Yale Library Book Talk: The Radical Fund by John Fabian Witt

John Fabian Witt, Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Professor of History, will speak about his new book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” He’ll be in conversation with James Forman Jr., J. Skelly Wright Professor of Law. 

In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance. In a world of shocking wealth disparities, shameless racism, and political repression, Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambitious progressive projects.

The men and women around the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black. They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes. Yet shared beliefs linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least. And they believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age. By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation.

A luminous testament to the power of visionary organizations and a meditation on the vexed role of money in American life, The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—an empowering road map for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.

John Fabian Witt is the Allen H. Duffy class of 1960 professor of law at Yale Law School and a professor in the Yale history department. He is the author of a number of books, including Lincoln’s Code, which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, and The New Republic, among other publications.