Editors’ Note: Carmen Rojas continues HistPhil’s book forum on John Witt’s The Radical Fund (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

John Fabian Witt’s The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America is one of the best books I’ve read about the perils and promises of philanthropy in the United States. It abandons the hero’s journey that many books about our sector are predicated on in service of a human, and humane, assessment of the early twentieth-century leaders, organizers, thinkers, and advocates that form our world. Instead of the familiar trope of the brilliant billionaire or CEO who develops masterful insights and goes on to change the world, Witt’s book offers us whole, complex, messy, and loving people who sometimes approach the issues of their time with tenderness and care and at other times clumsily and shortsightedly. In documenting the work of the American Fund for Public Service, commonly called the Garland Fund, Witt suggests that history does not pass, but rather accumulates. This accumulation helps us remember that we are not the first ones in these fights, that freedom is a constant struggle, and that solidarity is a precondition of a future worth living.

The Radical Fund reminds current leaders in philanthropy, like myself, who want greater justice for all people, that to make this world real we must support those with the capacity to imagine it. It offers students of history and practitioners of philanthropy lessons about taking risks in hostile political environments. And to all readers, it provides warnings against mixing ego with social change, especially for those of us working at foundations, where the focus is to give away money and where success is self-defined. 

I want to reflect on three important lessons from The Radical Fund. The first is that social change work requires active debates about capitalism. This feels especially true if we aspire to move from naming the symptoms people are living with toward addressing the causes of their suffering. When we treat our economic systems as immutable, we abdicate our responsibility to understand their role in extracting from our communities and normalizing human suffering. The second lesson is one we have needed to learn time and again as a nation: white nationalism cannot be addressed if there are no consequences for its perpetrators, beneficiaries, and apologists. And it cannot be addressed by the seductive, but ultimately incomplete, liberal practices of racial representation in the systems built to manage and maintain our current racial hierarchies. The final lesson, while tactical in nature, opens a universe of strategic possibilities: The left should invest in and experiment with a broad array of communication interventions grounded in shifting power. These interventions should be organized around answering, Whom am I trying to convince, and of what, in service of building the world we deserve to live in? These lessons are tied together by a commitment to imagine a world that has yet to exist—where all living beings are healthy and free.

The Practice of Questioning Capitalism

I’ve been in far too many conversations over the last five years where questioning capitalism is shunned, rejected, and disregarded. It’s too impractical to imagine a different relationship between capitalism and the public rules that should be governing it. It’s dismissed as absurd to wonder about the disproportionate power billionaires have over our well-being. And when considering the relationship between capitalism and our government, it’s described as out of touch to imagine that our government, which we support with our taxes, should provide us with the basics of a good life: housing, food, education, and dignity. Many leaders and institutions talk about power-building, movements, and community organizing without answering a fundamental question: To what end? When people are agnostic or unclear about whether the systems that shape our lives are worth supporting, we get stuck celebrating tactics as opposed to building paths to a better future. 

I love how the protagonists in The Radical Fund directly contend with the role of capitalism in their lives. They understood that the National Guard, paid with public dollars to massacre striking workers, was a feature, not a flaw, of capitalism. They understood segregation and disenfranchisement of people of color to be core parts, as opposed to peripheral consequences, of capitalism. They named time and again the ways that corporate capture of our public institutions, political leaders, and our democracy were all functions of capitalism. They did this while holding the contradiction of leading an organization whose wealth continued to accumulate, and grants continued to move, because of the ways capitalism privileges those who already have resources. They understood philanthropy and foundations to be features of their moment and used them to their fullest extent to support the creation of a different world.  

Morris Ernst, one of the book’s protagonists, reflected in the 1920s that the “United States had become the richest nation on earth—but also seemed to have the longest breadlines.” Ernst continues by noting the “giant industrial firms of the American Economy operated openly, even brazenly, as outright autocracies, dominating the lives of millions of working people while denying them a say in basic decisions.” This quote has stood the test of time in a nation where now nearly 70 percent of people live paycheck to paycheck, and one in four people over 65 barely survives on less than $15,000 a year. As our economy and democracy continue to be dominated by corporations poisoning our water and air, exploiting our people, and making the future bleak for our youth, it’s crucial to contend with the fundamental role of this economic system. In a moment where many imagine possible U-turns from today’s autocratic slide, I keep asking myself, To where, for what, and for and by whom? We need to offer serious solutions, and that requires tackling the centrality of a capitalism that is disciplined in its commitment to destroy public goods and undermine human flourishing, placing the lives of 99% of people in a constant state of precarity.

Neither Amnesia nor Amnesty will Address White Nationalism

The Radical Fund reminds us that white nationalism is not simply a byproduct of the rage and rancor of a few bad actors; rather, it’s the operating system of a nation built on genocide, slavery, and exclusion. Even though the American Fund for Public Service didn’t always get their assessment of the relationship between white nationalism and capitalism right, it refused to ignore the profiteers and politicians who wanted racial reconciliation by way of collective amnesia and rejected remedies to racial violence that required amnesty for those who killed, tortured, robbed, and tormented communities across our country.  

The most important insight The Radical Fund offers philanthropy is the distinction between liberal and left approaches to racial justice. Liberal approaches leave the systems that cause and perpetuate injustice virtually untouched while offering minimal solutions to those communities experiencing the greatest suffering. Liberals are unwilling to imagine a world free from the institutions that create injustice—they are more interested in diversifying leadership in immigrant detention, policing, and corporations than in questioning the existence of these institutions. Perhaps more insidiously, liberal leaders and institutions also tend to police the boundaries of left imagination while offering space for the white nationalists’ worst impulses to grow under the guise of civility.

Leftist leaders in The Radical Fund were fueled by their belief in an entirely different world. A world where everyone had what they needed to live a good life, free from exploitation and exclusion, and without the socially engineered hierarchies that have marked so much of our world. They were committed to taking on and dismantling the systems that caused racial injustice.They weren’t above policy reforms or legal fights, but needed them to be accountable to those communities who have experienced the greatest harm. When working toward repair and redress, they looked for “power instead of rights.” The leftists in The Radical Fund focused their work on taking down, not adjusting, “the institutional and administrative arrangements of oppression.” The protagonists in the book inform the way many of us understand the gift of imagining, in bold and unconstrained ways, the world we want to live in and are working tirelessly to bring to life. 

This distinction between left and liberal approaches to racial justice offers us important guidance in today’s philanthropy, where confusing oppression with polarization has become the primary framework for many leaders. The problem with indexing debate, disagreement, and difference through the frame of polarization is that it presupposes the left and right have the same power, resources, and platforms. Our opposition speaks openly about the conflict of ideas we are in, while we uncomfortably try to build bridges to nowhere. The Radical Fund reminds us that the left and right do not have equal power, resources, or influence. The book’s protagonists reject the proposition that the best place to be is the “mythical center” and instead understand that freedom and justice require disciplined and principled struggle.

Speak Loudly and for the People Using Everything You Have

“Narrative change.” “The Joe Rogan of the Left.” “Word pollsters.” Throughout philanthropy, we’ve been looking for the communications silver bullet that will advance the work of grant recipients and the communities they serve. The desire for a single approach to talking to people about their pain, dreams, and futures has hamstrung our sector from thinking as imaginatively as our opposition. While Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post and uses it to advance a conservative political and economic agenda, without worrying about its ability to generate revenue, liberal philanthropy continues to worry about media profitability. The Washington Post has gone from a peak of 22 million digital users in 2021 to 3 million average daily users by the middle of 2024, and yet Bezos has used it to cement his place as one of the greatest single beneficiaries of this current political administration. Imagine if we gave away our resources to build this scale of power and influence for the communities we serve?

It’s imperative that we understand that right-wing narratives don’t win out because they are more compelling or convincing. They win because right-wing funders and leaders spent time, energy, and money to own the infrastructure to amplify their point of view more quickly. This makes their perspectives dominant and natural in a context where nobody else is meaningfully competing. Making disgusting ideas and policies seem normal and natural is hard, generational work. The right understands this. While liberals are fixated on “changing the narrative,” the right is busy creating the conditions to ensure that their messages spread like wildfire. This often leaves liberals trapped in the difficult-to-break cycle of framing their messaging—and worse, their political analysis—within terms established by the right. 

The model the American Fund for Public Service offers is a significant departure from today’s approach. They supported so many interesting endeavors, all with a clear focus on convincing ordinary working people—across race and place—that their lives could be better if they worked together to fight against those who were causing them harm. They established political education programs, invested in films, set up union schools, funded research programs, built bookstores, supported publishing companies, resourced pamphleteers, sponsored college and university programs, bought newspapers, funded documentaries, and more. They understood that they were fighting some of the most powerful people in the world and used every available tool to do so. At their best, they understood that changing hearts and minds needed to work hand in hand with changing law and policy and didn’t shortchange the former in service of the latter. Most importantly, they were focused on helping people make sense of what was happening around them by stating simply who was winning and losing in the human-created system they were living in. 

They also understood the power of the persuaders. The persuaders are those people who build meaningful relationships with those struggling at the hands of the richest and most powerful forces in our nation, and not only offer an assessment of the problem but also have actual plans for the future they want to live in. W. E. B. Du Bois. A. Philip Randolph. Myles Horton. Sidney Hillman. Elizabeth Flynn. James Johnson. These people were problem solvers, not just problem namers, and with the support of the fund, they were able to reshape the next century of life in the U.S. 

At a time when many of us are trying to understand how we got here and how to get somewhere infinitely better, I am reminded that we are living and breathing expressions of a history that began long before our existence—we can never stand outside it. Debating the impact of our economic system, eliminating white nationalism, and engaging with all people about the world we want to live in have been central to the fights for social justice since before our time. The Radical Fund allows us to look with clear eyes at this history and tie our fates with those people who refused to tinker along the frayed edges of social change, who tried like hell to build a country free from racial injustice and economic subjugation, and who harnessed their imaginations and love to build a future worth living.

-Carmen Rojas

Since 2020, Dr. Carmen Rojas has served as the president and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation. Prior to MCF, Dr. Rojas was the co-founder and CEO of the Workers Lab, an innovation lab that partners with workers to develop new ideas that help them succeed and flourish.