Lessons for Nonprofits in The Radical Fund: The Perils of Self Dealing and the Promise of Incubating Novel Ideas

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).

David M. Schizer

In The Radical Fund,[1] John Witt recreates the world of radical politics during the 1920s and 1930s. His elegantly crafted narrative is jam-packed with vivid sketches of colorful personalities, as well as the social movements and events they influenced. At the center of the plot is the American Fund for Public Service, which was launched with a $1 million donation from Charles Garland, an idealistic and somewhat eccentric heir to a Wall Street fortune.[2] The directors of this “Radical Fund” were a “who’s who” list of prominent progressives, and it supported a range of causes, including civil liberties, civil rights, and organized labor. By chronicling the history of this charitable foundation (“the Fund”), Witt manages to offer an account that is both panoramic and focused. This is not a history of the 1920s and 1930s, but of a particular nonprofit. Yet through this lens, Witt captures the left-wing zeitgeist of an important era. 

          Since Witt writes about a nonprofit, I offer reflections on the way it was managed and regulated. On two dimensions, I come to a somewhat different assessment than Witt. First, the Fund was riddled with conflicts of interests and self dealing, a reality that may not trouble Witt as much as it troubles me. 

Second, the Fund exemplified a feature of our system that I celebrate, but Witt views with more ambivalence: nonprofits can claim subsidies without having to persuade government officials of the merits of their cause. This feature has helped incubate some of the most impactful social movements of our time. This transformative power of nonprofits is on full display in The Radical Fund, as Witt himself emphasizes, but his balanced narrative also offers critiques, which I find less persuasive.

1. Breathing Life Into an Era of Radical Politics 

          To be clear, though, The Radical Fund is not an effort to explore either how to run nonprofits or how to regulate them. Rather, the book is a mosaic of ideas, historical trends, and personalities. 

          The tale begins when Garland initially refused an inheritance from his father. Seeing an opportunity, muckraking author Upton Sinclair steered him to the entrepreneurial Roger Baldwin. A central figure in the book, Baldwin was as tireless as he was determined and well connected. He persuaded Garland to fund a new foundation, supporting left-wing causes. Baldwin served as the Fund’s principal organizing figure in his spare time, while leading the American Civil Liberties Union, which he founded. 

In both capacities, Baldwin invested in the Scopes Trial, working to defend a high school science teacher and football coach named John Scopes, who allegedly had violated Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution. Witt takes us behind the scenes, where we learn that the hapless Scopes actually was not sure whether he had ever taught evolution.[3] He agreed to be the defendant in a test case, which the business leaders of his home town of Dayton, Tennessee arranged, anticipating that the trial would bring attention (and therefore crowds and business) to the town. Baldwin was somewhat less prescient. He hoped the trial would focus national attention on the importance of academic freedom, but the lawyer he helped fund, Clarence Darrow, turned it into a parable about narrow-mindedness in small town America.[4] 

          Witt also introduces us to the courageous and committed James Weldon Johnson, a board member of the Fund and Executive Secretary of the NAACP. Nearly lynched three times,[5] Johnson launched a crusade to end this murderous instrument of oppression. His experience with the Fund was mixed. At times, Baldwin and others opposed funding civil rights work, but they made occasional exceptions, including litigation that focused attention on the exploitation of sharecroppers and early efforts to challenge Jim Crow, which paved the way for Brown v. Board of Education. 

          Witt also chronicles the inside baseball of the labor movement. Violent “Wobblies”[6] competed with moderate followers of Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, who referred to the Fund’s directors as “parlor pinks.”[7] Sidney Hillman wanted to harness productivity gains from technology,[8] while Elizabeth Gurley Flynn focused attention on imprisoned radicals.[9] 

          Witt gives an unvarnished account of the Fund’s insiders, warts and all. He calls out Baldwin for writing a naive (or disingenuous) book about civil liberties in the Soviet Union, which turned a blind eye to the regime’s crimes under Stalin.[10] He also tells us about Johnson’s aspiration to be a writer, which led him to author screenplays laden with racist tropes. Johnson’s reputation was saved only because the industry in those early years did not identify screenwriters.[11] 

Perhaps most bizarre was the saga of Charles Garland, the Fund’s benefactor. His marriage ended when he fell in love with someone else and suggested that, in Witt’s words, “he wanted to bring [her] into the marriage.” Garland evidently was surprised when his wife demurred. “A man who can love two women deeply,” he told a journalist, “is just so much better than a man with only one love.”[12] Building on this unconventional notion, he launched a commune that the press took to calling a “free-love colony.”[13] A novelist would be hard pressed to conjure up these plot twists. 

          Witt does leave out the dark side of one of his bit characters. In passing, he notes that Baldwin’s ACLU formed a committee on academic freedom, which included David Starr Jordan, the former President of Stanford.[14] But Witt doesn’t mention what an odd choice this was. Two decades earlier, President Jordan had forced out an economist named Edward A. Ross at the behest of the University’s principal donor, Jane Stanford.[15] This incident prompted another Stanford professor, Arthur Lovejoy, to leave for Johns Hopkins and to join Columbia philosopher John Dewey in founding the American Association of University Professors.[16] Jordan’s willingness to fire a professor at the urging of a donor made him a surprising choice for a committee on academic freedom (although, admittedly, two decades had gone by, so memories of this episode may have faded). In any event, it’s worth noting that the professor Jordan forced out was no hero. Ross was let go for calling for the exclusion of Asian immigrants on racial grounds. Unfortunately, in calling for his contract not to be renewed, Jane Stanford’s motive was not pure either. She was defending her family’s interest in railroads, which depended on immigrant labor. 

2. The Self-Dealing Fund 

Although Witt is critical of the individuals who populate his book, a minor quibble is that he may be too generous to the Fund itself in one respect: at times its directors were too casual about their fiduciary duties. 

Charities exist to advance their mission, not the interests of insiders. To police this rule, directors must discharge the fiduciary duty of loyalty, which requires them to put the charity’s interests first.[17] Transactions between directors and the fund warrant extra scrutiny. The law does not ban these dealings categorically, if only because insiders might offer especially favorable terms. Yet the law erects guardrails around self-dealing. An important one is that any proposed transaction between a nonprofit and an insider must be disclosed to the board, and the decision then ought to be made only by independent directors, who have no interest in the transaction. 

The fund skated on thin ice by regularly giving grants to organizations that employed its directors. Witt tells us, for example, that the Fund gave one of its first grants to the ACLU, which Baldwin had founded and was leading.[18] Another grant went to The New Republic, where director Robert Morse Lovett was an editor.[19] Substantial funding also went to Brookwood Labor College, even though director Clint Golden served on the faculty. 

When organizations employed board members, the Fund’s main safeguard against improper self-dealing was that it would support only special projects, not operating expenses. Yet the Fund should have gone further and required interested board members to recuse themselves. I gather that this was not the Fund’s practice. 

Indeed, as to one organization, Witt reports that the opposite occurred. James Weldon Johnson wanted a grant for the NAACP, which he ran. But although “Johnson orchestrated the application, . . . in view of his role as a member of the Fund board, he arranged for Arthur Spingarn of the NAACP’s legal committee to apply for the fund.” Even so, “Johnson chimed in to urge that such a grant” would be valuable.[20] Witt tells us that the directors unanimously approved this grant. Two years later, Johnson followed the same playbook. He wanted a grant on the race problem in education and labor, which he developed with W.E.B. Du Bois. But since the Fund had recently turned down another of his proposals, “Johnson decided it was best that he not formally submit grant proposals on his own,” Witt reported. “(He voted on grants to the NAACP all the same.) Du Bois submitted the grant proposal under his name alone. But it was a joint production.”[21] 

However worthy these grants may have been, this process was problematic. The Fund’s directors may have been principled about their causes, but their principles evidently did not extend to the procedures of the Fund. Unfortunately, this lack of discipline may have come at a cost. Witt reports that as Baldwin approached the age of ninety, he expressed regret that the Fund had “yielded too often to friendship and passing pressures.”[22] 

3. Tax Benefits for Charity: Incubating Novel Ideas 

Although the Fund’s leaders may have been sloppy about conflicts of interest, they were meticulous about claiming tax benefits. By qualifying as a tax exempt organization, the Fund was able to avoid a 12.5% corporate tax on its income, which would have totaled about $100,000 between 1922 and 1929.[23] Instead of turning this money over to Uncle Sam, the Fund used it for its mission. 

A.   A “Glaring Democratic Failure”? 

          Witt rightly observes that tax benefits for charity empower private actors to allocate government funds. When a charity earns investment returns, the tax exemption allows it to keep what otherwise would be public funds, which the charity’s leaders can spend as they see fit. Similarly, when a donor makes a deductible contribution, the donor gives not only her own money, but also the tax dollars she otherwise would have owed. 

          Witt offers a critique of these subsidies. To be clear, though, he attributes it to “critics,” without personally endorsing this view: 

As critics noted pointedly at the time, such tax advantages allowed people with money to substitute their own judgments for the decisions of accountable public officials. Special tax benefits were functionally identical to government expenditures, except that wealthy private individuals (not elected representatives) directed the spending according to their own definitions of the social welfare. Tax exemptions and deductions were, in this view, a glaring democratic failure giving those with wealth and power a novel kind of control over public resources.[24] 

B.    Incubator for Novel Ideas 

          But as I have written elsewhere, this delegation to private individuals is a feature, not a bug. There are good reasons for the government to offer what essentially are automatic matching grants through the tax system.[25] 

With the charitable deduction, the government invests only when donors commit their own money. Likewise, with the exclusion, the government invests only when the charity otherwise earns income, which means it is able either to charge for its services or to earn an investment return on donations it has received. Either way, private parties have “skin in the game,” and the government is piggybacking on their judgments. 

With these tax benefits, the government has developed a flexible way to seed countless social experiments. Nonprofits can use public funds to try new approaches, without the bureaucratic and political obstacles associated with government grants. 

At the height of the HIV crisis in the 1980s, for example, the New York Department of Health realized that thousands of lives could be saved by distributing clean needles to drug addicts, since needle sharing had become a deadly pathway for spreading the disease. Yet there was an outcry among taxpayers, who balked at facilitating and funding the use of illegal narcotics. Faced with this vociferous opposition, the government did not proceed. Instead, the Robin Hood Foundation and other nonprofits began distributing clean needles, relying in part on tax subsidies to fund them. Once the nonprofit sector demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach, the political opposition dissipated and the government began distributing needles.[26] 

This is but one example of a broader strategy. Even when a goal is uncontroversial (such as preventing the spread of a deadly disease), there may be bitter disagreements about how to pursue it. Tax benefits for nonprofits empower the sector to experiment with different approaches. 

This hands-off subsidy model is valuable when not just the means, but also the ends themselves, are controversial. It is no accident that the civil rights movement began in churches, the NAACP, and other nonprofits. Tragically, the government was neglecting (and, indeed, exacerbating) the historic wrongs suffered by Black Americans. Majoritarian institutions were deadlocked (or worse). Instead, the path forward lay through the nonprofit sector, funded in part with tax subsidies for charity. This government funding was available, even though actively allocated funding was not. 

The same was true of women’s rights, the environmental movement, and LGBTQ+ rights. Each of these causes depended on tax benefits afforded to nonprofits. In their early years, these social movements did not have wide enough public support to receive actively allocated government funds.[27] Critics should consider these historic achievements in deciding whether tax benefits to charity really are “a glaring democratic failure,” as the critics referenced by Witt have suggested. 

Is the practice undemocratic? As a formal matter, the answer clearly is “no.” After all, Congress has enacted these tax benefits and always has the power to revoke them. Our democratic process has determined that some public money should be allocated, essentially, as matching grants for private philanthropy. 

Admittedly, this democratically enacted choice delegates decisions to individual citizens, instead of government officials. But again, government officials are likely to follow the will of the majority. Although that is the right decision rule in most cases, relying exclusively on it can be costly. If we do, novel programs and causes are less likely to develop, and society will be the worse for it. 

The Fund is a case study of this incubation of controversial ideas. “The Fund’s modest endowment,” Witt observed, “had allowed its directors to put issues on the political agenda that elected officials had skirted time and again.”[28] This was certainly true of the Fund’s pivotal role in launching the legal battle against Jim Crow. As Thurgood Marshall put it soon after filing the Brown case, the Fund’s support “formed the groundwork for the first attack.”[29] This historic contribution alone justified Baldwin’s ultimate assessment of the Fund’s legacy. “I suppose,” he said, “we did quite a lot of good.”[30] 

Needless to say, some ideas funded with charitable subsidies are misguided or even offensive.[31] Indeed, I have reservations about some of the initiatives pursued by the Fund. But this is the inevitable consequence of a system that entrusts funding decisions to private citizens. (And, of course, government officials have been known to fund their share of misguided ideas as well.) 

Assuming we think government officials have more reliable judgment than private citizens–which, again, is a debatable proposition–we could rely solely on actively-allocated government grants, instead of passively-allocated tax benefits.[32] This might prevent bad ideas from being funded, rescuing us from a problem we can call “false positives.” But the downside of more active screening is that these officials might block initiatives that are worthwhile but not (yet) popular. This failure to fund good ideas can be called “false negatives.” In deciding how actively government officials should evaluate nonprofit initiatives, we need to weigh the effects of false positives and false negatives. 

The critics that Witt referenced seem to be especially concerned about the disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals. In principle, these critics might have two different concerns. 

First, when a tax benefit is provided with a deduction, it is more valuable for people with higher marginal tax rates. Deducting a dollar saves 37 cents for someone in the 37% bracket, but only 10 cents for someone in the 10% bracket. Yet this advantage to higher income taxpayers (known as the “upside down” effect) can be eliminated. Congress can use a credit that is uniform for everyone (e.g., in reducing taxes by 20 cents for every dollar given to charity, regardless of the taxpayer’s marginal rate).[33] 

Second, and more fundamentally, wealthy people have more money to give, and thus can claim more in tax subsidies for charity. This would be especially troubling if we viewed charity solely as a consumption good, which is valuable only to the donor. But this obviously is not the case. Donations are supposed to improve the lives–not of donors–but of the charity’s beneficiaries, whether they are students at universities, patients at hospitals, or clients at soup kitchens.[34] Admittedly, the circumstances of beneficiaries vary. Some are needier than others. But the tax subsidy must benefit a broad group–well beyond a nonprofit’s donors and insiders--or the subsidies would not be available. 

          This system does give wealthier donors a greater ability to claim charitable subsidies, if only because they have more resources to donate.[35] But this is not the only situation in which wealthy people have extra influence. They have more to spend on consumption as well, and thus get extra attention from businesses. Unfortunately, by making larger campaign contributions, they may also have added influence in elections and, therefore, on some decisions by government officials.[36] 

But unlike in these other situations, tax benefits to charity offer a silver lining to those who are especially concerned about inequality: these subsidies incentivize wealthy people to support charities. Instead of buying luxury goods for themselves, donors fund scholarships and build soup kitchens. Encouraging this voluntary redistribution of wealth is a goal that should resonate with critics of inequality.[37] 

C.    Less Generous Subsidies For Political Activity 

The last Section argued that a charity’s eligibility for tax subsidies should not depend on what government officials think of the cause. But this principle was not yet fully accepted in the early years of the income tax. In a notorious case, for instance, a Jewish group was denied a nonprofit charter because it planned to hold meetings on Sunday.[38] 

1.     Ending Viewpoint-Based Limits on Section 501(c)(3) Organizations 

This sort of pushback was directed at the Fund as well. Witt tells us that the Fund’s initial effort to incorporate in New York was rebuffed because of its ties to radical causes, so it incorporated in Delaware instead.[39] 

Treasury also challenged the Fund’s tax exemption. The Fund claimed to be organized and operated for “educational purposes,” but Treasury invoked 1919 guidance distinguishing “propaganda” from “education.”[40] 

This is a perilous line to draw, since it can be applied in ways that are not viewpoint neutral. Over a half century later, Judge Abner Mikvah rejected a variation of this approach, known as “the full and fair exposition test,” as unconstitutionally vague.[41] “The standards may not be so imprecise,” he wrote, “that they afford latitude to individual IRS officials to pass judgment on the content and quality of an applicant's views and goals and therefore to discriminate against those engaged in protected First Amendment activities.”[42] 

2.     Limits on Political Activity of Section 501(c)(3) Organizations 

In seeking tax exempt status, the Fund faced a regulatory environment that was more restrictive than today in some ways, and less restrictive in others. Government officials still tried to apply viewpoint-based limits, as noted above, and those have largely been eliminated.[43] But at the same time, Congress had not yet added statutory limits on a nonprofit’s political activities. 

Treasury still tried to limit these activities, and its efforts were litigated with mixed results.[44] In the most prominent case, Slee v. Commissioner, Judge Learned Hand concluded that political activity was problematic if it was not closely related to the mission.[45] 

As Witt observed, the case was about whether taxpayers could deduct contributions to the American Birth Control League, which received grants from the Fund.[46] In language that Witt quoted in part, Judge Hand said that “Political agitation as such is outside the statute, however innocent the aim. . .  Controversies of that sort must be conducted without public subvention; the Treasury stands aside from them.”[47] Since Witt’s discussion of the case was brief, he seemed to suggest that this was all Hand had to say in the matter. Other commentators have focused on this language as well, implying that Hand had offered a per se bar on lobbying.[48] 

But in fact, he did not deem all lobbying to be problematic. Rather, he acknowledged that charities could still seek to influence legislation, as long as this effort advanced their mission: 

[T]here are many charitable, literary and scientific ventures that as an incident to their success require changes in the law. A charity may need a special charter allowing it to receive larger gifts than the general laws allow.  It would be strained to say that for this reason it became less exclusively charitable, though much might have to be done to convince legislators.  A society to prevent cruelty to children, or animals, needs the positive support of law to accomplish its ends. It must have power to coerce parents and owners, and it does not lose its character when it seeks to strengthen its arm. A state university is constantly trying to get appropriations from the Legislature; for all that, it seems to us still an exclusively educational institution. No less so if, for instance, in Tennessee it tries to get leave to teach evolutionary biology.[49] 

For Hand, lobbying was permissible if it was relevant to the mission. “All such activities are mediate to the primary purpose, and would not, we should think, unclass the promotors,” he concluded. “The agitation is ancillary to the end in chief, which remains the exclusive purpose of the association.”[50] 

But in the case of the American Birth Control League, Hand concluded that its mission was to run a clinic for married women,[51] and that efforts to relax legal limits on birth control were beyond its scope. “We cannot say that the Board was without warrant in concluding that this aspect of the League's work was not confined solely to relieving its hospital work from legal obstacles.”[52] 

This was an odd conclusion, since the clinic’s goal was to empower women to have fewer children. Hand acknowledged the strained nature of his reasoning, but invoked deference to the court below (the Board of Tax Appeals) to justify it: 

Indeed, were we in a position to pass upon the evidence de novo, we should be somewhat slow to believe that the ends proposed did not still include convincing Legislatures and other influential persons that it was desirable in the interests of the moral and social well-being of the community that all persons should be free to control the number of their children. . . . Our review is limited to the correction of obvious errors; we cannot say that the Board committed any here.[53] 

In 1934, Congress responded to Slee and other cases by providing a different rule.[54] The new test for determining whether lobbying was permissible turned–not on whether it advanced the mission–but on whether it represented only a modest fraction of the nonprofit’s activities. A condition was added to Section 501(c)(3) that “no substantial part of the activities” of the organization “is carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting, to influence legislation.”[55] 

Eighteen years later, at the urging of then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, Congress added a ban on what nonprofit lawyers call “electioneering.” Section 501(c)(3) organizations could “not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.” 

Yet these clauses had not yet been enacted when the Fund awarded most of its grants, including some that were meant to influence legislation. For example, the Fund supported the NAACP’s effort to persuade Congress to pass a federal ban on lynching, as noted above. Witt offers a compelling description of the NAACP’s success in the House, which passed the so-called Dyer Bill, followed by heartbreaking failure in the Senate. 

Although the NAACP failed at its immediate goal of securing legislation, it succeeded in its longer term goal of influencing public opinion. Witt recounts how NAACP Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson joined forces with Edward L. Bernays, a publicity expert (and Sigmund Freud’s nephew), to publish full-page newspaper ads across the nation under the headline, “the Shame of America.”[56] Witt reports that this ad campaign “touched American public opinion, even in (or perhaps especially in) white circles” and quotes W.E.B. Dubois, who concluded that the NAACP  had “made five million intelligent Americans think about lynching” and had “reached the unreached.”[57] 

This mixed result should be of interest to nonprofit experts for reasons Witt does not mention. Although efforts to lobby legislators generally are beyond the pale for so-called “Section 501(c)(3) organizations”--that is, the most generously subsidized nonprofits, which can receive tax-deductible contributions–efforts to influence public opinion are still permitted, if pursued the right way. For example, a think tank certainly can issue a report analyzing public policy issues–and, indeed, even making recommendations–but should not call upon voters to penalize an elected official for her vote on a particular bill. If we apply this distinction to the NAACP’s campaign against lynching–even though this distinction obviously was not yet in effect–a Section 501(c)(3) organization can run an ad campaign educating the public about the horrors of lynching, even though it cannot lobby legislators to vote for a specific anti-lynching bill. Notably, then, the successful part of the NAACP’s effort would be permissible today for a Section 501(c)(3) organization, even though the unsuccessful part would not (if it represented too large a share of the nonprofit’s budget). 

3.     The 501(c)(4) Alternative 

To pursue political activity that is not permitted for 501(c)(3) organizations, nonprofits often create an affiliate that qualifies under Section 501(c)(4),[58] a provision that dates back to 1913 when the modern income tax was enacted.[59] A (c)(4) is tax exempt but, unlike a (c)(3), contributions to it are not deductible. 

Witt recounts that the Fund helped pioneer this (c)(4) alternative. When the government argued that the Fund was too political to qualify under (c)(3), the Fund claimed a tax exemption under (c)(4), using a theory developed by its capable tax counsel, Nicholas Kelly.[60] This alternative could not deliver a deduction for Charles Garland but, as Witt explains, he did not seem interested in one anyway.[61] 

While acknowledging the Fund’s creativity and tenacity in protecting its tax exemption, Witt relates a criticism that, again, may not represent his personal view. The Fund developed a strategy that its political foes could also use: 

The civic league exemption. . . was hardly restricted to the American Fund. To the contrary, the Fund’s political enemies swiftly took up the same tax advantages. . . . [I]t is an irony . . . that the exemption the American Fund had helped to establish applied to them all. Worse still, at least from the perspective of the Fund, subsidies like the tax exemption offered special privileges not in proportion to the righteousness of a cause but in proportion to the sheer size of the sums dedicated to it. The implications were ominous. It was the adversaries of the Garland Fund who had the money to take advantage of the tax code. The beneficiaries of the Fund’s efforts, by contrast, were among the poorest and most downtrodden people in America.[62] 

          While (c)(4)s are available to causes on both sides of the political aisle, as Witt emphasized, the playing field has not been as imbalanced as he suggests. Wealthy individuals do use them to support conservative causes, including Charles Koch[63] and Barre Seid.[64] Yet wealthy individuals also fund progressive causes. A recent high profile example was Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, who declared that “Earth is now our only shareholder” in donating the bulk of his company to a (c)(4), controlled by his family, which funds lobbying for environmental causes.[65] Likewise, George Soros has funded a (c)(4) called the “Open Society Action Fund.”[66] 

          Labor Unions also have been spared from the income tax since it was first enacted. Although they are exempt under Section 501(c)(5)--not Section 501(c)(4)--they are permitted to lobby for legislation.[67] Unions do face limits in contributing to campaigns,[68] though, so they form other types of tax exempt affiliates for this purpose. 

          In addition, just as progressive causes have been incubated in Section 501(c)(3)s, as noted above, they often form (c)(4) affiliates to engage in lobbying and endorse candidates. Indeed, NAACP is a (c)(4), although it has a (c)(3) affiliate.[69] The same is true of the National Organization for Women,[70] the Natural Resources Defense Fund,[71] and some LGBTQ+ rights groups.[72] 

          So although the Fund was a pioneer, it was not an outlier in using (c)(4) to advance progressive causes. While this structure has been available to both conservatives and progressives, the latter have made ample use of it. 

To sum up, I have a more positive view of nonprofit subsidies than a perspective Witt offers in the book (which, again, he attributes to critics, not to himself). These subsidies are well positioned–indeed, better positioned than actively allocated subsidies–to incubate causes that are novel, even controversial. The historical record bears this out. The nonprofit sector–not the government–launched many of the most transformative social movements in the past 100 years, including for civil rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and the environment. 

While my view of the sector is more unequivocally positive than Witt’s may be, my assessment of the way the fund was managed was less favorable. There seems to have been rampant self-dealing. Witt reports that the Fund frequently gave grants to organizations affiliated with its directors, and that at least one director regularly voted on grants to his own organization. 

But to be clear, none of this takes anything away from The Radical Fund, which is a truly outstanding book. The Fund was a font of ferment and activism. By chronicling its history, Witt brings to life a fascinating generation of progressive leaders, vividly depicting their dreams, disappointments, quirks, and flaws. The book is an important contribution.

David M. Schizer is Dean Emeritus and Harvey R. Miller Professor of Law & Economics, Columbia Law School. You can reach him by e-mail at david.schizer@law.columbia.edu.