Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption

The setting for Elizabeth Warren’s speech on Monday night was meant to be symbolic, down to the last detail. A riser was constructed beneath the lit-up seventy-three-and-a-half-foot arch in Washington Square Park, in Manhattan, with a giant American flag draped in the background. A lectern placed on top was made from reclaimed wood from the Maine home of Frances Perkins, the early-twentieth-century labor activist. According to Warren’s campaign, the lectern was built by craftspeople at a woman-owned woodworking company based in Brooklyn, who designed the base to resemble the soapboxes that Perkins and other labor organizers would have used. It was a stage set created to reflect the central theme of Warren’s campaign: the importance of the rights of working people, and the ways that the influence of money in Washington has undermined those rights. The lectern was forty-six inches high, for the forty-sixth, and next, President.

After an introduction by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, Warren emerged in a purple jacket, visible, at first, only as a small head bobbing over a sea of people waving signs reading “I’M A WARREN DEMOCRAT.” “When I’m in the White House, working families will have a champion,” she said, to cheers from the audience. She promised to stay after the speech was done to take selfies with as many people as wanted them, as has been her practice. She then launched into the story of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a blaze at a garment manufacturer near Washington Square Park, which occurred on March 25, 1911. The doors to the stairwells and exits had been locked by the factory’s owners to prevent the predominantly female workers from stealing cloth or taking breaks. As smoke filled the halls, workers crawled to the building’s ledges and then started to jump. Their bodies piled up, and Warren described in graphic detail how charred corpses accumulated inside the factory, and how “blood ran into the gutters.”

“It took eighteen minutes for one hundred and forty-six people to die—mostly women, mostly immigrants,” Warren said. “It was one of the worst industrial disasters in American history, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise.” The business owners had “greased the state government” in order to prevent regulations that might have increased their costs. She then paused. “Does any of this sound familiar?” she asked. “Our democracy is paralyzed. And why? Because giant corporations have bought off our government. . . . Corruption has put our planet at risk, corruption has broken our economy, and corruption is breaking our democracy!” She characterized Donald Trump as “corruption in the flesh,” but also noted that the country’s most pressing problems had been building long before he became President, adding, “A country that elects Donald Trump is already in serious trouble.”

Warren’s speech took place just as the Democratic-primary campaign is entering a new, more serious phase: the field of candidates has winnowed, and the debates have become less unwieldy. Warren has crept steadily up in the polls, hovering in many of them in second place, behind Joe Biden. The morning of the speech, the Warren campaign announced an endorsement from the Working Families Party, which was a coup for the campaign, and a disappointment to Bernie Sanders, who has been vying with Warren for second place and earned the Party’s endorsement when he ran for the Democratic nomination in 2015. The combination of events has created a sense of momentum around Warren that will be tested in the coming months, as primary voters and competitors begin focussing more narrowly on the candidates left in the race.

Voters are unaccustomed to hearing politicians speak so directly and frequently about corruption, perhaps because the system they’re participating in is an example of the depth of the problem. But, from the early days of her campaign, Warren has pointed to corruption as the root cause of most of the country’s problems. She lists tax laws that favor corporations, spiralling health-care costs and pharmaceutical prices, rising temperatures, and declining public-school systems as symptoms of the influence that the wealthy have over the policymaking process. In 2018, she introduced the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act in the Senate, which proposed a lifetime ban on most lawmakers going into lobbying and the creation of a new public-integrity office, among other things. (The House passed its own, less drastic anti-corruption bill that addressed some of the same issues earlier this year.) Warren describes her bill as the “biggest anti-corruption plan since Watergate.” During one of her first campaign stops in Iowa, which I attended, she told a crowd, “We have a Washington that works great for the rich, the powerful, the well-connected. And here’s the deal: when a government works for the rich, the powerful, and the well-connected and isn’t working for anyone else, that’s corruption, plain and simple, and we need to call it out.” The lines resonated.

As a prelude to Monday’s speech, Warren released a fifteen-page memo outlining how she would end corruption in Washington if she were President. The plan is exhaustive and goes further than anything she put forth before. In addition to ending lobbying “as we know it,” she says that she would require all senior government officials to divest any privately owned businesses—a clear reference to Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who maintain private business interests. She also proposes to mandate higher ethics and conflict-of-interest standards in the federal judiciary, and to end the practice of dropping misconduct investigations of judges once they step down from the bench.

According to the Warren campaign, more than twenty thousand people attended the Washington Square Park speech, which suggests that the anti-corruption theme is appealing to voters. Toward the end of the speech, after the threat of rain had passed, Warren returned to the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the activist Frances Perkins. At the time of the fire, Perkins was a sociology professor and was active in the movement for women’s suffrage. She rushed to the factory from a friend’s house nearby, and witnessed women and girls jumping to their deaths as smoke billowed out of the windows. The disaster galvanized her determination to go to Albany and become a worker’s-rights activist. Perkins took various positions in New York state government, and, in 1933, became the Secretary of Labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “What did one woman, one very persistent woman, backed up by millions of people across this country get done?” Warren asked. With F.D.R., Perkins helped create the New Deal, introduced Social Security for elderly Americans and unemployment insurance for the jobless, and helped to abolish child labor and establish the minimum wage. For Warren’s audience, the parallels were obvious.

“What happened in the aftermath of the fire is a different story of power. A story of our power,” Warren said. “We win when we get out there and fight. I am not afraid!”

“I love you!” a man yelled from the audience.