An Elegy for the Actual Founding Generation

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on John Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America (Simon and Schuster, 2025). 

Aziz Rana

            John Witt’s superb The Radical Fund tells the interwar story of the Garland Fund, a relatively small institution endowed by an idealist young socialist named Charles Garland, which nonetheless played a dramatically outsized role in bringing together key reformers, organizers, lawyers, and politicians across the era’s broad American left. The Fund itself has an almost Zelig-like quality, intersecting at some point with seemingly every major activist in the 1920s and 1930s on behalf of racial equality, labor rights, and civil liberties. In narrating the history of the Fund, Witt ultimately narrates nothing less that the birth of the United States itself—certainly the birth of the version of the country many Americans today embrace as their own. The book is thus a profound and incredibly moving testament to the collective efforts and achievements of the individuals who, in many ways, are the actual founding generation of the modern United States. 

            In popular culture, there persists a tendency to think of the country as having a single, unbroken constitutional project, from the eighteenth century to the present. In this account, later achievements are part of an unfolding liberal essence, whose germ was already present in the 1780s. Yet, in truth, the constitutional compact Americans, who came of age by the end of the twentieth century, have lived under bears little relation to the commitments and cultural world of Hamilton and Madison. The twentieth century compact linked together a series of ideological commitments that fundamentally broke with the eighteenth and nineteenth century defenses of explicit white supremacy and labor oppression. This new compact entailed a reading of the Constitution as grounded in racial inclusion and the legal overcoming of Jim Crow; an anti-totalitarian commitment to civil liberty and speech rights; a defense of market capitalism, but one hedged in by an entrenched regulatory and social welfare state; an embrace of institutional checks and balances, with the Supreme Court as a reformist participant; and a vision of US power as promoting these same internal values globally.

            In returning us to the world of the 1920s, The Radical Fund reminds the reader of what an unfamiliar country the United States was not so long ago. His cast of reformers exist in a society of brutal white violence and the ever-present specter of lynching, alongside extreme economic immiseration and private armies sent by business to wage actual, not metaphorical, war on labor.  These reformers are thus participants in a broad legal, economic, political, and cultural turn, and embody the generational hinge between a nineteenth century order and the one many American now would recognize. 

The post-Cold War years of the 1990s and 2000s saw an endless stream of hagiographies to the eighteenth-century revolutionary elites, with Lincoln added into the mix. In recounting the history of the Garland Fund and in honoring the life’s work of those involved, I see Witt’s book as a vital and beautifully written contribution to a new cultural repository. This repository speaks far more authentically to American achievement. Indeed, books such as this one—especially so grippingly told—are worthy in own right of memorialization through popular art, musicals and film, like the 1990s and 2000s hagiographies.

The Radical Fund proceeds with a deep spirit of optimism. If anything, the book’s implicit mood often verges on a sense of triumph, despite the fact that its time period was a low point for the American left. Many radicals understood the 1920s—given the effects of the first Red Scare, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan, and the broader climate of violent reaction—as years of defeat and despondency.  Union membership declined; circulation for the NAACP’s The Crisis dropped to less than a third of its 1919 peak; A. Philip Randolph’s Black socialist The Messenger ceased operation entirely by the end of the decade. Charles Garland himself collapsed into deep depression, at least in small part impacted by dashed hopes. 

Still, Witt’s focus on the Fund, during this era of retrenchment, teases out the early building blocks of what would become the defining legislative, judicial, and cultural victories of New Deal and Civil Rights eras.  We meet numerous figures, essentially before they gained real political power by the mid-century, who would eventually steer a very different American state.  And the reader’s knowledge of these victories to come gives a political ebullience to revisiting the 1920s. It even stiffens one’s sense of optimism about moments like our own. Perhaps, just as radicals then did not know that a new world was around the corner, we too in the face of authoritarian reaction may not be able to see the emancipatory changes on the horizon. It is a remarkable and worthy achievement—a real gift to readers—to offer both an honest assessment of structural injustice while sustaining one’s hope even in difficult times. 

Yet, for all its near-triumphalism, I could not help but read the book as an elegy for the American twentieth century, given the path the country has travelled since the 1920s. If Witt describes the beginning of a transformation, Americans now in many ways live at the historical breakdown of that mid-twentieth century compact. Trumpist politics amounts to a systematic assault on all the constituent elements of the order built by past reformers—from racial liberalism and basic civil liberties to the New Deal state and the Supreme Court as a reformist guide. 

Just as significantly, The Radical Fund’s story implicitly highlights how the infrastructural currents within which an ecumenical interwar left swam—the unions, the worker schools, the Black political organizations and churches, the political parties, the civic associations—have all receded under the weight of a half-century of neoliberal economic reorganization and profound cultural change. 1920s leftists may have been disheartened that the social revolution they anticipated had not arrived, but even during a time of reaction and seemingly declining numbers they operated in a context of extensive intermediate institutions.  These institutions shaped the schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods of a multi-racial U.S. working class. Mass organizing and movement-building since the Civil War meant that left ideas—even if under 1920s assault—were organically embedded in the everyday experiences of countless Americans. The roots had been planted for the burgeoning of a latent and massive political majority. In a sense, Americans today live at the other end of a historical horizon, in no small measure due to how dramatically the political terrain—one that the Garland Fund both benefited from and helped to expand—has been reconstituted.

For this reason, Witt’s book can offer more questions than answers when it gestures toward a theory of social change. One is left to wonder why this fund, again without that large of an endowment, time and again seemed linked to the figures and movements that between the 1930s and 1960s would reshape the United States on liberal grounds. Witt seems to shift between two potential responses. He is more convincing when he treats the Fund as an expression of movement vitality. In those moments in the book, he emphasizes how the Fund was an open space for an incredibly rich and variegated American left—from communists and anarchists to democratic socialists and eventual New Deal liberals. As Witt writes, unlike the philanthropic enterprises generated by business oligarchs such as the Carnegies—who used largess in part to legitimate their economic power—the Fund’s benefactor and directors were of the left.  They thus shaped their institution in the mold of the left’s cultural world. And for this reason, the Fund lived “on both sides of an essential and inescapable conflict” between revolution and reform, in the process “host[ing] debates among progressives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, and Communists” (497). 

Thus, the success of the Fund was not necessarily due to the steering wisdom of the directors, or their special foresight in how best to guide the society. Instead, it was because the Fund maintained contact with all the messiness and internal contradictions of the left’s overlapping institutions. The result was that it gave sustenance to movement actors broadly speaking, with both striking victories and false turns as evidence.

Yet, at times, Witt appears to embrace precisely a vision of change that emphasizes the Fund directors’ guiding knowledge. He can depict its central figures, like Roger Baldwin, as holding together a moderate middle that time and again seems to know just how to balance between what he castigates as a “wild-eyed IWW” (351), along with similarly irresponsible communists, on the one side, and the dominant forces of the status quo on the other. In this way, Witt can occasionally use language—“the race question surged to the fore of the Fund’s deliberations in a way that reshaped the future of America democracy” (326); “What happened next helped alter the life trajectory of the man [A. Philip Randolph] that would become the most influential Black union organizer in the twentieth century”—that make his Fund heroes seem almost like the invisible movers of all social change. 

One consequence of this latter tendency is that the book largely avoids interrogating the limits of the board’s politics when that politics coincides with what readers today would see as American liberalism’s conventional wisdom. And by the same token, almost all the criticism of the Fund’s choices is when it sides with views Witt depicts as emblematic of the less responsible left. Witt may well be correct about these assessments. But it does mean that the book refrains from the thorny matter of whether from our vantage point—at the end of the long twentieth century—the liberal mainstream is at all implicated in the crises of the present. Did the mid-century constitutional compact unravel in part due to its own instabilities and internal weaknesses or should the only goal for the future be restoration?

 One clear site of potential liberal self-examination would have been the question of foreign policy and American empire, issues in the present that have roiled the Democratic party and its coalition. But Witt treats in only two sentences the fact that Baldwin, in keeping as well with the ultimate direction of the ACLU, abandoned anti-imperialism: “Baldwin did adopt some general guidelines. The Fund would focus on America projects rather than international or foreign ones” (110).  The matter is left there. This is even though such a choice pushed against the desire of many radicals, like ACLU co-founder Crystal Eastman, to link anti-imperialism to anti-racism and anti-capitalism, and to treat the foreign as inextricably joined to any effort at domestic transformation. This silence avoids grappling with the long-term implications American liberalism’s cleaving of the foreign and the domestic, in ways that would have profound effects on Cold War America. By the 1950s, it was precisely questions of the US in the world, embedded in the debates about decolonization and Soviet rivalry, that would both lead to the systematic repression of left critics of the Cold War and play a significant role in containing domestic reform horizons. 

But ultimately, my wariness of this strain in the book is not about re-litigating strategic choices between competing, if shifting, left-liberal blocs. It is a concern that the idea of the Fund—at its best—as a wise and moderating change agent can direct the reader away from appreciating both what lessons to draw about social change today and why his reformers are genuine heroes.

Witt ends the book by noting the number of extremely wealthy people in 2025 who could invest in a similar philanthropic enterprise. This is a worthy call and certainly such money could have truly productive effects. But the Garland Fund story doesn’t really suggest that having the wealthy fund good causes is necessarily the pathway to change, especially if those efforts aren’t located in a rich cultural world. For starters, it is a very high bar to expect even truly well-meaning fund directors to get right the key strategic choices. Again, the Zelig-like success of the Fund was due less to the money and its distribution, and far more to the depth of left infrastructural life at the time. Baldwin himself when assessing their strategic choices felt that the Fund got it wrong more often than not: “we often merely gave blood transfusions to agencies already headed for the grave” (531). But in an era of extensive left experimentation and institutional depth—despite reactionary headwinds—the Fund’s margin of error was incredibly large. Thus, from today’s perspective, Baldwin’s more pessimistic assessment misses how the group, by being of the left—again in all its internal tensions—and by seeding the left generally, seeded sites too that would flourish. The takeaway for the present, which Witt clearly agrees with too, highlights the importance of rebuilding a cultural world within which a vibrant left can grow, including through critical funding.    

Finally, deemphasizing the matter of their strategic wisdom suggests another ground for viewing the book’s figures—Roger Baldwin, Sidney Hillman, A. Philip Randolph, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Garland, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, to name a few—as both American founders and American heroes. In reading The Radical Fund, I was struck, repeatedly, less by where these figures stood in the internal left debates of the 1920s and far more by the type of American cultural class that they embodied. Many of these individuals—black and white, men and women—were, for all intents and purposes, part of that era’s elite, given education, wealth, social standing, and leadership status within organizations. A striking number of them even attended or taught at Harvard, well before the institution’s broader middle-class, religious, racial, and gender accessibility. 

Yet, at the same time, these were individuals, including from patrician backgrounds, who expected to face repression and chose paths that meant prison, criminal prosecution, death threats, and even the potential of white lynching. The number of these figures that went to jail is notable, starting with both Charles Garland and Roger Baldwin. Above all, they took profound personal risks out of a sense of moral necessity. This fact actually can be missed when reading the book, because so much of what Witt valorizes in their politics seems uncontroversial when viewed through today’s liberal eyes. Yet, many of them fully understood that they inhabited an authoritarian social order in which dominant powers were opposed to those principles. Contesting that order necessarily required the willingness to bear intense individual costs.

One profound difference between that era’s reformers and today’s cultural elite—indeed, our professional-managerial class more generally—is a disconnect between the recognition of democracy in peril and an existential embrace of the courage necessary to demand change. It is hardly original to say that for future generations today’s threats, at home and abroad, to basic rights and democracy—from the immigration prison to Gaza—will be as self-evident as when we view the 1920s fight against Jim Crow and labor exploitation. And so, perhaps the main reason I experience this book as an elegy is because it forces me to confront the heroism of the past as well as the very different internal sensibilities and calculations of today’s cultural elite—all of us included. The question of the day is whether we can muster anything approaching the same existential reserves to be worthy inheritors of their legacy.

Aziz Rana is the J. Donald Monan, S.J., University Professor of Law and Government at Boston College.  He can be reached by email at ranaaz@bc.edu.