A 1920s Roadmap for Today's Resistance | First Draft with Susan Demas and author John Fabian Witt

Author and Yale Law Professor John Fabian Witt wanted distance from the chaos of the present, so he went back a century — and found its mirror image. In The Radical Fund, he unearths the story of Charles Garland, a young man who inherited a fortune and refused it, only to see his wealth transformed into fuel for civil rights, labor organizing, and free speech.

“1920s America looks a whole lot like 2020s America,” Witt notes, tracing parallels in inequality, racial tension, and the myth of returning to “normal.” What he discovered in the archives wasn’t a forgotten story of generosity — it was a playbook for resistance built by people who understood that change costs money, and conscience alone wasn’t enough to pay for it.

Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan Demas connects those lessons to the philanthropic landscape of today, where billionaire giving has become performance art and solidarity has been replaced by branding. The Garland Fund stood apart precisely because it rejected permanence; its founders spent everything they had to build movements that outlasted them. The fund’s secrecy wasn’t shame—it was strategy. They believed wealth could be useful only if it disappeared into organizing, not into endowments and marble halls. That principle may be the most radical one of all in a century defined by hoarded power.

The deeper truth Witt draws out is that progress has always required compromise with flawed tools. The Garland Fund’s dollars flowed to causes that couldn’t yet win—to workers criminalized for striking, to Black organizers told to wait, to educators teaching a labor movement into existence. The irony was that money born of privilege became the scaffolding for equality. That contradiction is the heart of the story—and the hinge between reform and revolution.

Today’s inequality looks perilously familiar. We’re again living in the age of plutocrats, a world where attention is currency and empathy feels like debt. But the fund’s history reminds us that even in the darkest cycles, people have chosen to spend what they have — time, money, courage—on something larger than themselves. That’s the inheritance worth keeping.

Share

Tune in to this conversation between Susan Demas and John Fabian Witt for a century-old roadmap to radical hope.

Putinism on American Soil

Joe Trippi · May 29

America is often described as a democracy and a capitalist nation in the same breath, as if the two are natural allies. But our Founders knew better. They feared that the unbridled power of wealth — what Keynes would later call the “animal spirits” of capital — could overwhelm the democratic institutions they were building.

Read full story