Sender Garlin and a Century of Radicalism

0:00Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along, which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zip. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free. That's right. Free. Welcome to today's deep dive.

1:01We are really excited to have you with us today because we are unpacking a really, really fascinating life. Yeah. It's a big one. It is. We're looking at the life of Sender Garland. And our mission today is to trace this incredibly long, complex life of a 20th century American journalist, a pamphleteer, a writer, and a guy whose lifespan basically the entire century of radical political history. Right. From 1902 all the way to 1999. It's just a massive timeline. Exactly. And our single source for this deep dive is a really comprehensive Wikipedia biographical article on Garland. Yep. But before we jump in, we do need to put out a crucial impartiality disclaimer because the source material is, well, it's highly politically charged. Very. I mean, Garland was deeply embedded in the Communist Party USA, the CTE USA for his whole life. Right. So we want to explicitly say to you, the listener, we are looking at this purely as a historical text. We are not endorsing or taking sides with any of the left wing or right wing ideologies discussed today.

2:02No, not at all. Our goal is simply to convey the facts of Garland's life exactly as they appear in the source material. We just want to understand the history. Exactly. But what's so wild about Garland is just his proximity to history. Like I said, he lived from 1902 to 1999 almost a hundred years. Yeah. And in that time, I mean, this is a man who interviewed Emma Goldman. He managed Woody Guthrie. And there's this great description of him where someone said he talked in a voice like a teletype machine, teletype machine, just that relentless like clack clack clack mechanical energy. Yeah. Just nonstop. I love that image. That's how someone becomes this absolute fixture of the 20th century radical left. We kind of have to rewind all the way to the beginning right back to his childhood. Yeah. Because he wasn't born in the US. He was born in Biaschistok, Poland in April 1902, which was part of the Russian Empire at the time. Right. But his family didn't stay long. The source says they escaped in 1906 when he was just four because they were fleeing

3:03pogroms. Yeah. And for those who might not know, pogroms were these horrific, organized, violent mob attacks against Jewish communities. So they were literally running for their lives, fleeing absolute terror and they make it to the US and they end up running a family bakery first up in Burlington, Vermont. And then later in Glenn's Falls, New York, a very classic American immigrant starting point totally. But Garland, I mean, he didn't just want to bake bread. He goes on this absolute marathon of an education. Oh, it's wild. The list of schools is just it's long. He goes to the University of Wisconsin, then NYU Law, then Albany Law, the new school for social research, and the Rand School of Social Science. Yeah. Bouncing around, taking classes with professors like Scott Nairing, who is a huge radical figure. Okay. Let's unpack this for a second because the source points out something really interesting about the timeline of his radicalization, right? Because you think, okay, he goes to all these progressive schools. He meets Scott Nairing. That's where he becomes a radical.

4:03But no, he actually considered himself a socialist by the time he was like 13 or 14. Just a young teenager. Right. And he got there just from reading the appeal to reason and books by Upton Sinclair while he was working in the bakery. So my question is, is it unusual for a teenager working in a family bakery to adopt such a rigid political framework so early? I mean, before he even really reads marks, well, what's fascinating here is how Garland actually described this himself later in life to the historian Howard Zinn. Okay. And he said that, yes, Sinclair made him a socialist. You know, Sinclair wrote these really visceral books about the struggles of the working class. It makes you angry. It gives you that emotional spark. The outrage. Exactly. But Garland said it was Karl Marx, who actually, and this is his word, recreated him. Recreated him. Yeah. Marx gave him this entire systemic critique of what he called a cruel, unjust society. So Sinclair gave him the feelings, but Marx gave him the entire architecture for how the world worked.

5:04And he was basically rebuilt by that ideology. Totally. And he didn't just want to, like, sit around and read about this critique. He wanted to be the one writing it. He wanted to broadcast it. Which brings us to the typewriter part of his life, the Apparachic phase. Yeah, his huge stint at the daily worker. Right. So he spent 17 years from 1927 to 1943 at the daily worker, which was the official paper of the Communist Party USA. And he wasn't just doing light local news. He was doing incredibly heavy hitting coverage. Oh, massive stories. He covered the Scotsboro Boys trial in Alabama, the Gastonia textile strike in 1929, the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. I mean, he was on the ground for major labor and civil rights battles. He even went over and reported on the Moscow purge trials. Right. Which, I mean, that's a huge deal. The fact that he was the one they trusted to cover the Moscow purge trials, which were these brutal theatrical show trials by Stalin that shows how deeply trusted he was by the party. Oh, absolutely. Confleming actually described Garland as a literary Apparachic, an Apparachic, meaning

6:06like a total loyalist, a loyalist, a functionary, a guy who enforces the party line. He was their guy and because he was their guy, the access he had was just staggering. The people he interviewed, let's just list a few because it's crazy. Go for it. He sat down with Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Huey Long, which is quite the mix right there. And it gets crazier. He interviewed Nadezhda Kripskaya, Lenin's widow, Lenin's widow, and he also interviewed Olga Nipper Chakova, the actress. It's an unbelievable roster of 20th century figures. He really is, but he wasn't just a reporter talking to famous people. He was also kind of this enforcer of what the party should be consuming. Right. His role as a cultural gatekeeper. The source mentions this column he wrote called the constant reader. And his job in this column was to literally take notes of books that should be, quote, praised or blamed, praised or blamed, just very cut and dry. Yeah. And if you think about it, it's so similar to what we see today with like algorithmic echo chambers

7:07or highly partisan influencers. Oh, that's a great point. Like, imagine relying on a single column to tell you what art is politically acceptable for you to consume. He's saying this book is good for the movement. That book is bad. He was literally programming the culture of the party. He was, but, you know, he did have a practical side when it came to culture too. It wasn't all just strict Marxist theory. Right. The Woody Guthrie connection. Yes. This is one of my favorite details. Garland was the features editor who oversaw a column called Woody Says. And that's Woody Guthrie, the famous folk singer. Exactly. And the funny thing is the Communist Party brass didn't even consider Woody's column to be, quote, strategic or basic. It wasn't high theory. It was just folksy. Yeah. But Garland and the paper ran it because it showed they were, quote, interested in the people. It was relatable. It brought people in. Exactly. And Garland was always doing things like that. He was a founding editor of partisan review. He was a charter member of the American newspaper guild. And he had all these random side gigs too, like managing public affairs for the New York

8:09Heart Association. Right. Or editing the legal brief of physicians. He was everywhere. He was highly visible. He wasn't just reporting on the movement. He was effectively the physical gateway into it. Which brings us to a really famous anecdote. Here's where it gets really interesting. The Whitaker Chambers story. Yes. So in Whitaker Chambers' memoir, Witness, he recalls a vivid memory from 1925 at Columbia University. Right. Chambers was looking for the Communist Party. And he hears about this high strung red-headed boy who had just slept on a bare floor and who talked incessantly about the Soviet Union. And that boy was Senator Garland. Talking in that teletype voice. So Chambers meets him and what happens? Well Chambers wants to find the party, but Garland tells him, well, actually, the Communist Party is currently called the Workers' Party for, you know, expediency, legal reasons. But he gives Chambers permission to use his name. Basically tell them, sender Garland sent you, as like a seeker password. Okay. But I kind of want to push back on that a little bit because it sounds so cloak and dagger,

9:12right? Like the super secret underground ring. Yeah. Very dramatic. But the source notes that Garland later just introduced Chambers to Harry Freeman. And Garland's own sister, Tiba Wilner, she was the promotional manager for the new masses magazine, which was a very public publication. Right. So was the party really this super secret underground thing? Or was it basically just an open secret among these New York literary circles? It's a bit of both, honestly. I mean, the red scare was a real thing. So there was genuine legal danger, which is why they use names like the Workers' Party. Right. The expediency. At the same time, in those specific Bohemian intellectual circles in New York, everyone kind of knew who everyone was. So Garland gets to play the role of the elusive gatekeeper giving out passwords, even though he's also highly visible. He loved the drama of it. Total. He was a connector. But as we move into the Cold War era, his role shifts. The party is under massive pressure, and Garland becomes this incredibly aggressive pamphleteer.

10:12The pamphlets are amazing. He wrote so many, and they were so targeted. Yeah. He wrote the real Huey P. Long. He wrote the real Rooking Backer. Going after huge public figures. And he goes after the media, too. He wrote the truth about Reader's Digest. Which is so funny to think about now. Reader's Digest. Right. But to him, that was bourgeois propaganda. And he wrote, is Dewey the man. And then directly tackling the Cold War, he writes, enemies of the peace, profile of the hate rush again. He was relentless. In red tape and barbed wire, close up of the McCarran Lawn Action, he's just churning these out. He's the ultimate loyal aporagic defending the party during its hardest years. But time marches on, right? The Cold War evolves. And this fiery young guy in New York, he ages. Right. By 1980, he's nearly 78 years old. Most people are, you know, retiring, taking it easy. But not sender Garland. No. He and his wife, the poet Martha Millet Garland, they decide to move out west.

11:12They relocate to Boulder, Colorado, to be near their son, Alexander. And if we connect this to the bigger picture, it's just incredible. He doesn't retire. He basically takes his New York radicalism and rebrands it for a modern university town. He founds the social issues forum at CU Boulder. He joins the cultural events board. Almost 80 years old. Yeah. And the people he brings to speak in Colorado, he just taps his network. He brings Howard Zinn. Who actually ended up writing Garland's obituary later. Exactly. He brings Michael Perenti, Angela Davis, and Fagan Ginger, Milt Wolf, who was the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln battalion. Bringing the history of the old left right to the students of the new left. And he stays active with local groups too. CSP's, left handbooks, the Rocky Mountain Peace Center. He just never, ever stops. I know, way to the end. Yeah. Sender Garland passed away at his home in Boulder on December 6, 1999. He was 97 years old. Left behind a huge family too, right? He did. His wife, Martha, his children, Emily, Alexander, Victor, and his granddaughters, Annelise,

12:16Amy, and Rachel. Just a massive legacy. So what does this all mean? When we look at this Wikipedia article and trace this whole story, to me, sender Garland's life is just a masterclass in relentless ideological commitment. Oh, without a doubt. I mean, from a little boy fleeing pogroms to praising and blaming books for the party, to organizing forums in his 90s, his 97 years basically map out the entire 20th century American radical left. It really is a map. Yeah. And it leaves you with such a lingering kind of provocative question, I think. What's that? Well, think about you, the listener. And think about someone dedicating 80 years of their life to a single, rigid political framework. I mean, from a teenager reading Upton Sinclair, all the way to a 97-year-old in Boulder. Yeah. Hold on to an ideology for that long, through massive global upheavals, purges, and an entire Cold War. Does your world view actually adapt to the changing century? Or do you just spend a lifetime trying to force the changing century to fit your world

13:18view? Wow. Does the teletype machine ever change its message? Or does it just keep printing? Exactly. Something to really think about. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. It's been great. Thanks for listening. Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board. But then, all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try Zippercrooter for free. At zippercrooter.com slash zipp. Zippercrooter doesn't depend on candidates finding you. It finds them for you. It's powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of, hey, Zippercrooter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. See why four out of five employers who post a job on Zippercrooter get a quality candidate within the first day. Zippercrooter, the smartest way to hire. And right now, you can try Zippercrooter for free.

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