Editors’ Note: Deepak Bhargava continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund.

Is it possible for foundations to do more than ameliorate the bad effects of systems that are fundamentally unfair? Philanthropy is often accused of working downstream of social problems — dealing with symptoms rather than root causes. 

Philanthropy’s fiercest critics go further and say that foundations purposely thwart systemic change.^[1] They argue that foundations’ lofty, do-gooder rhetoric legitimizes unjust systems while their grantmaking co-opts and defangs critics.

It’s true that there aren’t many examples of large liberal foundations that explicitly seek transformational change. (Conservative foundations have been more strategic in their efforts to remake society, according to a number of researchers).^[2] Though there are historical exceptions — a few smaller foundations that had an outsized impact, including the Taconic and Field Foundations and a network of individual donors organized by Harry Belafonte, who together provided pivotal support to the Civil Rights Movement. Today, several smaller foundations and donor networks pursue explicitly transformational social change in the spirit of the funders of the civil rights movement, but the scale of these efforts hasn’t shifted the whole field of philanthropic practice.

Nearly all large foundations have operated within paradigms of charity, expertise, and elite influence. Their boards are drawn largely from corporate America, academia, law, and other parts of the establishment. These institutions emphasize incremental rather than dramatic change, the role of technocratic expertise rather than power, and the importance of persuading elites rather than fostering mass engagement.

The past year has tested this philanthropic toolbox. Appeals based on research have had little effect on the behavior of policymakers and judges motivated by their ideological priors. In fact, the new elites running the federal government are not only closed to the influence of mainstream philanthropy — they are openly hostile to it. At the same time, foundations’ resources can’t fill gaps left by dramatic cuts to human services, science, public media, education, and the arts.

In this context, John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund, a riveting history of the American Fund for Public Service (or the “Garland Fund,” after Charles Garland, who donated his inheritance of $1 million to start it), arrives like a lightning strike — illuminating an alternative path for philanthropy to confront the challenges of our era.

Witt examines the role of the Garland Fund — led and governed by activists from labor, civil liberties, and civil rights movements — in pushing for fundamental changes to the economic and social order from the 1920s through its dissolution in the ’40s. The book provides a window into the noisy ensemble of movements and activists that reshaped U.S. society and politics under extraordinary duress.^[3]

The parallels with our own time are striking. The 1920s saw attacks by the state on the freedoms of individuals and civil society, waves of racial terror targeting Black Americans and immigrants, and escalating economic inequality driven by unregulated corporate power. Activists in the 1920s confronted the daunting reality that the existing social order was collapsing, while authoritarianism was gaining ground and progressive ideas and organizations had not yet coalesced into a coherent alternative.

In the crucible of these crises, the activists supported by the Garland Fund forged a new vision that shaped the policy agenda of The New Deal. They developed new strategies such as strategic litigation, sectoral bargaining, and mass communications to influence public opinion. Most importantly, they founded new organizations that engaged in or supported mass organizing. These included the legendary Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Brookwood Labor College, which trained many of the organizers who went on to build the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The Garland Fund also supported the iconic campaign that ultimately brought about an end to legal segregation in education.

It would be easy to overstate the impact of a single, small foundation in planting the seeds for historic progress in civil rights and civil liberties, racial justice, and labor rights. Witt avoids that mistake, rightly crediting larger social forces along with the courageous activists and millions of everyday people who took great risks to bring about change in a period of intense backlash and repression. Witt claims that “the Fund served as a nursery for fragile new social movements, an incubator in which new ideas could take root and grow in preparation for a more propitious moment.” And “when crisis arrived, the ideas, institutions, and movements of the Fund’s interwar workshop were ready to reshape America.”

It has become commonplace for today’s liberals and progressives to bemoan the greater strategic coherence of conservative philanthropy. But perhaps liberal donors don’t have to copy conservatives, as many have tried to do. Witt’s research offers another lineage to draw on.

After I finished the book, I wondered what the remarkable band of activists around the Garland Fund might say about the predicament we face. What advice would they give us? Based on what they said and did, here are six lessons I believe we can draw:

1) Aim high — but be practical as well as radical. The Garland Fund leaders differed about many things, but they agreed that American democracy, capitalism, its racial order, and the country’s leading institutions were broken and needed to be remade. This prompted bets on a scale and of an ambition — like rebuilding the labor movement and undoing segregation — that are needed today.

Despite facing overwhelming odds, the leaders of the Garland Fund and the activists they supported really believed that they could change society. And they felt they had an obligation to find and pursue strategies that could win. It’s fascinating to read the intense debates between Garland Fund board members (and also debates with prospective grantees) about the potential impact of various strategies and grants. These activists and funders were rigorous, not just righteous. They wanted to win.

2) Help everyday people build power because power is the currency of social change. Witt writes about the perspective that ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, also one of the founders of the Garland Fund, brought to both organizations.

“Durable change required something more than minimum wage laws, safer workplaces, and expert juvenile courts….The kind of change he was after now…would require not merely achieving new standards but also some way of ‘formulating, securing and holding’ them, as one of his allies put it. The real question, Baldwin concluded, was about the ‘sources of power’ for ‘getting and holding’ the desired outcomes. Gaining such power required vital organizations made up of masses of people to push for and sustain new and better ways of life through ‘direct action’ and ‘organization on the job.’ It required a form of organizing the people that made them responsible agents of their own destiny. Policy success without a strong democratic foundation, Baldwin came to think, had been the great failing of prewar progressivism.”

This perspective resonates today. Previous federal administrations have brought about substantial gains in a range of policy areas, from climate policy to poverty reduction. But the changes proved ephemeral because they did not rest on a foundation of durable organizational power or mass engagement.

3) Embrace a full repertoire of strategies. The Garland Fund supported a wide range of strategies — from efforts to reshape public opinion, to organizing workers, to policy development, to strategic litigation, to disruptive action through strikes. (Changes to the tax code have taken some aspects of these strategies off the table for today’s foundations.) Strategies were tailored to the circumstances — sometimes the inside track wasn’t available, and everything depended on workers’ willingness to strike. On other occasions, campaigns to pass bills or persuade courts worked. And there were often important feedback loops among the litigation, policy, communications, and mass organizing strategies that led to successes no one strategy could have produced alone.

The multi-pronged approach also served as an important bulwark. As Baldwin, influenced by the suppression of dissent during World War, put it, “The idea that ‘constitutional American rights can be maintained through law,’ has been pretty well exploded.” Legal rights, it seemed, were “hollow shams without the political and economic power to enforce them.” As Baldwin saw it, “the only places in the United States today with free press and free assemblage are where the workers or the farmers are strongly organized enough to take and hold those rights.”

As we confront a crisis of democracy that rivals that of the 1920s, litigation is surely essential, if only to slow the erosion of basic rights and to draw attention to abuses of power. But courts alone are unlikely to serve as the guarantor of those rights. Similarly, at a time when deploying expertise to influence elites —– a comfortable strategy for most foundations —– is proving less effective, the Garland Fund’s broader repertoire including strategies of mass organizing is instructive.

4) Bring activists in. The Garland Fund was governed and informed by the leading activists of the day, including Baldwin, as well as luminaries like James Weldon Johnson, Sidney Hillman, Norman Thomas, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. The protagonists of major social struggles influenced — and in some cases decided — where money should go. This occasionally created conflicts of interest. The activists represented a broad spectrum from liberals to socialists, and they engaged in fractious, sometimes sectarian debates. (The most painful parts of the book cover these often debilitating arguments.) But the involvement of people with practical experience organizing campaigns ensured that The Fund had the expertise to make educated bets. And it kept the Fund’s ears close to the ground — this was no ivory tower philanthropy.

5) Race, class, and democracy need to be addressed together. Progressive reformers have been arguing about the relative centrality of race and class to achieving social change for a long time. While the views of individual Garland Fund protagonists differed, the Fund took a “yes and” approach, adding to race and class an emphasis on the importance of civil liberties and democratic rights to any project of social change. The result was a “three-dimensional effort to produce institutions of racial equality, economic fairness, and free speech adequate to mass democracy.” Today, we would add a fourth dimension, recognizing the centrality of gender to any project of human freedom.

It is striking that the ACLU began with a focus on labor rights. Only later did the civil liberties agenda come to exclude economic rights. The intersectional work of the activist organizations supported by the Garland Fund raises the question of whether the specialization of today’s organizations — with democracy and civil liberties over here, economic justice over there, and racial justice somewhere else, impedes progress. Philanthropy has driven this fragmentation of the NGO sector by funding narrowly in issue siloes. 

6) Embrace experimentation, bet on up-and-coming talent, and don’t fear failure. The Fund backed bold organizing experiments and campaigns. While many of them succeeded, there was a high tolerance for failure. The foundation was committed to building mass organization and to scouting talent with the grit and imagination to take on daunting projects. One of the book’s most compelling stories is that of the Fund’s early support of A. Philip Randolph, whose success in building the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters created the foundation for progress on civil rights through the 21st century. The Fund also supported Brookwood Labor College, a kind of Highlander Center for workers and labor organizers that served as a training ground for the CIO’s big organizing campaigns in the 1930s. The Fund’s investment in popular education to support the passage of an anti-lynching bill, on the other hand, failed. But activists believed that despite the defeat of the bill, the public education campaign resulted in an unexpected and dramatic reduction in the number of lynchings.

One seeming success — the enactment of labor laws in the 1930s — had unexpected negative consequences, making some unions averse to the mass engagement and risk-taking that were crucial to their founding. And, of course, ending legal segregation through Brown v. Board of Ed. has not ended de facto segregation in schools.

Ambition was paired with a willingness to try new things, support emerging leaders, fund big plans, and take big risks.

Why should we care what activists and funders from a century ago might say to us now? The Garland Fund had a small amount of cash, compared to behemoths like Rockefeller and Carnegie. And it operated for only a few decades. But we have the receipts. Witt closes the book with the plausible claim that “people and movements touched by the American Fund did more for twentieth-century American liberalism than all the money of the era’s much larger and more famous foundations.”

Can philanthropy today help activists reconstruct the vision, strategies, and mass organizations required to overcome today’s crisis? The verdict is out, and critics have many reasons to be skeptical. But the Garland Fund shows that means, methods, and the moment met once before. And perhaps with courage and imagination, some of the methods can be directly applied to today’s challenges. Knowing that, don’t we have an obligation to try?

-Deepak Bhargava

Deepak Bhargava is the president of the Freedom Together Foundation, a position he assumed in February 2024. Before then, he led the grassroots organization Community Change for 16 years. Bhargava also served as a distinguished lecturer at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies and a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is the co-author, with Stephanie Luce, of Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World (New Press, 2023) and co-editor, with Ruth Milkman and Penny Lewis, of Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future (New Press, 2021).

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^[1] See for example, Anand Giridharadas, Winner Takes All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018).

^[2] Some conservative foundations have been forthright about their desires to change social norms, policies, and institutions and have used aggressive strategies to achieve those goals. See, for example, the landmark report by Sally Covington, Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations (1997).

^[3] There is an extraordinary and constructive exchange between Witt and scholar Megan Ming Francis about the Garland Fund’s history (I have co-authored a piece with Francis and have not met Witt). Francis published a brilliant paper that takes an altogether different view of the relationship between the Garland Fund and racial justice movements. The debate between Witt and Francis turns on the question of whether the Garland Fund engaged in “movement capture,” co-opting the agenda of the NAACP, or whether racial justice movement leaders captured the Garland Fund. The perspectives are not mutually exclusive; both dynamics appear to have been at play. The debate is essential reading for analysts of the relationship between philanthropy and social movements. And the open-minded, respectful nature of the exchange between the scholars is inspiring.