The American Fund for Public Service

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

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Gloria Garrett Samson

Book Code: GM9873

ISBN: 0-313-29873-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-313-29873-8

DOI:

288 pages, tables

Greenwood Press

Publication: 2/28/1996

List Price: $131.95 (UK Sterling Price: £75.00)

Availability: Out of stock

Media Type: Hardcover

Also Available: Ebook

Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4

Subjects:

Series Title: Contributions in Labor Studies

Series Number: 46

Reviews:

Samson has produced a nicely done book on a long-ignored topic... Garland was a very American radical, a wealthy man who rejected his inheritance and turned it into the most daring of the early American foundations, although he himself was inconsistently invovled with the Fund's management. The Fund was always on the fringes of radical reform, its activities ranging from support of the NAACP and progressive labor unions to the very edges of communist social action. Samson covers the activities of the Fund and its managers very competently, and in so doing, sketches a segment of the left-liberalism of the 1920s and 1030s that has been too often ignored. Her research is thorough, and the book fills an important gap.
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Choice

Description: This study examines one organization 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 revitalize 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 meager resources among the most "promising" radical ventures, typically militant labor organizations. The philanthropy's directors represented a who's who of the labor 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 will be of interest to scholars of labor relations, radical politics, American history, and philanthropy.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
An Inheritance Rejected
From Progressivism to Radicalism
The ACLU and a New Social Order
Free from the Bonds of Old Institutions
Workers Will Lay Down Their Tools
To Promote the Well-Being of Mankind
Pacifists as Radicals
It Takes Warm Hearts
Chosen to Box the Left Compass
A Sane Enough Radicalism
Spend It Here and Now
Scientific, Pragmatic, Efficient
Emancipation of Their Class in Every Sphere
Bolsheviks in Patriots' Clothing
Tempers Flare
The Rebel Girl Comes Aboard
Surveying the Left
Enemies on the Left
Education and Culture
Recipient Testimonials
"Negro Work"
Passaic
Vanguard Press
Friction Within and Without
Little Left to Repress
"The Manifold Discriminations That Beset Him"
Shift to Low Gear
We Did Quite a Lot of Good
Bibliography
Index

LC Card Number: 95-35689

LCC Class: HV97

Dewey Class: 361


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