Wherefore Art Thou Philanthropy

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).

Larry Kramer

          Let me start by saying that I absolutely loved reading this book. It’s a beautifully written, deeply engrossing account of a marvellous range of events across the first third of the twentieth century, though telling these stories often requires John to reach back to the last third of the nineteenth century and, in a few instances, takes him forward into later decades of the twentieth. This is historical research at its very best, displaying an encyclopaedic grasp of details, without ever losing either the narrative thread or the larger picture. I found it entirely captivating. 

          Along the way, readers are treated to oodles of fascinating details and novel insights about well-known incidents—from the Scopes Monkey Trial and the trials of Sacco and Vanzetti to the Scottsboro case—while also being introduced to less familiar episodes, some totally new to me, like April Farm, the Brookwood Labor College, and many more. In like fashion, we gain new perspectives and insights about well-known personalities like Roger Baldwin, Clarence Darrow, and W.E.B. Dubois; as well as familiar but not quite as well-known people like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, James Weldon Johnson, and Walter Lippman; and more than a few completely new characters (again, to me at least) like Charles Garland himself, A.J. Muste, and Clinton Golden. 

          John manages, in just a few pages for each, to paint detailed pictures of events and the people who made them, bringing the period to life and giving the reader a feeling of familiarity and authenticity. The cumulative effect is a narrative tour de force that should become a must-read for anyone looking to understand this turbulent period of American political history. It also serves as a timely reminder today—when even the most modest efforts to provide a social safety net are with a straight face condemned by folks on the right as “Marxist” and “socialistic”—that there was a time in the not so distant past when American politics really did have a far left. 

          But here is the thing: the book isn’t really about the Garland Fund, which serves in John’s account more like a narrative hook on which to hang the many stories that comprise the book’s substance. The Fund runs through the text as a kind of Zelig-like figure (the eponymous lead character in Woody Allen’s 1983 film). Like the character in the movie, the Fund is there, in the background, of nearly every important development on the political left in the 1920s and 30s. But we learn relatively little about it: about the role it played and how it played that role. 

          Nor is it enough to know only about the board. How is the funder staffed? How is the staff organized? How are staff members chosen? What is the relationship between board and staff? What is the funder’s philosophy of and approach to philanthropy generally? Is it a strategic funder? If so, how are strategies devised, executed, and assessed? If not, how does it organize the use of its assets? How are particular grant recipients selected and evaluated? What kind of relationship does the funder maintain after the grant is made? 

          Having read The Radical Fund, I can’t confidently tell you the answer to any of these questions. We never learn how (or in many cases, why) individual board members were chosen, and with few exceptions, we are given little sense of how the board’s operations evolved over time, much less what its decision-making process looked like. Indeed, we learn virtually nothing about the Garland Fund’s internal structure, operations, or processes for making choices. There are discussions of the Fund’s broad thinking around its major initiatives—whether to support labor or focus on race, for example, or whether to support arts and culture—but (again with few exceptions) we get little information or insight into how the Fund went about translating these broad goals into decisions about the specific grants it made and the particular grantees it supported. 

          This is unfortunate, because rigorous histories of philanthropy are scarce, despite its undeniable importance and influence. To have a historian of John Witt’s talent and skill look as closely and deeply at the Fund as he did at its grantees would have been an invaluable contribution to a woefully understudied field. 

          This is particularly true inasmuch as the Garland Fund’s creation in 1924 occurred smack in the middle of the formative period of modern philanthropy—following on the heels of the Russell Sage Foundation(1907), the Carnegie Corporation (1911), the Rockefeller Foundation (created in 1913 but expanded into its modern form in 1929), the Cleveland Foundation (created as the first community foundation in 1914), the Rosenwald Fund (1917), the Commonwealth Fund (1918), the Twentieth Century Fund (1919), the Duke Endowment (1924), and the Kresge Foundation (1924), and ahead of the Sloan Foundation (1934), the Ford Foundation (1936), and the Guggenheim Foundation (1937). 

          The creation of these newfangled private grant-making entities—built on a novel legal and institutional architecture to foster a modern bureaucratic form of philanthropy—introduced something unprecedented and radically different into civil society, and the new foundations were all breaking fresh ground in these years: developing the first idea of professional philanthropy, while experimenting with unconventional approaches to giving away money. The whole idea that there can be a “science of philanthropy” emerged in this period. 

          Which begs the question: what did the folks at the Garland Fund make of it all? What were their ideas and theories about the role of philanthropy and the best ways to practice it? People who have never done serious philanthropy invariably roll their eyes when told that giving away money at scale is difficult—difficult, at least, to do well. But anyone who has had responsibility for doing so knows this is true. How, then, did the directors and staff of the Garland Fund approach the contemporary issues and controversies about professional philanthropy? Apart from the short Chapter 11—which describes their strenuous (somewhat deceptive and disingenuous) efforts to get the full tax benefits offered for philanthropic activities—we are not told much. 

          Of equal importance to understanding the Garland Fund are questions about how its directors and staff saw themselves operating within the larger funder community? A brief discussion of their initial decision not to fund Black education (pp. 174-77) makes clear they were aware of the newly emerging big funders. Did they communicate with them? Try to learn from them? What did they think about how these funders operated? Did they ever collaborate or seek to collaborate? Did anything that was happening in the larger philanthropic community influence their behavior or decisions? If so, how? If not, why not? 

          As a reader, I came away with very little sense of either how the Garland Fund operated internally or how it operated within the still emergent philanthropic community. Of course, none of this takes away from what the book does accomplish, which is to take readers on an exhilarating journey through the radical politics of the 1920s and 30s, but I was sorry (and a bit disappointed) to see how little attention John gave to the practice of philanthropy itself. It is a missed opportunity—one worthy, perhaps, of a follow up article. 

          As an aside, given what we do learn about how the Fund operated, I was struck by how many of its activities would be considered unethical, and possibly even unlawful, today. Time and time again, for instance, we read about board members ignoring flagrant conflicts of interest to shamelessly fund their own organizations or those of their friends. I’m not entirely sure what the law was at the time; perhaps it was different. In any event, it would have been interesting to get some insight into how (or if) the Fund’s directors thought about the ethics of philanthropy and its bearing on their own practices. 

          Be all this as it may, the critical question in philanthropy is always and ultimately about impact, about making a difference in the world. So, what can we say about the Garland Fund’s actual impact? John’s view is clear from the book’s subtitle: “How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I’m not sure the book succeeds in substantiating this claim, though I’m also not sure the Fund needs to have had this extravagant effect for its story to be worth telling. 

          Clearly, many of the organizations the Fund supported or helped launch turned out later to be very impactful. These include organizations that remain influential today, like the ACLU and the NAACP, as well as prominent journals like The Nation and The New Republic. At the same time, as Roger Baldwin himself conceded (p. 531), most of the Fund’s grantees did not have any lasting impact, making it difficult to know whether the successes reflect strategic shrewdness or simply the luck that comes from spreading one’s bets widely enough. Here is a good example of a question that would have been helped by knowing more about the internal approach and processes used by the board and staff. 

          Further complicating the task of assessing impact—even when it comes to Fund grantees that unquestionably made a difference—it is hard to know the extent to which the Fund’s contributions were pivotal or even meaningfully additive. I can think of efforts we supported while I was at Hewlett in which our funding was unquestionably decisive, whether by virtue of timing, scale, or both. In other instances, we contributed to efforts that I was proud and happy to join, but other funders developed the strategy, spearheaded the idea, or put in more capital, and I cannot honestly say that our funding or participation was the critical difference between success and failure. Which efforts of the Garland Fund fall into the former category and which the latter? It’s hard to know without more information about what other funders were doing or contributing. 

          The amount of money put into most ventures by the Garland Fund seems small, which isn’t surprising since it was a small fund. But, then, philanthropy itself was still quite small compared to today. So, was the Garland Fund just a minor participant in many organizations, some of which turned out later to be very impactful? Or was its participation in some way pivotal to success? What can we say, in other words, about attribution, especially when it comes to organizations that the Garland Fund supported early but that didn’t achieve impact and success until many years later, based on strategies and work quite different from what the Fund had supported at the start? 

          As anyone involved in philanthropic evaluation will attest, questions like these are incredibly difficult to answer, particularly as grantee organizations that achieve major impact tend also to have multiple funders. In some ways, the most reliable evidence we may have is what other funders and other actors think. And here, as John displays in the book’s final pages, the record is unclear. Perhaps the fairest statement comes from the Fund’s most important actor, Roger Baldwin. As John describes Baldwin’s late-life views, “The Fund’s modest endowment had allowed its directors to put issues on the political agenda that elected officials had skirted time and again, and which unions and membership organizations alone could not sustain.” (p. 531) Looking back on the entire experience, even with the mistakes, false starts, and wrong turns, Baldwin concluded, “’I suppose we did quite a lot of good.’” (p. 532) 

       Speaking from the perspective of 12 years in philanthropy, I think that’s saying quite a lot. 

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          Today’s new ultra-high net worth funders often act as if they have nothing to learn from the philanthropy of the past and seem to believe they are inventing ways of doing philanthropy that are wholly new and uncommonly bold. In fact, little of what today’s funders are doing was not tried in some form by funders in the early and middle years of the 20^th century. As The Radical Fund makes abundantly clear, earlier generations of funders were every bit as ambitious, creative, risk-taking, and courageous as anyone working in the field today—more, perhaps, if we compare the work of funders during the first Red Scare to the timid, fearful response of today’s foundations to the lethal threat posed by the Trump Administration. For these funders, The Radical Fund should be a must-read.

Larry Kramer is President and Vice Chancellor, The London School of Economics and Political Science. You can reach him by e-mail at  larry.kramer@lse.ac.uk.