Prologue: A Curious Inheritance PROLOGUE A Curious Inheritance In November 1920, three weeks after Warren Harding won election to the presidency on a promise to restore normalcy, a restless young man on a farm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, did something that was not normal at all. Charles Garland was coming into his adulthood, like many young people, with a growing dismay at the world into which he had been thrust. Just past his twenty-first birthday, he was tall, with dark hair, a soft mustache, and a generous if distant smile. He had a slightly brooding disposition. And he saw grievous inequalities all around him. He recoiled at the gap between the haves and the have-nots. He was a white man who deplored the postwar mob violence against Black communities. He loathed the spread of narrow-minded nativism. Yearning for a more communal and cooperative way of life, he found himself moved simultaneously by the spirit of the New Testament, the pacifism of Leo Tolstoy, and what he dimly understood as the romance of the Russian Revolution. The socialism of his favorite writer, the English novelist and commentator H. G. Wells, inspired him to prize service to others over the selfishness of private property. 1 But young Garland was also rich. As an heir to a Wall Street banking fortune, he was the beneficiary of several substantial trusts. In addition, he stood to inherit outright more than a million dollars from his late father's estate. And when he came into the bequest, Garland said no. "A system which starves thousands while hundreds are stuffed condemns itself," he announced. Someone, he added, needed to stand against the organized selfishness of society. He decided that he would do his part. 2 The executors of the estate were perplexed; no one could recall anyone declining such a fortune. Local newspapers took note. And soon reporters from up and down the East Coast and as far away as San Francisco descended on Garland's mother's fashionable Cape Cod farm to get a word with the attractive young eccentric. The New York Times reported that Garland invoked the example of Jesus and said he preferred to earn a living with his hands. The front page of the Boston Globe explained that Garland, who had recently dropped out of college at Harvard, had chosen a life of "honest toil." Private property, he said, sapped the meaning from life. Newspaper columnists asked their readers what they would do with a million dollars. A jovial janitor told reporters he would buy cigars and automobiles--and then minutes later came into a more modest inheritance of his own, which he assured readers he would keep. "If you really want to know," a comedian quipped, "just leave me a million and I will tell you." Letters to the editor took sides for and against. Onlookers asked if the Bolsheviks had influenced young Garland. (Would the revolution against private property spread to American shores?) Journalists probed Garland's unusual ideas about sex and marriage. (Would collectivist ideas about property lead to free love?) Reactions alternated between scandalized and voyeuristic. Photographers followed Garland and his beautiful young debutante wife as they came and went. Gossip columnists spread rumors about an affair with a paramour. It seemed an episode perfectly tailored to titillate the society pages of the postwar idle rich and their aimless children. From England, Garland's erstwhile hero H. G. Wells deprecated Garland's decision as "depressing news to receive so early in the day." 3 A few people watching from afar, however, had a more ambitious idea. In Los Angeles, the muckraking author Upton Sinclair, whose bestselling novel The Jungle had publicized the horrors of the meatpacking industry, wrote to Garland with a proposal. Don't refuse the money, Sinclair urged. Accept it and give it away. Sinclair recommended that Garland get in touch with a man named Roger Baldwin, who had recently founded the American Civil Liberties Union, and whom Garland knew already through family connections. Baldwin and Garland met on the Cape. And by early 1922, a plan was in place. Garland would accept the bequest. He would transfer several hundred thousand dollars to his wife and their infant daughter. And he would make a nearly $1 million gift--equivalent after inflation to around $18 million today--to endow a philanthropic foundation called the American Fund for Public Service, dedicated "to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world." 4 Baldwin, a preternaturally energetic New England patrician and self-described "philosophical anarchist," conceived of the endeavor as what he called a "gamble in human nature," a high-risk experimental wager in social change. "We are not reformers trying to patch up the defects of existing institutions," he explained to a friendly journalist. "We are rather a group of those who would assist those forces which are experimenting with new institutions." The premise of the Fund, he asserted, was that basic features of American society--from its ideas and norms, to its laws and most powerful organizations--were not fixed in place, not inevitable or unchangeable. The Fund would aim for fundamental transformations. It would challenge the "present means of producing and distributing wealth," question the "controlling of ideas in education," and protest, if need be, "private property itself." It would support, Baldwin said, organizations that instilled into workers the kinds of "knowledge and qualities" valuable "for carrying on the struggle for the emancipation of their class." Baldwin proposed to test new ideas for what he believed was the central question of his time: how to build democracy for an immense, racially divided country in the age of inequality, mass production, and mass communications. If the "law of percentages" worked out, some of the Fund's efforts, maybe even "a fair proportion," Baldwin guessed, might produce ideas "valuable to mankind." 5 Skeptics doubted that the Fund would amount to much. "The only result" of Garland's "liberality," sneered the New York Tribune , "will probably be to part him from $800,000." Garland's gift paled by comparison to the great endowed foundations already being created by the titans of the American economy--Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage among them. Thanks to the booming stock market of the 1920s, Garland's money would ultimately support grants of nearly $2 million, or around $36 million in 2024 dollars. By 1922, the Rockefellers alone had given away enough to amount to a Garland-sized foundation every day for nearly an entire year. 6 Concerned critics warned that the new philanthropic initiative might act as "a golden transmission belt for Communist propaganda" or as "the life stream of the Red Revolutionary movement in the U.S." The editors of the New York World called the Fund a criminal enterprise. Others branded it the "Free Love Fund," scandalized by its participants' unorthodox ideas about marriage and sex. At the new Radical Division of the federal government's Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover opened a file labeling the group "revolutionary." In years to come, observers would charge that the Fund was a vital node in a "red network" aiming to subvert America. The red-hunting Texas congressman Martin Dies and his successors in the House Un-American Activities Committee would denounce the Fund as a shadowy threat to American values. After being turned down for a grant, the old-line labor leader Samuel Gompers at the American Federation of Labor dismissed the Fund as quintessential "parlor pinks." 7 Baldwin and the board of directors he assembled to run the American Fund, however, were after something that even giant sums could not guarantee, and for all but a few of the Fund's directors it wasn't Soviet-style revolution. The Fund's core project came to life in a group of men and women who understood themselves as practical agents of transformative social change. They would seek to remake an unjustifiably unfair society--but they would do so not by smashing the world and building it from a clean slate. Some of the Fund's directors had flirted with violent revolution earlier in their careers; a minority counted themselves, at one time or another, among the Communist Party faithful. But most on the Fund's board aimed to start with people as they existed in the world. The Fund's pivotal efforts drew on the United States' history, its institutions, and its wealth, deploying them as resources in the struggle for something better. Along with Baldwin, key figures in the Fund's orbit included innovative labor leaders, advocates for racial minorities, left-leaning economists and social scientists, liberal journalists, birth control advocates, and progressive reformers. There were anti-Communist liberals and leading socialists. They were a fractious bunch--a "mixture of forces," as Baldwin came to think of it, intentionally designed to take in all points on the left-liberal side of what he called the American political compass. They cooperated and they bickered. They learned from one another. They competed with one another. Sometimes they divided into bitter factions, and at least once they formed romantic connections. Shared beliefs, however, linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy, if it had ever existed, disserved those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age. 8 This book is about the American Fund and its legacies. During a decade in which a Gatsby-tinted haze of jazz and fabulous wealth masked a violent system of Jim Crow segregation and widening economic inequality, the Fund nurtured progressive social movements in exile. What Time magazine would later call "Mr. Garland's Million" functioned behind the scenes as the funding wing of the ACLU, sustaining efforts to establish a democratic conception of free speech--no small thing in a nation emerging from draconian wartime speech controls and struggling under an onslaught of war-fueled propaganda and disinformation in the press. The Fund and its circle helped finance a new generation of progressive labor unions, too. Throwing its weight behind unions that sought to transform American capitalism, the Fund supported so-called industrial unions that organized all workers in a given industry, from lowest paid to highest, including workers of all races and all trades. In time, Fund beneficiaries cultivated the fledgling Congress of Industrial Organizations and helped build the federal labor laws of the New Deal. And after years of trial and error, the Fund and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, began a campaign for race equality in the law. 9 Coming just as the Wall Street crash of 1929 devastated the Fund's financial position, the directors' grant for an NAACP legal campaign was the most hotly contested award in the Fund's nineteen-year existence. The campaign produced two landmark decisions in the U.S. Supreme Court. The 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education ruled racially segregated public schools unconstitutional. Brown is how historians remember the Fund, when it is remembered at all. But the Fund's joint campaign set in motion a mostly forgotten parallel case, too. Coming a decade before the famous desegregation case, Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad told unions and employers they had to deal fairly with Black workers. Steele marked a culmination of the Fund's efforts to shape the racial maldistribution of modern capitalism's spoils. For the directors of the Fund, race emancipation and class liberation traveled together. It is the little-remembered Steele that best embodied the Fund's ambitions--and both the power and the limits of its achievements. 10 Successes for labor, race, and free speech were hard to foresee in the aftermath of the First World War, when democracies on both sides of the Atlantic slid into forms of authoritarianism. In 1920, American voters elected Harding to the presidency on the basis of an impossible promise to restore the greatness of an imagined Anglo-Saxon past, before mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, before Black migration to the North, before the flu pandemic of 1919, and before the creative destruction of modern capitalism. Harding's campaign platform of normalcy had done nothing to arrest galloping economic inequality. With each passing year, the economy's wealthiest men--oil king John D. Rockefeller, automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, and steel magnate Elbert Gary among them--won preposterous, world-historic riches. Rockefeller's net worth alone amounted to around 1.6 percent of annual American economic output in the 1920s, roughly equivalent to the net worth of Elon Musk a century later if we were to measure his assets as a share of the national economy. By the end of the 1920s, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans owned 84 percent of the nation's wealth. 11 Workers in industries like railroads, steel, iron, and agriculture, on the other hand, saw few gains in the 1920s. In a decade of prosperity for many, employees in the sprawling textile industries and in coal's underground archipelago worked long hours in grim conditions. Concerted employer campaigns against labor drove union membership down to levels not seen since the beginnings of the nineteenth century. Huge new industrial firms, making everything from home appliances to automobiles, adopted novel systems of scientific management that exerted tyrannical control over workers' lives. Congress shut down the borders to most immigrants. Meanwhile, lynch mobs murdered hundreds each year, three-quarters of them Black, in unashamed public spectacles. Racial violence in the American West took the lives of Mexican immigrants and people of Chinese descent. States enacted a wave of new laws banning political radicalism, while the courts upheld the arrest and imprisonment of those who spoke out in dissent. Novel strategies of disinformation and propaganda whipped up public opinion into red scares, nativism, and a second Ku Klux Klan, calling into question the capacity of voters to know basic facts about the democracy in which they lived. 12 The men and women who ran the American Fund for Public Service--also known as the Garland Fund, after its donor, or as the American Fund, or simply the Fund--understood themselves to be in a distinctively modern struggle for democratic power. They did not mean voting procedures or political parties; the Fund supported no partisan political projects. The Fund's directors were concerned with what they saw as the underpinnings of modern political life--the sources of public opinion, most of all. They hoped to dislodge the habitual patterns of thought that, in one of Baldwin's favorite quips, made the country "safe for intolerance." The American Fund aimed its efforts at the sources of what Baldwin called "fear and hate"; it targeted the habits of mind sustaining crying injustices and vast social inequality. 13 The Fund left its fingerprints on what sometimes seems like nearly every controversial cause of the age. It financed the NAACP's campaign for anti-lynching legislation. It contributed to the defense of radicals and aliens caught up in the Justice Department's indiscriminate postwar raids. Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League received support for its voluntary motherhood campaign, though the Fund steered clear of her baleful ideas about eugenics. Civil rights firebrand W. E. B. Du Bois consulted regularly with the Fund and relied on its support for projects that turned the Fund's attention toward segregated education. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr worked on American Fund projects, as did the Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who received crucial Fund support at precarious moments early in his career. The pacifist A. J. Muste was one of the Fund's chief beneficiaries, decades before becoming an inspiration to Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. in the practice of nonviolent protest. The American Fund supplied the money behind Clarence Darrow's 1925 defense of John Scopes, charged with the crime of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee, as well as Darrow's defense later that same year of Ossian Sweet, a Black doctor charged with murder for defending his family and their home against a mob of white neighbors in Detroit. For much of the decade, the Fund helped pay for the nationwide campaign to free the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, sentenced to death after a grossly inadequate murder trial in Massachusetts. In the early 1930s the Fund underwrote both the NAACP and the Communist critics of the NAACP in their rival efforts to defend the nine young Black defendants known as the Scottsboro Boys against rape charges in Alabama. Fund resources financed high-profile 1920s labor strikes, subsidized a bold study of rural electrification for the poor, and supported the first generation of twentieth-century civil rights lawyers, men like Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, as they pressed for an end to Jim Crow. Garland's inheritance could not sustain so many efforts by itself, to be sure. In a sprawling nation of 100 million people, with a gross domestic product of $74 billion, a foundation with between one and two million dollars at its disposal had modest power at best. Like any organization, moreover, the Fund made wrong turns and foolish investments. Under an onslaught of grant applications from alchemists, from inventors of quack patent medicines, and from makers of novel tooth powders, the Fund's directors financed ill-conceived efforts, hopeless causes, and fraudulent enterprises. On more than one occasion, the Fund's enemies and even its friends charged the directors with corrupt self-dealing, and not without reason. And yet, for all this, Garland's gift offered a shelter in progressivism's wilderness years. While Jazz Age celebrities like F. Scott Fitzgerald and his friends tired of what they disdainfully called "Great Causes," and in an era when historians wondered what had become of America's reform energies, the Fund served as a nursery for fragile new social movements, an incubator in which new ideas could take root and grow in preparation for a more propitious moment. In the decades to come, the quiet work of the Fund and its beneficiaries would bear fruit. More even than its founders could have guessed, the world the Fund sustained helped shake loose what Baldwin called "the bonds of old institutions." 14 If the Garland Fund and most of its key figures are no longer well-known to American audiences, that is at least in part by design. Even as the men and women charged with administering Garland's gift distrusted money and expressed suspicion of its power, they typically behaved more like the buttoned-down directors of a corporation than members of a radical group. Incorporated inconspicuously in Delaware, the Fund assiduously kept its ratio of overhead expenses to grants low and produced meticulous annual reports documenting its grants and expenditures. It had no formal offices, but it hired accountants to comply faithfully with state regulatory requirements. The Fund's lawyers, in turn, navigated the modern U.S. tax code and even helped develop new tax treatments--loopholes, critics would later call them--for nonprofit foundations. 15 Such efforts to remain out of view have obscured the Fund's story for observers ever since; in the historians' view, the Fund has retreated behind the movements it supported. But the Fund's disappearing act has made it harder to see the interconnectedness of the core projects of modern American liberalism. The Fund's story illuminates an amalgam of radicalism and practicality at the foundations of some of the signal achievements of the twentieth century. Today, much of what the Fund's beneficiaries accomplished is under siege. Like the world in which Charles Garland and the Fund's directors lived a century ago, the United States is a wealthy nation in crisis, plagued by unjustifiable economic inequalities, strained by racial divisions, and beset by disinformation campaigns that openly distort the democratic process. Detractors on the left and the right alike have turned on the Fund's legacies. 16 This book is an effort to recover the astonishing world of the American Fund and to tease out the lessons its history holds for our own. The Fund's key figures--men and women, Black and white, working-class and outrageously privileged--were among the first to take up the challenge of remaking a recognizably contemporary mass capitalist society. Their lost struggle is an education in overcoming the injustices of the twenty-first century. But saying so gets ahead of the plot. The Fund's story begins with what democracy was up against more than a hundred years ago when, in the aftermath of World War I, the young Charles Garland launched a most unusual experiment in democratic change. Excerpted from The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America by John Fabian Witt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
