Garland Fund

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Portrait of Charles Garland from 1922, the year he endowed the fund

The American Fund for Public Service, commonly known as the Garland Fund, was a

1926 Passaic Textile Strike
, as well as a host of similar projects. The fund was terminated in 1941.

Institutional history

Establishment of the fund

In 1920,

H.G. Wells, he had come to the earnest belief that the money "is not mine."[1]

Hearing of the young man's decision to refuse his inheritance and his rationale, the socialist author

Reconstruction.[2]
While Garland did not immediately take action upon this suggestion, it seems as though the idea of accepting the inheritance in the name of establishing a radical philanthropic organization derives from this time.

In 1921, Garland was approached by Roger Baldwin, head of the American Civil Liberties Union, probably through ACLU attorney Walter Nelles, a law partner of Swinburne Hale, who had recently married Garland's widowed mother.[3] Baldwin convinced Garland to accept his father's inheritance and to establish with it a "national trust fund" which would aid efforts to expand "individual liberty and the power of voluntary associations."[4]

On July 5, 1921, the American Fund for Public Service was formally incorporated by Lewis Gannett of the

securities at the First National Bank of New York.[5] In preparation for the task of distributing the funds, Roger Baldwin reached out to the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Russell Sage foundations to determine how those philanthropies handled grant requests.[5]

The board of directors included Roger Baldwin,

Norman M. Thomas
.

According to the James Weldon Johnsons's autobiography:[7]

[Garland] was an uncommonly handsome young man and extremely reticent. He turned his inheritance over merely with the request that it be given away as quickly as possible, and to "unpopular" causes, without regard to race, creed, or color. In doing this, he made no gesture of any kind. He simply did not want the money, and refused to take it. He wished only to be left free to follow the life he had planned to live. It was a strange experience to look upon a man in the flesh and in his right mind who could act like that about a million dollars.

While the board of directors in charge of distributing grants from the Garland Fund exhibited great cooperation during its initial phase, gradually the fratricidal hostility which characterized American radical politics in the 1920s made its way into the board's discussions. The board seemed to split between a

Socialist right wings, with a small number of centrists tipping the balance.[8]

After the successful establishment of the fund, Garland "took up a farmer's life."[9]

Notable contributions by the fund

From an early date the Garland Fund's board of directors determined not to give money directly to political parties, instead targeting funds to groups or institutions engaged in original groundbreaking efforts on behalf of the working class or oppressed minority groups.

International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.[10]

At end of the 1920s, the Garland Fund earmarked a fund for the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, to finance "a large-scale, wide-spread, dramatic campaign to give the Southern Negro his constitutional rights, his political and civil equality, and therewith a self-consciousness and self-respect which would inevitably tend to effect a revolution in the economic life of the country. . ."[11] The lawyer Nathan Ross Margold was retained by the NAACP to lead the legal drive based on these. He produced the Margold Report, outlining a different strategy for a legal drive funded by the Garland Fund. Based on this strategy, he argued Nixon v. Condon in front of the Supreme Court and won, overturning a Texas state strategy to exclude blacks from voting in national primaries. The Texas Democratic party was quick to adjust, however, finding a new way to circumvent the law, demonstrating the weakness of Margold's strategy.[9] After granting almost $20,000 of the $100,000 initially earmarked for the NAACP, the fund ended its support - the stock-market crash had demolished much of the fund's resources.[9]

Termination of the fund

On June 18, 1941, the board of directors of the American Fund for Public Service announced that it had voted to terminate the fund, returning its "few remaining assets" to Charles Garland. Garland was assigned $24,626.18 in outstanding loans, as well as the organization's final cash balance of $1,619.13.[12] Over the course of its 19-year existence, the Garland fund had contributed nearly $2 Million to almost 100 enterprises.[12]

Beneficiaries and clients of the fund

References

  1. ^ a b Harpers magazine, no. 142 (February 1921), pg. 397. Cited in Gloria Garrett Samson, The American Fund for Public Service: Charles Garland and Radical Philanthropy, 1922-1941. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; pg. 1.
  2. ^ Sinclair to Garland, December 2, 1920. Cited in Samson, The American Fund for Public Service, pg. 2.
  3. ^ Samson, The American Fund for Public Service, pg. 2.
  4. ^ Samson, The American Fund for Public Service, pp. 2-3.
  5. ^ a b c Robert C. Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; pg. 130.
  6. ^ "Heir to a Million Gives Up $800,000". New York Times: 1, 3. 1922-07-04.
  7. ^ Johnson, James Weldon (1968) [1933]. Along This Way (Viking Compass ed.). New York: Viking Press. p. 386.
  8. ^ Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union, pg. 131.
  9. ^
    OCLC 841333634
    .
  10. ^ a b Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union, pg. 132.
  11. OCLC 634013084
    .
  12. ^ a b Samson, The American Fund for Public Service, pg. 219.

Further reading

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Garland_Fund&oldid=1076256873"