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

Summary

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.