Prologue: A Curious Inheritance PROLOGUE A Curious Inheritance In November 1920, three weeks after Warren Harding won election to the presidency on a promise to restore normalcy, a restless young man on a farm in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, did something that was not normal at all. Charles Garland was coming into his adulthood, like many young people, with a growing dismay at the world into which he had been thrust. Just past his twenty-first birthday, he was tall, with dark hair, a soft mustache, and a generous if distant smile. He had a slightly brooding disposition. And he saw grievous inequalities all around him. He recoiled at the gap between the haves and the have-nots. He was a white man who deplored the postwar mob violence against Black communities. He loathed the spread of narrow-minded nativism.

Yearning for a more communal and cooperative way of life, he found himself moved simultaneously by the spirit of the New Testament, the pacifism of Leo Tolstoy, and what he dimly understood as the romance of the Russian Revolution. The socialism of his favorite writer, the English novelist and commentator H. G. Wells, inspired him to prize service to others over the selfishness of private property.1 But young Garland was also rich. As an heir to a Wall Street banking fortune, he was the beneficiary of several substantial trusts. In addition, he stood to inherit outright more than a million dollars from his late father''s estate. And when he came into the bequest, Garland said no.

"A system which starves thousands while hundreds are stuffed condemns itself," he announced. Someone, he added, needed to stand against the organized selfishness of society. He decided that he would do his part.2 The executors of the estate were perplexed; no one could recall anyone declining such a fortune. Local newspapers took note. And soon reporters from up and down the East Coast and as far away as San Francisco descended on Garland''s mother''s fashionable Cape Cod farm to get a word with the attractive young eccentric. The New York Times reported that Garland invoked the example of Jesus and said he preferred to earn a living with his hands. The front page of the Boston Globe explained that Garland, who had recently dropped out of college at Harvard, had chosen a life of "honest toil.

" Private property, he said, sapped the meaning from life. Newspaper columnists asked their readers what they would do with a million dollars. A jovial janitor told reporters he would buy cigars and automobiles--and then minutes later came into a more modest inheritance of his own, which he assured readers he would keep. "If you really want to know," a comedian quipped, "just leave me a million and I will tell you." Letters to the editor took sides for and against. Onlookers asked if the Bolsheviks had influenced young Garland. (Would the revolution against private property spread to American shores?) Journalists probed Garland''s unusual ideas about sex and marriage. (Would collectivist ideas about property lead to free love?) Reactions alternated between scandalized and voyeuristic.

Photographers followed Garland and his beautiful young debutante wife as they came and went. Gossip columnists spread rumors about an affair with a paramour. It seemed an episode perfectly tailored to titillate the society pages of the postwar idle rich and their aimless children. From England, Garland''s erstwhile hero H. G. Wells deprecated Garland''s decision as "depressing news to receive so early in the day."3 A few people watching from afar, however, had a more ambitious idea. In Los Angeles, the muckraking author Upton Sinclair, whose bestselling novel The Jungle had publicized the horrors of the meatpacking industry, wrote to Garland with a proposal.

Don''t refuse the money, Sinclair urged. Accept it and give it away. Sinclair recommended that Garland get in touch with a man named Roger Baldwin, who had recently founded the American Civil Liberties Union, and whom Garland knew already through family connections. Baldwin and Garland met on the Cape. And by early 1922, a plan was in place. Garland would accept the bequest. He would transfer several hundred thousand dollars to his wife and their infant daughter. And he would make a nearly $1 million gift--equivalent after inflation to around $18 million today--to endow a philanthropic foundation called the American Fund for Public Service, dedicated "to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.

"4 Baldwin, a preternaturally energetic New England patrician and self-described "philosophical anarchist," conceived of the endeavor as what he called a "gamble in human nature," a high-risk experimental wager in social change. "We are not reformers trying to patch up the defects of existing institutions," he explained to a friendly journalist. "We are rather a group of those who would assist those forces which are experimenting with new institutions." The premise of the Fund, he asserted, was that basic features of American society--from its ideas and norms, to its laws and most powerful organizations--were not fixed in place, not inevitable or unchangeable. The Fund would aim for fundamental transformations. It would challenge the "present means of producing and distributing wealth," question the "controlling of ideas in education," and protest, if need be, "private property itself." It would support, Baldwin said, organizations that instilled into workers the kinds of "knowledge and qualities" valuable "for carrying on the struggle for the emancipation of their class." Baldwin proposed to test new ideas for what he believed was the central question of his time: how to build democracy for an immense, racially divided country in the age of inequality, mass production, and mass communications.

If the "law of percentages" worked out, some of the Fund''s efforts, maybe even "a fair proportion," Baldwin guessed, might produce ideas "valuable to mankind."5 Skeptics doubted that the Fund would amount to much. "The only result" of Garland''s "liberality," sneered the New York Tribune , "will probably be to part him from $800,000." Garland''s gift paled by comparison to the great endowed foundations already being created by the titans of the American economy--Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage among them. Thanks to the booming stock market of the 1920s, Garland''s money would ultimately support grants of nearly $2 million, or around $36 million in 2024 dollars. By 1922, the Rockefellers alone had given away enough to amount to a Garland-sized foundation every day for nearly an entire year.6 Concerned critics warned that the new philanthropic initiative might act as "a golden transmission belt for Communist propaganda" or as "the life stream of the Red Revolutionary movement in the U.S.

" The editors of the New York World called the Fund a criminal enterprise. Others branded it the "Free Love Fund," scandalized by its participants'' unorthodox ideas about marriage and sex. At the new Radical Division of the federal government''s Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover opened a file labeling the group "revolutionary." In years to come, observers would charge that the Fund was a vital node in a "red network" aiming to subvert America. The red-hunting Texas congressman Martin Dies and his successors in the House Un-American Activities Committee would denounce the Fund as a shadowy threat to American values. After being turned down for a grant, the old-line labor leader Samuel Gompers at the American Federation of Labor dismissed the Fund as quintessential "parlor pinks."7 Baldwin and the board of directors he assembled to run the American Fund, however, were after something that even giant sums could not guarantee, and for all but a few of the Fund''s directors it wasn''t Soviet-style revolution.

The Fund''s core project came to life in a group of men and women who understood themselves as practical agents of transformative social change. They would seek to remake an unjustifiably unfair society--but they would do so not by smashing the world and building it from a clean slate. Some of the Fund''s directors had flirted with violent revolution earlier in their careers; a minority counted themselves, at one time or another, among the Communist Party faithful. But most on the Fund''s board aimed to start with people as they existed in the world. The Fund''s pivotal efforts drew on the United States'' history, its institutions, and its wealth, deploying them as resources in the struggle for something better. Along with Baldwin, key figures in the Fund''s orbit included innovative labor leaders, advocates for racial minorities, left-leaning economists and social scientists, liberal journalists, birth control advocates, and progressive reformers. There were anti-Communist liberals and leading socialists. They were a fractious bunch--a "mixture of forces," as Baldwin came to think of it, intentionally designed to take in all points on the left-liberal side of what he called the American political compass.

They cooperated and they bickered. They learned from one another. They competed with one another. Sometimes they divided into bitter factions, and at least once they formed romantic connections. Shared beliefs, however, linked them throughout. They believed that American capitalism was broken. They believed that American democracy, if it had ever existe.