By Kenneth Irvine
At its January 7th meeting the Greenwich Retired Men’s Association heard a story of radical generosity and institutional upheaval, unfolded through the words of John Fabian Witt, a professor at Yale Law School. Introduced by host Bob Rimmer, Witt—a legal historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist—presented a narrative that felt strikingly modern despite being rooted a century in the past. His presentation, centered on his book “The Radical Fund,” detailed how a single inheritance became the seed money for the American civil rights and labor movements.
The story began in 1922 with Charles Garland, a Harvard dropout and the grandson of a prominent investment banker associated with the early Citigroup empire. In an act that stunned the nation’s socialites, the young idealist rejected a million-dollar inheritance, citing his readings of Tolstoy and the New Testament as reasons to despise accumulated wealth during a time of shocking inequality. Witt explained that the media of the time was obsessed with the photogenic young man on his Cape Cod farm who refused to be rich.
The rejected fortune might have vanished into legal limbo if not for Upton Sinclair, the famed muckraking author of “The Jungle.” Sinclair reached out to Garland, convincing him that while rejecting the money was a great “stunt,” it would be far more effective to accept it and give it to radical causes. To manage this, Sinclair enlisted Roger Baldwin, the founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Together, they established the American Fund for Public Service, more commonly known as the Garland Fund, to “free people’s minds from the bonds of old institutions.”
Witt emphasized that the fund’s board was a “who’s who” of 20th-century progressivism. It included James Weldon Johnson, the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP and a leading light of the Harlem Renaissance, who directed the fund’s grants toward civil rights. There was also Sidney Hillman, the leader of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, who argued that labor unions needed to be as massive as the corporations they bargained with.
Through the 1920s, the fund acted as a quiet engine for major legal and social battles. It financed Clarence Darrow, the legendary defense attorney, in the Scopes Monkey Trial and the defense of Ossian Sweet, a Black doctor prosecuted for defending his home against a white mob in Detroit. It also provided the initial capital for a litigation campaign led by Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice. This specific “tiny slice” of the fund’s budget, as Witt described it on a pie chart, eventually flowered into the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954.
Beyond the courts, Witt noted that nearly half of the fund’s outlays went toward “workers’ education,” primarily through the Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. Led by pacifist A.J. Muste, Brookwood trained a new generation of organizers, including the future United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther, who would lead the massive strikes of the 1930s.
Witt’s presentation suggested that the turmoil of the 1920s—marked by the “normalcy” of Warren G. Harding, rising nativism, and the propaganda of the Committee on Public Information—closely mirrors the democratic crises of today. He posited that the Garland Fund succeeded because it was willing to invest in visionary, outsider ideas long before they became mass movements. Witt concluded by reflecting on Baldwin’s own ambivalence about using “tainted” capital to fix a broken democracy, a tension that remains central to modern American philanthropy.
The RMA’s next presentation, “The Roberts Court’s Remaking of Religious Freedom” by Nelson Tebbe, is scheduled for 11 AM on Wednesday, January 21, 2026. RMA presentations are held at Christ Church Greenwich, Parish Hall, 254 E. Putnam Avenue, Greenwich, CT 06830.
Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has remade the law surrounding religious freedom, strengthening the right to free exercise and weakening the Establishment Clause. Nelson Tebbe, the Jane M.G. Foster Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, will describe the changes that the court has made since about 2020. He will focus on three cases that were decided this summer: concerning parents’ right to absent their children from aspects of the public school curriculum that offend their religious values, concerning the ability of religious groups to form charter schools, and concerning the rights of religious employers to be exempt from paying unemployment taxes. In these cases, the Roberts Court has extended the pattern of ruling in favor of religious actors.
Professor Tebbe works on freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and general constitutional law. In the spring of 2025, he was the Kluge Chair in American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. His articles have appeared in leading legal periodicals including Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Harvard Law Review, and his books have been published by Harvard and Oxford University Presses. As a media commentator, he has published opinion pieces in media outlets such as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. A graduate of Yale Law School and Brown University, Professor Tebbe also holds a Ph.D. with distinction in the anthropology and sociology of religion from the University of Chicago.
To stream the presentation by Nelson Tebbe at 11 AM on Wednesday, January 21, click on https://bit.ly/30IBj21. This presentation will also be available on local public access TV channels, Verizon FIOS channel 24 and Optimum channel 79.
Note: The views expressed in these presentations are those of the speakers. They are not intended to represent the views of the RMA or its members.
RMA speaker presentations are presented as a community service at no cost to in-person or Zoom attendees, regardless of gender. Any member of the public who would like to receive a weekly email announcement of future speakers should send a request to members@greenwichrma.org. The RMA urges all eligible individuals to consider becoming a member of our great organization, and thereby enjoy all the available fellowship, volunteer, and community service opportunities which the RMA offers to its members. For further information, go to https://greenwichrma.org/, or contact info@greenwichrma.org.
