THE RADICAL FUND

How a young man “launched a most unusual experiment in democratic change.”

“The opportunity presents itself once more,” reads the final sentence of Witt’s account of the American Fund for Public Service, which worked to reshape American democracy and civil rights between 1922 and 1941. It’s a perfect coda. Then as now, the U.S. interwar years saw the post-pandemic election of a president who promised to “restore the greatness of an imagined Anglo-Saxon past” amid vast and widening wealth inequality, racial unrest, and a public-information environment where “critical political thinking,” as ACLU founder Roger Baldwin put it, “[was] dead.” Launched through the inheritance of Charles Garland, a reluctant heir who subscribed to H.G. Wells’ vision of a “society based on a ‘spirit of service’ rather than a ‘spirit of gain,’” the fund would go on to punch well above its relatively modest weight. It gave away less than $2 million across 19 years and nevertheless managed to finance a range of transformative legal causes, including those spearheaded by the likes of the ACLU and the NAACP. It also financed less-well-known organizations, such as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, one of the country’s first influential Black labor unions. This is a book to admire and read deliberately. A Yale law professor, Witt effortlessly switches between sharp profiles and nuanced portrayals of landmark decisions. Casual readers, in their efforts to keep up, may find themselves paging back in sections. Elsewhere, the book’s unflinching accounts of race and labor violence leave a mark. So does its call to action. About 150,000 Americans, Witt writes, have “assets worth more than $30 million, roughly equivalent after inflation to the amount given away by the American Fund’s directors.” While the American Fund made gains in building a better world, “its triumphs were not final.” This book urges: Let’s keep going.

An important and meticulous look at the impact of a forgotten fund’s revolutionary work.