How to Remake America S8 | E9

Summary

Radical Candor Podcast: How to Remake America

Season 8, Episode 9 | April 8, 2026
Hosts: Kim Scott (B), Jason Rosoff, Amy Sandler
Guest: John Witt (A), Author of The Radical Fund

Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the themes of John Witt’s book, The Radical Fund—exploring the influence of a little-known 1920s foundation that seeded powerful forces for social, economic, and civil rights progress in America. Host Kim Scott leads a rich discussion with Witt about optimism in grim times, the historical roots of civil rights and labor movements, and the powerful lessons we can draw for leadership—and citizenship—today. The conversation is a hopeful call to learn from the past, nurture democracy, and plant seeds for a better future.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Motivation Behind The Radical Fund (01:30–03:36)

• John Witt’s Inspiration:
  Witt explains his motivation: observing “the aspirations of an era of a civil rights movement and a labor movement” achieved in his youth, and despairing as those gains appeared to erode.

  “My lifetime has been watching those things on the ropes… And this book is about a foundation that started a long time ago, the 1920s, a century ago.” (A, 02:10)

• The goal was understanding the origins of progress—and how fragile it is.

2. The Impactful Work of the Garland Fund (03:36–08:13)

• Major Achievements Supported:
  • Brown v. Board of Education (“the most important and famous 20th-century Supreme Court case,” B, 03:32)
  • First major First Amendment/free speech Supreme Court cases (B, 04:47)
  • Defense of Sacco and Vanzetti; funding for the Scopes Monkey Trial
  • Support for labor colleges—places training future union and civil rights leaders
• Historical Perspective:
  • Free speech as a legal principle at the Supreme Court is a surprisingly recent phenomenon.

    “1931 is the first time the U.S. Supreme Court uses the First Amendment to protect a dissenting speaker.” (A, 05:10)

3. Seeds of Labor Activism and Interracial Solidarity (06:44–08:38)

• Labor College Experiment: Training organizers at institutions like Brookwood Labor College, which created a network of future labor and civil rights leaders.
• Connection to Civil Rights Movement:
  • NAACP sent students to these colleges
  • The Highlander Folk School, where Rosa Parks later trained, came directly from this tradition.

4. Democracy, Capitalism, and Inequality: The Sidney Hillman Vision (08:38–14:18)

• Hillman’s Vision:
  • Sought to harness the wealth created by modern capitalism and distribute it more equitably, not by class warfare but by industrial democracy.
  • Believed in organizing workers by industry, not occupation, enabling them to bargain collectively with giant corporations.

    “What the labor movement should do is to capitalize on the astonishing prosperity that mass production capitalism can generate and capture some of that prosperity for the working class.” (A, 10:09)

  • Impact:
    • Inspired FDR’s New Deal policies
    • Helped shape the National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)
    • Created a blueprint for a “participatory democracy and a participatory economy” (B, 12:39)
  • Key Quote:

    “The project was to figure out how to do those things at scale... Hillman’s part of this first generation of worker participation in the making of firms, making firms better.” (A, 13:04)

5. The Lessons for Today: Worker Participation & Technology (14:18–16:11)

• Kim Scott draws a parallel between worker participation then and the present, considering the rise of AI:

  “If we can use AI to help people automate the parts of their jobs that they don't love so they can do work that has meaning... AI could take us back to where we were at the end of your book.” (B, 15:38)

6. Democracy Beyond Economics: Race, Immigration & Inclusion (16:11–22:12)

• Interracial Solidarity:
  • Hillman’s vision depended on bridging divides among workers, especially across racial lines, as the Great Migration and new immigration transformed society.
  • Witt gives a primer on how divisions—dating back to Bacon’s Rebellion—were used by elites to maintain injustice:

    “...the response by Virginia elites is to harden the difference between black enslaved people and white workers and to start the project of divide and conquer.” (A, 18:25)

• Vital Quote:

  “If workers allow themselves to be divided, they will be conquered by... and this goes back to Bacon’s Rebellion.” (B, 17:59)

7. The Power of Narrative and Propaganda (22:47–31:24)

• The Garland Fund, with leaders like James Weldon Johnson and W.E.B. Du Bois, understood that shifting public opinion was as vital as legislative victories.
• Innovative Tactics:
  • Full page “Shame of America” anti-lynching ads during the campaign for anti-lynching legislation—using Madison Avenue’s Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, as lead designer.
  • The media campaign reduced lynchings, despite no immediate legislative win.

    “The number of lynchings dropped dramatically after this campaign.” (B, 29:44)

• Art, Activism & Debate:
  • Black art’s purpose: should it be for beauty or for progress? W.E.B. Du Bois argued it should serve the cause (“I don’t want to engage in anything that’s not propaganda.” (A, 30:33))

8. The Origin and Philosophy of The Radical Fund (Garland Fund) (32:10–38:09)

• Dramatic Origin Story:
  • Charles Garland, inheriting a Wall Street fortune, wanted to refuse wealth tainted by social injustice; he was convinced by Upton Sinclair to put it to good use via a foundation.
  • Garland’s decision started a media sensation.
• Philosophy on Power:
  • The foundation not only distrusted centralized philanthropy (the “dead hand” problem) but committed to spending down money quickly, not existing in perpetuity.

    “One of their goals... is to give the money away as fast as possible.” (B, 37:35)

9. Debating the Need for Crisis to Create Reform (38:09–41:33)

• Kim reflects on the worry that, as in the 1930s, economic and social catastrophe may be a prerequisite for progress.
• Witt distinguishes: crises create opportunities, but the outcome is not pre-determined—social groundwork makes better outcomes (like the New Deal) more likely over catastrophe (like fascism).

  “Catastrophes... don’t determine their own future. Many futures can come out of a stock market crash...” (A, 40:03)

10. Final Lessons: Pragmatism, Experimentation, and Hope (41:33–45:24)

• Lasting Impact Despite Limited Means:
  • The foundation’s impact dwarfed its resources—not everything they tried worked, but some ideas “bloomed later in all sorts of really astonishing ways.” (A, 43:27)
  • Witt: “[They were] like the venture capitalists of idealism.” (B, 43:31)
• Learning from the Past:
  • The challenges of today—inequality, political division, technological change—have historical precedent.
  • “We have resources to draw on… The project now is to find the kinds of social formations, the equivalents of industrial democracy for our 21st-century capitalism.” (A, 44:22)
• A Note of Hope: There are people “doing incredibly great work on this... you don’t have to expect it to fix everything tomorrow, but we’re planting seeds.” (B, 45:05)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Imagine a world of... surging racial conflict, wild economic inequality and the repression of free speech and the shutdown of immigration. And it all comes right after a pandemic. It's like our world.” (A, 20:17)
• “If you allow... workers to be divided, they will be conquered.” (B, 17:59)
• “I recommend that everyone read or listen to The Radical Fund… as soon as it was over, I just started again at the beginning, and I almost never do that, but the book really meant so much.” (B, 45:24)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:30 — Why John Witt wrote the book
• 04:47 — Landmark cases supported by the Fund
• 06:44 — Labor colleges, civil rights, and labor union education
• 08:38 — Sidney Hillman’s ideas for economic democracy
• 16:11 — Discussion of including Black Americans in democracy
• 18:25 — Historical roots of racial division (Bacon’s Rebellion)
• 22:47 — Propaganda, narrative, and ad campaigns
• 32:10 — The surprising origin story of the Garland Fund
• 37:35 — The “spend down” structure, opposition to “the dead hand”
• 40:03 — Debating whether reform demands catastrophe
• 43:31 — Philanthropy as venture capital for idealism
• 44:22 — Applying lessons to the challenges of today

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Episode Summary

This episode uncovers the overlooked foundation that jumpstarted some of the greatest 20th-century advances in justice, democracy, and labor rights. By tracing the vision and battles of its leaders, the discussion reframes how small actions and pragmatic coalitions can, despite limited resources, lay groundwork for massive change. It connects history’s lessons—on solidarity, democracy, propaganda, inequality, and leadership—with present-day challenges, leaving listeners with both a sober analysis and a well-founded optimism: even amid turbulence, the seeds of progress can be planted.

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“The challenges we’re facing have been faced before… We have resources to draw on—a sense of how to build democracy for our own moment of economic flux.” (A, 44:22)

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Recommended for:
Anyone seeking inspiration about leadership, history’s lessons on democracy, and actionable hope for building teams, organizations, or nations that are resilient, just, and humane.

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Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hello everybody and welcome to the Radical Sabbatical Podcast where I, Kim Scott, am talking to the authors of the books I love. And one of the books that I love so, so much is the Radical Fund, written by John Witt. And with me today is John Witt. Thank you so much for writing this book, John.

[A]

You're welcome, Kim. I didn't do it for you in particular, but I'm so glad to hear

[B]

that you appreciated it. The thing, there are many things I love about this book, but one of the things that left me with a sense of optimism is how similar and in fact much worse things were in the 20s and 30s. And somehow people found a way to muddle through and, and to create a better world. So that's what I love. What, what, what prompted you to write this book? What, what, what love prompted you to write it?

[A]

It always is love that prompts you to write a book. I mean, does it?

[B]

There's no other. It's not money, that's for sure.

[A]

Well, sure. And so for me, I feel like my lifetime, I was born like 72. I feel like I, I watched the aspirations of an era of a civil rights movement and a labor movement that when I was born, had accomplished things that just a generation before were unthinkable.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And my lifetime has been watching those things on the ropes in playing defense and stumbling. And this book is about a foundation that started a long time ago, the 1920s, a century ago. And what they did was they set in motion the kinds of things that formed the ideals of my childhood that have been in retreat ever since. And so this foundation launched Brown against Board of Education, the most important and famous 20th century Supreme Court case. And also one. A case that many of my students, I teach here at Yale Law School, many of my students are disillusioned about. No, it did not desegregate America. Yeah, it did in some dimensions, but we have tons of segregated. And you see, you see the point. And so I wanted to get at the. At the origins of this project that meant so much to me growing up and that I, you know, like so many other Americans, am watching in various forms of collapse and decay.

[B]

Yeah, it's horrifying, really. It's like it's. And I think that's part of the reason that I wanted you to talk to the radical candor listeners is that so many people are coming to me and they're saying in this world, which seems to. Where everything I believed in seems to be up for grabs, all the things that I thought we all agreed on, we don't agree on anymore. I'm worried that if I succeed, I may be part of the problem and not part of the solution. And the folks in your book offer such an incredible example of how you can change the world with not a ton of resources and what a positive impact that these folks had. So, yeah, Brown v. Board of Education. I mean, the list goes on. Scopes Monkey trial. They funded a lot of work that we just, you know, we just can't imagine that one fund. So what were some of the other big accomplishments?

[A]

Yeah, right. That's a great way into. Just to get a sense of what this foundation was funding. It exists from 1922 to 1941. And some of the things that come into their purview are the earliest First Amendment free speech cases at the U.S. supreme Court. I don't think Americans understand that free speech at the US Supreme Court is an incredibly new thing.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. It's like after World War I. Yeah.

[A]

Arguably, 1931 is the first time the U.S. supreme Court uses the First Amendment to protect a dissenting speaker. I mean, 1931, this is the Bill of Rights is 1791. You know, we get 140 years of no free speech in the courts. And these people, because this foundation exists right alongside the early aclu, American Union. So they're working on free speech cases. They are working on the Scopes Monkey case, which is a First Amendment free speech case for teachers.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Civil rights cases like the Scottsboro nine, a terrible essentially lynching by. By a judge in Scottsboro, Alabama in the early 1930s. And the decades long defense that gets initiated in the 30s is launched by this. Found, paid for by this foundation, the defense of two anarchists named Sacco and Vanzetti that transforms liberalism in the 1920s. The secret money behind it is this foundation. And then the creation of a whole network of labor colleges, which is now forgotten thing. But in the 1920s, labor is on the retreat, on the defensive. Sounds a little familiar.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And the move of the 1920s is to invest in a series of essentially higher education institutions that take labor organizers and union members, spend a year with them at a. My favorite is a place called Brookwood Labor College in Katona, New York. Fancy neighborhood, big mansion. And it was a left Labor College for 20 years.

[B]

And talk about some of the people who are educated there.

[A]

Amazing. So the NAACP would send students there and get scholarships paid for by this foundation. The brain trust of this college, Brookwood Labor College, was a man named A.J. musty, who's a really important nonviolent protester. He inspires Dr. King in the 1950s and 60s. And the guy behind the scenes is a man named Sidney Hillman, Russian Jewish immigrant, chased by the Cossacks, essentially chased by the. To Chicago, where he's running the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. And in the 1920s, he's the great theorist of how to remake American capitalism. All this is happening outside the state, that is outside the government. The federal government is not interested in the ideas of Sidney Hillman or the NAACP or the Brooklyn Labor College. So these are people in political exile who are dreaming up new forms to do politics to make the world a better place. And the industrial labor union, the kind of thing that exists, people now know it today through the United Auto Workers. United Auto Workers comes out of the Brookwood Labor College experiment as a new idea about how to organize people in modern capitalism. So, so many things we've already talked about. It's like a scattershot. But, but, but this foundation was quietly seeding experiments in all these areas.

[B]

And wasn't Rosa Parks educated at one of these schools?

[A]

I mean like really she's part of the lineage because the Highlander Folk School, famous place for southern civil rights activists. The Highlander Folk School comes out of the Brookwood tradition. And the founder of Highlander, a guy named Miles Horton, spends a day at Brookwood on his way to creating Highlander. So it's lots of connections.

[B]

And let's talk about Sidney's ideas for fixing Democracy slash capitalism. In a way that works because it does feel to me. I mean I went to Harvard Business School. It's not like I'm a communist, but it feels to me like capitalism is the rich get richer algorithm has run away with us. The wealthiest, if I'm right about this, the wealthiest 20 families in the country will have 103%. If you just do the math of all the wealth in the country by 2035, if you know which obviously that's not going to happen, but something's wrong in the state of capitalism.

[A]

Right. It does feel right. There's something. The state of Denmark rotten.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

Well, so. So Hillman, you know, there is a tradition and this foundation has communists on it. Part 1 Big fight late in the. In the story is a fight in which the communists try to take it over and fail.

[B]

Thank goodness. I mean they, they were part of the problem.

[A]

Yeah, those. Well, Hillman's part of the opposition to their effort. And Hillman comes in and says that the American tradition of. Represented by the industrial workers of the world, which is kind of an indigenous and indigenous American radicalism in capitalism. He says that approach to class warfare was wrong. And what the labor movement should do is to capitalize on the astonishing prosperity that mass production capitalism can generate and capture some of that prosperity for the working class.

[B]

Yeah, share a little. You know, we're all getting. The pie's getting bigger. Let's not, let's make sure three people don't get all the slices.

[A]

Totally. But he wasn't under any illusion that just appealing to the interest to the bosses and their better, their better judgment would produce that. He knew that he had to be able to deliver power in order to extract for labor. And for tens of millions of, of working class Americans, they're just desserts from the amazing machine of American prosperity that was mass production capitalism. And so the industrial labor union is Sydney Hillman's brainchild. And the idea is to bring together workers across occupations, not just the bricklayers and the carpenters in their own separate occupational trades unions, but instead to organize them all by industry, such that they could organize at a scale adequate to meeting with the General Motors, General Electrics, Ford motor companies of the age. And what he helps to set in motion was what his, his generation called industrial democracy. It was a democracy in which union leaders with the project of advancing the prosperity of America could meet and bargain with management that had the same project and then figure out some way to split up the proceeds. And that kind of project lit up the World of Brookwood Labor College and lit up this foundation and I think helped produce. Well, we know from the economic historians that it produced a capitalism in the middle of the 20th century that managed to get rid of the wild inequalities of the 1920s and avoid the wild inequalities of our time. I mean, the thing.

[B]

And it grew faster. It was more success. It was both, actually. And that, I think gets. I mean, you. It doesn't get lost in your book, but it had that fact. It was growing. We were growing because I think his ideas had a bit. Sid, Sidney's ideas had a big impact on FDR and sort of the New Deal. I assume I'm right about that.

[A]

Yeah. No, for sure. It's Brookwood. Brookwood Labor College students and staff end up as New Deal administrators.

[B]

Yeah. FDR always said, ask Sidney. Right, right.

[A]

Exactly right. And the Wagner act, the National Labor Relations act, that produces the bargaining regime that's designed by the technical experts out of this Brooklyn Labor College, Sidney Hillman world.

[B]

Yeah. And it turns out. And they were reacting against Taylorism. Right. It turns out that if you get the best ideas out of people and pay them reasonably, if you have a particip. Participatory democracy and a participatory company and a participatory economy, it's going to grow faster. It's going to. It's going to get. Because we'd never had the kind of growth that we had in those years.

[A]

Right. Well, their project was to figure out how to do those things at scale. I mean, the mass production economy was a huge challenge to the old longstanding artisanal ways of inducing worker participation. And once the artisanal skilled roles had fallen aside because of the astonishing efficiencies made possible by mass production. Hillman is the first generation of. In a sense. I mean, you. From the Harvard Business School perspective, Hillman's part of this first generation of. Of worker participation in the making of firms, making firms better.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like we've lost so much of that and we started losing it kind of in the Sevent, I guess, or. You tell me when you're the historian. I'm just.

[A]

Well, it goes through cycles, doesn't it? I mean, you know, there's. And those cycles are partly based on changing fads and fashions in managerial culture and in union culture and partly based on changes in technology.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I mean, you know, I don't know. The AI moment doesn't seem like a moment that's designed to reproduce the kinds of Worker participation, except I think it is.

[B]

Here's my. Here's my optimistic view for how it could be anyway, because I sort of feel like one of the. One of the huge mistakes that we made, you know, I guess starting around the 70s, is starting to hammer away, not pay workers well, not allow, you know, not allow them to participate in the. And when. When growth slowed, management paid itself more and workers less. Go figure that. And then started outsourcing and started treating people like cogs in a machine. And contrast that with TPM at Toyota, which was like, oh, we're going to treat people well because we know that they're going to know when to, you know, pull the Kanban cord. And that worked better. And I sort of feel like when I was at Google, I was leading a sort of a basically call center. Essentially, it was customer support. And so there was a lot of routine, boring work. And I said to folks, we're going to try to automate all the grunt work, but we're not going to shrink the size of the team. I'm not going to fire you all for figuring out how to automate your jobs. I want you all to figure out how to grow the business, like with your extra time, and do projects that have real meaning for you. And I think if we can use AI to help people automate the parts of their jobs that they don't love so that they can do work that has meaning and that will help grow, then AI could take us back to where we were at the end of your book.

[A]

Well, that makes sense. If I were one of your listeners right now, Kim, I might be thinking, well, what on earth does this foundation that's working on democratizing management in the 1920s and 30s, what do they have to do with Brown against Board of Education?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And then the First Amendment. But I think there's a really important lesson here, too, which is Sidney Hillman's view about industrial democracy required figuring out how to work across different demographic groups.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I mean, you know, you and I right now are talking. After 50 years of astonishing immigration to the United States, the 1965 Immigration act transforms America. I say for the better. Yes, the Great Migration transformed the America of early and mid 20th century. It transformed early and mid 20th century United States. I mean, the shutting down of immigration in 1920 is accompanied by this astonishing great migration of black Americans from South to North. And so one of the things this foundation does in its commitment to try to figure out how to remake American democracy is take on front and center the project of ACCOMMODATING integrating, engaging. This new black population is now a part of American democracy. Before the Voting Rights act of 1965, black Americans in the south weren't a part of American democracy, or at least after the fall of Reconstruction.

[B]

Yeah, they were for like 10 years. And then.

[A]

Right. The Great migration means that black America is part of our politics.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

For the first time since 1876.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And, and that, that is such a big project for the United States. And, and, and, and it turns out it was connected to the industrial democracy in all sorts of ways.

[B]

Yeah. Essential. Because if, if you, if you allow, if, if, if workers allow themselves to be divided, they will be conquered by. And, and this goes back to Bacon's Rebellion. I mean, this is an old, old American story, unfortunately. You probably know, I mean, you definitely know more about Bacon. Why don't you explain to people what Bacon's Rebellion is? I'll get the facts wrong.

[A]

This 17th century moment in which white indentured servants and black labor, it's not quite clear what its status is. It's so early in the colonial experiment that black and white workers are working across this enslaved indentured servant category. And there's an uprising of white and black labor. And the response by Virginia elites is to harden the difference between black enslaved people and white workers and to start the project of divide and conquer. Provide psychic wages to white workers. They get status in return for abandoning the class solidarity across race and also

[B]

in return for abandoning living wages.

[A]

Well, that's the effect. Yeah. I mean, this book really starts in 1919. The foundation doesn't start until 1922. But the book is about the crisis of post war democracy. And that's a moment in which strikes all across America as workers try to retain the gains of the World War I moment, are crushed. And they're crushed because black strike breakers come. The steel is the best example around Pittsburgh. Black strikebreakers. Black workers aren't allowed in the white unions, so of course they're strikebreakers. They don't have any investment in protecting the white workers. In fact, at places like East St. Louis in 1917, and then again in race riots all through 1919, white workers have ganged up and essentially engaged in pogroms, destroying entire black communities to try to protect their privileges in the industrial economy.

[B]

And your descriptions of these events are so hard to read and so important to read. I mean, it was terrible what people did.

[A]

So imagine, imagine a world of, you know, surging racial conflict, wild economic inequality and the repression of free speech and the shutdown of Immigration. And it all comes right after a pandemic. It's like our world.

[B]

It is. No, it was very interesting. I was at an event the other day, and somebody said, you know, oh, I had this friend and he had this flooring business in Pennsylvania, and he hired a group of people and he took out loans, and then all his competitors hired, you know, workers who. Who would accept, you know, below minimum wage payment because they. They didn't have their documentation. And it put him out of business. And his. He was angry at these poor worker. How about. I'm like, how about being angry at those people that mistreated those workers and at a government that doesn't protect them? Like, if. If we really pay everybody well, then we don't have this problem. And. And I think. And I. I suggested he read your book because it was. It was. It's so clearly laid out. This is not. This is not something new. Like, why were. Why are these white workers blaming these, you know, these black workers when they should be blaming the leaders who are

[A]

really both in the same boat? They're both in the same boat.

[B]

Yeah. And building that solidarity was something that was a big project of the Radical Fund.

[A]

Yeah. This is a group of people who set out under these conditions of authoritarianism and Jim Crow and economic inequality.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

To figure out how to rebuild a democracy that can be decent. It's not going to be perfect.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

In fact, there are big debates. There are idealists and perfectionists in this group who want to push for perfection. And the heart and soul of this group, people like James Weldon Johnson, the head of the naacp, or Roger Baldwin, the head of the aclu. Frida Kirchway, this amazing editor of the Nation through the 1920s and 30s. Nation magazine. These are people who are deeply pragmatic. They're idealists in their way, and they wanted to actually accomplish a working, decent democracy, not just dream of one.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And the foundation, which came by surprise, this money for this foundation. And it was this occasion where they got to experiment in different forms of democratic. Different. Different forms of democratic life making.

[B]

Yes. And I want to talk about the surprise because it was. That is a good story in itself. But first I want to talk about James Weldon Johnson, who was one of the most remarkable. I mean, there's. This book is full of remarkable people. But talk. Talk a little bit about the role that he played in helping because a lot of the people didn't understand and the fund didn't understand the importance of building solidarity in order to create a participatory economy and a truly participatory democracy. Talk about his role a little bit.

[A]

Well, Johnson's one of the great, mostly forgotten characters of the 20th century America.

[B]

Yeah, I was shocked. I'm like, why don't I know all about, like, why didn't I study Johnson? I mean, I think we know the answer, but I didn't know Val Johnson. I read your book.

[A]

He's a polymath and he's a Renaissance person. He is the drafter of the lyrics to what's known as the black national anthem. Lift every voice and sing. Those are his lyrics. He's a poet, he's a novelist, he is an editorial writer. All through the 1910s, he was in the foreign service under Theodore Roosevelt. Unbelievable. Until fired by Woodrow Wilson because the Democrats coming into the White House in 1913 means the end of the black civil service. He's born in Jacksonville, Florida. He's an early participant in the Great Migration. He's nearly lynched right around the turn of the 20th century in a terrible moment of a terrible fire in Jacksonville, where he grows up. And his response, as is the response of his brother, is to leave and go to New York. His brother becomes a really important figure in Broadway musicals in the early part of the 20th century. Johnson dabbles in that. But in 1920, becomes the first black director of the NAACP. This is W.E.B. du Bois, great institution, the national association for the Advancement of Colored Persons still around today, famously importantly, and it's run for 11 years by White directors. The idea is that Du Bois is behind the scenes along with a variety of fascinating characters, some black, some white. But a white director is needed to have power is the thought. But Johnson is such an influential figure and the NAACP is feeling its maturity in 1920, and he becomes the first black director. And in that position, he helped sponsor much of the Harlem Renaissance while pushing for anti lynching legislation in the Congress and serving all the while on the foundation, on this board of this foundation where he works together with white labor union people like Sidney Hillman. And that's really. That conversation is the thing I think maybe that most lit me up in learning about this story. It's a story in which white labor union leaders come together with the leaders of the black great migration to have a conversation around a table about how to split up a pot of money. That's big for them, but not big in the scheme of things. They've got to work together and they have some fights because they disagree. And they also learn from one another in all sorts of Ways. And I think the Democratic projects that came out of the 1920s that helped to transform the New Deal and the civil rights movement came out of these kinds of conversations where unlikely people talk to one another.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And I think there was also another thing that really struck me about the book was the understanding that, you know, power was important, money was important, but also the narrative was important. Sort of the, and the role of propaganda in this. And one of the really interesting things that you wrote about was during the effort, during Johnson's effort to get the anti lynching legislation passed, the decision to take out the ads. Can you talk about that? Because that was really eye opening.

[A]

This is one of the first things the foundation does. And again, it's really about 1919, you know, World War I and this aftermath brings the power of propaganda to the attention of the entire Atlantic world in a way that nothing had before. Because World War I showed how governments and powerful interests like large firms and U.S. steel and others could shape the opinions of the people. I mean, think of the ad campaigns that probably your listeners, viewers, readers are familiar with from World War I. The Uncle Sam ad, I want you for the U.S. army. That is part of this propaganda campaign of the United States government and people thinking about democracy in the wake of the war. People like the great columnist Walter Lippman in particular are thinking, how can democracy work if the government can shape the way people think? Yes, because the government's supposed to be accountable to the people who are supposed to be independent of the government. But it turns out that propaganda, so propaganda is this threat to democracy. And what the foundation does is decide to invest in a series of counter propaganda efforts. And the very first one, the very first one is an ad campaign in the middle of the fight to get an anti lynching bill through the Congress. A fight that fails because the Democrats filibustered in the Senate. James Weldon Johnson along with W.E.B. du Bois goes to the fund and asks for funding for an ad campaign. They actually designed the ad campaign by the early leader of Madison Avenue, a guy named Edward Bernays, the first great publicity man, ad man in American history. He's the.

[B]

Freud's great grandson or something.

[A]

Freud's nephew. Twice nephew. Okay, twice through marriage. And, and, and Bernays puts together a full page ad called the Shame of America that runs in newspapers all around the country. Paid newspaper ads, full page ads paid for by the, the Garland Fund. And the ads bring to the attention of Americans all over the place. White Americans in particular, black Americans already knew about this.

[B]

They knew yeah.

[A]

It was the NAACP's campaign for decades, for a decade and more. And the shame of America brings the basic statistics about this lynching crisis. You know, three to 4,000 people since the fall of Reconstruction into the early part of the 20th century, lynched, sometimes in horrific public executions. I mean, just a nightmare of racial control.

[B]

Yeah. When you read about them, you just, I mean, especially, I grew up in the South. I'm like, who were these people doing this? And, you know.

[A]

Right. And Boys and Johnson come to think that even though they lost in the, in the Congress, in the Senate, that their, their ad made a difference. And the number, yeah.

[B]

The number of lynchings dropped dramatically after this campaign.

[A]

Yeah. So it's, which is not to say that Jim Crow collapsed. No, it all had to alter in response to this assertive engagement. They even put it out in the, in Atlanta newspapers, so. Which was an aggressive. Georgia was not the place for anti.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. But they took their money. Their money was green. And that is, that is also an interesting theme that keeps, that I kept thinking about throughout the book, because I think of propaganda as a bad thing. You know, it has a negative connotation. But Orwell wrote a book, all art is propaganda. WB Du Bois said, you know, I don't want, you know. But how did he put it? He. I don't want to engage in anything that's not propaganda.

[A]

Yeah. He wants to change people's minds. And he goes back and forth on this. But in the middle of the 20s, he's committed to the idea that black art isn't worthwhile unless it has a propagandistic dimension to advance the project of the American black community that's so horrifically repressed and subordinated and subject to violence in the, in the 20s. But he's in a big debate because on the other side, some followers of James Weldon Johnson are saying, wait, if we subordinate our art to these political projects, then Jim Crow is reaching into our lives and altering the aesthetic standards, the aesthetic visions. And so that's really, that debate comes into the book in ways that James Weldon Johnson allows me to see. And it was a, I, I, I learned, I learned a lot and I

[B]

think a lot about that, those ad campaigns, especially given the way that advertising drives social media and like it, it seems like it's amped up. This is true, this is, was true then, but it's exponentially more true now.

[A]

Right. And I, I wonder, yeah, the debates, I mean, Lippman's ideas, along with Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson they sound like our debates about democracy in the era of social media and the Internet. Disinformation campaigns, misinformation, echo chambers. And they were essentially developing strategies for clicks. How do they capture the attention of American citizens since democracy turns on the attention of American citizens.

[B]

Yeah. And they were just using the tools. They, you know, these were tools that would use for good. The Right. They were being used for bad, so they used them for good. And that's the genius of it. The, you know, it's tempting to say advertising should be illegal, you know, or you can, you know, fight fire. Fight fire with fire. And that's also the question of money. And the fund itself comes up. So maybe this is a good time to talk about how the fund came to be and the debate about the existence of the fund at all, which is incredible.

[A]

Yeah. It all starts with an unplanned inheritance. A Harvard undergraduate named Charles Garland, who's in the process of dropping out. He never, never finishes. Inherits when he turns 21, the residue of his grandfather's Wall street fortune. His grandfather had been in and around the beginnings of what's now the citigroup empire, the first National bank of New York in the late 19th century. He's a partner of Jay Cook around in the Civil War, railroad finance in the 1870s. And when young Charles inherits this money in 1920, his 21st birthday, he looks around at the world we just described, Kim. The world of Jim Crow, racial subordination, economic inequality. And he says, I want no part of this. I didn't earn this money. I don't want to be implicated in the evils of the world of authoritarianism around me. I refuse it. And it causes a huge scandal because

[B]

there's a lot of people who are like, I'll take it.

[A]

Well, exactly. And he is. He is ultimately lionized and mocked in the press.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

ID Pages from all over the country send their reporters scurrying to Massachusetts to report on this young man. It helps that he's a looker. He's a handsome young man. The pictures are in the book. I'll leave it to the viewers to decide. He's also got a beautiful young debutante ball wife, also 21 years old. And so pictures of the two of them fill the society pages around the country until he is persuaded by the amazing American, eccentric, idiosyncratic character writer Upton Sinclair, who's written the Jungle, which is the great of the stockyards of Chicago. And Sinclair says to Garland, Charles, don't refuse this. Accept the money. And Give it to me and I'll give it away to causes you believe in. And eventually Garland is persuaded to do this.

[B]

Well, I mean, I think Upton Clare did something slightly different, if I remember right. He didn't say, give it to me. He said, I'll give it to somebody else. So it was very clear, you know, and there were checks and balances. Like one of the other themes through the book is power and the problem of power. And so he wasn't saying, you know, give it to me. He was like, let's create a group of people who will figure out how to do this.

[A]

Let's create a foundation. And honestly, Sinclair is not an organized enough person to ever been able to give away a million. It's a million dollars. He could not have handled it. He did apply for grants a whole lot.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

There's a lot of inside conflicts of interest in this story. Actually, my nonprofit lawyer friends are horrified by it. The man who takes over and sets up the foundation's board is Roger Baldwin, who two years before has created the ACLU. ACLU created 1920, same year as the inheritance. And Baldwin incorporates the American Fund for public service in 1922. It's a Delaware corporation. It, after some lobbying and litigation, has the tax status of what we would call a 501C4. And. And that's how the thing comes about. And Baldwin puts together a board of directors of people who aren't so sure that big sums of money should be changing American politics. Yes, none of them are sure about it. And that debate runs through. Garland's initial reaction is shared by these people.

[B]

Yeah, they're talking about the dead hand. I love that. So talk about the dead. What was the problem with the dead hand?

[A]

Well, the dead hand is a kind of classic problem in the law of trusts going back into the medieval age England. It's also a problem in constitutional democracies. I mean, Thomas Jefferson says that we should have a revolution every 18 years because otherwise we're being governed by the dead hand of the past.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Just as a trust, if it's all bound up in a set of rules that allow it to exist into perpetuity, allows people in the past to control us in the present and off into the future. And so this is a. This is a real problem in democratic theory and how to organize a world that's had wealth in the past. And this group of people is made up of people who are among the fiercest critics of the new Rockefeller era. Foundations of the American 1920s. This is the beginning. Kim of the great philanthropo industrial complex of America. The Carnegie's, the Rockefellers, the Russell Sages and all of the big names, McGill University. There's buildings that I'm in building that is built, finished in 1931, it's built with Rockefeller oil money through the Harkness family, silent partners of the Rockefellers. And so all of these big institutions in the United States are being built up with the wild economic profits riches of 1920s robber baron capitalism. And this group is made up of critics of that.

[B]

Yes, they changed some things, right? They changed their. One of their goals for example is to give the money away as fast as possible.

[A]

Spend down structure. The philanthropists among your people observe that it's not to exist in perpetuity. It's not a 5% payments a year to preserve the principal. They want to spend it down as fast as they can. And they're amused because the Wall street returns in the 1920s. They can't spend it, they can't spend it fast enough.

[B]

Yeah, mackenzie Scott is having that same problem. I just read recently she's given away more money than almost anyone ever and she still has more than she started with because of this algorithm.

[A]

We're doing well. Let's hope that the fall of 1929 isn't looming in our own.

[B]

Yes, I mean and this is one of the questions I had for you because it seems like, you know, the last time we were in a similar situation it took three combined things to change it. It took a crash, a stock market crash, it took a nearly a revolution. I mean there was, there was a lot of violence and unrest in the country which you describe and it took a war like. And so the question is we're facing a similar set of problems in terms of people being disenfranchised in terms of people in terms of economic inequality. And I think when you wrote the book the economic inequality was not as big now as then, but I think now it's worse. I think I read recently that Elon Musk is worth more than Rockefeller was by some measures. So we're facing a similar set of problems and the question is what can we do so that we can solve the problems without an economic collapse, a revolution and, and a war like those were pretty painful ways to, to come to grips with what happened.

[A]

Right. Well there's a historian economist at Stanford named Walter Scheidel, has a great book you should bring him on. It's called the Great Leveler. And the Scheidel claim is that you don't get radical transformations without catastrophes.

[B]

Well, I hope he's probably right, but I hope he's wrong.

[A]

Well, here's, here's the thing is that catastrophes and big transformative events don't determine their own future.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

That is many things, many futures can come out of a stock market crash or a Great Depression. And we know this in the interwar period because Germany's economic crisis in the interwar period produces fascism.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

The United States's economic crisis in the interwar period produces the New Deal. And then fast on its heels, the civil rights era. That was not a necessary path. There were many paths that could have been taken, many of them quite horrific. And I think that what the groups in the 1920s and early 30s that were ceding these forms of industrial democracy we've talked about, these forms of interracial solidarity, these forms of free speech, what those things did was they made it just that much more likely that the United States would take better democratic paths out of economic catastrophe rather than worse.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

And I think that's huge.

[B]

Huge.

[A]

There are big forces in the world and we can't. There are going to be big forces and they're going to push our countries in directions with huge amounts of power, but they're not going to determine the particular path that those histories take. And that, I think is what these folks were up to was, you know, preparing for better paths rather than worse.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think the thing you end on such an inspirational note about a reminder of what all these people did with what they had and what, I mean, you know, the initial fund, it was, it was a big deal to inherit a million dollars in 1920, but it was even 36 million dollars or something today, like you can. It was not an infinitely huge. It was nothing like what the Rockefeller foundation had. So with, with not infinite resources, you can have a huge impact on the future, a hugely positive impact on the future. And especially if you don't try to control it. I mean, that was the thing all of these people were looking for checks and balances. They weren't insisting on control.

[A]

No, for sure. They didn't, for example, use the kind of metrics that a lot of philanthropists use today of measurable, measurable results. We've talked today about the success stories. I mean, the number of things they invested in that collapsed almost immediately. They were, they were engaged self consciously in experiments. They were investing in people in long term projects. Brown against Board of Education. The grant is 1930. The Brown against Board of Education case is 1950. 4. So they have a long time horizon. They're investing in talent and finding amazing people and sometimes failing. And if we'd asked them in 1929, they would have said it was a failure. This summer, before the crash, they would have said, this is not taking. But it turned out that things they'd seeded bloomed later in all sorts of really astonishing ways.

[B]

They were like the venture capitalists of idealism.

[A]

I love it. I love it for the radical candor. That's the way to think about it. But it did have a kind of venture dimension. They spread their money in a whole bunch of different ways and they saw which kinds of investments would have huge payouts, and then that dwarfed the ones that had failed in all sorts of. And the question now is, what are the kinds of investments that we might be able to make today? One baseline point here is we've been here before. I think it's really easy for us after almost 80 years of a New Deal order with a civil rights add on. Of course, those two things were always in some tension with one another. It's easy for us to forget that there have been forms of authoritarianism in American history. In the modern era.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Forms of wild inequality with racial violence that dwarfs things that we see today as horrible as many of the things we see today are. So we've been in similar kinds of situations and we have resources to draw on sense of how to build the democracy for our own moment of economic flux. They're in a moment of economic flux. The rise of mass production capitalism and our moment of technological transformation. The project now is to find the kinds of social formations, the equivalents of industrial democracy.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

For the age of our 21st century capitalism.

[B]

And the good news is there's a lot of people out there doing incredibly great work on this. And I think that's the thing to hold on to, is not that you have to expect. Expect it to fix everything tomorrow, but we're planting seeds and it may take some years for those seeds to bloom.

[A]

Yeah, agreed.

[B]

Well, I recommend that everyone read or listen to the Radical Fund. I listened to it on Audible. This is a book that I listened to, and as soon as it was over, I just started again at the beginning, and I almost never do that, but the book really meant so much. So, John, thank you so much for writing it and for talking to us about it. Really appreciate it.

[A]

It's a pleasure, a pleasure to get to talk.

[B]

Thanks so much.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

The Radical Candor podcast is based on

[A]

the book Radical the Kick Ass Boss

[B]

Without Losing youg Humanity by Ken Scott the Radical Candor podcast theme music ones composed by Cliff Goldmacher follow us on LinkedIn radical candor the company and visit

[A]

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