‘The Radical Fund’: How a spurned inheritance fueled progressive change

In 1920, Charles Garland, the wealthy heir to a banking fortune, made newspaper headlines for doing the unthinkable: he declined to accept an inheritance of more than a million dollars from his late father’s estate. 

Garland was disillusioned by the era’s gross inequality — the top 10 percent of American income earners took in half the country’s annual national income. Garland saw his refusal to add to that problem as a way of standing up to systemic economic inequality. 

But Upton Sinclair, author of “The Jungle,” the 1906 novel that exposed the brutal working conditions in the Chicago stock yards, read about Garland’s decision and thought he had a better idea. In a letter to Garland, Sinclair urged him not to refuse the money, but to instead give it away. He put him in touch with Roger Baldwin, a Harvard-educated labor advocate who had just founded the American Civil Liberties Union.

Garland and Baldwin met and came up with a plan. Garland would bequest nearly a million dollars (the rough equivalent of $18 million today) to endow a philanthropic foundation called the American Fund for Public Service. Baldwin would run the foundation with a board of directors comprised of people who were actively involved in efforts to create a more just society. 

John Fabian Witt’s new book, “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America” (Simon & Schuster), unpacks the American Fund’s 19 years in existence, a period during which it gave away $2 million to a wide array of labor, racial equality, and civil liberties causes, and the various quarrels about and struggles for progressive change during the period preceding and following the New Deal. 

“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. 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,” Witt writes. “The Fund’s pivotal efforts drew on the United States’ history, its institutions, and its wealth, deploying them as resources in the struggle for something better.”

Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a professor of history in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. His book “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won a Bancroft Prize and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award. He spent 13 years researching and writing his new book. 

Witt sat down with Yale News to talk about Baldwin’s tortured relationship with money, the raucous debates among the fund’s directors, and its late-stage associations with Soviet espionage rings. The conversation has been condensed and edited. 

The Garland fund was established in 1922. Set the stage for what was happening in American society at that time. 

John Fabian Witt: Like much of Europe, the United States was in a democratic crisis. The Wilson administration had imprisoned hundreds of political dissenters, including presidential candidate Eugene Debs. There was a shutdown in immigration, vast economic inequality, racial tensions unlike anything that we know about in our world today. Race riots meant large masses of white people killing and destroying Black communities. And it was a world of Jim Crow apartheid. So, a harrowing set of democratic crises. 

Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, aligned with Garland to start this fund in hopes of moving toward a more just society. But the obstacles were enormous. How optimistic was he that they could affect change? 

Witt: I don’t know that he was at all. He was torn about the role of money in American political life. He was a critic of the new big philanthropies that were coming on the scene. At the same time, he was under no illusion that you can make change without resources and power. Making change requires deploying power. The epigraphs of my book are the biblical line that money is the root of all evil, and the American proverb that money makes the world go round. Baldwin kind of oscillated between those two poles. He tried to hold those contradictory ideas in his head at all times. He was divided at the end of this story in the 1940s, after the fund had been shut down, all its money used up. He was not entirely sure how much the fund had accomplished. 

Baldwin’s initial plan for the fund was to focus on labor — defending the rights of workers. But issues related to racial discrimination came before the fund repeatedly. In fact, one of their first grants was to support the NAACP’s anti-lynching ad campaign. There was considerable tension within the fund’s board of directors as to whether they should be getting into race-related causes. Why was that? 

Witt: There was a debate about what the great problem of 1920s America was. Was it the vast inequality that arose out of untrammeled free markets and the exploitation of the working class? Or was it Jim Crow and the world of racial subordination and white supremacy? The fund had scarce resources, and so different constituencies with different views around that debate came to the table and argued with one another for more than a decade. There was this moment in August 1925 when a group of fund directors decided they would stop funding Black organizations. But a decisive intervening figure appeared just a few weeks later — A. Philip Randolph, founder of the first Black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph, who went on to become one of the most important civil rights leaders of the 20th century, scrambled and confounded the whole debate and sent it off in a new direction.

The fund did make considerable headway in improving the lives of workers, but not without more inner turmoil. What was that about?

Witt: There was a fascinating debate happening in the labor movement about what the right form of labor mobilization should be. The ’20s was a time when labor was in retreat, having been beaten back and hemorrhaging members across the decade. The old-line American Federation of Labor stood for a kind of traditional, slightly stodgy approach to organizing around occupations — the bricklayers, carpenters, boilermakers, machinists and so on. On the other hand, there was a radical side, led by the remnants of the Industrial Workers of the World, who stood for a revolutionary approach. For them, capitalism was the problem. Class warfare was the frame for thinking about what labor was up against. And then there was a third approach that emerged during the course of the decade. That was the idea of industrial unions: a combative but collaborative relationship to capitalism, in which workers who were organized at an industrial scale bargained with company owners to produce a better capitalism — one that would accrue prosperity for workers and collective control over their lives. The industrial union project, which became the heart of the fund’s efforts, eventually developed into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). 

Would you talk about the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters? It took root with the fund but didn’t come to fruition until much later. 

Witt: The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters started in the middle of the ’20s as a small organization trying to bring together the Black porters on the Pullman Palace Car Company’s railroad sleeping cars. The idea started with the porters themselves, but they couldn’t organize because if any one of them stepped out as a union organizer they would instantly have been fired. The racial politics are interesting because the Pullman Company only wanted Black porters. These were the men who cared for, shined the shoes of, provided food for, and tended to the middle-class and wealthy passengers riding on these glorious sleeping cars of the late 19th and early 20th century. A. Philip Randolph was the organization’s founder, and it took a decade for his efforts to come to fruition. The union didn’t get recognized by Pullman until 1937, after the New Deal had created legislation that empowered unions. All along the way, the foundation was quietly supporting and helping to finance the Brotherhood. And just as important, it connected Randolph to the leading union organizers and consultants and accountants and economists, the world of the future CIO, which helped make him into one of the 20th century’s great labor leaders. 

The fund also backed the ACLU’s 1925 legal challenge to the Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. The outcome of that high-profile trial — commonly known as the Scopes monkey trial — was not what Baldwin had hoped for, but it did still serve a valuable purpose. 

Witt: Famously, the ACLU set up this case as a test case. They placed an ad and got John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, to come forward to be a test defendant. He was charged with violating the anti-evolution law. Now one of the furious debates at the foundation was about whether courts and lawsuits were a way to change the world. The view held by labor union types who had been beaten down by the courts repeatedly was that courts wouldn’t help change the world; you needed to organize in politics, in the streets, in unions. The Scopes case was interesting because, even though Scopes was found guilty, the case demonstrated that litigation and courts can become pivots in public opinion — in this case about the free speech rights of teachers. They could get the attention of the country. We’ve talked so far about labor and race, but public opinion and propaganda campaigns were another huge part of what this outfit was about. They saw in the Scopes case that court cases could be a great communication strategy. 

Why is the fund so little known today? 

Witt: Everybody on the board of directors was a little bit embarrassed about it. They all believed that money is the root of all evil. They found it hysterically funny that Wall Street kept giving them more money throughout the ’20s. They were critics of the use of philanthropy and money, and they were hesitant to claim credit for the funding project. 

Another piece of this is that by the last decade of the fund’s life, when most of the money was gone and it was limping toward its denouement, it got roped into Soviet espionage rings. It had wandered into the world of Whittaker Chambers, the Soviet spy who later turned to conservativism. When the Red Scare began in the late 1940s and 1950s, the radical foundation was no longer a group to which people wanted to be connected. Liberals didn’t want to tarnish successes like the ACLU’s free speech campaigns or the NAACP’s Brown v. Board of Education or the CIO’s unionizing gains. 

What do you see as the fund’s legacy? 

Witt: Launching the litigation campaign that led to Brown v. Board of Education is the fund’s most famous legacy. Just as important, the world of the fund managed to identify and incubate the economic formation of the industrial union as something that would put tens of millions of Americans in a position to be able to control the direction of their economic lives and the lives of their families. Since the decline of industrial manufacturing in the United States, we’ve been struggling to find a way to give Americans a comparable sense of having a say in the direction of the economy. What we need now, a century after the Garland Fund, is another round of deep thinking on ways to reinvent democracy for the new capitalism of the 20th century.