The Radical Fund – An Historian’s Brief For Social Democracy

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).

Willy Forbath

John Witt’s The Radical Fund is a feast.   Brimming with narrative energy, the book is a brilliantly detailed chronicle of the life and times of the Garland Fund’s directors and counselors along with the individuals and organizations whose work it sustained.  Dozens of famous and forgotten figures of the broad left of the early 20^th century – activists and organizers, journalists, attorneys, economists and other policy mavens; liberals and progressives, socialists and social democrats, syndicalists, anarchists and communists – inhabit the book’s 600-plus pages, as directors and beneficiaries of the Fund alongside the organizations many of them founded and led, including three that turned out to be pillars of modern American liberalism in the decades ahead: the ACLU, the CIO (and the industrial unions it came to house), and the NAACP. 

Witt is equally masterful crafting shrewd and revealing biographical sketches, recounting dramatic strikes and protests, and conveying the stakes of intricate organizational conflicts and the genealogy of complex ideas – all in pithy and often sparkling prose.  

Still, one could fill a small library with books about these people and organizations.  What is to be gained from a new one that attends to the outfit that funded them?  A great deal is the answer.   

Witt shows us how the outlook and direction of each of these movements were altered over time by their engagements with one another.   The book, in other words, is not only a wide-angle tale; it is a revelatory dialectical account of the making of mid-twentieth-century liberalism.  Witt’s dialectical insights emerge almost seamlessly from the historical narrative. 

Most striking is the book’s reconstruction of how the early NAACP’s Black leaders, as directors and grantees of the Fund, were pushed and prodded by the era’s white labor radicals (again, including key figures in the Fund’s world, its founder and chief executive, Roger Baldwin among them) to reframe and reimagine many of their efforts in terms of the class struggle and economic democracy -- and how these relationships also pushed the white labor-and-class-struggle-minded radicals to abandon some of their ideological priors about the primacy of class struggle over racial justice, as they were pushed to see how much their socialist and syndicalist orthodoxies failed to fathom about the South’s system of racial subordination and the dynamics of the struggle against Jim Crow. 

Among the fruits of this approach are Witt’s superb portraits of the great Black labor leader and civil rights champion, A. Phillip Randolph and of Charles Hamilton Houston, the brilliant Black dean of Howard Law School and special counsel and key strategist of the NAACP in the 1930s.  Both serve Witt as embodiments of an outlook that blended hitherto separate visions of race emancipation and class liberation. 

That is not all.  Witt also offers an original exploration of the paradoxical nature of left-wing philanthropy.  The United States may be unique for the outsized role that private foundations have played in funding public goods and thereby shaping a nation’s governance.  The Garland Fund was formed soon after the giant Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations began play their familiar parts in directing and underwriting the course of ameliorative social reform with the aim of softening the ravages of the harshly exploitive new corporate capitalist order from whence came the fortunes they spent.  The Garland Fund set out instead to upend that order, using its tiny portion of the unwarranted gains of capital accumulation.  The big foundations hoped to quell insurgency from below; the Garland Fund hoped to underwrite it.  Witt shows us how the Fund’s own corporate and tax attorneys constructed and defended its endeavors, in a novel study of the possibilities and limits of Audre Lourde’s famous aphorism about using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.

 With its tiny portion, the Fund accomplished much.  Its most enduring accomplishment, however, was not the landmark decisions like Brown v. Board nor the industrial unions its grants helped build or any other institution, but instead a deeper and more fundamental discovery about the character of radical reform.  An “amalgam of radicalism and practicality,” Witt suggests, is the hidden legacy of “the world of the Fund.” 

 This “amalgam” threads through the book as Witt “teases out” what he finds to be the recurrent grammar or deep structure of radical reform.   None of the individual actors or organizations on the non-communist, non-syndicalist, liberal left began the journey with this set of premises. None could have discovered them on their own; they had to learn and invent together.

The Garland Fund Board of Directors’ meeting place in Greenwich Village was the room where it happened.   The Fund’s fractious Board meetings brought together – “convened,” as Witt is fond of saying, the heroines and heroes and the irksome villains of Witt’s saga.  The heroes and heroines are the anti-communist socialists, social democrats, and left-leaning progressives and New Dealers: A. Philip Randolph, Charles Hamilton Houston, of course, but also A. J. Muste, Robert Wagner, Frances Perkins, Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther, and others, who fought to organize the unorganized and dismantle unbridled capitalism and white supremacy but also joined battle with the Fund’s roster of scheming Bolsheviks and  “self-immolating” syndicalists like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and, much of the time, Roger Baldwin himself, aligned with the IWW (International Workers of the World or “Wobblies”), who dreamed of total revolution and opposed funding grants for the very projects and organizations that embodied the “social democratic vision” and pragmatic radical-reform outlook Witt prizes. 

What motivated this outlook, he argues, was a shared search for a wiser alternative to total, revolutionary rupture as the way to topple capitalist domination and Jim Crow.   And the search succeeded.

What, then, is the hidden grammar that Witt “teases out” of all these happenings?   “Democracy” and “technocracy” are his keywords; they stand for the hot and cold elements of radical but durable social change: a pair of opposing touchstones, in deep tension with one another, yet equally indispensable to the endeavor.   The hot, democratic element is the generation of “passionate” movement energy and solidarity via “social mobilization.”  This provides the “fuel” for radical democratic reform.  The cold element is the technocratic work of legal architecture and institutional design essential to secure democratic gains and ensure that poor and working people continue over time to enjoy a real measure of both political clout and material security, and a real share of voice and authority in the governance of social and economic life.  “Social mobilization” without institutional and legal frameworks is destined to fade away; legal and institutional frameworks without ongoing movement energy are hollow and bureaucratic. 

Witt’s grammar of radical reform has something in common with the notion of “non-reformist reforms,” which left legal scholars like Amna Akbar have recently revived from the work of 1970s “post-Marxist” theorists like Andre Gorz; and much in common with the pragmatist- and legal-realist and institutionalist-inspired work of scholars  in the Law and Political Economy movement like Amy Kapczynski, Sabeel Rahman, Jed Purdy, and David Grewal, along with the work of “new labor law” scholars like Kate Andrias and Ben Sachs.    Like Witt, the LPE and “new labor law” schools find inspiration in early twentieth-century social democracy’s radical gradualism and its quest for new institutional frameworks capable of empowering poor and working people and of linking struggles for class, racial, and sexual emancipation. 

 Witt’s history, then, is a signal contribution to the genre of social democratic revivalism that the late, great twentieth-century European historian Tony Judt launched with books like Ill Fares the Land. 

 Any review worth its salt has to offer some critique.  This one’s lies partly in a dose of caution about Witt’s treatment of the hard left.  Witt may slight the truth in their criticisms, even though he’s right about the folly of their alternatives.  More important, he seems to slight another hostile force that bore down on the Fund’s great synthetic achievements from without, and not from within – not the Wobblies and communists, but the dawn of the Cold War and the second Red Scare, which got underway during the later years of Witt’s chronicle.  These developments go largely unexamined, along with the purges they produced - of all manner of leftist activists and thinkers, energies and ideas from the NAACP, the ACLU, and the CIO, alike.  Yet, this historical turn in the road hobbled, where it did not obliterate, the left/liberal alliances and collaborations that Witt treats as durable, but other historians have found more fragile and fleeting.

The Radical Fund promises to “recover the astonishing world of the [Garland] Fund” and “the lessons its history holds.”   That, far and away, is its main goal and great achievement.  But Witt also aims to address and correct the Fund’s “[d]etractors on the left.”    The detractors are prominent left-leaning legal historians who have not been “generous” to the Fund and its great organizational offspring.   Perhaps, they seem to Witt a tiny bit like contemporary avatars of the hard left of a century ago.  In any case, they have sparked a bit of muted wrath. 

These historians, Witt explains, “assert that the Fund’s best-known campaigns settled for a limited set of legal rights where the real issue was brute power.”   The joint NAACP-Garland Fund campaign against Jim Crow, he tells us, stands falsely charged for “substitut[ing] court-room triumphs for transformative change.”   This is Witt’s view of Risa Goluboff’s celebrated The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, among other leading accounts.  The ACLU, in Witt’s view, has been charged with the same bum rap.  In this case, it is Laura Weinrib’s The Taming of Free Speech  that tells the ACLU’s history as a tale, in Witt’s words, of “pursuing abstract ideas about the freedom to speak in a world where some people had the resources to make themselves heard and others did not.”     Similar critiques, he observes, “attack Sidney Hillman’s CIO for erecting labor union institutions said to have sapped the energies of working-class mobilization.” 

What all these historians miss, says Witt, is the “amalgam” approach to the history at hand.  Don’t look at the NAACP, ACLU, or the administrative-state-building endeavors of Robert Wagner and his legal team crafting the NLRA (Wagner Act) in isolation.  Widen your lens to see how these lawyerly “technocratic” actors collaborated with the insurgent, grassroots, leftist-led social movements of the “Fund’s world.”   Together, they produced revolutionary changes in American life. 

Thus, it was “the electricity of the sit-down strikes alongside the bureaucratic structure of the Wagner Act” that ushered in a social transformation in the material well-being of millions of working-class families – the creation of a blue-collar middle class; and the economic resources and political clout of their powerful unions, in turn, underwrote decades-long campaigns for voting rights in the South and the enactment of the great civil rights statutes of the 1960s. 

Similarly, Witt suggests, if you widen your lens, you see how much Goluboff’s civil rights history misses.  You glimpse how the NAACP’s great Charles Hamilton Houston understood full well that “[i]t was the Communist Party…not the NAACP, and certainly not the NAACP’s legal campaign, that had energized ‘the masses’ of Black people ‘with a sense of their raw, potential power.’..‘What sort of justice [, Witt quotes Houston declaring,] did the [Scottsboro] boys obtain in Alabama’…before the ILD [the communist International Labor Defense outfit] ‘entered the case?’” 

 And so, Houston put up with the Communists’ slander and scorn, and welcomed their contributions to the struggle, in virtue of the dedication of their militant, grass-roots organizers in Southern Black communities, industrial workplaces, and cotton fields.   It’s this antagonistic cooperation, Witt concludes, this amalgam of social mobilization and careful lawyering, that Golbuff overlooks.

 There is much to all this.  But still, Goluboff does not miss the NAACP’s radical alliances that Witt recounts.  They are part and parcel of the labor-focused era in the civil rights struggle, whose “lost promise” Goluboff laments.   She may overstate how far the NAACP abandoned economic matters when its focus came to rest on desegregation.  She may miss the continuities that link the labor work of the 1930s with the employment discrimination work of the post-war NAACP.   But by the same token, Witt glosses over how swiftly Charles Houston’s testy left/liberal collaborations evaporated, as the Red Scare got underway, and drove the NAACP to expel communists and steer clear of radical alliances.    There is no mistaking the shift Goluboff chronicles on the road to Brown v. Board in the chilly climate of Cold War liberalism.

Likewise with Weinrib’s Taming of Free Speech.  Weinrib is not making the kind of counterfactual argument Witt ascribes to the Fund’s “detractors.”  Goluboff certainly suggests that there was a more transformative, radical path needlessly abandoned by the NAACP.   Not so with Weinrib’s take on the ACLU.  She chronicles how the ACLU abandoned its early partisanship for the working class and labor’s “freedom to agitate” in favor of a “neutral principles” approach to free speech and civil liberties, which led the organization to litigate on behalf of all comers - for employers along with workers, right-wingers as well as leftists.  To show this, and to call it a “taming of free speech,” is not the same as contending that the ACLU made a moral and political blunder, or that the road not taken was a more promising one.   

It remains true, however, that the path the ACLU chose was one fairly described, in the critical legal history lingo Witt abjures, as legal liberalism.  Right now, legal liberalism does not look so bad.

Or not so bad in the arena of civil liberties and restraints on unbridled state actors.  Labor law is another matter.   Legal liberalism and liberal legalism have not been good for labor law, from labor’s perspective.  Witt offers a paean for the joinder of sit-down strikes and the creation of Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act.  But even in the immediate wake of the Switch in Time and the Court’s upholding of the Act, the Court set about its own taming of the Act, squarely outlawing and cutting off the “electricity of the sit-down strike” and other key weapons in labor’s arsenal – even before Congress got into the act with Taft-Hartley.  Like Banquo’s ghost, the old, repressive judge-made common law of labor-capital relations would not die.    And even in the salad days of the Warren Court, even the great liberals like Justice Brennan, SCOTUS carried on with doctrines that buried the right to strike in a legal black hole, and fulfilled many of the dire prophecies that the hard left offered up against Witt’s social democratic heroes and their efforts to enlist the state on labor’s side. 

The hidden logic of Witt’s historical amalgam may not be quite as tidy as Witt suggests. Like the sit-downers, labor once more may have to resort to precarious illegalities along the uncertain way to rekindling a better future. And so too, with the new kinds of unions – of debtors, tenants, and others, whose legal scaffoldings left legal scholars have begun to imagine, and whose work Witt commends. 

Witt has produced a grand brief for reviving the social democratic vision.  And in the work ahead, his book is not only an intellectual tour de force but a welcome inspiration and a precious gift. 

Willy Forbath holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law at UT Austin School of Law.  You can reach him at wforbath@law.utexas.edu.