Puffery of Radical Publishing Donations
John Fabian Witt, The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollard Upended America (New York: Simon & Schuster, October 14, 2025). Softcover: $35.
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“…Secret history of an epic experiment to remake American democracy. Before the dark money of the Koch Brothers, before the billions of the Ford Foundation, there was the Garland Fund. In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance… 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.”
The blurb is blatantly biased in favor of this project, failing to even acknowledged that money was the main unifying force behind those who participated in distributing this Fund (partly to themselves). To clarify, in 1922, Garland established this fund as a philanthropic organization. It was led by trustees including Roger Baldwin (also one of the founders of ACLU in 1920, before this fund opened). It disbursed, through 1941, $2 million to left-wing causes, including the Federated Press (1922-49: labor: initially established by the People’s Council of America), Vanguard Press ($155,000: 1926), New Masses magazine (1926-48: Marxist: this magazine revived earlier magazines under other names), World Tomorrow… Christian World magazine (1918-34: pacifist, Christian socialism), and the legal-defense fund (labor). In other words, most of this fund was spent on publishing socialist propaganda that might have contributed to the anti-socialist McCarthyism or Red-Scare period of the 1947-59. Or alternatively, all or most of these efforts were artificially forced to close by McCarthyism that began to imprison or otherwise penalize those who openly celebrated leftist views. Garland explained that he was a Christian socialist by evoking Jesus when he first turned his money over in 1920. When Garland tried to just refuse the money Upton Sinclair wrote to him to insist that he should “give it away” instead, and put him in touch with Roger Baldwin to run this fund. This is a pretty artificial start. Given my research into ghostwriters, it seems that Sinclair or other writers probably manipulated Garland into viewing his fortune as evil and then directed most of it towards their own presses and magazines, or to lawyers (who might have been hiring ghostwriters). This endeavor might have accomplished far more practical good if the money had been spent on building great housing for the poor, or teaching the poor to build houses, or a number of other practical direct-assistance programs: perhaps free food on farms where anybody who helps with farming them can just pick free food out of the ground. The main surviving entity, Vanguard, did not have any significant bestsellers that could have swayed the public until after it was sold to James Henle in 1932 (making a private profit for the seller, after they had received this fund’s money to start it).
The interior of the book digresses into the biographies of those who ran this fund, as in “The Education of Roger Baldwin”. It romanticizes what this fund achieved without considering its reality, and how similar donations might be better managed in our present.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/