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How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
by John Fabian Witt
From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the captivating 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 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.
"Making stark the parallels he sees with the present...Witt excavates an invigorating counter-history of the American left defined by its scrappy collegiality. It's an immense and essential achievement." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This is a book to admire and read deliberately...An important and meticulous look at the impact of a forgotten fund's revolutionary work." —Kirkus Reviews
"Insightful... The engaging writing, paired with Witt's keen eye for the limitless effects of seemingly small historical events, make this book important for scholars and general readers alike seeking to understand American society." —Library Journal
"Enjoyable." —Booklist
"A brilliant account of how one modestly endowed organization helped transform America." —Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello
"A rare achievement by a gifted historian at the peak of his powers." —David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Frederick Douglass
This information about The Radical Fund was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
John Fabian Witt is the Allen H. Duffy class of 1960 professor of law at Yale Law School and a professor in the Yale history department. He is the author of a number of books, including Lincoln's Code, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic, among other publications. He lives with his family in Connecticut where he tends an orchard, watches baseball, and fishes in the Long Island Sound.
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