What Money Can Do: John Witt’s The Radical Fund

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).

Mary L. Dudziak 

In this chaotic and destructive era of American history, John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America is something of a salve. Written more in the form of a novel than a traditional history book, the narrative follows the lives of brilliant idealists who sought to realize their expansive visions of social change. Their accomplishments expanded civil rights and free speech and changed American history.  Witt’s great command of the history of U.S. reform efforts coupled with his envious narrative power make the book a compelling read. 

The spark for these reformers’ efforts was money: the unwanted inheritance of Charles Garland, who did not believe in inherited wealth. The visionaries who made decisions about what the Garland Fund would support, and the ones who put the money to use were an important cast of characters in the history of social change in the twentieth century United States. In Witt’s hands, the Fund’s history is a narrative device that weaves their stories together.

A great contribution of the book is that it brings a broader audience to important figures like James Weldon Johnson and the early days of the NAACP, A. Phillip Randolph’s leadership of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Roger Baldwin’s work in founding the American Civil Liberties Union, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s labor and free speech activism, and others. Their stories make the book compelling, even though centering Witt’s social change story on the Fund limits the cast of characters, and thereby the focus of reform. If only Alice Paul, the fearsome woman suffrage leader and ERA proponent, had been in that circle.  Neither does it allow for close examination of how the Garland Fund’s impact intersects with other causal forces across decades of American history, like the rise of the United States as a world power.[1] Witt does engage critics of his methodology who employ different approaches to civil rights history, but only briefly in the epilogue.[2] (This is, of course, common practice in a trade press book.)

By centering wealth, The Radical Fund raises an important question for our own day: if money was a crucial causal force in a tremendously important era of social change in U.S. history, might this mean that wealth matters most in attempts to tackle the crises of our own age? Witt suggests this point in his very last line: "The opportunity presents itself once more.”[3]

Witt’s parting words might give some readers hope. Might our generation’s wealthy oligarchs be inspired to follow Garland’s path and give away both the money and control over the social change vision it could enable? After all, some of our youngish billionaires have created important charitable foundations. Witt provides a warning, however, that those who attain power and influence often use it for their own advancement. His example is Felix Frankfurter, a brilliant immigrant who became an insider and eventually rose to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.[4] Witt writes: “Where the men and women of the Fund’s board fought to remake the world root and branch, the ambitious Frankfurter pruned its limbs to climb its heights.”[5]

The social justice vision of some contemporary billionaires might be seen in The Giving Pledge, founded in 2010 by Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett. According to its website, the pledge “is a promise by the world’s wealthiest philanthropists to give the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetime or wills.” Those who have pledged certainly have big ideas and plans. Among them is Mark Zukerburg. He has pledged to give 99% of his wealth to charities during his lifetime. With his wife Priscilla Chan, he has created the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative through which they intend to donate three billion dollars to over the next ten years. Its focus is “education reform, biomedical advancements, immigration reform and housing affordability, improving the education system, global development, health and criminal justice systems policy.” It is, in essence, their Garland Fund.

Zukerburg’s charitable giving is important, but his spending priorities and his values might be best revealed by another project: a massive compound in Hawai’i with a huge underground bunker – perhaps to save himself and his family if (when?) the rest of humanity suffers a catastrophe. Do we want billionaires like this to be the social justice visionaries of our own age?

A man named Charles F. Feeney may be a better example. Born into a working-class family that struggled through the Great Depression, he started a duty-free shopping business that went global and amassed a fortune of at least $8 billion dollars. He was a bit Garland-like. Feeney eventually grew unhappy with his opulent lifestyle and wondered whether he had a right to be so rich. “I just reached the conclusion with myself that money, buying boats and all the trimmings didn’t appeal to me,” he told his biographer, Conor O’Clery.  Feeney gave the vast bulk of his fortune away, doing it secretly, without the usual recognition. His wealth accomplished much, but its quiet dispersal lacked the kind of plan and organizational infrastructure that the Garland Fund developed.[6]

Does a democratic society want our current billionaires to shape a vision for a just society, and carry it out with the effectiveness of Garland and his gang, when at least some of them are taking concrete steps to save themselves if the rest of the world is about to perish? Of course not. Democracy may be in peril, but it is too important to give up on. Instead, the United States and the world would benefit from the kind of transformative power driven by an aspect of twentieth century reform efforts that coincided with and followed after the Garland Fund’s history. Grassroots mobilizing in the civil rights movement fueled social change that has endured for decades and was a central part of the alchemy of the civil rights era. Pressure from below shaped public opinion and impacted the incentives for presidents and members of Congress. The resulting reforms may be under assault, but that history is a powerful example of reform through democracy. A similar lesson from the massive antiwar demonstrations in the later years of the U.S. war in Vietnam is that the people can speak loudly enough that their leaders have no choice but to listen.[7]

 As good as The Radical Fund is, it would be best if its history is not a template for the current generation of the wealthy. Instead, we need more people like Charles Feeney whose mission was to do good by giving it all away without a master plan. And for restoring American democracy itself, we should remember the broader lessons of the civil rights movement. Mass mobilization is not lost to history, as we can see on street corners around the country on No Kings Day.

Mary L. Dudziak is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law. You can reach her at mary.dudziak@emory.edu.