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

In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance and, in a world marked by extreme wealth inequality, open racism, and political repression, chose instead to invest in a future where radical ideas such as working-class power, free speech, and equality could flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund supported a new generation of ambitious progressive projects, bringing together men and women who were rich and poor, white and Black, who cooperated and argued, formed rivalries, fell in and out of love, and made mistakes, yet remained connected by shared convictions: that American capitalism was broken, that American democracy—if it had ever truly existed—systematically took from those who had the least, and that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.