The Radical Fund
How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the “engrossing” (The New York Times) secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund.
In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance. In a world of shocking wealth disparities, shameless racism, and political repression, Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambitious progressive projects.
The men and women of the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black. They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes. Yet shared beliefs linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.
By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation.
A “fascinating” testament to how “radical philanthropy can foster important and necessary changes in American life” (The Wall Street Journal), The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—and an empowering roadmap for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer finalist Witt (American Contagions) unearths the nearly forgotten history of the American Fund for Public Service, an endowment that, for roughly two decades, brought together a network of activists united in their belief that "American institutions needed to be radically remade." In November 1920, on the heels of the election victory of Warren Harding (who promised to "restore" American "greatness"), a young Charles Garland, heir to a Wall Street banking fortune, decided to "take a stand" by using his inheritance to fund radical causes. While Garland's gift "paled by comparison" to the endowed foundations already being administered by American titans like the Rockefellers—who gave away the equivalent of Garland's foundation nearly "every day"—Garland's fund was the one supporting the most historically important causes, Witt finds. It financed the NAACP's push for "anti-lynching legislation," contributed to the legal defense of "aliens caught up in the Justice department's indiscriminate postwar raids" and Clarence Darrow's 1925 defense of John Scopes, and supported the likes of Margaret Sanger, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Profiling this exhilarating range of figures, Witt finds that Garland's pan-left project, which funded both "anti-communist liberals" and "leading socialists," allowed for a robust exchange of ideas and tactics. Making stark the parallels he sees with the present (Harding railed against mass immigration as society reeled from the flu pandemic), Witt excavates an invigorating counter-history of the American left defined by its scrappy collegiality. It's an immense and essential achievement.
