Ten Arguments in The Radical Fund (Part 2)

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).

John Fabian Witt

Yesterday I posted a quick, non-exhaustive guide to five arguments embedded in The Radical Fund, along with connections to the generous and searching symposium posts hosted here on Balkinization.  Here are the promised five more.  As I mentioned yesterday, I may try in the future to draw out some of these arguments and elaborate them in stand-alone articles.  But each of them is already imminent in the book.  Or at least I’d like to think so.     

Recall the first five: (1) Brown was central to the long civil rights movement, not a rival to it; (2) interest convergence was a feature not a bug; (3) the famous Margold report was about power, not rights; (4) the early ACLU hid its positive liberty ideas in its philanthropic wing; (5) the Wagner act’s hard tactical choices were earned.

Here are five more about communism, nonviolence, philanthropy, and contingency: 

Ok number six is cheating, because it’s actually two in one.

The heterodox world Baldwin created around the Garland Fund is usefully thought of as a long Popular Front, running not from the mid-1930s to 1939, but from 1922 to 1939.  The kinds of eclectic energy historians often associate with the Popular Front extended back deep into the previous decade.  Consider the Fund’s support during efforts to defend the Scottsboro Nine for both the International Labor Defense and the NAACP—organizations that were famously at odds with one another.  Consider the Fund’s support for Norman Thomas’s social-democratic organization, the League for Industrial Democracy, alongside its support for the Communist Party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker.  

But popular front-style cooperation came with limits and contradictions.  William Z. Foster, the first Party member to serve on the Fund’s board, was the principal American practitioner of the Party’s strategy of “boring from within” unions and progressive organizations to take them over for Party projects.  Baldwin aimed at first to limit the number of Party members order to fend off the risk that Foster would launch precisely such an effort inside the Garland Fund.  But Foster outfoxed him, and eventually Baldwin’s own ideological drift led him to aid Foster in the effort.  By 1929 and 1930, the Party’s efforts to coopt the Fund came to a head in a knock-down, drag-out battle over the big grant for the NAACP’s litigation campaign.  Party members and fellow travelers (including Baldwin!) opposed the grant, supporting Black Belt self-determination front groups instead.  Anti-communist social democrats and liberals of the board managed to fend off the Party faction by one vote.

The noncommunist and anticommunist elements of the Garland Fund world sometimes gave as well as they got.  During the two decades between the red scares, long before the rise of Joe McCarthy and the Cold War-fueled turn against Communists, the social democratic left felt compelled to expel Party members from its ranks repeatedly.  Brookwood expelled its Communists in 1932.  The Southern Tenant Farmers Union did so in 1934.  Expulsions went both ways: the CPUSA expelled Fund director Ben Gitlow in 1929 when he balked at following the new intransigent line of the Third Period. 

7.  From violence to nonviolence

The Radical Fund is a story about early 20^th-century social movements.  It’s also a story about the worlds of the early 20^th-century left.  And one dimension of this world not to be missed is the shift from a radicalism of violence to a radicalism of nonviolence during the interwar years. It’s a transformation that happened across the watershed of the First World War and its bloody aftermath, when the uncompromising class war orientation of the Industrial Workers of the World gave way to the nonviolent protest ethics of A.J. Muste and the collective bargaining architecture of Sidney Hillman, both of which were nurtured at the now-forgotten Brookwood Labor College. 

Partly, to be sure, this shift was a result of wartime repression, deportations, and criminal prosecutions; federal and state governments locked up many of the leading exponents of violent radicalism in the 1910s, including virtually the entire leadership of the IWW.  No wonder left political violence diminished!  Partly, the shift to nonviolent tactics was a result of learning and strategic rethinking of the left’s best paths to change.  And at least in some small part, the story of the Fund’s midwifery of the 20^th-century politics of nonviolence arises out of the tax code.  For as several of the posts in this symposium have observed, the Fund’s story is also a history of the new philanthropic industrial complex emerging in the 1920s, complete with nonprofit tax exemptions and a whole host of consequences. 

8. Philanthropy 1: Movement Capture?

What to say about the Fund and the new philanthropy of the 1920s?  For the past decade, the Garland Fund has had a star turn in what Megan Francis calls the theory of “movement capture.”  This is something like what Ruth Wilson Gilmore means when she says “the revolution will not be funded,” or what Anand Ghiridaradas has in mind when he excoriates the culture of twenty-first century philanthropic funders. The idea is that funders can coopt and derail the movements they sustain, and moreover that the Garland Fund’s relationship to the NAACP is a prime example of the phenomenon.

Francis and I have engaged this question before.  I proposed some years back that the NAACP had coopted the Fund, rather than the other way around.  As I see it now, who coopted whom is less interesting than the transformations occasioned inside the world of the Fund.  The Garland Fund put groups in dialogue with one another, and sometimes in conflict, too.  Those conversations and conflicts transformed the movements they touched.  Black liberation groups ranging from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the NAACP drew on the organizing expertise of Sidney Hillman’s industrial union project, not to mention their ideas about work and class.  Labor organizations, in turn, learned from Black organizations just how challenging it would be to organize in the era of the Great Migration given the widespread racism of white labor unions.  The story is one of neither capture nor cooptation, but instead mutual remaking. 

9. Philanthropy 2: Conflicts of Interest & the Channeling Effects of Tax Law

The Fund was for sure rife with conflicts of interest in its internal operations.  It was also astonishingly good at keeping its expenses low; less than five percent of its assets went to administrative costs, despite a years-long fight with tax authorities over the organization’s tax exempt status.  Similarly, the conflicts of interest at issue were ideological, not financial; grants raised conflict issues because they supported efforts ideologically aligned with one or another faction on the board, not because they lined directors’ pockets.  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn briefly drew a small wage from the Fund in return for acting as its secretary, but for most of the organization’s life it had no full-time staffers.  A part-time stenographer commuted from the Bronx to take the minutes and deal with correspondence.  Instead of staff, the board relied on the expertise of its own members as well as of committees made up of board members and well-placed volunteer advisors like Dewey, Frankfurter, and Lippmann.  There’s a lesson there.  Relying on board members’ expertise almost inevitably meant conflicts of interest, because the directors knew most about the things in which they were most directly involved.

The main organizational lesson was that structure was destiny.  The committees that reviewed grant proposals had near-absolute sway over the applications received and the grants made in the relevant domains.  And as time passed, more and more of the grants made went to projects, like the NAACP campaign, sponsored by insiders.  Whether this inside-dealing was bad or not depends on whether it was at odds with the mission of the organization. 

I’m not entirely certain that today’s nonprofit law is less friendly to social change by foundation spending.  David Pozen proposes that changes since 1969 in the tax law push foundations toward litigation and away from other strategies by giving clearer tax benefits to organizations that fund litigation.  Maybe.  But I’m not so sure.  A change in the tax law that makes litigation cheaper than other forms of social mobilization will only affect a movement’s mix of strategies if the movement thinks that the strategies are substitutes rather than complements.  If my pie crust recipe calls for a certain ratio of flour to butter and you make flour cheaper, I’m not going to divert money to flour.  I’m going to ration the savings across my two ingredients to keep the optimal ratio.  If you make any one ingredient cheaper, I’m going to make more pie!  This is the basic economics of substitution effects. 

Of course, if there are internal debates over what the best recipe is, then tax incentives may nudge movements toward one faction over another.  (That’s some of what seems to have happened in the debate over nonviolence and violence as strategies.) 

10. Conditioned Contingency with Vast Stakes is the Path of the Law and Society

One last observation: The Radical Fund is deeply preoccupied with questions of contingency and determinism in history that have been at the heart of my scholarship for twenty five years now.  Was the history of early twentieth century law determined by the massive forces of modernity?  Did mass production capitalism, the Great Migration, vast world wars, and giant geo-political competitions dictate the path of the law?  Or was the path of the law open to multiple possible futures?  The Radical Fund is particularly preoccupied with the question of whether social movements for labor and race made a difference—a question that is, after all, squarely at issue in the literature.  What about the much smaller group of civil libertarians; how if at all did they reshape the law?  What role for happenstance?

The Radical Fund offers for public law what The Accidental Republic proposed for private law and Lincoln’s Code suggested for the law of nations. 

Think of it as a model of conditioned contingency.  Big impersonal forces and imperatives (themselves artifacts in part of legal arrangements) shape the boundaries of possibility; they make certain moves that much harder, and they make certain outcomes more likely.  Social settings produce pressures—but not deterministically, since big things like calamities, war, and economic change take their meaning from the social projects that successfully engage them.  And these meanings matter.  The history of the law is about degrees of freedom and chance that hold huge stakes for how human beings live together, critics to the contrary notwithstanding.

Put more concretely, The Radical Fund is about the possibilities of democratic life in the age of mass production capitalism amid the great Black migration from South to North.  It’s an experience that might have taken many forms, and did.  The particular paths taken through this experience, it turns out, were profoundly shaped by energetic human agents, their interactions, strategic coups and resources, along with their disagreements and missteps—and the social formations they managed to spark and sustain. 

John Fabian Witt is the Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. You can reach him by e-mail at john.witt@yale.edu.