The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy, 1922-1941

This study examines one organisation from the radical left of the 1920s and 1930s: the American Fund for Public Service. Little known today, but infamous in its time, the American Fund represented a united front of anticapitalists - anarchists, socialists, communists, and left-liberals - which attempted to revitalise the left in order to end capitalism and, therefore, war. Financed by Charles Garland, an eccentric, 21-year-old Harvard dropout, the Fund performed the difficult task of allocating relatively meagre resources among the most promising radical ventures, typically militant labour organisations. The philanthropy’s directors represented a who’s who of the labour left of the period: Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, Scott Nearing, James Weldon Johnson, and more. The fund anticipated philanthropies later in the century which meant to challenge the status quo beyond reformism. This study should be of interest to scholars of labour relations, radical politics, American history and philanthropy.