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

Winner of the Terry McAdam Book Award

As recommended on The Ezra Klein Show

From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the “engrossing” (The New York Times) secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund.

In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance. In a world of shocking wealth disparities, shameless racism, and political repression, Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambitious progressive projects, including the ACLU and the NAACP.

The men and women of the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black. They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes. Yet shared beliefs linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.

By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation.

A “fascinating” testament to how “radical philanthropy can foster important and necessary changes in American life” (The Wall Street Journal), The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—and an empowering roadmap for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.