John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School, has published The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster):
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 around 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 luminous testament to the power of visionary organizations and a meditation on the vexed role of money in American life, The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—an empowering road map for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.
Several book events, including the New York Historical today and Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, on Thursday, are listed on the publisher's website. In addition, the Supreme Court Historical Society will host an event by Zoom at Noon ET on October 23, and Professor Witt has already discussed the book on the Strict Scrutiny podcast.
--Dan Ernst
