oregon and another Brandeis biographer. “And then he realized, ‘Wait a minute. These guys will abuse this power.’”

This understanding sparked Brandeis’s antipathy toward any unchecked ability to impose conditions over man. “He is somebody who was extraordinarily consistent about his skepticism of concentrated power, regardless of whether it was coming from the commercial sector or from government,” said Lina Khan, former chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Indeed, in his crackdown on fraudulent life insurance, a reform he considered the crowning accomplishment of his life, he countered with a private bank option, not a public option.

This would prove uncomfortable to liberals when the Democratic hero voted to strike down a few New Deal programs on the Supreme Court. But big government wasn’t really a feature of pre–New Deal America; the radical component of Brandeis’s Progressive Era fulminations was his attack on big business.

Source: Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department/Brandeis University Library

IN “A CURSE OF BIGNESS” and a series of articles in Harper’s that were collected into the book Other People’s Money—and How the Bankers Use It, Brandeis wrote his briefs against corporate power. He considered consolidated trusts too big to manage; it was impossible for their leaders to track so many divisions. They were inherently corrupting, with their boards populated with the same self-interested insiders (he termed them “interlocking directorates”). They suppressed innovation and rejected internal improvements, making them inefficient by temperament and design, the precise opposite of the beliefs held by Robert Bork, the right-wing legal scholar who reversed much of Brandeis’s theories about competition policy in the 1970s.

The trusts were constructed and controlled by financiers with no experience in the trusts’ particular businesses, but much expertise in controlling capital to advantage themselves. Brandeis warned of a financial oligarchy that never took on risk, instead using borrowed cash to build lucrative empires that threatened the nation’s stability. Despite its thunderous reputation, Other People’s Money is mostly laden with dense regurgitations of valuations, shares of stock, and bank deposits. Yet the vigor of his pursuit suggested that Brandeis found the financiers behind monopoly even more distasteful than the monopolies themselves.

But financial control isn’t Brandeis’s primary complaint about bigness. He believed that those robbed of the ability to start their own business or purchase what they please were harmed as citizens, too. “Brandeis stands for the idea that economic independence is a fundamental condition for democratic freedom,” said Zephyr Teachout, a professor at Fordham Law School. There’s no record of him uttering the famous line attributed to him—that we can have a democratic society or concentration of wealth, but not both—yet he would agree with its essence.

He did say another line that speaks to his belief in how facts can change the world: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

The confrontation that elevated Brandeis as a national icon concerned the New Haven Railroad, which was in the process of rolling up all the rail lines in New England, using a fake subsidiary to purchase the stock of the last holdout, the Boston & Maine. J.P. Morgan was the New Haven’s financial patron, and thanks to its 8 percent stock dividend, practically every businessman in Boston was its champion. But Brandeis, who paid his own firm $25,000 so he could freely work on the matter, pored over the New Haven’s books and found significant financial strain that he said threatened the company’s operations and its dividend.

This outraged the city’s financial elite, who were all heavily invested in the New Haven. They claimed Brandeis was misinformed and driven by anti-bigness monomania. But though the Massachusetts legislature approved the merger in 1909, math was on Brandeis’s side. The New Haven was indeed in terrible financial shape. As stock transfers made middlemen millions, the railroad deteriorated, with a series of deadly crashes attributed to deficient maintenance. The company’s books were riddled with phony accounting. In time, the feds broke up the New Haven, the dividend was eliminated, and railway president Charles Sanger Mellen was ousted. It’s now part of Amtrak.

The 1912 election was described in Matt Stoller’s Goliath as a crossroads for how the nation would wrest democracy back from the frightening business dominance that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. President William Howard Taft, running for re-election, wanted to use existing tools of trust-busting, which were limited by the courts; former President Theodore Roosevelt, who broke from his handpicked successor and founded the Bull Moose Party, believed monopolies were inevitable but could be regulated into becoming benign.

Brandeis backed Woodrow Wilson, someone he had never spoken to until after Wilson clinched the Democratic nomination. After Brandeis wrote one congratulatory letter, Wilson summoned him to his summer cottage in Sea Girt, New Jersey, and they hammered out an entire economic platform over a three-hour working lunch. The program was Jeffersonian where Roosevelt’s was Hamiltonian, regulating not companies but competition by outlawing unfair methods like forced sales, contractual restraints, or price discrimination. It fit Brandeis’s small-government approach, and he thought it would free citizens to pursue their talents. “They believed good people should be given the opportunity to succeed, and if it was opposed by large corporations, that block should be taken away,” Urofsky said.

His insistent refusal of pay for legal work on Progressive reforms gave Brandeis the nickname “The People’s Lawyer.” Credit: Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department/Brandeis University Library

The country gave their votes to Wilson. While considered too controversial for the cabinet, Brandeis stage-managed a legislative burst that included the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the constitutional amendment allowing an income tax, and two anti-monopoly laws, the Clayton Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act. The former secured prohibitions on unfair practices while allowing the government to challenge mergers that “substantially lessen competition,” rather than just ones that create a monopoly. The FTC could study markets to identify new tactics and prevent consolidation before it formed.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the public figure who most closely took on Brandeis’s role as counsel to the situation before entering public office, drew on his approach to government when devising the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “The whole point of the CFPB was not new substantive rules, a new rule declaring overdrafts illegal, but instead to change the structure so there was countervailing power to the financial predators,” she said.

The New Freedom was not wholly successful. Despite efforts to decentralize the new central bank, the same lords of finance would come to dominate it. Brandeis disliked the selections for FTC commissioners. And Wilson’s attention drifted amid the Great War and his failing health. It took the Great Depression for the country’s political elite to recognize Brandeis’s warnings. Franklin Roosevelt would eventually institute plans like the separation of commercial and investment banking and the Securities Exchange Act to outlaw stock fraud, which appeared plucked directly from Other People’s Money. (Brandeis reissued the book after the 1929 crash.)

The New Deal, then, delivered on the promise of the New Freedom, and its structure of regulated competition sustained America’s unprecedented shared prosperity in the decades following World War II.

SUCH WAS HIS IMPACT as a private citizen that Brandeis’s Supreme Court career can be addressed as almost an afterthought. The 1916 nomination fight itself, which occasioned a horror among the business class that is today reserved for Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, was among its most interesting elements. A cartoon from the era showed “Privilege,” “Wall Street,” and “Monopoly” writhing in pain while Brandeis strolls along. At one point, a petition of 55 prominent Boston Brahmins opposing the nomination was circulated, whereupon a lawyer in Brandeis’s office fashioned a chart of all their overlapping financial connections. It was supposed to run in The New Republic, then a house organ for Brandeis allies. “The editor killed it. The owner’s friends and business connections were being called out,” Rosen explained.

Moneyed interests despaired at Brandeis’s ascension to the Supreme Court. Credit: Nelson Greene/Library of Congress

Brandeis sat from 1916 to 1939 on a Lochner-lite Court, repeatedly outvoted by conservatives until FDR appointees joined him during his final years on the bench. Yet he believed in the power of dissent to illuminate reason in the minds of men. And he used his familiar blend of facts, animated by America’s principles of individual liberty, to establish a legacy that would eventually convince a nation.

In Whitney v. California (1927), the Court supported punishment for a woman who organized the state’s Communist Labor Party, alleged to be a violent criminal syndicate. Brandeis concurred on technical grounds, but used the case to argue for free speech as a cornerstone of democracy. “Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties,” he wrote. “They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”

People must be allowed to hear all sides of the debate, because that is how ideas develop and the national character builds, Brandeis believed. Anything less is arbitrary coercion that breeds repression and hate. “I think Brandeis had very well-developed ideas about citizenship,” said Tim Wu, the former Biden administration competition policy czar who borrowed Brandeis’s title The Curse of Bigness for one of his own books. “The U.S. was meant to be a republic of citizens and not a republic of observers or passive followers.”

The greater assault on liberty came from new technology. Brandeis found Prohibition unworkable precisely because of the police powers it would take to enforce it. A Seattle policeman named Roy Olmstead ran a bootlegging operation, and federal agents got the evidence needed to indict him by tapping the phone wires outside his office and listening in on his conversations. They never actually entered Olmstead’s premises, ruled Taft, promoted to chief justice after his failed re-election, and therefore there was no Fourth Amendment violation.

The broader point Brandeis made was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone.

In his dissent, “Brandeis insists on preserving the same amount of privacy in the age of wires as the age of the horse and buggy,” Rosen said. He wanted government kept at the electronic water’s edge, the same way it’s kept outside the home. He also wanted to incorporate in the dissent a new technology he thought would be truly privacy-depriving in 1928: television. But untutored in its operation, he mistakenly believed that those on-screen could see and hear those watching at home. In this, Rosen quipped, he anticipated Zoom.

The broader point Brandeis made in Olmstead was that Americans had the constitutional right to be left alone. If you were compelled to give up your thoughts and beliefs, your freedom to think would be extinguished, the greatest crime of tyrants. “He really believes in the individual conscience and the capacity and ability of people to engage in moral reflection, and that we should support laws and structures to encourage that capacity,” Teachout said. “There is a force in our internal thought processes that actually shapes the world.”

The right to privacy was affirmed by the Warren Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, as was Brandeis’s conception of free speech that should only be abridged to avert serious injury. At a time when constitutional protections—like the right to make private medical decisions with your doctor—are being knocked down by the Roberts Court, Brandeis’s dissents demonstrate to Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson that there is power in building an argument with care and precision, utilizing the facts that surround, that can meaningfully oppose. One day, the nation might just agree with you.

WE ARE TODAY LIVING in the world Brandeis feared. The rule by the one percent, the fusion of big government and big business, the domination of public knowledge by Big Tech and AI platforms, the surveillance economy—the fever dreams of the past are now present, and worse than had been imagined. “Government itself has been weaponized on behalf of the wealthiest,” Sen. Warren told me. “And that means democracy as a tool is under threat in a way that Brandeis didn’t have to confront.”

Chief Justice William Howard Taft (left) had a conservative majority, but Brandeis’s dissents would eventually become the legal standard. Credit: AP Photo

When a new strain of anti-monopolists who rebelled against the laissez-faire attitudes of the past 40 years sought to give themselves a name, they chose the New Brandeis movement. While I may have been the first to publish that nickname, it was not my invention. But in reviewing Brandeis’s life and work, it fits. Anti-monopolists follow in the American traditions of skepticism toward concentrated power and a desire for human freedom. And like Brandeis, they believe that personal self-governance is necessary for political self-governance.

“He always said that the most important thing a person can be in a democracy was a citizen,” Urofsky said. “As a citizen you not only reap rewards of democracy but have a responsibility to it.”

The epitome of a citizen in Brandeis’s preferred democracy may be his own great-grandson, Paul Brandeis Raushenbush. He leads the Interfaith Alliance, founded to countervail the power of the religious right and Christian nationalism, and more recently supporting faith leaders who are working to shield their neighbors from ICE. “We are saying religion can be the handmaiden to authoritarianism but also its worst enemy,” he told me.

This work has associations with Raushenbush’s other great-grandfather, Walter Rauschenbusch, a leader of the Social Gospel anti-poverty movement of the late 19th century. Brandeis’s daughter Elizabeth married Rauschenbusch’s son Paul in 1925, and the two became leading economists at the University of Wisconsin who authored the first state unemployment compensation law in the nation. Brandeis would successfully lobby FDR for an unemployment insurance component to the Social Security Act of 1935. The late philosopher Richard Rorty was Paul Raushenbush’s cousin.

“This is the vibe,” Raushenbush said.

He talked about Brandeis’s austere summer home on Cape Cod, still owned by the family today, where the mattresses were made of horsehair and a TV had to be rented to watch the political conventions. And he talked about Brandeis’s commitment to serving the people, armed with the facts and common wisdom. He related it to Walter Rauschenbusch, at his church in the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, wondering how the Gospel can uplift a congregation in penury, and his grandparents, in their office in Madison, wondering how someone copes with no job prospects, and how government can help.

“There’s a theme here that is relevant to our lives,” he said. “How am I going to use my skills to impact and love my neighbor?”

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David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

David Dayen

ddayen@prospect.org

David Dayen is the executive editor of The American Prospect. He is the author of Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power and Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud. He co-hosts the podcast Organized Money with Matt Stoller. He can be reached on Signal at ddayen.90. More by David Dayen

Biography

Ida Tarbell: The Journalist Who Took Down Rockefeller

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Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect

Posted in Money, Politics, and Power

Not even Teddy Roosevelt could break up his corrupt oil monopoly—until a daughter of the Pennsylvania oil fields came along.

Whitney Curry Wimbish by Whitney Curry Wimbish July 31, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

For a brief time during the Progressive Era, Ida M. Tarbell was the most famous woman in America. It was 1901 and the McClure’s Magazine journalist had recently published a much-loved, yearlong, 20-part series on Abraham Lincoln, for which she had traveled cross-country, uncovered new material, and put the publication solidly in the black at last. It was the first time since Samuel Sidney McClure launched his magazine in 1893 that it wasn’t struggling on the brink of bankruptcy. Tarbell’s Lincoln series doubled its circulation, and the newsroom could finally exhale, at least for a moment.

At 43 years old, Tarbell was living the life she wanted. She had a comfortable apartment in New York City, a career with purpose, no domestic responsibilities beyond her two cats, a wide circle of international friends, and colleagues who appreciated both her and her work.

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But ghosts of the Gilded Age were haunting America, and now that McClure’s had solid financial footing, it was racing to catch up. Competitors were already breaking news on corporate trusts, which outraged Americans exhausted and infuriated by the conditions that had plunged the country into extreme inequality.

As the senior staff writer and by all accounts McClure’s best friend, it was on Tarbell to undertake this next great investigation. One colleague suggested a story about the sugar monopoly. Another suggested Philip Danforth Armour, the meatpacking monopolist who used “everything but the squeal.” Those ideas were swiftly sidelined when oilmen in Spindletop, Texas, hit a gusher so powerful on January 10, 1901, that it is now credited as the genesis of the Texas oil boom, not to mention Exxon, Mobil, and Texaco. Spindletop shot a black geyser 200 feet into the air and produced 70,000 barrels daily; in just months, the tiny nearby town of Beaumont grew five and a half times, to 50,000 people who wanted to get rich off the black gold.

So the newsroom ditched squeal and sugar for oil, specifically the oil of John D. Rockefeller. His Standard Oil Company controlled the vast majority of the nation’s oil production, an undeniable monopoly. For Miss Tarbell, as her colleagues called her, the assignment made her queasy. After all, Rockefeller had ruined her father.

IDA MINERVA TARBELL WAS BORN on November 5, 1857, in Erie County, Pennsylvania, to Franklin Sumner Tarbell and Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell. The three lived in a log house full of “joyous interests,” delicious food, and a big fireplace. In 1860, the family moved 40 miles away to Titusville, where Franklin believed he was the one who could build the tank that could hold the hundreds of barrels of oil bubbling up from a new well.

The Tarbells lived in a shanty so grim that Ida, then a toddler, announced one day that she was going back to their old home, only to return an hour later, solemnly telling her mother that she did not know the way there. The episode must have instilled some sense of permission to investigate that carried into Ida’s career. “I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was to be accepted,” she wrote. “My mother always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions asked.”

Tarbell was concerned with understanding not just how the world worked, but for whom.

The benefits of the oil boom were imperceptible to Ida as a child, she later wrote. But she recognized the horrors. On April 17, 1861, her father and his friends were excited to hear news that a man who had been drilling deeper than others had struck a new oil vein. As they ran toward the well, a massive explosion rocked the very earth. “A careless light had ignited the gas which had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in the vicinity,” Tarbell wrote. Nineteen men burned to death. The horror did not end there that night. After dark, a man “burned and swollen beyond recognition” turned up at the shanty doorstep, and the family took him in and nursed him back to health. In another instance, a neighboring woman was hurrying to start a fire in her stove and poured oil on the wood, Tarbell recalled. The woman and two others who ran to her aid “were burned to a crisp.”

The tragedy was tangible, she wrote, not a mystery from beyond. “What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in handling either crude or refined oil,” Tarbell wrote of the dead women. “I heard horrified whisperings about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for nights.” Tarbell suffered nightmares for the rest of her life.

Such events would have been enough to turn a person against the architects of the industry that caused them. But Big Oil had not finished with Tarbell’s education just yet. For three months in 1872, when Tarbell was a teenager, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company went on a spree of coerced corporate takeovers, buying out 22 of 26 rival refineries at bargain-basement prices in what later became known as the Cleveland Massacre. The independent companies sold because Rockefeller told them of a powerful alliance between bigger oil drillers and railroads. A few months before, Pennsylvania Railroad President Tom Scott had indeed formed a secret alliance called the South Improvement Company. The South Improvement partners wanted to stop competition between refiners so they could raise the cost of transporting the oil by freight. Under the secret agreement, the railroads would increase their prices beyond what operators like Tarbell’s father could pay and then give some of their proceeds to Rockefeller, a form of payment they termed a “rebate”—but “kickback” and “bribe” work, too. That was enough to scare the small-businessmen into selling their companies for cheap.

When the news leaked to newspapers across Pennsylvania’s oil region, oilmen like Tarbell’s father were incensed. They ran into the street, she wrote in her History of the Standard Oil Company. “Nobody waited to find out his neighbor’s opinion. On every lip there was but one word, and that was ‘conspiracy.’ For weeks the whole body of oil men abandoned regular business and surged from town to town intent on destroying the ‘Monster,’ the ‘Forty Thieves,’ the ‘great Anaconda,’ as they called the mysterious South Improvement Company.”

Rockefeller scoffed at talk of a conspiracy; it didn’t matter much to his monopolistic project, wrote biographer Ron Chernow in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. Once he had the Cleveland refineries, “he then marched on and did the same thing in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and the other refining centers.”

Among those ruined was Tarbell’s father. “A big hand reached out from nobody knew where, to steal their conquest and throttle their future,” she wrote. It was akin to a “blow between the eyes.” She was 15.

THAT WAS THE BACKGROUND AGAINST which Tarbell considered her new assignment as a reporter at the height of her career. Yet she was no longer a teenager and had passed the recent decades with the same explorer’s spirit her mother had encouraged in Pennsylvania.

She wrote and thought from a worldly perspective. She was concerned with understanding not just how the world worked, but for whom. She had attended college, the only woman in her class, and originally sought a career as a scientist. She had flirted with men, and she flirted with at least one woman when she lived in Paris, where she supported herself as a writer and gathered an international set of friends, men and women alike. She produced a biography of Madame Marie-Jeanne Roland, a French revolutionary put to death by guillotine, and another of Napoleon Bonaparte. She had reshaped the nation’s view of Abraham Lincoln through her cross-country reporting, showing him as a “bright, rather handsome” striver, as one Chicago reader put it, not the unkempt, backwoods lowborn of conventional wisdom at the time.

With the goodwill and trust of her readers, Tarbell began to hunt Standard Oil just as President Theodore Roosevelt was, but with greater stealth and truer aim. In December 1901, almost a year after the Spindletop gusher blew, Roosevelt used his State of the Union address to tell lawmakers they must use their power to curb monopolies. They did not until well after McClure’s began publishing Tarbell’s exposés the following November.

Already, The Atlantic had published articles about Rockefeller’s monopoly in a series titled “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” Tarbell decided she would go deeper. She excavated the numerous legal cases the company had fielded since 1870, unearthing similarities and connections between all the disparate records of evidence and sworn testimony—a feat of research unassisted by digital tools—all illustrating rampant corruption, including that Rockefeller had colluded with the rail industry. She interviewed numerous sources in preparation for an interview with Rockefeller himself, and she began to encounter warning after warning, from other reporters and even her father, all of whom said Rockefeller would ruin her if she found out too much. Tarbell parried with Rockefeller’s corporate flack, Henry Huttleston Rogers, a man whose nickname was “Hell Hound,” who tried and failed to intimidate her, and so, finally, just froze her out of an interview with Rockefeller. She adjusted, using the same technique she’d used writing about Lincoln, reviewing documents, interviewing all the people around him, including Rockefeller’s estranged brother, Frank, a figure she found sad.

Standard Oil was an undisputed giant before Tarbell’s 1904 series, which triggered legal action that broke up the company. Credit: Harris & Ewing/Library of Congress

Yet she could not deny that Rockefeller had also put his considerable wealth toward public health, toward the University of Chicago, John Hopkins, Harvard, and what is now Spelman College, and funded a clinic for poor women and numerous other philanthropic ventures. She was committed to showing those facts, too, writing not just invective against the man who bankrupted her father but showing a human simultaneously capable of generosity and cruelty.

Chapter 17 of The History of the Standard Oil Company is titled “The Legitimate Greatness of the Standard Oil Company,” and notes that the privileges of securing a practical monopoly “alone will not account for its success. Something besides illegal advantages has gone into the making of the Standard Oil Trust,” and though it is now “blackened by commercial sin, has always been strong in all great business qualities—in energy, in intelligence, in dauntlessness. It has always been rich in youth as well as greed, in brains as well as unscrupulousness.” In our era of cynical both-sides journalism, Tarbell’s brand did not hold all things equal. Rather, she acknowledged that they existed. That was an ethic that marked her writing throughout her career: the desire to separate fact from fiction, real wisdom from conventional wisdom. She employed a distinctly different approach than the one of mainstream journalists today, who often attempt to act as ciphers through which events must pass on their way to the page (or website).

Tarbell finished her series in October 1904 and collected the articles into a book published the same year. By then, Standard Oil controlled all but 9 percent of the country’s oil production, but still it took another year for Roosevelt to order the Justice Department to investigate Rockefeller’s trust. In 1906, the department sued Standard for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act, a law previously used to punish labor unions because courts ruled that strikes and boycotts hurt trade. Three years later, a federal circuit court agreed, and so did the Supreme Court in 1911. The decision forced Rockefeller to break Standard into 34 geographically separate companies that would compete with one another. None of that would have happened without Tarbell’s reporting, historians say, and it was her articles that historian Nancy C. Unger, professor emerita of history at Santa Clara University, says were responsible for the Hepburn Act of 1906, which expanded the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission; the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which further strengthened the ICC; the creation of the Federal Trade Commission; and the Clayton Trust Act of 1914, the law that “really puts teeth” into the Antitrust Act, Unger told me.

Tarbell was at once objective and impassioned, as the following paragraph that Unger highlighted makes clear:

“No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way,” Tarbell wrote. “If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days.”

“To have that kind of animus and still produce a balanced, compelling, evidence-based indictment, I think that’s hard to do,” Unger said. “It’s hard not to let your anger and resentment color things and run away with it, and she did a really admirable job of saying, ‘I have to go and see where the evidence takes me.’”

For biographer Kathleen Brady, author of Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker, the details that stood out to her while researching the godmother of modern investigation were the ones that showed Tarbell to be a woman making her way in an inhospitable world, at times traveling alone and outside of the sphere of acceptable womanly activity. Brady’s research showed that Tarbell expected she would prove that John D. Rockefeller was simply a better businessman than most of the people that she knew, including her beloved father, Brady told me. “But there was more to the story, and we live in a completely different world now because the Supreme Court in 1911 broke up Standard Oil.”

Before you go.

I hope that you found this article interesting and thought-provoking. The reason we’re able to publish stories like this — free of programmatic ads and never behind a paywall — is because readers like you step up to support our work. 

The Prospect doesn’t answer to advertisers or billionaire owners. We answer to you and to our commitment to pursuing the truth, wherever that leads us. 

Independent, reader-supported journalism is critical at a time when the free press is under assault. 

If you believe this kind of reporting should exist and remain free to read, we hope you’ll consider chipping in. Every contribution, however modest, makes a real difference.

Donate Now

David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Whitney Curry Wimbish

writers@prospect.org

Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish

Biography

Ida B. Wells: Brave Woman

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An illustration of Ida B. Wells.
Credit: Illustration by Lyndon Hayes for The American Prospect.

Posted in Politics

By chronicling the shame of lynching in the South, Ida B. Wells exposed the corruption of white supremacy.

Naomi Bethuneby Naomi Bethune July 29, 2026 (Prospect.org)

This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.

At the age of 27, when Ida B. Wells first began editing and writing for the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee, she encountered a preacher whose rhetoric was less than pious. Wells detailed in her posthumous autobiography Crusade for Justice that the unnamed reverend had decided that “morally there were no virtuous southern girls.” He had specifically pointed to how Wells had recently been fired from her schoolteacher position. But this termination was not motivated by Wells’s inability to educate her students; rather it was the result of an editorial she had published detailing the dreadful conditions for Black children in the Memphis public school system.

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When a family friend told Wells about the preacher’s comments, she immediately requested an audience. Wells traveled to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and confronted the reverend face-to-face. “He acknowledged that he had made the derogatory remarks, but added that he had only told it to my close friends. He realized his error and he begged pardon and stood ready to make amends,” Wells noted in Crusade for Justice. At Wells’s request, he apologized for his attempt to defame her from his pulpit the following Sunday, reading a statement that Wells herself penned.

“I could have denounced him in my paper and made him even more unpopular than he was. I could have sued him in the courts; but feeling that he had been taught his lesson, I let the matter drop,” Wells wrote. “I felt that I had vindicated the honor of the many southern girls who had been traduced by lying tongues.” Her decision to hold the preacher accountable for his sexist, defamatory remarks was reflective of her approach to life: One must act to defeat perceived injustice, no matter how difficult.

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in July of 1862, three years before the end of the Civil War. Her mother was a skilled cook and her father was a respected carpenter; both involved themselves in Reconstruction politics after they were emancipated. They managed to ensure education for themselves and their children, encouraging Wells to read, write, and attend school. Tragically, both parents died in 1878 from yellow fever, leaving Wells orphaned and a guardian of her siblings at the age of 16.

Over the next few years, Wells cared for her siblings while focusing on professional and academic interests. She took on teaching work near her hometown and later moved her family to Memphis to pursue a similar position. There, she became one of the first to legally challenge Jim Crow laws, which had begun cropping up in the South during Reconstruction.

At the age of 21, Wells purchased a first-class ticket on the Chesapeake, Ohio and Southwest Railroad from Memphis to Woodstock, Tennessee, and sat down in the respective ladies’ car. Instead of checking her ticket and moving on, the conductor ordered her to move to the second-class smoking car, which was mostly occupied by Black people. But Wells refused, and two additional railroad employees helped the conductor drag her into the smoking car, ripping her dress in the process. Instead of giving in, Wells opted to disembark, still holding on to her ticket. This was more than 70 years before Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.

Credit: The New York Public Library Digital Collections; Science History Images/Alamy.

When Wells returned to Memphis, she retained a lawyer and sued the railroad. The court awarded her $500 in damages, and the verdict ensured that all railroads would have to offer first-class accommodations to Black passengers. The railroad appealed, and the Tennessee Supreme Court struck down the ruling, demonstrating that true racial equality in the post-Reconstruction period would be difficult to produce.

After this incident, Wells began writing for the Black-owned local publication The Living Way under the pseudonym “Iola,” mostly focusing on issues facing Black Americans. Her stories quickly gained attention in the U.S. and internationally, leading her to be referred to as the “Princess of the Press.” Soon after, in 1889, Wells became co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight. It was there that she first became involved in investigative reporting and pushback against it, especially as she turned her attention to covering lynching.

AS BLACK AMERICANS BEGAN to build economic and social mobility in the South after emancipation, white supremacists countered with racist violence. Between 1882 and 1968, nearly 5,000 lynchings occurred in the U.S., likely an undercount since these murders were not formally tracked or documented. Wells understood that terrorizing Black people was integral to the cultural fabric of the U.S., particularly in the South. Her commitment to reporting on the phenomenon was spurred on by the lynching of one of her close friends, Thomas Moss, in 1892.

A popular man in the local Black community, Moss, along with his partners Calvin McDowell and William “Henry” Stewart, owned a shop named People’s Grocery Company in the Curve, a neighborhood outside of Memphis. It was located in the same neighborhood as a white-owned grocery store, and was challenging its competitor’s long-standing monopoly in the local economy. What started as an immature fight between Black and white children in the area escalated into accusations that the People’s Grocery was a planning center for Black attacks against white residents.

After a shoot-out between Black men guarding the People’s Grocery from a white mob and a county sheriff backed by five deputized citizens, over a hundred Black people in the area were jailed, including Moss, McDowell, and Stewart. Not long after, they were dragged from their cells, brought to a railroad yard, and shot in cold blood. Local newspapers framed the lynchings as the natural result of Black people attempting to target white people. But Wells saw that portrayal as a farce, and set out to prove it.

So began her commitment to investigative reporting, and her status as one of the United States’ most important muckrakers. Armed with a pistol, Wells traveled the country, visiting sites of racialized violence and interviewing Black community members. Lynching, Wells concluded, was a systemic method of oppressing Black Americans in a post-slavery world. And false criminal accusations served to distract people from the deeper issues at hand.

“She understood that lynching was more than the product of racial hatred,” says Paula Giddings, professor emerita of Africana Studies at Smith College. “It was a means to publicly dishonor Blacks and thus exclude them from spheres of social, political, and especially economic influence.”

Indeed, Wells’s investigations highlighted a pattern in which lynchings helped to ensure that Black Americans would remain economically subordinate to white people. It was a bloody pattern that occurred again in 1898, this time in the thriving, majority-Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina, where most shops and restaurants were Black-owned. White supremacists noted this prosperity, and began a smear campaign to force Republicans out of positions of political power.

Ida B. Wells wears a pin she created to commemorate the court marshal and hanging of Black Soldiers in Texas. The pin reads, “In Memoriam Martyred Negro Soldiers Dec. 11, 1917.” Credit: Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center/University of Chicago Library.

After a white suffragist named Rebecca Latimer Felton claimed in a speech that Black male rapists were a major threat to white women’s safety, Alexander Manly, editor and owner of the Black-owned Wilmington Daily Record, published a rebuttal. A massive white mob, already emboldened by a monthslong local white supremacist campaign, stormed Wilmington, destroying the Daily Record’s offices and then murdering dozens of innocent Black people.

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Hundreds of other Black residents were cast out of their homes, and local elected leaders were forced to resign. After the massacre, white people filled the jobs that Black people had once had. It was a devastating blow to a community that was building economic mobility, sparked by a local journalist’s questioning of a racist conspiracy theory.

At every turn, Wells faced serious danger, particularly in her home base of Memphis. Months after publishing her report on Moss’s lynching in the Free Speech, in which she quoted his final words (“Tell my people to go west, there is no justice here”) and encouraged an economic boycott of white businesses, an angry white mob destroyed the publication’s offices. Wells had just released an article that disputed the common claim that Black men raped white women as a rationale for lynchings, saying it was a “threadbare lie.” Instead, she pointed to consensual relationships between white women and Black men as often being the true story. Fortunately, Wells was out of town at the time.

Wells’s life was threatened, and a price was put on her head. It would be 30 years before she could return to the South. Instead, Wells continued to travel, writing and speaking in both the U.S. and Europe about the unchecked horrors of lynching. She published two books, Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895), which employed statistics, interviews, and narratives as documentary evidence. Included in Southern Horrors is a letter sent to Wells by Frederick Douglass, whom she was close to, in which he called her a “brave woman” for her coverage of lynching.

“Let me give you thanks for your faithful paper on the lynch abomination now generally practiced against colored people in the South. There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison,” Douglass wrote. “You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves … you have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.”

IN 1893, WELLS SETTLED in Chicago. Soon after arriving, she met and married Ferdinand L. Barnett, an attorney and publisher of The Conservator, Chicago’s first Black newspaper. Their wedding was front-page news, as both Wells and Barnett were liked and respected figures in the civil rights community. They went on to have four children, but unlike other women of her age, Wells did not opt to become a homemaker; she continued her anti-lynching crusade and became more involved in the era’s Progressive movements.

Wells’s background in reporting racist violence and advocating for the empowerment of Black Americans motivated her interest in civil rights organizing. In 1898, she was elected secretary and national organizer of the National Afro-American Council, a precursor to the NAACP.

Ida B. Wells with her children Charles, Herman, Ida, and Alfreda, in 1909. Credit: Niday Picture Library/Alamy.

1908 saw the deadly Springfield, Illinois, race riot, in which thousands of white people attacked the city’s Black community, triggered by a false rape accusation of a Black man. At least nine, but likely dozens more, Black people were killed, and thousands were forced out of their homes. It was the catalyst for the formation the next year of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Wells worked tirelessly to draw up plans for the NAACP’s success. But compared to many of her peers, she was quite radical, which caused friction with people like Booker T. Washington, who advocated for racial accommodation rather than directly fighting against oppression. Despite W.E.B. Du Bois taking a more proactive approach to protesting injustice, Wells took issue with his belief that elite Black Americans should advance the race as a whole.

“Her belief in both the worthiness and political potential of the Black working class differed from many of her peers in the NAACP—who believed in leadership by the ‘talented tenth’—as well as the compliant conservatives led by Washington,” says Giddings. Wells also wanted anti-lynching to be a key area of focus for the new organization, but faced some skepticism from her peers.

When it came time for the “Founding Forty” NAACP members to be called at a 1909 conference, Wells’s name was not on the list. While a commotion broke out, with the NAACP’s more radical faction protesting the news, Wells left the building. From then onward, her relationship to the NAACP remained fraught. “I cannot resist the conclusion that, had I not been so hurt over the treatment I had received at the hands of the men of my own race … the NAACP would now be a live, active force in the lives of our people all over this country,” she detailed in Crusade for Justice. For most of her life, Wells would often experience marginalization at the hands of her male contemporaries, due to her identity as a Black woman and her willingness to transgress gender roles.

Despite this, Wells continued to forge her own path as an anti-racist feminist. As the suffragette movement took off in the early 1900s, she advocated for the rights of Black women. But this often put her at odds with white women in the movement, many of whom refused to take an intersectional approach to feminist organizing. Focusing on racial discrimination and recognizing Black women as integral to the struggle for suffrage was unpopular. This led Wells to call out her peers for their racism, and attempt to organize in ways that prioritized Black women’s interests.

In 1913, Wells and two of her white colleagues in the movement formed the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. It aimed to inform working-class Black women of their civic duties and highlight paths toward electing Black candidates to political office. That March, the Club attended a national suffrage parade in Washington, D.C., at which they faced racial discrimination and were forced to march behind the white women. But Wells slipped out from the back and joined her white colleagues in leading the Illinois contingent, shocking onlookers.

BEYOND HER ACTIVISM, Wells was a probation officer, founded Chicago’s first Black kindergarten, and ran unsuccessfully for the Illinois state Senate as an independent candidate in 1930. By the late 1910s, the relatively new federal agency which would later be known as the FBI had opened up a file on Wells, labeling her as “one of the most dangerous negro agitators.”

Wells’s approach to bettering the world around her was multifaceted, organizing both locally and nationally, constantly pursuing avenues for change. But she was much more than the sum of her accomplishments: She was a mother, a devout Christian, and a person who lived through serious trauma. After decades of work, she died in 1931 at the age of 68.

Wells’s philosophy of action is vitally important to recognizing how we can combat oppression today. She exposed how lynchings and other acts of racialized violence often masked corruption. Today, the Trump administration has continued to cite undocumented immigrants as the biggest danger to the U.S., while siphoning off government funds to line the pockets of the president and his allies. Just as lynchings were often used as a cover-up of attempts to destroy Black economic and social mobility, attacking immigrants and other marginalized groups has pulled focus from the Trump administration’s own shady dealings.

As the nation recognizes its 250th anniversary, Wells should be seen as more than just a trailblazing figure, but also someone whom Americans can be inspired by. “She represents the promise of the country,” says Giddings. “As a Black woman who fought to make this country face the truth about itself and its citizens, she represents the real promise of America’s declaration 250 years hence.”

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David Dayen

David Dayen
Executive Editor

This article appears in Aug 2026 issue.

Naomi Bethune

nbethune@prospect.org

Naomi Bethune is the John Lewis Writing Fellow at The American Prospect. During her time studying philosophy and public policy at UMass Boston, she edited the opinions section of The Mass Media. Prior to joining the Prospect, she interned for Boston Review and Beacon Press. More by Naomi Bethune

Biography

Bio: Kurt Lewin

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Kurt Lewin
Born9 September 1890
Mogilno, Province of Posen, German Empire (now Poland)
Died12 February 1947 (aged 56)
Newtonville, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma materFriedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin
Known forGroup dynamicsaction researchForce-field analysisT-groups
SpousesMaria Landsberg​​(m. 1917; div. 1927)​Gertrud Weiss ​(m. 1929)​
Children4
Scientific career
FieldsPsychology
InstitutionsInstitute for Social Research
Center for Group Dynamics (MIT)
National Training Laboratories
Cornell University
Duke University
ThesisDie psychische Tätigkeit bei der Hemmung von Willensvorgängen und das Grundgesetz der Assoziation (1916)
Doctoral advisorCarl Stumpf
Doctoral studentsDorwin CartwrightLeon FestingerBluma Zeigarnik
Other notable studentsRudolf ArnheimMorton Deutsch

Kurt Zadek Lewin[1][2] or Kurt Tsadek Lewin[3] (/ˈluːɪn, ləˈviːn/[4] LOO-in, lə-VEEN; German: [leˈviːn]; 9 September 1890 – 12 February 1947) was a German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States.[5] During his professional career, Lewin’s academic research and writings focuses on applied research, action research, and group communication.

Lewin is often recognized as the “founder of social psychology” and was one of the first to study group dynamics and organizational development. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lewin as the 18th-most cited psychologist of the 20th century.[6] During his career, he was affiliated with several U.S. and European universities, including the University of Berlin, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford University, and the University of Iowa.

Early life and education

Lewin was born in 1890 into a Jewish family in Mogilno, County of Mogilno, Province of Posen, Prussia in present-day Poland, a small town with then about 5,000 residents, about 150 of whom were Jewish.[7] Lewin received an orthodox Jewish education at home.[8] He was one of four children born into a middle-class family. His father owned a small general store, and the family lived in an apartment above the store. His father, Leopold, operated a farm jointly with his brother Max; however, the farm was legally owned by a Christian because Jews were not permitted to own farms at the time.[7]

In 1905, Lewin moved with his family to Berlin, so Lewin and his brothers could receive a better education.[7] From 1905 to 1908, Lewin experienced hair loss. Lewin studied at the Kaiserin Augusta Gymnasium, where he received a classical humanistic education.[7] In 1909, he entered the University of Freiburg to study medicine, but transferred to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München to study biology. At the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, he became involved with the socialist and women’s rights movements around this time.[9]

In April 1910, Lewin transferred to the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he was still a medical student. By the Easter semester of 1911, his interests had shifted toward philosophy. By the summer of 1911, the majority of his courses were in psychology.[7] While at the Friedrich Wihelm University of Berlin, Lewin took 14 courses with Carl Stumpf (1848–1936).[7]

When World War I began, he served in the Imperial German Army, during which he sustained a war wound and returned to the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin to complete his PhD. Lewin wrote a dissertation proposal asking Stumpf to be his supervisor, and Stumpf assented. Even though Lewin worked under Stumpf to complete his dissertation, their relationship did not involve much communication. Lewin studied associations, will, and intention for his dissertation, but he did not discuss it with Stumpf until his final doctoral examination.[7]

Career

Academia

A tablet commemorating Lewin’s birthplace in present-day Mogilno, Poland

Lewin was originally involved with schools of behavioral psychology before changing directions in research and undertaking work with psychologists of the Gestalt school of psychology, including Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler. He also joined the Psychological Institute of the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he lectured and gave seminars on both philosophy and psychology.[9] He served as a professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin from 1926 to 1932, during which time he conducted experiments about tension states, needs, motivation, and learning.[8]

In 1933, Lewin had tried to negotiate a teaching position as the chair of psychology and creating a research institute at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.[8] Lewin often associated with the early Frankfurt School, originated by an influential group of largely Jewish Marxists at the Institute for Social Research in Germany. But when Adolf Hitler came to power in Nazi Germany in 1933, the Institute members disbanded, and moved to England and then to the United States. The same year, he met with Eric Trist, of the London Tavistock Clinic. Trist was impressed with his theories and went on to use them in his studies on soldiers during World War II.

In August 1933, Lewin immigrated to the U.S., where, in 1940, became a naturalized citizen. A few years after relocating to the U.S., Lewin began asking people to pronounce his name as “Lou-in” rather than “Le-veen” because the mispronunciation of his name by Americans had led to many missed phone calls. However, shortly before his death, he began requesting students and colleagues to use the correct pronunciation (“Le-veen”) because that is the one he preferred.[7] Earlier, in 1930, he spent six months as a visiting professor at Stanford University.[9] After his immigration to the U.S., Lewin worked at Cornell University, the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and as director of the Center for Group Dynamics at MIT.

Following World War II, Lewin was involved in the psychological rehabilitation of former occupants of displaced persons camps with Dr. Jacob Fine at Harvard Medical School. When Trist and A T M Wilson wrote to Lewin proposing a journal in partnership with their newly founded Tavistock Institute and his group at MIT, Lewin agreed. The Tavistock journal, Human Relations, was founded with two early papers by Lewin entitled “Frontiers in Group Dynamics”. Lewin taught for a time at Duke University.[10]

Lewin coined the notion of genidentity,[11] which has gained some importance in various theories of space-time and related fields.[citation needed] For instance, he introduced the concept of hodological space or the simplest route achieved through the resolution of different field of forces, oppositions, and tensions according to their goals.[12]

Lewin also proposed Herbert Blumer‘s interactionist perspective of 1937 as an alternative to the nature versus nurture debate. Lewin suggested that neither nature (inborn tendencies) nor nurture (how experiences in life shape individuals) alone can account for individuals’ behavior and personalities, but rather that both nature and nurture interact to shape each person. This idea was presented in the form of Lewin’s equation for behavior, B = ƒ(P, E), which means that behavior (B) is a function (f) of personal characteristics (P), and environmental characteristics (E).

Scholars in the 1930s reveled in fear that, by devoting themselves to applied research, they would distract the discipline from basic research on scholarly problems and create a false binary on whether research was developed for the perpetuation of their respective discipline or for practical application.[13] Despite this debate within the social sciences at the time, Lewin argued that “applied research could be conducted with rigor and that one could test theoretical propositions in applied research.”[13] The root of this particular binary seemed to stem from the epistemological norms present within the hard sciences – where the distinction was much more pronounced; Kurt Lewin argued that this was contrary to the nature of the social sciences. With the help of scholars, including Paul Lazarsfeld, there was a method through which money could be acquired for research in a sustainable manner. Lewin has encouraged researchers to develop theories that can be used to address important social problems.[14]

To demonstrate his dedication to applied research and to further prove that there was value in testing his theoretical propositions, Lewin became a “master at transposing an everyday problem into a psychological experiment”.[13] Lewin, in his beginnings, took a seemingly banal moment between himself and a waiter and turned it into the beginnings of his field research, which Lewin reasoned that the “intention to carry out a specific task builds a psychological tension, which is released when the intended task is completed” in tandem with when Sigmund Freud theorized that “wishes persist until they are satisfied.”[13] This happenstance observation started the demonstration of the “existence of psychic tensions”, fundamental to Lewin’s field theory.[13]

While applied research helped develop Lewin into a practical theorist, what further defined him as an academic and a forerunner was his action research, a term he invented himself.[13] Lewin was increasingly interested in the concepts of Jewish migration and identity. He was confused by the concept of how while an individual distanced themselves from performing the Jewish identity in terms of religious expression and performance, they were still considered Jewish in the eyes of Nazis. This concept of denying one’s identity and the promotion of self-loathing as a form of coping with a dominant group’s oppression represented the crisis of Lewin’s own migration to the United States.[13] Lewin, as his student and colleague Ron Lippitt described, “had a deep sensitivity to social problems and a commitment to use his resources as a social scientist to do something about them.

In the early 1940s, he drew a triangle to represent the interdependence of research, training, and action in producing social change.”[13] This diagramming of an academic’s interests and actions within this triangulation yields an interesting part of accessing Lewin and his contributions. Rather than noting social justice as the beginning or the end, it was ingrained in every single academic action that Lewin took. It was this particular world view and paradigm that furthered his research and determined precisely how he was going to utilize the findings from his field research. Furthermore, it all reflected upon Lewin the man and his way of coping with the events of his time period. This devotion to action research was possibly a way of resolving a dissonance of his own passage to America and how he left his own back in present-day Poland.

Prominent psychologists mentored by Lewin included Leon Festinger (1919–1989), who became known for his cognitive dissonance theory (1956), environmental psychologist Roger Barker, Bluma Zeigarnik, and Morton Deutsch, the founder of modern conflict resolution theory and practice.

Force-field analysis

Main article: Force-field analysis

Force-field analysis provides a framework for looking at the factors (“forces”) that influence a situation, originally social situations. It looks at forces that are either driving movement toward a goal (helping forces) or blocking movement toward a goal (hindering forces). Key to this approach was Lewin’s interest in gestaltism, understanding the totality and assessing a situation as a whole and not focusing only on individual aspects. Further, the totality for an individual (their life space) derives from their perception of their reality, not an objective viewpoint. The approach, developed by Kurt Lewin, is a significant contribution to the fields of social science, psychology, social psychology, organizational development, process management, and change management.[15] His theory was expanded by John R. P. French who related it to organizational and industrial settings.

Action research

Main article: Action research

Lewin, then a professor at MIT, first coined the term action research in about 1944, and it appears in his 1946 paper “Action Research and Minority Problems”.[16] In that paper, he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action” (this is sometimes referred to as the Lewinian spiral).

Leadership climates

Lewin often characterized organizational management styles and cultures in terms of leadership climates defined by[17] (1) authoritarian, (2) democratic and (3) laissez-faire work environments. He is often confused with McGregor with his work environments, but McGregor adapted them directly to leadership-theory. Authoritarian environments are characterized where the leader determines policy with techniques and steps for work tasks dictated by the leader in the division of labor. The leader is not necessarily hostile but is aloof from participation in work and commonly offers personal praise and criticism for the work done. Democratic climates are characterized where policy is determined through collective processes with decisions assisted by the leader. Before accomplishing tasks, perspectives are gained from group discussion and technical advice from a leader. Members are given choices and collectively decide the division of labor. Praise and criticism in such an environment are objective, fact minded and given by a group member without necessarily having participated extensively in the actual work. Laissez-faire environments give freedom to the group for policy determination without any participation from the leader. The leader remains uninvolved in work decisions unless asked, does not participate in the division of labor, and very infrequently gives praise.[18]: 39–40 

Change process

An early model of change developed by Lewin described change as a three-stage process.[19] The first stage he called “unfreezing”. It involved overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing “mind set”. It must be part of surviving. Defense mechanisms have to be bypassed. In the second stage the change occurs. This is typically a period of confusion and transition. We are aware that the old ways are being challenged but we do not have a clear picture as to what we are replacing them with yet. The third and final stage he called “refreezing”. The new mindset is crystallizing and one’s comfort level is returning to previous levels. Lewin’s three-step process is regarded as a foundational model for making change in organizations. There is now evidence, however, that Lewin never developed such a model and that it took form after his death in 1947.[20]

Sensitivity training

Further information: Sensitivity training

While working at MIT in 1946, Lewin received a phone call from the director of the Connecticut State Inter Racial Commission,[21] which requested his help in finding an effective way to combat religious and racial prejudices. He set up a workshop to conduct a “change” experiment, which laid the foundations for what is now known as sensitivity training.[22] In 1947, this led to the establishment of the National Training Laboratories, at Bethel, Maine. Carl Rogers believed that sensitivity training is “perhaps the most significant social invention of this century.”[22]

Lewin’s equation

Main article: Lewin’s equation

Lewin’s equation, B = ƒ(P, E), a psychological equation of behavior developed by Lewin, states that behavior is a function of the person in their environment.[23]

The equation is the psychologist’s most well known formula in social psychology,[citation needed] of which Lewin was a modern pioneer. When first presented in Lewin’s book Principles of Topological Psychology, published in 1936, it contradicted most popular theories in that it gave importance to a person’s momentary situation in understanding his or her behavior, rather than relying entirely on the past.[24]

Group dynamics

Main article: Group dynamics

In a 1947 article, Lewin coined the term “group dynamics“. He described this notion as the way that groups and individuals act and react to changing circumstances. This field emerged as a concept dedicated to the advancement of knowledge regarding the nature of groups, their laws, establishment, development, and interactions with other groups, individuals and institutions. During the early years of research on group processes, many psychologists rejected the reality of group phenomena. Critics[who?] shared the opinion that groups did not exist as scientifically valid entities. It had been said by skeptics that the actions of groups were nothing more than those of its members considered separately. Lewin applied his interactionism formula, B = ƒ(P, E), to explain group phenomena, where a member’s personal characteristics (P) interact with the environmental factors of the group, (E) its members, and the situation to elicit behaviour (B). Given his background in Gestalt psychology, Lewin justified group existence using the dictum “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. He theorized that when a group is established it becomes a unified system with supervening qualities that cannot be understood by evaluating members individually. This notion – that a group is composed of more than the sum of its individual members – quickly gained support from sociologists and psychologists who understood the significance of this emerging field. Many pioneers noted that the majority of group phenomena could be explained according to Lewin’s equation and insight and opposing views were hushed. The study of group dynamics remains relevant in today’s society where a vast number of professions (e.g., business and industry, clinical/counseling psychology, sports and recreation) rely on its mechanisms to thrive.[25]

The most notable[according to whom?] of Lewin’s contributions was his development of group communication and group dynamics as major facets of the communication discipline. Lewin and his associated researchers shifted from the pre-existing trend of individualist psychology and then expanded their work to incorporate a macro lens where they focused on the “social psychology of small group communication” (Rogers 1994). Lewin is associated with “founding research and training in group dynamics and for establishing the participative management style in organizations”.[13] He carved out this niche for himself from his various experiments. In his Berlin research, Lewin utilized “group discussions to advance his theory in research.” In doing so, there was certainly the complication of not knowing exactly whom to attribute epiphanies to as an idea collectively came into fruition. In addition to group discussions, he became increasingly interested in group membership. He was curious as to how perspectives of an individual in relation to the group were solidified or weakened. He tried to come up with the way identity was constructed from standpoint and perspectives. These were the beginnings of what ended up developing into “groupthink”. Lewin started to become quite interested in how ideas were created and then perpetuated by the mentality of a group. Not included in this chapter is how important this became in looking at group dynamics across disciplines – including studying John F Kennedy and the way he tried to interact with his advisors in order to prevent groupthink from occurring.[26]

Peach and coconuts

Lewin conceived the Peach v Coconut cultural distinction. Peach cultures included India, the U.S., most of Latin America, and Southern Europe. Peaches tend to be soft and friendly on the surface, even with strangers, but have a hard protective inner core. Coconut cultures include China, Russia and most of Europe except the south. Folk from coconut cultures have a soft inner core, but a tough exterior than can lead to a perception of unfriendliness with strangers. Yet once a person has gained their trust, they can be loyal friends for life. The Peach v Coconut analogy was later popularised by Fons Trompenaars, who said it “explains all sorts of animosities that bedevil cross-cultural friendships, business dealings and diplomacy.”[27][28][29]

Personal life

In 1917, Lewin married Maria Landsberg. In 1919, the couple had a daughter Esther Agnes, and in 1922, their son Fritz Reuven was born. They divorced around 1927, and Maria immigrated to Mandatory Palestine with the children. In 1929, Lewin married Gertrud Weiss. Their daughter Miriam was born in 1931, and their son Daniel was born in 1933.[7]

Death

In 1947, Lewin died of heart failure in Newtonville, Massachusetts, and was interred in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His wife died in 1987.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Lewin

Biography

“Past is F*ing Prologue,” – The Origins of the Roger Stone-Donald Trump Relationship and the Ghost of Political Scandals Past

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Peter Grant

Peter Grant

Jul 12, 2022 (Medium.com)

Roger Stone with former President Richard Nixon

“Past is fucking prologue,” — Stone’s Rule #4

This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available here.

ROGER STONE AND THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION

Convicted felon Roger Stone, one of America’s most infamous masters of the political dark arts and a longtime friend and advisor to former President Donald Trump, has come under renewed scrutiny for his promotion of the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen and for his activities in and around the January 6th insurrection.

Despite achieving prominence following the 2020 election, the idea that the election would be “rigged” against Trump was actually formulated and promulgated before the 2016 election.

The “Stop the Steal” rally that Trump addressed on January 6th immediately prior to the assault on the Capitol borrowed the phrase “Stop the Steal” from Stone, who had coined it as far back the 2016 Republican primaries.

In 2015, Stone facilitated Donald Trump’s first interview with Alex Jones of InfoWars. Jones, America’s most prominent conspiracy theorist, later introduced the idea that the 2016 election was going to be “rigged” against Trump.

Two days after Jones did so, Trump echoed the idea that the upcoming election would be “rigged” at a rally in Columbus, Ohio held on August 1st, 2016. Thus a seed was planted that would germinate for over five years. While Trump’s upset victory in 2016 obviated the need for the “Big Lie,” it was dusted off and put back into use after he lost the 2020 election.

Alex Jones interviewing Donald Trump on his program InforWars in December of 2015. The interview was facilitated by Roger Stone.

Stone is also linked to groups that were centrally involved in the storming of the U.S. Capitol, including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Early in the Trump presidency, Stone was a central figure in the so-called “Russia investigation” conducted by the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

At critical moments during the 2016 election, Stone was in touch with an online avatar operated by Russian military intelligence, the entity that hacked the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton Campaign and later provided the stolen emails to Wikileaks.

Shortly thereafter, Stone made public statements which suggested that he had prior, non-public knowledge that Wikileaks was in possession of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s stolen emails.

Investigators have never been able to determine how Stone came into possession of this information. The investigation into Stone was obstructed and Trump later pardoned his old friend.

Stone lied under oath in testimony relating to these matters before Congress. He was subsequently indicted by Mueller’s prosecutors, with additional charges such as witness tampering to follow.

After being arrested and released on bail, Stone began interacting and coordinating with the now notorious right-wing group the Proud Boys, who occasionally served as his “body guards” during the various rallies and legal proceedings that followed.

Stone became friendly with Enrique “Ricky” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who is currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy.

According to the Washington Post, the FBI is investigating Stone and Alex Jones’ connections to the Proud Boys.

Roger Stone with Enrique “Ricky” Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy related to the events of January 6th.

The far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, members of which are also currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy for storming the U.S. Capital, also have links to Roger Stone. During the protests in and around Washington, D.C. on January 5th and 6th, members of the Oath Keepers provided Roger Stone with security.

Oath Keeper Roberto Minuta, who is named in the indictment alongside Oath Keeper leader Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, was seen with Stone outside the Willard hotel in Washington, D.C. on the morning of January 6th. Alex Jones was also staying in a suite at the Willard Hotel, where he interviewed former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, one of the lead cheerleaders of the “rigged” election canard.

In another suite was located the so-called “Command Center” where, at various times, Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, among others, plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the lead up to, and during, the January 6th insurrection.

Roger Stone seen outside of the Willard Hotel Roberto Minuta (far left), a member of the Oath Keepers currently under indictment for seditious conspiracy.

The exact role Roger Stone played in the unprecedented events of the January 6th insurrection remains to be fully explained. The path that led him to January 6th involves decades worth of involvement in political scandals, corruption, and criminal election stunts.

Stone developed an early conviction that American elections are often determined by dirty tricks, criminal associations and subterfuge. An account of Stone’s life, and the story of the circumstances by which he met Donald Trump, paints a disturbing picture.

ROGER STONE, RICHARD NIXON, AND WATERGATE

Roger Stone was born in 1952 and grew up in Lewisboro, New York. Half Italian and half Hungarian, Stone’s mother wrote for a local newspaper and his father was a laborer who dug wells for a living.

Though as a child he had supported John F. Kennedy because he was Catholic and “had better hair than Nixon,” upon receiving a copy of Barry Goldwater’s book The Conscience of a Conservative, Stone became a staunch Republican at the age of 11.

“I read this book,” Stone told The Washington Post, “and I was completely transformed into a zealot.”

During Goldwater’s Presidential run, Stone rode his bike to the local campaign headquarters after school each day to lick envelopes and run errands. The 12 year-old Stone cried after Goldwater lost. However, his passion for politics remained undimmed. By age 13 Stone was taking the train into New York City to work weekends for William F. Buckley, Jr’s unsuccessful bid to become mayor.

Stone developed an early fascination with Richard Nixon and came to believe that he “had been fucked out of the presidency in 1960, thanks to Joe Kennedy and [his] mob friends.”

It is worth pausing for a moment to note how alleged acts of chicanery in the 1960 presidential election influenced Stone’s views on politics.

Another individual who believed the 1960 election had been stolen was Richard Nixon himself. Indeed, this belief influenced Nixon’s later sabotaging of President Lyndon Johnson’s peace negotiations in Vietnam during the 1968 election, as well as the activities and events the led to the Watergate scandal.

After Nixon’s 1960 loss, Stone penned a letter to the candidate encouraging him to run again. Nixon replied with a thank you note, telling Stone that he had no plans to run again but if he did, he would be in touch. Stone’s passion for Nixon would remain undimmed for the rest of his life, ultimately leading him to get a tattoo of the former President on his back.

Stone later moved to Washington, DC to attend George Washington University. At a time when the counterculture movement was in full steam, Stone joined the Young American’s for Freedom.

During Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign, Stone invited Jeb Magruder, the deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), to speak before the college’s Young Republican Club. “There are a bunch of hippie-type, leftwing, pinko degenerates that attend and harass him, but he handles it okay,” Stone recalled of the event.

Afterwards, Stone asked Magruder for a job and was hired. He dropped out of college and joined CREEP.

Jeb Magruder

Stone served as the assistant to the President of CREEP Bart Porter, who also ran the organizations notorious dirty tricks operations. During the day, the 19 year-old Stone worked as a scheduler for Nixon campaign surrogates. “By night, I’m trafficking in the black arts. Nixon’s people were obsessed with intelligence.”

Under orders from Porter, Stone arranged for a spy named Michael McMinoway, operating under the codename Sedan Chair II, to infiltrate the McGovern campaign.

Under the pseudonym Jason Rainier, Stone provided donations in the name of the Young Socialist to the campaign of Democrat Pete McCloskey and then forwarded the receipts to the newspaper. Stone’s experiences during the Nixon campaign would have an enduring influence on both his political ideology and his reputation as a “dirty trickster.”

It’s a reputation that far from run away from, he’s spent a lifetime cultivating.

“Roger likes the aura of having done something bad in the past,” said Stone friend David Keene in reference to his hijinks for CREEP during the Nixon reelection campaign. “You get the feeling that he’s sorry it was so minor. He likes to say, ‘Watch me, I’m a tough guy.’”

After Nixon won reelection in 1972, Stone got a job at the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was responsible for many of the programs initiated under Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. As Stone describes it, H.R. “Bob” Halderman’s, “charge to us was to dismantle, replace, and fire everybody.”

A year later Halderman was embroiled in the raging Watergate scandal and was tried on counts of perjury, conspiracy and obstruction of justice. Stone had been renting a room from Bart Porter. On the evening of the Watergate break-in, Stone claims that Porter was out of town so he took urgent phone messages from a variety of individuals associated with the break-in, including G. Gordon Liddy, chief operative of the White House Plumbers unit.

Nixon went on to become the first and only President to resign from office to avoid being impeached and removed.

G. Gordon Liddy

Following Nixon’s fall from grace, Stone got a job in December 1973 as a junior staffer for Senator Robert Dole. However, six months after he began, Stone’s association with the “Ratfuckers” of the Nixon campaign was revealed during a Congressional hearing and he was forced to leave Dole’s staff.

In the immediate aftermath of Watergate, many Republicans wished to avoid the taint of scandal and Stone admits, “It was tough to get a job for a couple of years.”

ROGER STONE AND THE REAGAN REVOLUTION

Roger Stone with President Ronald Reagan.

In 1976, Stone served on Ronald Reagan’s first unsuccessful attempt to garner the Republican nomination as the campaigns Youth Director. A year later he formed the National Conservative Political Action Committee with fellow young Republicans Charles Black and Terry Dolan.

The Committee pioneered the practice of bundling campaign contributions in order to circumvent campaign finance limits on individual contributions. It served as a precursor to super Political Action Committees (PACs) that came to dominate politics. It was at this time that Stone worked beneath the legendary Republican pollster and negative campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who had an enduring influence on Stone.

In the spring of 1977, Stone ran to be the chairman of the Young Republicans. A network of influential Republicans between the ages of 18–40, in the days of brokered conventions the Young Republicans was an influential organization. Stone’s candidacy was managed by a young, up-and-coming Republican operative named Paul Manafort.

Manafort later served as chairman of the 2016 Trump Campaign after Stone lobbied the candidate to hire him. Stone and Manafort had known each other from their days in the College Republicans. Manafort managed to convince Stone’s chief rival to run for treasurer instead of president with a promise of future support that he later broke.

Stone won after a campaign that Manafort would later describe as, “one of the great fuck jobs.”

Lobbyists and partners Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Charles Black (left to right).

By the time Stone was elected Chairman of the Young Republicans, he was already working on Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In this capacity, Stone was introduced to one of America’s most infamous lawyers and political fixers: Roy Cohn.

Stone’s meeting with Roy Cohn in 1979 was perhaps one of the most consequential of his life. Years later, whenever asked about who his heroes were, Stone listed Roy Cohn, Richard Nixon and the Duke of Windsor. It was an unconventional list, but revealing of the man’s taste and character.

ROY COHN AND THE BIRTH OF THE ROGER STONE-DONALD TRUMP POLITICAL ALLIANCE

Roger Stone standing with New York lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn

Roy Cohn exploded into the American national consciousness as an infamous player in the Red Scare of the 1950s. With the drawing of the Iron Curtain, the onset of the Cold War and the discovery of significant Soviet intelligence infiltration of American political, military and scientific institutions, a sense of fear and in many cases near hysteria swept over the body politic. As is so often the case in moments such as these, reasonable fears can be seized upon by unscrupulous demagogues for their own political purposes.

Cohn was a child prodigy. He graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and through his family’s political connections landed a job at the US Attorney’s Office in Manhattan. His early cases involved the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss, and the infamous Rosenberg trial. The most controversial part of the trial came during sentencing. The Rosenbergs, accused of sharing nuclear secrets with the Soviets, were found guilty.

Cohn claimed that the judge presiding over the trial, Judge Irving Kaufman, owed his position to Cohn’s father, who was a judge based out of the Bronx. Cohn further claimed that he had Kaufman assigned to the case through his connections to the district court’s clerk office. Evidence suggests that Cohn engaged in inappropriate communications with Judge Kaufman at the time he was contemplating what sentences to impose. Cohn suggested the death penalty, and that’s what the Rosenbergs received.

The vast majority of individuals caught up in the Red Scare were innocent and many lives were needlessly destroyed. The demagoguery, hysteria and self-serving cynicism of the era found its personification in Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, giving rise to the epithet McCarthyism.

Cohn started working with Joe McCarthy as his chief counsel in 1953. McCarthy had built a national profile by making outlandish claims of Communist infiltration and subversion infecting nearly all walks of American life, from Hollywood to the State Department to the Pentagon. McCarthy and Cohn’s hunt for hidden Communists inordinately impacted members of the Jewish faith and homosexuals.

For Cohn to have played such a prominent role in the persecution of these communities was curious indeed as he was both Jewish and a closeted homosexual.

Infamous Red-baiting Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy with his young chief counsel Roy Cohn.

McCarthy’s enemies found the opportunity to pounce when it came to the drafting into the military of G. David Schine, an unpaid “Chief Consultant” working with McCarthy and Cohn. After it became clear that Cohn was seeking preferential treatment for Schine, a scandal broke and culminated in the the Army-McCarthy Hearings.

The hearings led to McCarthy’s downfall and Cohn’s banishment from Washington. Cohn was outclassed and out-lawyered by the Chief Counsel of the US Army Joseph N. Welch, who in a confrontation with McCarthy uttered the phrase that marked the end of the McCarthy era, “At long last, have you no sense of decency?”

Cohn returned to New York where he became one of the city’s most influential power brokers. He developed a reputation as a “legal executioner.” His methods were relentless and unethical.

His professional and personal life were constantly under scrutiny, and yet he always seemed to get away with it. In the 1960’s, when his rival Robert Kennedy was Attorney General, Cohn was indicted four times but acquitted in each an every case. In the 1970’s he was charged with violating banking laws in Illinois and was again acquitted.

Cohn represented the most senior members of the American Mafia. He once boasted that he had gotten Irving Saypol, the the prosecutor of the Rosenberg case, his job as US Attorney. According to Cohn, Saypol’s appointment needed to be approved by Frank Costello, boss of the legendary Luciano crime family (later known as the Genovese crime family), one of the New York mafia’s infamous Five Families.

“In those days, nobody became U.S. Attorney in New York without the O.K. from the mob,” Cohn stated. “But Saypol would not have gotten the nod from Costello without me.”

Infamous and politically connected leader of the Genovese Crime Family Frank Costello.

Cohn’s connections to the FBI, he was a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover’s, along with his network judges, prosecutors and district attorneys, made him an ideal lawyer for a wide range of mafioso. His clients included Genovese Crime Family underboss Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Bonanno boss Carmine “Nino” Galante and numerous members of the Gambino crime family including Carmine Fatico, Aniello Dellacroce, Tommy and Joe Gambino, Angelo Ruggiero and a young and a then little known mobster by the name of John Gotti.

Federal anti-organized crime strike force members told Cohn biographer Nicholas von Hoffman that in the 70s, when wiretapping was increasingly becoming an issue, members of “The Commission,” the governing body of the American mafia, met in Roy’s office because attorney-client privilege made recordings in-admissible in court.

While at the top of his game as a political fixer and mafia attorney in New York, Roy Cohn met a brash young real estate developer by the name of Donald J. Trump.

Roy Cohn with a young Donald J. Trump at the opening of Trump Tower.

In 1973, the U.S. Justice Department sued the Trump Organization for housing discrimination against blacks. After a chance encounter at a Manhattan watering hole called Le Club in which Trump bemoaned the timidity of his lawyers, Cohn took Trump on as a client. In typical Cohn fashion, he countersued DOJ for $100 million. The case eventually settled.

Trump was enthralled with Cohn, who went on to play a pivotal role in Manhattan real estate career. Trump also developed a new appreciation for the benefits of having a consummate legal fixer that he took with him to the White House.

Roger Stone tells several variations of the story of how he first met Roy Cohn in 1979. In one version of events, Stone first met Cohn at a party held by Sheila Mosler, a socialite and vice chairman of the New York County Republican Committee.

In another, Roy Cohn’s name came up on a rolodex given to him by Michael Deaver, an advisor to Ronald Reagan. At the time, the 27-year old Stone was the political director of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut for the Reagan Campaign.

Regardless of how initial contact was made, all the stories end up with Roger visiting Roy at his 68th Street townhouse in Manhattan.

Roger Stone with Ronald Reagan, whose campaign he served as the political director for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

“When I got there, Roy was in his bathrobe, eating three strips of bacon burned crisp and both halves of a deviled egg,” Stone later recalled. He noticed a heavy set man sitting next to Cohn.

“Mr. Stone, I want you to meet Tony Salerno,” Cohn said, introducing the young Reagan staffer to the underboss of the Genovese crime family.

Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Genovese Crime Family underboss and client of Roy Cohn’s.

“So Roy says we’re going with Reagan this time,” Salerno chimed in. Stone launched into his pitch for Reagan as Cohn and Fat Tony listened intently.

“You know, Tony, everything’s fixed.” Stone quoted Cohn as saying. “Everything can be handled.” Salerno mentioned the Supreme Court. Cohn continued. “Cost a few more dollars.”

“He started telling me how he was going to help me set up the Reagan Campaign,” Stone said of Cohn. “[E]verything from union endorsements to office space. He told me to ride down to the courthouse with him. He had a young lawyer with him, and it was clear that Roy knew nothing about the case he was going to argue. But he knew it didn’t matter. He used to say, ‘Don’t tell me the law. Tell me the judge.’ Roy knew how the world worked.”

Years later, Stone told the reporter Matt Labash that he suggested to Cohn that if they could get the candidate John B. Anderson to make a bid for the Presidency on behalf of New York’s Liberal Party, it would split the vote between Carter and Anderson and deliver the New York to Reagan.

“Let me look into it,” Roy replied. Shortly thereafter, Cohn told Stone, “You need to go see this lawyer… and see what his number is.”

“Roy, I don’t understand,” Stone replied.

“How much cash he wants, dumbfuck,” Cohn shouted.

Stone claims to have visited the lawyer and learned that his number was $125,000 cash. Thinking the number was outlandish, Roger returned to Cohn thinking with a number that high that was the end of it. Not according to Cohn, “That’s not the problem. How does he want it?”

“There’s a suitcase,” Stone explained to Labash. “I don’t look in the suitcase… I don’t even know what was in the suitcase… I take the suitcase to the law office. I drop it off. Two days later, they have a convention. Liberals decide they’re endorsing John Anderson for president. It’s a three-way race now in New York State. Reagan wins with 46 percent of the vote. I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don’t know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

Remarkably, neither Stone’s introduction to a crime boss, nor the alleged plot to split the liberal vote, was the most important consequence of his meeting with Roy Cohn. Cohn provided Stone with an introduction that would change the course of American history.

“You need to meet Donald and his father,” Cohn insisted. “They’d be perfect for this. Let me set up a meeting.”

Donald Trump and Roy Cohn.

“I went to go see him,” Stone recalled, “and Trump said, ‘How do you get Reagan to 270 electoral votes?’ He was very interested [in the mechanics] — a political junkie. Then he said, ‘O.K., we are in. Go see my father.”

Stone travelled to Fred Trump’s Avenue Z office in Coney Island. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan for President.’ It was not illegal — it was bundling. Check trading.”

The Trumps even arranged for Stone to open Reagan’s New York City campaign headquarters in a townhouse next to the 21 Club. It was the beginning of a fateful political alliance.

Roger Stone was hardly the only member of the Reagan Campaign that Cohn was connected to. According to notes taken by Cohn‘s switchboard operator, Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, William Casey, “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.”

Casey was a Wall Street investor and a veteran of America’s World War II-era intelligence service the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.). Following the 1980 election, reporters and researchers alleged that Casey cut an “October Surprise” deal with the Iranians, who were holding American diplomatic personnel hostage, to wait until after the election to release them.

Nearly four decades later, Stone and another 1980 Reagan campaign alum, Paul Manafort, would be suspected of “colluding” with a foreign adversary to impact a domestic election.

Interestingly, Stone addressed the so-called “October Surprise” allegations in a book he co-authored with Saint John Hunt during the 2016 Republican primary attacking Jeb Bush and the Bush family in general.

Former OSS officer and Reagan Campaign manager, William Casey standing with Ronald Reagan. Casey, who later led the CIA during the Iran-Contra scandal, is alleged to have negotiated with the Iranians during the 1980 election to delay the release of American hostages until after the election in what became known as the “October Surprise.”

“The Reagan/Bush camp needed to cut a secret deal with the Iranians not to release the hostages before the election,” Stone and Hunt write in Jeb! And The Bush Crime Family: The Inside Story of an American Dynasty.

“As it turned out, the hostages were not released as Carter had promised, and partly as a result of the years-long standoff with the Iranians, Carter lost the election. On January 21st, 1981, the very day that Reagan and Bush were being sworn in, the hostages found themselves on a plane to freedom. Coincidence? The accusations that Reagan and Bush had somehow thwarted the Carter/Iranian deal to free the hostages by election time, thereby winning the election for [Reagan], were rampant. How much of a role did [Bush] play? That’s the million dollar question.”

Stone and Hunt later continue, “Political researcher Robert Morrow interviewed retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman in 2009 in Austin, Texas. Inman, who was involved in intelligence for over 25 years, told Morrow that he was convinced that the Reagan campaign made a deal with the Iranians not to release the American hostages until after the 1980 general election. Inman said he was completely convinced Reagan campaign chair William Casey was involved in such a deal, but he said he did not think G.H.W. Bush was involved because Casey hated Bush. Inman worked at high levels of the Office of Naval Intelligence and the Defense Intelligence Agency while Bush was CIA director in 1976 and they developed a close working relationship.”

“So, as with so many other “facts,” we come to our own conclusions. Do we believe that our candidate was honest and would never dream of co-opting a presidential deal for his own gain? No, I say.” A curious thing to say, seeing as Stone himself had worked on the campaign.

So it appears that just as be believed that Joseph Kennedy had used his connections to Organized Crime to steal the 1960 election, Roger Stone is just as convinced that Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who later became Reagan’s director of the CIA and became embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, had negotiated with enemies of the United States to engage in activities that would impact the outcome of a Presidential election.

Thirty six years later, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump would find himself courting help from another American adversary, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Roger Stone was exactly where he wanted to be, at the very heart of the controversy.

Forty years later, decades of political corruption and lies would culminate in a violent assault on the very seat of American democracy.

The next article will cover Stone’s involvement in the 1981 New Jersey Governors race and lobbying work for Donald Trump.

You can find my collected writings here.