RETIRED MEN'S ASSOCIATION OF GREENWICH, Inc. (RMA)
Invites you to its presentation, January 7, 2026, at 11 am at Christ Church, Parish Hall, 254 East Putnam Ave., Greenwich. The program will also be shown on Zoom at https://bit.ly/30IBj21 and on local cable channels 24 (Verizon) and 79 (Optimum)
John Fabian Witt, PhD.
“The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America”
In 1922, a young idealist named Charles Garland rejected a million-dollar inheritance. In a world of shocking wealth disparities, racism, and political repression, Garland opted instead to invest in a future where radical ideas—like working-class power, free speech, and equality—might flourish. Over the next two decades, the Garland Fund would nurture a new generation of wildly ambitious progressive projects.
The men and women around the Fund were rich and poor, white and Black. They cooperated and bickered; they formed rivalries, and made mistakes. But they all believed that American capitalism was broken, and that American democracy (if it had ever existed) stole from those who had the least. They believed that American institutions needed to be radically remade for the modern age.
By the time they spent the last of the Fund’s resources, their outsider ideas had become mass movements battling to transform a nation. A testament to the power of visionary organizations, The Radical Fund is a hopeful book for our anxious, angry age—an empowering road map for how people with heretical ideas can bring about audacious change.
John Fabian Witt is a professor at Yale University, where he teaches and writes on the history of American law and the law of torts. He has written several books, including The Radical Fund, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,
American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19, and To Save the Country: A Lost Manuscript of the Civil War Constitution, as well as articles for The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He has taught at Columbia Law School, Harvard LawSchool, and the University of Texas at Austin.
Our next presentation, on January 14, will be by Rick Lawrence, PhD, former senior staff member at IBM, on “How Will AI Impact Jobs and the Economy?”
