{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":" John Witt and The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America","description":"In this episode of Capital for Good, we speak with John Fabian Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a professor of history at Yale, and one of the country\u2019s most distinguished legal historians. The author of numerous award-winning books, including American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19 and Lincoln\u2019s Code: The Laws of War in American History, Witt joins us to discuss his latest, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon & Schuster, 2025). We begin with the genesis \u2014 of the Garland Fund and Witt\u2019s interest in writing about it. He explains that most histories of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case include mention of a "funny little foundation" that gave early support to the NAACP, launching the legal campaign that would culminate in the desegregation landmark. Witt discovered, however, that Brown was "just the tip of the iceberg.\u201d The Garland Fund \u2014 named for the young idealist Charles Garland, who at twenty-one refused a million-dollar inheritance \u2014 in fact had its fingerprints on a sweeping range of progressive movements in the United States that would shape American democracy. And Witt notes, the conditions of 1920s America that shaped the fund\u2019s creation \u2014 deep economic inequality, declining labor unions, surging ethno-nationalism, immigration backlash, threats to free speech \u2014 look "astonishingly like 2020s America." The fund would come to be known officially as the American Fund for Public Service.  We discuss the fund's three principal focus areas \u2014 labor, civil liberties, and civil rights \u2014 and the extraordinary cast assembled by inaugural director Roger Baldwin, founder of the ACLU, to govern it, including labor leader (and New Deal \u201cindustrial democracy\u201d architect) Sidney Hillman; James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP; and editors from The Nation and The New Republic. We explore some of the initial tensions between the fund\u2019s labor and racial justice priorities, and the eventual fusion of the two via efforts like A. Philip Randolph\u2019s creation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the all-Black union within the Pullman Car Company. Witt suggests that this marriage of civil rights and labor organizing \u2014 \u201cworking class solidarity across racial lines\u201d \u2014 was a central contribution of the fund and its grantees. We also touch on the fund's intentionally unconventional approach to philanthropy. Conceived as a kind of "anti-Rockefeller Foundation," the Garland Fund had virtually no staff and was deeply conscious of the \u201cparadox\u201d of \u201cusing a Wall Street fortune to attack capitalism and inequality.\u201d Many of the fund's progressive investments failed, and others would take years to come to fruition, paying dividends in the newly \u201cplastic\u201d political landscape of the Great Depression.  We conclude with lessons for today from the Garland Fund's experience. Witt asks, if the industrial union was the unit \u201cwell suited to manage mass production capitalism\u201d and therefore \u201cresponsible for a good deal of equalization of the American economy\u201d for much of the 20th century \u2014 what is the 21st century equivalent. "What's going to connect people together and to their economic futures such that some kind of decent political coalition of people who feel the security sufficient to be good citizens can come out of it?" This episode of Capital for Good was recorded at a book talk hosted by the Open Society Foundations in New York. Mentioned in this Episode:  The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America, (Simon & Schuster, 2025) Lincoln's Code: The Laws of War in American History, (Simon & Schuster, 2012) How to Save the American Experiment, (New York Times, 2025) NAACP CIO ACLU ","author_name":"Capital for Good","author_url":"http:\/\/tamerinstitute.libsyn.com\/website","html":"