Professor John Fabian Witt Writes What Happened When Money Backed Radical Dreams

When an idealistic young heir to a Wall Street banking fortune named Charles Garland turned down a million-dollar inheritance in 1920, the writer Upton Sinclair wrote him with a different idea: accept the money and then start a foundation to give it away.

So begins the latest book by John Fabian Witt ’99, Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law. “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America” (Simon & Schuster) tells the story of the American Fund for Public Service. Also known as the Garland Fund, its purpose was boilerplate philanthropic mission-statement: “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” But as Witt explains, Garland and the crew he assembled to administer the fund aimed for something much grander.

For next two decades, the fund would champion the needs of working-class people, equality for Black Americans, and free speech — the latter before the courts had started to enforce that right. While the country’s robber barons used their philanthropy to quell the growing public fury about the exploitation that built their fortunes, Witt’s book says that Garland’s band of radicals applied money to rein in galloping inequality and to instead turn capitalism’s prosperity toward working people.

“They believed that American capitalism was broken,” Witt writes. “They believed that American democracy, if it had ever existed, disserved those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.”

The fund’s list of beneficiaries reads like the greatest hits of early 20th century progressive causes. It was a substantial and early backer of the NAACP, supporting its campaign for antilynching laws and funding the lawyers — including future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall — who would lay the groundwork for landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education. The fund also supported the ACLU team that included Clarence Darrow defending evolution in the Scopes trial. It likewise backed the defenses of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys, both cases that came to symbolize injustice in the U.S. legal system, as well as James Joyce’s fight against obscenity charges. And it supported a school where labor leaders developed strategies for far-reaching nonviolent strikes and protests.

Aside from making change through industrial labor unions and the courts, the fund also hoped to sway public opinion and influence popular culture. It gave modern art a venue by underwriting the early days of the New Masses magazine, supported A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger magazine in Harlem, and backed Labor Age, the pioneering labor monthly of the 1920s. The fund also put money toward movies, a radio station, and a publishing house that helped launch the career of Dr. Seuss with his “500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.”

Witt delves into the personalities in the fund’s orbit, a cast of characters that includes some of history’s civil rights luminaries and others whose names are less known to us today. Among those Garland chose to support were NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson, whom Witt writes had more influence on the fund than any other one person, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, fresh from the radical labor union Industrial Workers of the World. Her eventual Communist Party membership badly split the fund — and helped bring down the world it had made. Unwanted attention from the House Un-American Activities Committee cemented the fund’s demise in 1941. But at the organization’s climactic moment, Witt writes, the fund’s board held off a Communist takeover to assert a campaign of nonviolent liberal change.

“The Fund’s core project came to life in a group of men and women who understood themselves as practical agents of transformative social change,” Witt writes. “They would seek to remake an unjustifiably unfair society — but they would do so not by smashing the world and building it from a clean slate.”

That extended to the decidedly unradical duties of corporate governance. The board issued annual reports, hired accountants, and sought and found tax advantages (loopholes, according to critics) for their experiment in philanthropy. The tension between private wealth and public good is as much a part of the fund’s legacy as its wins in civil rights and labor, Witt shows. Roger Nash Baldwin, director of the ACLU and the fund’s most active member, expressed unease at the time about money’s role in politics.

“The Fund’s story illuminates an amalgam of radicalism and practicality at the foundations of some of the signal achievements of the 20th century,” Witt writes.

In addition to his appointment at Yale Law School, where he teaches the history of American law and the first-year course on Torts & Regulation, Witt is a professor of history in the University’s history department. His previous books include ”Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,“ which won the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, was awarded the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Witt is a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He teaches annually in the Warrior-Scholar Project Academic Boot Camp for enlisted veterans and has launched a course on the history of the U.S. Constitution for secondary school teachers and other educators through the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History.