My review of John Witt, The Radical Fund

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).

Baldwin assembled an extraordinary and eclectic board that included jurists such as Felix Frankfurter, journalists like Freda Kirchwey, labor organizers such as Sidney Hillman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and one Communist, William Z. Foster. The fund’s early grants to the ACLU, the NAACP, and Brookwood Labor College reflected its founders’ belief that progress could be achieved through education, litigation, and peaceful organizing. Baldwin described this as a “mixture of forces” spanning the full left-liberal spectrum of American politics (4).

The same inclusiveness that initially energized the fund soon produced deep internal tensions. Baldwin, though willing to include a Communist perspective, recognized the Party’s tendency to dominate institutions and warned that “one Party member on the board was enough” (234). When Foster tried to send proxies to board meetings, they were turned away. As late as 1926, Baldwin sought to strengthen the anti-Communist faction within the board. In retaliation, the Party derided the fund as “counter-revolutionary” and mocked Baldwin and Socialist leader Norman Thomas as “a terrible bunch” (233–234).

Despite Baldwin’s efforts, Communist influence proved difficult to contain. The fund’s commitment to pluralism left it vulnerable to what the Party itself described as “boring from within” (234). By the mid-1920s, as liberal unions weakened under employer pressure, Baldwin feared that disciplined Communists might be the only radicals still capable of organizing workers effectively. The situation grew more complicated after Baldwin’s 1927 visit to the USSR, where he succumbed to Soviet propaganda and wrote an absurdly glowing book called “Liberty Under the Soviets” before later resuming his criticism of Soviet repression.

The ideological tension intensified during the 1930s. The Great Depression radicalized many on the left, including Charles Garland himself, who began openly sympathizing with Communist causes. Although Garland lacked formal authority, the directors felt morally obligated to respect his preferences, and he used that leverage to advocate for grants to Party-backed initiatives. He declared his “entire support and sympathy” for “left wing radical activities,” such as Communist efforts to organize Black sharecroppers in the South (398). Garland dismissed liberal projects like the NAACP’s legal work and Brookwood Labor College as “right-wing movements,” pressing instead for aid to the Communist-affiliated Workers’ School in New York (397–398). To him, only revolutionary projects fulfilled the fund’s mission, a view other board members saw as ideological capture.

By 1934, Garland’s radicalism had concrete consequences. Following the advice of Party operatives Harold Ware and Lement Harris, the fund granted money to Communist front organizations such as Farm Research, Inc., the Farmers’ National Committee for Action, and the Farmers’ National Weekly, a Party-linked newspaper publicizing foreclosures and sharecroppers’ unions (398–399). These grants redirected a significant share of the fund’s resources toward Party causes.

The most audacious proposal came when Ware and Harris suggested laundering Soviet funds through Amtorg, a Soviet trading company that also served as an espionage conduit. Moscow would repay an old loan to a collective-farm experiment, and the fund would then channel the disguised money to Harris’s committee. This plan was blocked by Thomas, James Weldon Johnson, and ex-Communist Ben Gitlow, who warned that aiding Harris would mean supporting “Communist Party wrecking activities in the agricultural field” (399). Even so, the damage had been done. After Ware’s death in 1935, Harris continued to use Garland as a conduit for grants. As Witt notes, “two-thirds of the Fund’s new gifts went to Party-run organizations in agriculture,” and in some years “every new gift went to groups sponsored by Ware or Harris and endorsed by Garland” (399).

The result was not a dramatic coup but a slow erosion of purpose. A fund designed to democratize American capitalism had become, over time, a channel for foreign-directed Communist objectives.

Witt resists reducing this story to mere gullibility. Instead, he portrays individuals of sincerity and moral complexity. Baldwin’s “law of percentages,” his belief that some experiments would yield “ideas valuable to mankind,” captured both the courage and the naïveté of liberal idealism (4). The fund’s liberal directors hesitated to impose ideological tests, fearing that exclusion would betray their commitment to pluralism. Yet that very generosity became a structural weakness when confronted by Stalinism’s demand for total conformity.

The openness that had nurtured contributions to genuine liberal achievements—such as the ACLU’s free-speech litigation, the NAACP’s early legal strategy leading to Brown v. Board of Education, and pioneering interracial unionism—also enabled disciplined radicals to divert resources in the fund’s later years (5–9, 398–399). In the end, the Garland Fund’s story reveals how liberal pluralism can be exploited by followers of authoritarian ideologies. Its leaders believed democracy would flourish by embracing all forms of dissent, and that belief yielded both historic advances and moral confusion. They funded defenders of liberty as well as some of its adversaries.

Witt’s account serves as both tribute and warning. It celebrates visionaries who sought to dismantle “the bonds of old institutions” (9) while reminding readers that liberal generosity can, if unchecked, become a surrender of liberal judgment. The fund’s entanglement with Stalinism does not overshadow its genuine contributions to civil liberties and racial justice, but it exposes the risks of refusing to distinguish between progressive liberalism and manifestations of authoritarianism on the left.

This history also clarifies why postwar liberals’ decision to distance themselves from Communists, a move now sometimes derided as surrendering to the Red Scare, was both morally justified and politically necessary. It cleared the ground for the liberal achievements of the mid-twentieth century, including the civil-rights movement and the Great Society programs.

Today, as liberal democracy again faces threats from multiple directions, the Garland Fund’s story feels newly relevant. Illiberal forces on the left, represented most prominently by mobs shouting “Globalized the Intifada” in support of a terrorist theocracy, seek to undermine Western civilization to promote “anti-colonialism” and other (misnamed) illiberal ideologies, while illiberal forces on the right normalize racism and antisemitism under nationalist banners. Those progressives and conservatives who value the liberal tradition have more in common with each other than with the authoritarians on either flank. Perhaps in the 1920s, a fund dedicated to assisting radical ideas was a necessary innovation. Today, resources devoted to strengthening America’s liberal core would be a welcome boost to efforts to ward off illiberal extremists of all stripes.