The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

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. (Oct.)