In a country where so much of our politics is funded by dark money—funds given by anonymous donors to nonprofits that try to influence elections—it is both refreshing and startling to read about Charles Garland, a young banking heir in the 1920s who used most of his fortune to finance the American Fund for Public Service. What made this fund different from the foundations established by the likes of Rockefeller and Carnegie is that its monies would go to fixing what its directors thought was broken in American capitalism. The A.C.L.U., unions, and the N.A.A.C.P., among others, all benefited from the fund’s seed money, and its legacy stretched from helping to finance Clarence Darrow’s defense in the Scopes evolution trial in 1925 to victory in the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
The fund closed in 1941, after giving away nearly $2 million, but as John Fabian Witt so eloquently details, it was the strategic deployment of those dollars that proved so influential in remaking American progressivism. This is historical narrative at its best: deeply reported, illuminating, and wonderfully told.
