Originally posted at Balkinization for a symposium on John Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon and Schuster, 2025).
John Fabian Witt's The Radical Fund masterfully reconstructs the history of the American Fund for Public Service, better known as the Garland Fund. The Fund embodied both the promise and the peril of radical philanthropy in the United States between World War I and World War II. Conceived by Roger Baldwin and financed by Charles Garland's relatively modest inheritance, the fund set out to support "pioneering enterprises" capable of advancing democracy and social justice (105–109). Yet the very inclusiveness that defined its mission proved to be its undoing. Its openness blurred essential distinctions between liberal reform and revolutionary activism, particularly the illiberal strains of the latter promoted by American Communists who followed secret directives from the USSR.
Witt portrays the fund's dual identity with care. Its experimental commitment to supporting every left-leaning cause was both its greatest strength and its central weakness. Baldwin, a founder of the ACLU and self-described "philosophical anarchist," viewed the fund as a "gamble in human nature," a bold experiment in social change. He and Garland believed that existing institutions were malleable and that private wealth could be redirected to benefit the working class and expand civil liberties (1–4).
