The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America - Hardcover

$35.00
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The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
  • The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America
The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America - Hardcover

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America - Hardcover

by John Fabian Witt
$35.00
$35.00

Book Overview

As recommended on The Ezra Klein Show

From Pulitzer Prize finalist John Fabian Witt comes the "engrossing" (The New York Times) 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. 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 of 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 "fascinating" testament to how "radical philanthropy can foster important and necessary changes in American life" (The Wall Street Journal), The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age--and an empowering roadmap for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.
ISBN9781476765877
Author John Fabian Witt
PublisherSimon & Schuster
GenreBiography, News & politics, and History
FormatHardcover
PublishedOctober 2025
LanguageENG- English
Pages736
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography History Nonfiction Political Science

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More by John Fabian Witt

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America - Hardcover

The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America - Hardcover

By John Fabian Witt

About John Fabian Witt

John Fabian Witt is the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, a professor in the Yale history department, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellow. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, the Harvard Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal, among other publications. Witt is the author of The Accidental Republic, which was awarded book prizes by the Harvard Press Board of Syndics, the American Society for Legal History, and the Law and Society Association.

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