In 1920, Charles Garland, the wealthy heir to a banking fortune, made newspaper headlines for doing the unthinkable: he declined to accept an inheritance of more than a million dollars from his late father's estate.
Garland was disillusioned by the era's gross inequality - the top 10 percent of American income earners took in half the country's annual national income. Garland saw his refusal to add to that problem as a way of standing up to systemic economic inequality.
But Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle," the 1906 novel that exposed the brutal working conditions in the Chicago stock yards, read about Garland's decision and thought he had a better idea. In a letter to Garland, Sinclair urged him not to refuse the money, but to instead give it away. He put him in touch with Roger Baldwin, a Harvard-educated labor advocate who had just founded the American Civil Liberties Union.
Garland and Baldwin met and came up with a plan. Garland would bequest nearly a million dollars (the rough equivalent of $18 million today) to endow a philanthropic foundation called the American Fund for Public Service. Baldwin would run the foundation with a board of directors comprised of people who were actively involved in efforts to create a more just society.
John Fabian Witt's new book, "The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America" (Simon & Schuster), unpacks the American Fund's 19 years in existence, a period during which it gave away $2 million to a wide array of labor, racial equality, and civil liberties causes, and the various quarrels about and struggles for progressive change during the period preceding and following the New Deal.
"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," Witt writes. "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."
