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).
Laura Weinrib
Nathan Margold’s oft-debated framework for the NAACP’s desegregation litigation campaign, John Witt convincingly argues in The Radical Fund, “was not a guide, naive or otherwise, to the establishment of new rights,” but “a strategy for navigating power in the institutions where authority resides” (423). That bold reinterpretation is one of many insights in Witt’s magisterial new book—and in my view, the most emblematic of the project as a whole. The Radical Fund is at its most illuminating when it follows its actors to the place where twentieth-century civil-rights, civil-liberties, and labor strategies quietly converged: not in the declaration of abstract rights, but in the allocation of authority. Over the course of the 1920s, the administrators and beneficiaries of the Garland Fund came to understand that substantive victories were downstream of “governing who decides” (426)—a view they helped write into labor law via the Reading Formula and, ultimately, the Wagner Act’s embrace of majority rule and exclusive representation.
What Witt’s narrative strongly suggests, but does not expressly spell out, is how his cast of characters learned that legacy-shaping lesson. Writing in our own dispiriting moment of progressive enervation and exclusion, Witt is understandably inclined to recover moments of cross-faction creativity. To be sure, he tells us, the board’s fractious assemblage of labor leaders, racial-justice advocates, academics, and reformers “bickered” and “competed.” Yet they also “cooperated” and “learned from one another,” working together to advance “shared beliefs” (4). It is therefore tempting to imagine the Garland Fund as a laboratory of collaboration and compromise, where transformative figures from the left-liberal coalition of the 1920s bracketed their ideological differences, heard each other’s concerns, and mutually developed a stronger set of tactics for ready deployment once the balance of power shifted. Yet Witt’s account points instead toward a different conclusion, less heartening but no less relevant. More often than not, disagreements on the board devolved into procedural combat: narrow votes, stacked committees, and acrimonious infighting. Witt is a careful historian, and he declines to assert a causal connection where the archives don’t supply one. But it is reasonable to conclude that what the Fund taught its stewards, above all, was that compromise is fragile and turf battles inevitable even among putative allies. Having learned through administering the Fund that control of procedures decides outcomes, Witt’s protagonists carried that lesson into policy.
Read in that light, The Radical Fund is less a story about building consensus than a study in structuring who decides, first in the Fund’s own governance and then in the legal and administrative regimes its alumni helped to construct. Internally, the stakes were evident early on. Witt shows the board’s Communist contingent methodically enlarging its leverage in the 1920s: adding Benjamin Gitlow on the implicit (and never consummated) understanding that William Z. Foster would vacate his seat; bringing on Robert Dunn, whose Party membership was not disclosed to non-Communist directors; then recruiting Clarina Michelson once the bloc had the votes to do it. These stepwise moves turned a vocal minority into a durable faction. The anti-Communist directors responded in kind. They stacked key committees with labor liberals and civil-liberties allies, and they set grant conditions to preclude diversion to Party causes.
The sparring came to a head in the Fund’s most consequential internal fight, the 1930 NAACP grant. Witt reveals a polarized board practiced in procedural hardball; “the board’s entire left wing cycled through parliamentary maneuvers designed to sabotage the grant” (390). In a meeting where the directors were otherwise evenly divided, NAACP executive secretary James Weldon Johnson was the deciding vote, and no rule formally required him to step aside. When he declined to recuse himself, the anti-Communists maintained a bare majority, and in a series of six-to-five votes, defeated a sequence of motions to divert the funds to alternative causes. Had the Fund’s recusal rules been formalized or the balance of power shifted only slightly, there would never have been a Margold Report in the first place. It is impossible to read this scene as a triumph of shared purpose. It is instead a tutorial in how to control agendas and marshal votes that the Fund’s directors would carry outward.
The fight over the NAACP education campaign only increased the vitriol among the directors, as the Party’s efforts to embarrass the NAACP in Scottsboro—which Witt links to lingering resentment over the grant vote—make starkly apparent. Witt notes that the Fund did attempt a conciliatory posture, releasing money to both the ILD and the NAACP, but here too the effort at mediation soon dissolved into partisan rancor. He presents Charles Hamilton Houston as “an early adopter of something like the Garland Fund’s middle ground between the NAACP old guard and the insurgent ILD” (442), who participated in ILD-led Scottsboro protests while serving on the NAACP’s National Legal Committee. For that very straddling, the ILD denounced him as an “agent of capitalism,” and a Party-affiliated civil rights group associated with Fund director Clarina Michelson named him one of its “Uncle Toms of the year” (443). The episode makes plain how quickly bridge-building slid into sectarian policing, and why centralized decision rules came to look like the surest path to implementing organizational goals.
So how did these bitter lessons about the allocation of power play out in policy? Take the Margold example I opened with. In Witt’s account, it was Indian law that taught Margold that administrative power often dominates formal rights. Margold transposed the power logic he developed in his early work on Pueblo land and tribal governance to the assault on Jim Crow. Rather than pursue an endless series of “eye-dropper” equalization suits that would “barely cause a ripple” (428), he proposed to attack the “administrative structure of Jim Crow” (429), namely, the offices and jurisdictions that determined how schools were organized and which students they served. This is an important and persuasive retelling, but it is not the only mechanism on offer. Witt also shows Fund affiliates warning that courtroom victories could be undone in administration. And it was the Fund’s own priorities that steered Margold toward targeting decision-making power—first the all-white primary, and eventually the state-created allocations of authority that sustained school segregation. It is not implausible that Fund insiders absorbed those commitments, at least in part, through their wrangling with the Communists over the NAACP grant.
It is in New Deal labor law, however, that the preference for unitary decision rules—structures that promise to contain antagonistic forces by minimizing internal vetoes—plays out most concretely. In 1933, when Leo Wolman and William Leiserson (both saturated in the “new unionism” associated with Fund director Sidney Hillman) faced a bitter dispute at Berkshire Knitting Mills near Reading, Pennsylvania, they seized the opportunity to borrow majority rule and exclusive representation from the Railway Labor Act, pair it with reinstatement of strikers, and hold a secret-ballot election. The Reading Formula soon became the centerpiece of New Deal labor policy, vindicating a particular vision of industrial democracy. But it also cleaved the Fund world “along its now-familiar radical and progressive axes” (484).
The left wing warned that majority rule and exclusive representation would favor established, conservative unions over the radical upstarts the Fund had worked to sustain, and they pressed for the recognition of minority unions. When Wagner’s circle set out to replace the toothless NIRA in 1934-35, that critique brought the Fund’s leftists into partial alignment with their erstwhile adversaries in the NAACP, who sought safeguards against racially exclusive unionism (a concern that later led Houston to litigate Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railway Co., in which the Court first recognized a duty of fair representation under the Railway Labor Act, and found a parallel in A. Philip Randolph’s resort to federal boards and executive action). Conversely, the Fund’s progressive labor experts championed exclusive representation as the only reliable path to industrial democracy and a necessary bulwark against company unions. This time, they insisted, employers must be compelled to recognize majority unions; the will of the majority must be backed by state power. When Congress passed Wagner’s bill, majority rule and exclusive representation were channeled through administrative machinery. The contingent Reading Formula became a legal-administrative order.
Although the broad contours of this arc are familiar, Witt’s history of the Garland Fund provides the crucial infrastructural underpinnings. At board lunches and through Brookwood, the Fund cultivated the ties that made uptake of the new unionism possible. By the same token, the ceaseless jockeying inside the Fund may have reinforced the progressives’ conviction that pluralism (in the sense of intra-movement power-sharing and contestation, not mid-century industrial pluralism) was unworkable in practice, as well as the leftists’ certainty that majority unionism would outmaneuver and exclude minorities. Correlation is not causation, and it would be tendentious to claim that Fund infighting wrote exclusive representation into the Wagner Act. Still, it seems more than coincidental that the factional politics of the Garland Fund, where Communists were always a minority, tracked the dynamics of the minority unionism debate so precisely. The Fund’s Communist faction had well learned the perils of procedural subordination to a more moderate majority.
I don’t mean to downplay the genuine left-liberal cross-pollination that the Garland Fund fostered, from Brookwood’s pedagogy to workers’ theater and print culture to early coordination between the NAACP and ACLU. Those innovations became inputs to systems, from the NLRA’s exclusive representation to administrative equality in schools and primaries, that centralized decision rights. The payoff was enforceable contracts for labor and doctrinal and administrative footholds for civil rights. But the cost, as Baldwin warned, was considerable too: the squeezing of minorities and a narrower tactical toolkit.
The Radical Fund resists easy binaries. It is tempting, in our own increasingly authoritarian moment, either to romanticize pluralism or to celebrate centralized countervailing power. Witt’s brilliant book resists both poles. It shows that coalitions win when they control who decides; it also shows how victory can narrow the alliance that made it possible. A fair assessment of Witt’s history will credit both conclusions. The Fund taught interwar liberals and leftists how to allocate authority, and when they gained access to state levers, they chose designs that privileged unitary decision rules. That choice helped to level the playing field against entrenched antagonists. It also made dissent harder to sustain inside the victorious faction. The Radical Fund is optimistic about cross-camp creativity, but its deeper moral is institutional. Build power with pluralism in mind, or the answer to “who decides” will, all too quickly, become “the powerful.”
Laura Weinrib is the Fred N. Fishman Professor of
Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and an Affiliate Professor in the
Harvard History Department. You can reach her by email at lweinrib@law.harvard.edu.