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

In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with John Fabian Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a professor of history at Yale, and one of the country’s most distinguished legal historians. The author of numerous award-winning books, including American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 and Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History, Witt joins us to discuss his latest, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

We begin with the genesis — of the Garland Fund and Witt’s interest in writing about it. He explains that most histories of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case include mention of a "funny little foundation" that gave early support to the NAACP, launching the legal campaign that would culminate in the desegregation landmark. Witt discovered, however, that Brown was "just the tip of the iceberg.” The Garland Fund — named for the young idealist Charles Garland, who at twenty-one refused a million-dollar inheritance — in fact had its fingerprints on a sweeping range of progressive movements in the United States that would shape American democracy. And Witt notes, the conditions of 1920s America that shaped the fund’s creation — deep economic inequality, declining labor unions, surging ethno-nationalism, immigration backlash, threats to free speech — look "astonishingly like 2020s America." The fund would come to be known officially as the American Fund for Public Service. 

We discuss the fund's three principal focus areas — labor, civil liberties, and civil rights — and the extraordinary cast assembled by inaugural director Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, to govern it, including labor leader (and New Deal “industrial democracy” architect) Sidney Hillman; James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP; and editors from The Nation and The New Republic. We explore some of the initial tensions between the fund’s labor and racial justice priorities, and the eventual fusion of the two via efforts like A. Philip Randolph’s creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the all-Black union within the Pullman Car Company. Witt suggests that this marriage of civil rights and labor organizing — “working class solidarity across racial lines” — was a central contribution of the fund and its grantees.

We also touch on the fund's intentionally unconventional approach to philanthropy. Conceived as a kind of "anti-Rockefeller Foundation," the Garland Fund had virtually no staff and was deeply conscious of the “paradox” of “using a Wall Street fortune to attack capitalism and inequality.” Many of the fund's progressive investments failed, and others would take years to come to fruition, paying dividends in the newly “plastic” political landscape of the Great Depression. 

We conclude with lessons for today from the Garland Fund's experience. Witt asks, if the industrial union was the unit “well suited to manage mass production capitalism” and therefore “responsible for a good deal of equalization of the American economy” for much of the 20^th century — what is the 21^st century equivalent. "What's going to connect people together and to their economic futures such that some kind of decent political coalition of people who feel the security sufficient to be good citizens can come out of it?"

This episode of Capital for Good was recorded at a book talk hosted by the Open Society Foundations in New York.

Mentioned in this Episode: 

• The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
• Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, (Simon & Schuster, 2012)
• How to Save the American Experiment, (New York Times, 2025)
• NAACP
• CIO
• ACLU