Warlord for a Day

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).

Jamal Greene

          In Brewster’s Millions, a thoroughly forgettable 1980s comedy based on a 1902 novel by George Barr McCutcheon, a man comes suddenly and surprisingly into world-altering wealth via an inheritance and must quickly decide how to spend it. The conceit of the film is that if Brewster spends the money in full, he gets ten times as much, and if he doesn’t, he gets nothing. Hilarity ensues. Or at least, it was meant to. The biggest problem with Brewster’s Millions is that, despite having Richard Pryor and John Candy as its comedic leads, it isn’t very funny.

          Spending vast sums of money turns out to be rather serious business, as John Fabian Witt’s splendid book, The Radical Fund, makes pellucid. Witt’s subject is Charles Garland, who receives a roughly $1 million inheritance—the same amount as McCutcheon’s Brewster—that he initially refuses in indignant protest of unearned wealth in a world of vast inequity. He is eventually persuaded, by Upton Sinclair no less, that he should accept the money but give it away. His charitable efforts turn into the American Fund for Public Service, which spends down the money and its investment earnings in the roughly two-decade period between the World Wars.

          The trick for the Fund was to spend the money not just fully, but wisely. Garland was a lefty—the old kind—as was ACLU co-founder Roger Baldwin, whom Garland tapped to direct the fund. In telling the story of the applicants vying for American Fund largesse, rivalries within the Fund’s board of directors, and competing philanthropic philosophies, Witt takes readers on a lush journey through the strategic challenges around confronting labor exploitation and racial discrimination, two of the most trenchant social problems of twentieth-century United States, with a million dollars and a dream.

          Though Witt doesn’t quite put it this way, The Radical Fund at times reads as a book about how to pursue social change within a failing state—or, more optimistically, one that has not yet been fully realized. The challenge of building out industrial democracy in the first half of the twentieth century was that workers had lost control of their lives and livelihoods through factory work and, eventually, failing farm prices, and had no effective political recourse. The government was structured to protect narrowly conceived property and contractual rights, and courts understood those rights to be constitutionally entrenched (by a constitution written in an era in which non-property owners were largely excluded from electoral politics).    The even more daunting challenge of combatting Jim Crow was that white supremacist planters controlled the Democratic Party and traded political favors for non-interference with a system of race-based feudalism and caste-like social privilege.

This dilemma plays out in The Radical Fund in the sequelae of the classic debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois over how much to compromise with segregation in order to achieve black emancipation. James Weldon Johnson, the Board’s lone black director, toggled between these camps over the course of his own life. It plays out in the labor strategies of institutionalists like Sidney Hillman versus radical socialists such as Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. It plays out in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategies for improving black education, whether it’s via cases seeking to improve the resources given to black schools and teachers or attacking segregation itself more directly. Refusing to attend to the economic circumstances of, say, teachers who will lose their jobs in a unitary school system, in order to achieve loftier, longer-term, speculative goals is hard—and not necessarily right—when there are real people standing before you holding out their hats. But can you reform an utterly compromised politics by relying on its own rotten infrastructure?

It is impossible to read Witt’s book without asking the same question about today’s U.S. politics. (Witt doesn’t shy away from infusing those notes throughout the text.) It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the Trump Administration is attempting to induce a militarized but ultimately failed federal state, one able to inflict violence sufficient to keep the governing regime in power but lacking the capacity to address genuine social problems. It has shuttered federal agencies addressing public health and education, has defunded scientific and medical research, has sought to coerce academic institutions into banal conformity with its ideology, and has pursued massive tax cuts for the wealthy at the expense of the social needs of the most vulnerable Americans. In deciding whether and how to participate in funding the government under these circumstances, Democrats in Congress face their own version of the American Fund’s dilemma.

A predictable consequence of the Administration’s agenda is to create opportunities for other sources of economic power. (This is, no doubt, part of the Administration’s goal, so long as it controls or is in league with those sources.) How should that power be exercised? The Fund had its successes and failures, but a theme of its most successful projects is that, rather than focusing on individual needs or vanity projects, they catalyzed organizational capacity, such as by educating union organizers at places like Brookwood Labor College or supporting higher quality education for minority students, which could then create a black professional class to pay the movement forward. The Fund’s most innovative recipients were also conscious of the need to seek control of the information environment — that is, to engage in propaganda — every bit as much as their opponents do. As the labor lawyer Walter Nelles put it, the question isn’t whether to use political and legal institutions coercively but rather “which coercive power (not of course right in any strict sense) will result in more peace, freedom and happiness.” [Witt, 477]

This is dark stuff, but perhaps necessary if we are to turn tragedy into comedy. As the American people seek the light at the end of our own tunnel, we would do well to learn what we can from a history that, thanks to Witt, will in time make Garland’s Millions far more memorable than Brewster’s. 

Jamal Greene is Dwight Professor of Law at Columbia Law School.