CHAPTER 1

“For the Improvement of Mankind”

In the span of two generations following the Civil War, an unprecedented number of Americans became rich and powerful enough to shape community and national affairs by themselves. In the 1870s, there were just 100 millionaires in the United States. During the next twenty years, more people made more money more rapidly than ever before in history, and they made very large gifts to society. In 1892, the New York Tribune counted 4,047 millionaires.1 By 1916, there were over 40,000, and at least two of these millionaires, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Henry Ford (the second having contributed much to the expanding wealth of the first), counted their fortunes in billions.

That many of these men—in some instances, their widows—opted to give much of their newly acquired money away was to have major consequences for the way Americans manage a host of important endeavors. Reinvesting large fortunes in philanthropic institutions depended on establishing long-term alliances between the rich and reformers. These partnerships diverted unprecedented sums of private money to the service of a modernizing, universalizing program of human progress. Instead of limiting their activities to pre-established purposes, as mandated by the rules governing charitable contributions, they advanced an open-ended program of works for the improvement of mankind.

The philanthropic projects were acts of generosity and hubris on a scale never before entertained. The new rich felt free to both envision and fashion the common good, and they did so. Until then, it had been unimaginable that some Americans could be wealthy enough to build, almost entirely by themselves, a complete university and have it compete effectively with older schools that had acquired size and strength over generations. And yet, this is what Johns Hopkins did in Baltimore, Ezra Cornell in Ithaca, Leland Stanford in Palo Alto, and John D. Rockefeller in Chicago.2 In fact, the University of Chicago was just the first in a series of prestigious institutions of research and policymaking that the oil magnate bankrolled, including the China Medical Board, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Laura Spelman Memorial, and the Rockefeller Foundation.³ Wealthy Americans built scores of new libraries, museums, and hospitals across the nation, often in tandem with local groups, and continued to make multiple gifts to existing institutions.

This direct conversion of massive capitalist wealth into public assets, under the guidance of the wealthy themselves and their wise advisors, was a most significant new development in late-nineteenth-century America. With their gifts, the new rich expanded the realm of civil society. What made their philanthropy historically distinctive is that they conceived of it very broadly.

The institutional innovations and programs of the new philanthropy were big enough to be widely recognized early on as a new force in “civilization,” to borrow Daniel Coit Gilman’s characterization of the phenomenon. Gilman, a founding member of the American Social Science Association (1865), the first president of the Johns Hopkins University (1876), and perhaps the original academic entrepreneur, explained it well in “Five Great Gifts,” a 1907 Outlook magazine article.⁴ Having sought out philanthropists at a time when their numbers were growing rapidly, he was in a good position to assess their work. Gilman emphasized that the scale of the new gifts and the ambition behind them put them in a category altogether distinct from traditional investments in local welfare institutions.

Gilman underscored the new philanthropy’s insistence on long-term solutions to social problems instead of temporary relief for the destitute. High among its goals was the search for root causes.⁵ Gilman also identified philanthropy’s two most important programs of the early years. The first was building a national structure for scientific research in higher education, an agenda that ultimately would help transform the United States into a major power.6 Here Gilman highlighted not only John D. Rockefeller’s endowments but also Andrew Carnegie’s several institutions of research and Mrs. Olivia Sage’s gift creating the foundation she named after her deceased husband Russell Sage (a railroad financier who had no interest in giving his fortune away but made his widow the richest American woman). Gilman explained that the new money was used not only to support all kinds of investigations but also to secularize American higher education by allowing research and teaching programs to break loose from sectarian religious control.

Gilman then identified rebuilding the American South after the Civil War—especially educating the freemen—as philanthropy’s second big project. The South offered a unique field of application for philanthropy’s scientific and educational mission as well as its policymaking agenda in agricultural reform and public health. George Peabody, a wealthy Baltimore merchant who lived in London, initiated this project in 1867 with his Fund for Southern Education, often considered the first modern foundation.⁷ The Peabody Fund was the first of a long series of philanthropic investments in the region (including the Slater Fund in 1882, the Rockefeller General Education Board in 1902, and the Julius Rosenwald Fund in 1917).

When Gilman pointed out that the new philanthropy was “national” in scope instead of “provincial or local,” and that the managers of the new philanthropy—those reformers entrusted with simultaneously formulating and executing the grand charge of their philanthropic patrons—could not be “suspected of personal, sectional, political, or denominational prejudices,” he was claiming for philanthropy an instrumental role in promoting national unification in Reconstruction and beyond.

Charity had been for the needy; philanthropy was to be for mankind. Philanthropists, however, could not have done this by themselves. The much-heralded shift from charity to philanthropy could not have happened without a partnership between the rich, who had made their careers as organizational wizards, and the various progressive elites of the academic world, local governments, the judiciary, and emerging professional associations. Together these interests figured out how to put the new money to work for science, education, and public health. They recognized that heretofore-unavailable private fortunes constituted an important public resource for social progress. From the East Coast and Midwestern centers of capitalist development, the alliance spread to the South.

The Southern philanthropic drive would eventually set the stage for an even larger reform effort across national boundaries. A harbinger of things to come, post-Reconstruction philanthropy in the U.S. South would serve as a pattern for lifting parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa out of poverty, disease, and ignorance and bringing relief to war-torn Europe. That it became in some instances easier to export modernizing ideas abroad (or to accept failure) than to operate in the Southern United States in opposition to Jim Crow is only one of the tough realities of the story I am about to tell.

The Rich and Reformers Join Forces to Change the Law of Charity

Some important obstacles had to be overcome before this progressive vision could be realized and many large fortunes put to use for the public good. This was especially true if a gift came as a bequest. The law of charity traditionally protected heirs by limiting bequests to narrowly defined causes. As reformers with ambitious agendas increasingly came to vie with heirs as the beneficiaries of large fortunes, it became imperative for the reformers to revisit the law of inheritance and the administration of trusts. Only in the best of circumstances, as in the harmony between the elder and younger Rockefellers, did heirs contribute to the creation of big philanthropies. The reverse was more common, and the heirs had the law on their side.

In order for a bequest to withstand a challenge from heirs or competing interests, the trust instruments normally had to state in quite specific terms how the money was to be used, identify trustees clearly (often through incorporation), and provide for a class of beneficiaries.8 Heirs who were looking forward to becoming rich and who were upset when this did not happen, often challenged the gifts—and the less specific the gifts, the easier the challenge.

These entrenched legal precedents dated back to the founding of the nation and beyond. Although American states had abolished British laws as soon as their post-revolutionary legislatures met, the 1601 British Statute of Charitable Uses continued to carry weight in American courts because it listed acceptable purposes for gifts: for relief of the indigent, medical care, learning, religion, and objects of general public utility.9 In their desire to encourage philanthropy, British ecclesiastical and chancery courts had used the statute to ensure that charitable trusts were carefully defined, as did state equity courts in the United States. Judges had recourse to another precedent in British law to keep trusts active in the event that the donor’s initial intent was lost with the passage of time or the designated categories of beneficiaries disappeared. In such cases, the old legal doctrine of cy-près (stay as close as possible to the donor’s wishes) provided guidance for the courts to redefine trusts and maintain them.

In the court of law, the ambitious new philanthropists placed themselves in opposition to the centuries-old charitable practice of carefully delimiting purpose and beneficiary. They did not want to feel constrained in their giving. They conceived of their largesse as open-ended so that it might achieve the greatest impact on society. The sheer increase in size and scope of their donations, as well as the number of such cases, eventually forced courts—and legislatures when it became imperative to rewrite the law—to recognize the new philanthropy’s lofty potential for society. Because legal requirements that limited gifts to specific purposes impaired the conversion of vast fortunes into programs to serve such broad concepts as the common good, donors and prospective beneficiaries fought to remove them.

The British had faced a similar challenge before the Americans. Historian W. K. Jordan has shown in his masterful work on Tudor philanthropy that the taxation powers given British communities for poor relief were meant to be used as a last resort only if charity failed to provide the needed funds.¹⁰ As a result, the British chancery courts accommodated most charitable bequests meeting the minimal requirements of the definition in the Statute of Charitable Uses, whether administered by an incorporated body (governed by a charter) or not, when heirs challenged them.

In the United States, interpretation of the British precedents varied widely. In New England, a strong associational life encouraged donations of all sorts. With church disestablishment and the budding of the benevolent empire of bible, tract, and missionary societies, Sunday schools, educational institutions, and charities, New England (and Mid-western states, which were populated by New Englanders) showed an inclination to permit most bequests. In Massachusetts, for example, few donations to charitable and educational establishments were effectively challenged by heirs, no matter how vague. For instance, all donations to Harvard were protected as a matter of course. In an 1865 case, the Massachusetts Supreme Court upheld a charitable bequest with instructions to the executors to apply the gift to “the furtherance and promotion of the cause of piety and good morals.”11 Other states were stricter. In Virginia, heirs who challenged bequests to church and charity for vagueness resorted quite effectively to common-law restrictions and requirements of incorporation to block donations. Courts often felt compelled to side with them.¹²

The real battleground for open-endedness was New York, the state with the largest number of new fortunes—and thus, potentially, a major springboard for the new philanthropy—but where the Constitution of 1846 had abolished the chancery courts in an effort to unify the court system and systematize incorporation law. This created a new legal environment for donors and some confusion. Though New York had repealed the 1601 Elizabethan Statute along with all other English laws in 1788, for the first half of the nineteenth century the state’s chancery courts largely upheld disputed charitable trusts as long as they conformed to the general categories in the statute. Under the 1846 constitution, New York courts continued to enforce charitable trusts for a while, but by the 1860s judges were prohibiting grants to charitable trusts they deemed too vague in favor of charitable corporations to which the state granted clearly worded charters.¹³ From the judges’ standpoint, the reform spared them from the guesswork of engaging in cy-près should the trust become obsolete. They could instead stick to the letter of the charter.

New York judges who promoted this reform reflected concern with the negative impact of large gifts on economic expansion—especially mortmain, or the transfer of land to charitable organizations for perpetual ownership. Worried that land-rich churches restricted the amount of land in circulation and stifled the market, they made their views heard in the 1848 general incorporation statute for charities that limited the value of the assets a charitable corporation could hold. New York State thus contained the growth of civil society institutions until the tide turned in the 1880s, when it became clear to the state’s legislators and judges alike that the public had much to gain from the philanthropic redistribution of new wealth.

A significant trial of how large a gift could be came in 1881, when a bequest to Cornell caused the University to exceed the asset limit it had been allowed under its 1865 charter. The benefactor, Jennie Fiske, donated her fortune to Cornell to further the library and construction program her father, John McGraw, a close friend of Ezra Cornell, had started a few years earlier. The challenge to the gift was much talked about as the plaintiff was none other than Jennie Fiske’s husband, Willard Fiske, a Cornell faculty member.14 Realizing that legal restrictions stood in the way of educational expansion, the legislature promptly produced a new university charter without asset limitation. But the 1882 charter modification could not be applied retroactively, and the university lost the Fiske donation on appeal in 1888. More profound changes were in the offing.

The real test case of open-endedness came when Samuel Tilden in his 1884 will earmarked his own fortune—earned as a corporate attorney—to create a free public library in New York City.¹⁵ Tilden was a popular figure, and so was his cause. The New York governor had won the popular vote in the presidential election of 1876 only to lose to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes by one vote in the electoral commission.¹⁶ A leading swallowtail Democrat—as the gentlemanly Democrats were once called because of their preference for wearing frock coats—Tilden fought his own party’s crooked welfare system with its exchange of alms for votes. As an attorney and Democratic Party leader, he successfully brought down Boss Tweed and the corrupt ring that controlled New York City. With his own money, he wanted to build a library for the city, as Ben Franklin had done in Philadelphia. Libraries were a favorite project of railroad magnates and other industrialists in late-nineteenth-century America, most famously Andrew Carnegie.

Tilden’s nephews and nieces (he had no children) challenged the will on technical grounds. The governor had provided quite generously for each family member, so the challenge was unexpected. But the nephews and nieces, very much in debt, had been looking forward for some time to becoming rich, and they used every legal avenue open to them.

In his essay on great gifts, Gilman praised Tilden for his high-minded testament. Carnegie, however, chided Tilden for not having built his library during his lifetime. Carnegie argued that all Tilden and other philanthropists had to do to bypass legal limitations on bequests was to follow his example and give their money away while alive.17 But that did not go to the root of the problem. The long-term obstacle to large-scale open-ended philanthropy was an obsolete legal framework.¹⁸

New York law required that donations be made to corporate bodies with a recognized charter. Accordingly, the nephews and nieces asserted that the Tilden bequest was illegal because the new library had yet to be incorporated. Moreover, some of the bequest language was surprisingly vague. If, for some reason, the trustees of the estate failed to create the new library, the bequest specified that the money would then go to another worthy public cause of their choosing, provided it was lofty enough to be for the “benefit of mankind.” That too violated the law, based on British precedents of specificity. The challengers had the upper hand, and the Supreme Court of New York had no choice but to side with them, though reluctantly. The heirs won in 1888. Here was a large open-ended gift that could not survive a court challenge, at least not immediately.

Still the tide was turning towards open-ended bequests. Tilden’s heirs faced the active opposition of reformers, as did those who challenged other large bequests. Over time the reformers won more cases as the gifts’ potential for social betterment grew more manifest. Although Tilden’s nephews and nieces were initially successful, they had not counted on the determination of Andrew Green, Tilden’s law partner and lifelong associate. Green would later become famous for orchestrating the consolidation of the five boroughs into greater New York in 1898, but at that moment, all he wanted for New York was to save the Tilden trust to form the New York Public Library. Although he could not, under state law, overcome the rights of Tilden’s heirs, he could seek delays in paying them. Green reached a settlement with one of Tilden’s heirs and used the portion of the will he had thus recovered to work out a partnership with New York’s Astor and Lenox libraries. The Tilden trustees opened the New York Public Library in 1895, and Green lobbied the legislature to change the law.

The most important outcome for the future of philanthropy is that New York State did exactly that in 1893 with a special act of the legislature known as the Tilden Act.19 The new law not only restored the charitable trust as a legal instrument of philanthropy in New York State to make it easier to give money, but also made it possible to leave a bequest undefined and to put the trustees in charge of redefining its goals for each generation. New York legislators in effect transferred the power of cy-près from the judge to the trustee. The new legal framework would make it possible for successive generations of trustees to alter the donor’s plan in response to society’s needs.²⁰ It removed a long-standing objection to philanthropy and endowments in general, that is, the binding of one generation by another, a drawback that Jefferson had lamented already in the early years of the nation.

With philanthropy covering an ever-broadening field, courts around the country no longer struck down vague bequests so long as they could prove charitable intent, as a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case, In re Knight’s Estate, shows. Heirs challenged a gift in 1894 to a so-called religious organization by the name of the Friendship Liberal League.²¹ To many observers it was unclear what the organization advocated or believed in. It was a church only to the extent that William James, had he known about the organization, might have given it that designation among the many types of churches he listed in his Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). One witness testified that “the league was not intended to propagate any ideas religious or otherwise,” but on cross-examination he gave it a more militant character. He said that “it was opposed to all isms.” Another witness testified that the object of the league was “the investigation of truth,” and that “a Christian or infidel would be alike eligible to membership.” In the end it was good enough for the judge “to know that the league is in effect their church; and that its services are intended to give expression to their peculiar views about religion, and in some way to aid in the social, intellectual and moral elevation of themselves and others.” The ruling contained a broad definition of charity, “to refer to something done or given for the benefit of our fellows or the public.” The Supreme Court of California affirmed a similarly broad principle of open-endedness in giving when stating in 1890 that “the enforcement of charitable uses … must expand with the advancement of civilization” and “new charitable uses must be established.”22

New York’s legislative action in the Tilden case was thus part of a broader shift in American law. Maryland had passed a similar law in 1888, guaranteeing that no devise for charitable use would be voided for uncertainty of beneficiaries. In 1907, Michigan enacted a statute that basically copied the 1893 Tilden Act. Virginia passed its version in 1914.²³ Soon enough states had similar statutes to make open-ended philanthropy for the good of mankind the law of the land. Officials of the Rockefeller Foundation must have felt an awkward sense of being Americans when the British Treasury in the mid-1920s denied the foundation a tax exemption for returns on British investments on the grounds that the “well-being of mankind” was not a recognized charitable purpose in England.²⁴ American philanthropy had by then found its unique identity.

The Rich and Reformers Agree to Systematize Welfare

The Tilden Act was the first major victory of the fledgling partnership between the rich and reformers. As a greater array of projects became possible, the alliance gained much strength from the long-standing and virtually universal dissatisfaction in late-nineteenth-century America with the distribution of alms to the poor. Not only was charity unpopular, but the ineffectiveness of the existing patchwork of poor houses and outdoor relief was widely deplored.25

Reformers around the country had been for some time looking for ways to rethink the welfare system. The new wealth promised the means for reform, even if it meant reducing funds available to charity. Americans believed they could eliminate welfare almost completely by identifying and addressing the root causes of social evils. The American Social Science Association, which emerged in the 1860s in part from the Massachusetts Board of Charities, was a group of elite Protestant scholars and reformers—Gilman was a charter member and Tilden a leading figure—who saw social science investigation and social service reform as the most urgent routes toward eventually alleviating and even doing away with industrial poverty.

Most charity workers were well aware of the pauperizing tendencies of almsgiving, even as they disagreed with the unalloyed Social Darwinism that Carnegie indulged in his pronouncements. From the Charity Organization Society’s office in New York City, its tough-minded founder Josephine Shaw Lowell was designing a so-called “scientific” system for the coordination of charities to prevent the duplication of aid to New York City’s poor, while at the same time taking a stand against abuses perpetrated by capitalists against workers in the workplace.²⁶ It was important to her to do both. But when a downturn in the economy or personal misfortune led immigrants to seek alms, they expressed their distrust of the charity system by being selective takers whenever they could. Many immigrants sought welfare in their own ethnic associations of mutual help more often than in Protestant charitable institutions, which they perceived to be instruments of assimilation and social control.²⁷ Southern blacks knew that applications for help only added justification for their disenfranchisement.

The rich, however, endorsed Lowell’s efficiency drive because it was consistent with their own desire for a shield from solicitors. Big givers were daily besieged by individual appeals for help which they did not have time to read, let alone answer. Baptist minister Frederick Gates, who enjoined John D. Rockefeller, Sr., to give his money away or “it will crush you and your children, and your children’s children,” testified that the elder Rockefeller was “hounded” like a “wild animal” by supplicants.28 Mrs. Sage received 20,000 letters asking for money within six months of her announcement that she would turn her late husband’s fortune over to charitable causes.²⁹ Pursued doggedly by supplicants but determined to tackle larger social problems, philanthropists turned to reformers in academic, professional, and religious circles. If big-money philanthropy were to be effective, individual cases had to be somehow aggregated, and a few general principles of giving defined.

Initially for a measure of personal relief, Rockefeller, who remained a pious Baptist, channeled his giving through the American Baptist Education Society, of which Reverend Gates was executive secretary. Rockefeller wanted both a buffer to protect him from the incessant solicitations and an organization that could deal with these requests in some enlightened way. He kept his distance from charities even in his own Cleveland and made a forceful case for sound business principles in his giving. Trusting Gates turned out to be an important decision. Gates sought to define the broad missions but to leave the organizational details to grantees or, in his own words, to engage in “wholesale” philanthropy, not “retail.” Mrs. Sage, while continuing to respond to many different sorts of appeals, turned to attorney Robert de Forest, Josephine Shaw Lowell’s close associate who became president of the New York Charity Organization Society in 1887. Her goal was for de Forest to fund programs of social work and by extension the study of social issues in the foundation she established in New York City in 1907.³⁰

Thus developing and formulating general ideas for the new philanthropy became another project of the progressive generation and the purpose of multiple, if often controversial, deals between the rich and reformers across the country. Much common ground was found in the recognition that the large newly available philanthropic resources should not go directly to the poor. Instead these resources were to be treated as public assets, making it possible to address large questions of social organization. Most reformers were nonsectarian Protestants who embraced universal values to reach across fragmented American communities. They were looking for comprehensive approaches. As they realized the potential of big donations for their scientific and educational projects, they sought association with the philanthropic moguls.

Although some of the wealthy were eager to use their fortunes to transform society and reformers needed funds to support their causes, working together was a balancing act. Of resentment and mutual avoidance there was plenty. The philanthropists were the titans of industry who caused the very afflictions that reformers sought to undo. As antitrust suits made the headlines, muckrakers frequently denounced those who gave money away as hypocrites and their philanthropies as fronts to distract the public from illegal corporate strategies. But at the same time, as historians have often underscored, many progressive reformers who stood for industrial regulation—work safety and collective bargaining—could find little common ground with the labor movement whose language and strategies they did not share. This facilitated their rapprochement with philanthropists.

Workers for their part stood their ground whether in bread-and-butter unionism or in American socialism. They did not believe that what they needed first were libraries. In the 1890s, many communities, invoking recent memories of the tough labor lockouts the company had practiced, were reluctant to accept Carnegie libraries. Twenty of the forty-six solicited towns in Pennsylvania turned down the offer by voting against allocating the required share of matching funds.31

Suspicion of the new philanthropy was not limited to labor circles. Missionaries had their qualms too. Social Gospel minister Washington Gladden denounced “tainted money” and kept the controversy alive for years, especially after the Congressional Board of Foreign Missions accepted John D. Rockefeller’s large gift in 1905.

Politicians paid close attention to the cumulative effect of these denunciations. President Theodore Roosevelt warned his attorney general Charles-Joseph Bonaparte in 1908 that the “representatives of predatory wealth” were “by gifts to colleges and universities … occasionally able to subsidize in their own interest some head of an educational body.”³² Congress had given national recognition to several Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies by granting them their charters. Senator Nelson Aldrich (R-R.I.), John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s father-in-law, had engineered a charter for the Rockefeller General Education Board in 1902, to support its work in education, agricultural productivity, and public health throughout the country, especially in the South. But such national sponsorship became increasingly hard to secure. The well-publicized antitrust suit and court-ordered breakup of Standard Oil, beginning in 1910, made it politically impossible for Congress to grant a charter to the proposed Rockefeller Foundation.33 The foundation was denounced instead as a “Trojan Horse” ready to undo democracy. U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham criticized it as “an indefinite scheme for perpetuating vast wealth,” believing it to be “entirely inconsistent with the public interest.” Attorney Frank Walsh, whom President Wilson had appointed chair of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, and who was pro-labor, denounced the Rockefeller family’s “huge philanthropic trusts as a menace to the welfare of society.”³⁴ The Rockefellers therefore ended up in 1913 applying for a charter in New York State, where their foundation was welcome. The labor violence that erupted in Rockefeller-owned Colorado coalfields and culminated in 1914 in the disastrous Ludlow Massacre led to added denunciations.³⁵

Deep-seated hostilities endured through the years no matter how much good work was done. Senator Robert La Follette, who had been sitting by Walsh’s side at the Industrial Commission, pursued the battle in his own state of Wisconsin. His unabated animosity against foundations took posthumous effect in 1925 when the Regents of the University of Wisconsin adopted a much disputed resolution forbidding the state university from accepting gifts from foundations (the measure was rescinded in 1930).³⁶

Listen to such voices, and it would seem that philanthropic institutions could not contribute much good to society. But history has shown that enough wealthy Americans and reformers, including reformers who were critical of the industrialists’ labor and economic practices, found ways to achieve détente and to further a larger social agenda that benefitted millions.

The Philanthropic Foundation: A Success Story?

The advent of open-ended philanthropy generated an intense period of institutional creativity at the turn of the twentieth century. The most important outcome was the “foundation” as a new kind of institution designed to administer large philanthropic resources to various communities of recipients. The general-purpose foundation was a genuine American invention, a direct outcome of the greater range of options the new rich and associated reformers could rely on for adapting philanthropy to society’s changing needs and contributing to public policy. Twenty-seven foundations were in operation by 1915.37 There were over 200 by 1930. Although many remained charitable trusts supporting traditional causes, the leading ones, in the words of Frederick Keppel, second president of the Carnegie Corporation, were dedicated to the search for “truth.”³⁸

Foundations were the offspring of the turn-of-the-century legal changes reformers had fought for. Legal distinctions between giving during one’s lifetime or in one’s will were a thing of the past. Mission statements that would have been struck down by courts a few years earlier became commonplace. Mrs. Sage enjoined her new foundation “to take up the larger and more difficult problems” of the day (1907). In an early draft for the charter of the Rockefeller Foundation, Reverend Gates stated as its goal “the promotion of any and all of the elements of human progress” (1910). The final resolution, only slightly more concrete, was “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world” (1913). Almost all of the Carnegie institutions were designed “to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.” Simon Guggenheim added “the appreciation of beauty” to this list of broad goals. In creating the foundation dedicated in 1925 to the memory of his son John Simon, he wanted maximum flexibility because no one could “foresee the future.”³⁹ The programs were presumably universal, benefiting all, at least in principle, without distinction of color, race, or creed.

There was a fair amount of experimentation in management methods. Foundation priorities often reflected the philanthropists’ personal interests. So long as Carnegie remained at the helm of his charities, his pet projects were funded first. Church organs were a whim, but thousands of churches got them. Community libraries became an obsessive priority. Simplified spelling was not so surprising a wish from a former telegraph operator who saw in the idea a way to accelerate the adoption of English as the lingua franca and thereby to help the peace movement, to which he was devoting a large percentage of his gifts.40 Carnegie, Olivia Sage, and other big philanthropists also responded to a number of the traditional appeals emanating from the many organizations of civil society.

The modern American university, a latecomer to the world of knowledge, owes an enormous debt to the new philanthropy. Philanthropic investment in education and science under the guidance of academic leaders like Gilman was heavy. Philanthropists found in educators and scientists grantees who could put the new money to work for both credible and important goals. The idea was not simply to expand the number or size of academic institutions, but to create an educational establishment that was ecumenical and open to science rather than denominational in outlook. In this endeavor, the two early giants of large-scale philanthropy, the Rockefeller and Carnegie organizations, played a critical role in secularizing American higher education. As foundations, they used their newly acquired leverage quite effectively to keep religion and science distinct and separate.

Henry Pritchett, former president of MIT, advised Carnegie to support science. Because an attempt by the Cleveland administration and the National Academy of Sciences to establish a research university in the nation’s capital had failed, Carnegie and Pritchett established the Carnegie Institution of Washington (1902) with research departments in experimental evolution, marine biology, history, economics, and sociology, soon expanded to include astronomy, geophysics, and botany.⁴¹ Congress granted the charter. President Roosevelt was among the trustees, as were the president of the senate, the speaker of the house, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and the president of the National Academy of Sciences. Gilman, a logical choice, was elected the institution’s first president; Robert Woodward, dean of the College of Science at Columbia University and editor of Science, the second.

Carnegie and Pritchett were reluctant to support existing institutions of higher education so long as they remained controlled by religious denominations but, from their base at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, they devised a means of forcing American colleges to eliminate those religious requirements that stood in the way of scientific education. The need for faculty pensions, which Carnegie had recognized as a Cornell trustee in the 1890s, when the faculty was earning less than white-collar workers at Carnegie Steel, became the instrument for implementing the change. Establishing pension systems was in the air in the business world and in insurance circles, and much needed in academia, as Pritchett informed Carnegie.

The masterful strategy was to make the eligibility of faculty to receive a pension paid for by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching dependent on the college removing from its charter denominational requirements (such as requiring trustees, officers, faculty or students to belong to any specified sect or imposing any theological test). In other words, the Carnegie Foundation successfully turned pensions into tools of secularization. Colleges around the country complied one after the other, even if the move was vocally resisted at Methodist Northwestern, Presbyterian Princeton, and Baptist Brown. Initially, the pension program included only private institutions, but with faculty members threatening to leave such public universities as Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota for private colleges, Carnegie extended the program to them in 1908. In 1917, it became the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, the parent company of the plan most university professors currently use.42

Under the umbrella of their now very broad mission statements, foundations took on the job of reforming entire fields of education. With the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901, Gates and Rockefeller had created a model institution for medical research. The decision to build an institute independent of a university had been difficult, especially as it involved a painful break with the University of Chicago, when it had become clear that the University trustees wanted to join forces with the local Rush College of Medicine. Not trusting that the arrangement would generate a “temple of science,” the Rockefellers invested their money elsewhere.43 Pathologist William H. Welch of Johns Hopkins served as the Rockefeller Institute’s first director before installing his student Simon Flexner in that position.

A few years later, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching hired Simon Flexner’s brother Abraham to investigate medical schools. The resulting report, which Flexner blandly entitled Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), crystallized for a generation what the new medical education should be, that is, taught by a full-time faculty totally free from constraints not directly related to the educational mission.⁴⁴ Abraham then moved over to the Rockefeller General Education Board and put much of the vast resources now at his disposal behind Welch, who, back at Hopkins, had become instrumental in leading doctors towards accepting full-time faculty positions.⁴⁵ The deal to fund Hopkins was struck in 1913.

Two years later, the General Education Board funded a school of hygiene and public health, also at Hopkins and also under Welch’s guidance. The General Education Board turned down a proposal from Harvard, which was unwilling to adopt radical changes in medical education. The story of a foundation stimulating competitors and selecting winners sounds all too familiar today, but it was new then. Rockefeller’s seriousness in reforming medical education was underscored when Harvard’s former president Charles Eliot was unable to secure the money for his own university despite using his seat on the General Education Board to lobby on its behalf. The Flexner brothers were Jews, and thus an irate Harvard dean could not help but denounce Abraham as “circumcised alike in pecker and intellect.”⁴⁶ But Flexner eventually prevailed in implementing his views on medical education in the country at large.

Another characteristic of the new foundations was their recruiting of experts to conduct in-house investigations as well as to promote different educational and professional programs. Abraham Flexner is best known for his pioneering inquiry into medical education. Mary Richmond’s 1917 Social Diagnosis was a landmark of social work from the Russell Sage Foundation. Foundation managers developed connections with the larger world of expertise from which they could recruit, and on which they could always call. Already in the 1920s, the term “philanthropoid” came to be used in the foundation world to designate “those who give away the money of others” in the matrix of teaching, research, and policymaking.47

This role only grew in the 1920s and 1930s. Funders and recipients learned how to work together. Even the foundations’ detractors, like sociologist Eduard C. Lindeman, who in the 1920s kept exposing them in the muckraking tradition, now granted them the status of a new “cultural phenomenon.”⁴⁸ Grantees still bothered by tainted money overcame their reluctance. By then, foundations provided about 7 percent of annual giving (it is about 12 percent today), but by concentrating their giving they made their influence felt in the world of knowledge and public policy well beyond this seemingly small percentage.

While the new foundations carried out their agendas, potential recipients actively sought out philanthropic resources in any form. As Gilman correctly saw it, this impulse was especially strong in academic entrepreneurs like him. In dealing with donors, university presidents feared that faculty radicalism might upset donors and stymie funding. But despite a few highly publicized contests over academic freedom at Wisconsin, Stanford, and a few other universities, the influx of big-philanthropy money into academia only grew throughout the twentieth century and fostered the scientific project.⁴⁹

A “Temple of Science”

The rich and reformers forged together a secular, scientific, and professional academic establishment for the country at large that dramatically enhanced Americans’ ability to generate new knowledge. The early history of the University of Chicago illustrates the ways in which the new philanthropy emancipated academic life from its sectarian straitjacket and introduced a new scientific ethos to the country.

Of all the major academic projects launched in the late nineteenth century, Chicago stands out as a seminal philanthropic enterprise that almost instantly outgrew its local and sectarian origins to become emblematic of the more liberal Protestant perspective that would be the hallmark of the new American philanthropy at its most effective. The rich funders supported educational reformers within an institution turning more ostensibly liberal.

Rockefeller had decided early on to channel his philanthropic gifts through the American Baptist Education Society to shield himself from the constant stream of supplicants. On behalf of the society, Gates, who had reached the conclusion that Midwestern Baptist students were in dire need of a good educational institution, proposed to rebuild at Chicago an existing Baptist school, which had closed its doors after the Chicago fire.50

As a Baptist minister, Gates did not plan a secular institution, but as he explained it twenty years later to the younger Rockefeller, he believed “sectarianism” was bad not only for science; it was also “the curse of religion.”⁵¹ William Rainey Harper, who became the university’s first president, also wanted a center of higher education uninhibited by denominational requirements. Although a biblical scholar and ordained Baptist minister once associated with the original Baptist University at Chicago, Harper agreed to leave Yale only after he was given free rein to build a first-class university, that is, one where he could recruit the best minds irrespective of their religious affiliations and even beliefs. Thomas Goodspeed and Henry Morehouse, the other two ministers among the founders, were more conservative. Although Rockefeller supported several small Baptist schools (Denison College in Ohio, Spelman College for African-Americans in Georgia), which remained genuinely Baptist, he had a different vision for Chicago. He gave a free hand to Gates and Harper, who tested the donor several times on the issue of orthodoxy.

Here was a gift to a religious denomination—the Baptists—that was used to create an institution that immediately shrugged off its denominational requirements. The very same Baptist ministers who sought the money and founded the school simultaneously led its secularization. Educators at Chicago, backed as they were by a large donor who, in his own words, admired “scientific men” who “arrive at some helpful contribution to the sum of human knowledge,” could afford independence from the parochial outlook of parishioners.52 The ministers placed advancing knowledge ahead of sectarian loyalty.

Controversy over Chicago’s religious liberalism lingered in Baptist circles in the 1890s. Augustus Strong, a Baptist minister who had been very close to Rockefeller in Cleveland, and whose son had married Rockefeller’s daughter, led the charge against Harper.⁵³ Strong tried to derail the Chicago project by accusing Harper, as a biblical scholar, of being lax in textual interpretation. Strong’s motives, however, were not entirely pure; he was seeking Rockefeller money for a university in New York under his own control. But as a result of this controversy, Harper was forced to teach his biblical classes outside the Divinity School at Chicago. Ultimately the Divinity School itself became a liberal center for the scientific study of religion. After a few years, the only remnant of denominational orthodoxy at Chicago was the requirement that the university president be a Baptist (which eventually led its acting president, psychologist James Angell, to depart in 1919 to head the National Research Council); that requirement would ultimately be abolished as well. The only time when Harper seems to have yielded to Baptist grassroots pressure was in limiting the number of African-American students, thus avoiding alienating Southern applicants.

Leaving the sectarian origins of the university behind was necessary also for very practical reasons. Even though the initial Rockefeller gift was very generous, it was a matching grant. The university grew by attracting other donations, most often in the form of bequests from prominent Chicago families. Looking to the community for help, the ministers quickly ran through their Baptist donors. Disestablishment was partly a matter of necessity to gain the support of the larger community.

Although the object of their donations was local, many of these donors framed their gifts in the universal language of the new American philanthropy. Some were quite explicit in supporting the ambitious scientific scope of the project. Martin A. Ryerson, heir to a local fortune, president and treasurer of the University’s Board of Trustees, and benefactor of the physics program, encouraged “the cultivation of science for its own sake.” Real estate developer Helen Culver explicitly directed her gift for biology “to be used in perpetuity for the benefit of humanity,” using the language increasingly heard in the halls of philanthropy in the 1890s.54 Representing the William B. Ogden estate gift for a school of science, Andrew Green, who had fought the Tilden heirs in New York, made the gift to the university on the condition that “admission to the proposed school of students and professors alike” be made “without reference to their particular religious beliefs.”⁵⁵ This ethos, a hallmark of the Rockefeller charities under John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s leadership, was what the Baptist ministers who led the school wanted in the first place, and it enabled the University of Chicago to emerge as one of the centers of American Protestant liberalism.

The spirit of the pact between the rich and reformers was perhaps best expressed in the personality of its most prominent member. As heir to the largest American fortune, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had suffered a deep personal crisis and depression in 1904 when he came to realize that he was not cut out for the family business. He responded by steeling his resolve, abandoning corporate directorships and, with his father’s encouragement, devoting his life entirely to philanthropy. Although he had no inclination towards any kind of radicalism, Rockefeller was deeply influenced by the progressive Social Gospel view of political economy taught by his professors at Brown University and also espoused by Frederick Gates. He felt a deep sense of purpose and was steeped in the enlightened duty of the rich to help mankind. With the family philanthropies invested in medicine, education, and the natural sciences, he pushed for “scientific progress carried out under God’s inspiration” in secular circumstances.⁵⁶

Rockefeller promoted the union between the rich and reformers, which had emerged in science, technology and expert knowledge, and culminated in the new American academic environment. Conversely, despite genuine reservations about a rise in inequality that sprang from the very economic concentration that bankrolled the new philanthropy, the larger reform milieu formed a partnership with big-money philanthropy that permitted both to grow. That Rockefeller could hold his ground in Congressional testimony in defense of the open shop after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre was in no small part a reflection of the progressive movement’s own difficulty with labor. Participants in philanthropy advocated bypassing the autonomy of subcultures. But it remained to be seen whether a program of universal progress, which managed to flourish despite its lack of affiliation with the labor movement, could be exported to the American South, where the deep-seated conflicts of race relations directly interfered, and to the larger world.

Exporting Northern Philanthropy to the American South

The South was a major test of the philanthropic program’s exportability outside its initial milieu. As Daniel Coit Gilman explained in his essay, developing a modernizing program for the improvement of rural life in the U.S. South appeared early on the philanthropic agenda. The big idea was a three-pronged educational campaign aimed at ending illiteracy, improving public health, and boosting agricultural productivity.57 But every program philanthropists launched was hampered by a fundamental inequity between blacks and whites seemingly so intractable that they never addressed it head on. This avoidance, however reasonable, exerted its toll. The Northern alliance of wealth and educational reform could not spread easily in the South, where resistance to measures that benefited African-Americans severely tested philanthropic effectiveness. As philanthropists eventually realized, any long-term positive outcome depended on turning the recipients themselves into agents of change, and this entailed the collaboration of local churches (the very institutions that philanthropists felt were obstacles to progress elsewhere) as well as state and local governments.

The compromises the philanthropists reached among themselves and with the local actors show clearly two contradictory trends that would come to characterize American philanthropy in the twentieth century: the real limits of its application when it came to issues of social justice, and at the same time its role in helping launch social justice movements that took on lives of their own.

What Northern philanthropy could do was vital for emancipation as federal investment in Southern education receded before a tide of white supremacy. With the white South fearing that federal funds might take the Negro “beyond himself,” Congress failed to pass the common school bill that New Hampshire Senator Henry Blair proposed in 1884.58 Only through land transfers indirectly benefiting the industrial schools of Hampton and Tuskegee did the federal government continue to play a small role in the freemen’s education.

John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had meant to call the General Education Board the Negro Education Board.⁵⁹ To him, the Southern drive was yet another way to renew his parents’ commitment to the education of the freemen. His mother, Laura Spelman, had been raised by abolitionists. At the request of its two founders, the older Rockefellers had expanded the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, which was renamed Spelman College in 1884; they then founded Morehouse College, also in Atlanta, this time for African-American boys, and named it after Rockefeller American Baptist Education Society associate Henry Morehouse.

Baltimore merchant George Peabody had also pioneered educational efforts. He made his initial donation for education in the Southern states in 1867. At the time, the Freedmen’s Bureau, which W.E.B. Du Bois called “the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted,” heavily invested its resources in education.⁶⁰ The bureau focused on establishing missionary schools for newly freed slaves. After the bureau ceased its operation in 1871, Peabody Trustees, including President Rutherford Hayes, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, and Secretary of State William Evarts, were anxious to appease white Southerners, many of whom were illiterates who resented the education Northern missionaries were dispensing to African-Americans. The first Peabody general agent, Barnas Sears, had served on the Massachusetts Board of Education. Instead of missionary schools limited to African-Americans, he promoted state systems of public education such as Horace Mann had developed in Massachusetts, theoretically capable of serving all pupils, and he began the strategy of using Peabody funds to stimulate their creation.

In pursuing appeasement, Sears made a point early on of funding white schools almost exclusively. Reporting on the fund’s appropriation in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1881, after Sears’s death, his daughter justified the policy. She observed that while during the previous year over one hundred white children had been denied admission to an “over-crowded building,” the New York Missionary Society “has erected a handsome brick building exclusively for the colored race, and the white citizens of the city have to endure this painful contrast.”61

Sears did not leave African-Americans completely out. He appointed several former Freedmen’s Bureau commissioners as Peabody agents and distributed only 6.5 percent of his funds towards “Negro education” during the twelve years of his administration. Freemen received a small boost in the face of declining missionary involvement and the federal government’s disengagement from the region when, in 1882, New England manufacturer John Slater established a new fund (over which former President Hayes also presided) entirely dedicated to their education.⁶²

When he became general agent for both the Peabody and Slater funds, Southern educator and former Confederate officer J.L.M. Curry pursued Sears’s idea of building state educational systems with the potential for educating the entire population. A Harvard Law School graduate, also impressed by Massachusetts policy, Curry allocated Peabody and Slater funds in such a way as to stimulate local politicians to match them with tax revenues for public education.

The strategy of public education in the American South slowly grew from this initially modest philanthropic incentive. How to translate a project for fostering public education based on a strategy of public-fund allocation into significant gains for African-American communities was the huge challenge Northern agents set for themselves by appeasing whites. While genuinely attempting to help the freemen, they irreversibly allied themselves with Jim Crow. Only through persistently exploiting a few cracks in the system could philanthropic agents hope to plant seeds of social justice.

Over a hundred concerned white educators and civic leaders from both North and South met in Capon Springs, West Virginia in 1898 to discuss the state of Southern education. This conference and successive ones (John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his associate, Baptist minister Wallace Buttrick, attended in 1901) led to the creation of the Southern Education Board. The leader of the Board was Robert C. Ogden, a partner in John Wanamaker’s Department Store and the director of its New York operations, who also presided over the Hampton Institute Board of Trustees. For several years Ogden took Northern philanthropists on well-publicized railway tours of the South to visit black and white schools. George Foster Peabody (a New York investment banker from Georgia, unrelated to the benefactor of the Peabody Fund) was essential in funding the Southern Education Board in its early days. The board mobilized the energies of both Frederick Gates and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who, in turn, launched the General Education Board. Long Island Railroad President William H. Baldwin, whom others trusted to invest their money “wisely” in the South, became its first president.63

For the moment, Northern philanthropists and their Southern allies worked with a theory of race relations predicated on a vision of an organic society they claimed they shared. University of Tennessee President Charles Dabney argued that we should consider “the human race” as “an organism” and “the Negro as a man.”⁶⁴ Curry stressed the danger of an alternate course because “We are bound, hand and foot, to the lowest stratum of society. If the Negroes remain as co-occupants of the land and co-citizens of the States, and we do not lift them up, they will drag us down to industrial bankruptcy, social degradation, and political corruption.”⁶⁵ Booker T. Washington echoed: “The Negro can afford to be wronged; the white man cannot afford to wrong him.”⁶⁶

The philanthropists developed a theory that the best hope for the freemen was an educational strategy they misleadingly labeled “universal.” In practice, this meant educating white Southerners first. As University of Virginia president Edwin Alderman rationalized it, education for whites would make them more tolerant of blacks. If “knowledge and not prejudice will guide his conduct,” Alderman wrote, the education of one white man “is worth more to the black man himself than the education of ten Negroes.”67

In proceeding with “universal education,” the philanthropists saw society clearly divided between a superior and an inferior race. “There cannot be any question about that,” General Education Board director Wallace Buttrick told a group of Tennessee school superintendents.⁶⁸ Curry concurred: “History demonstrates that the Caucasian will rule. … White supremacy does not mean hostility to the negro, but friendship for him.” To white Southerners stuck with “primitive people” in their midst, the most appropriate way to go about educating these people was to recognize this basic fact of life.⁶⁹

Dabney summed up the connection between primitiveness and industrial education in arguing that “the negro is a child-race, at least two-thousand years behind the Anglo-Saxon in its development, and like all other races it must work out its own salvation by practicing the industrial arts, and becoming independent and self supporting.”⁷⁰ Curry admired the methods of industrial education that General Samuel C. Armstrong (the son of missionaries in Hawaii, and the former commander of U.S. Colored Troops in the Union Army) had developed at Hampton. Armstrong’s teaching had deeply impressed the young Booker T. Washington during his years at the normal school. Curry now pressured Washington on behalf of the Slater Fund to expand these methods into an educational creed for the black South rather than the more traditional curriculum Freedmen’s Bureau-supported Northern missionaries had advocated. Baldwin in turn advised Washington that the Rockefellers could be major donors at Tuskegee, adding to the resources already provided by Andrew Carnegie and other donors.⁷¹

It is important to note that philanthropists and reformers alike were genuine in their desire for improvement in race relations and should not be confused with the hardline Jim Crow biological racists to whom they conceded race inequality. Although the philanthropists approved of the principle of segregation—the law of the land since Plessy—and had no real vision for an alternative to it, they were clear-headed that mass education, even industrial education, would eventually overturn the status quo in American race relations. They welcomed that fact and promoted the idea that educated people needed opportunities in a more tolerant society. “Unless the colored race is to be removed from the country, how,” Baldwin asked, “can we educate millions of them and keep them so separate and apart?”72 Baldwin also knew that much of the Jim Crow legislation was due to “fear on the part of the ignorant white people that the Negro will get on top.”⁷³

W.E.B. Du Bois, who converted to Marxism later in life, accused Baldwin of having been interested merely in training a docile black labor force “to break the power of the trade unions.” Historians have often echoed his indictment and applied it broadly.⁷⁴ But the available evidence supports it only partly. Unlike other railroad executives, Baldwin was open to collective bargaining—although he remained a defender of the open shop. Like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Baldwin was a supporter of a moderate progressive regulatory movement. Baldwin’s commitment to the South as “his greatest opportunity for good work” was sincere enough to make a deep impression on Chicago philanthropist and Sears, Roebuck leader Julius Rosenwald, who devoted his fortune to black education.⁷⁵ Inspired also by Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald sought to establish a black school in every Southern county. It was as an American Jew that Rosenwald, addressing a black audience at Hampton in 1911, denounced “race prejudice” as “destructive”; “it offers nothing but a hopeless warfare and a blank pessimism.”⁷⁶

The northern philanthropists, Rosenwald among them, persisted in working with the state in an attempt to expand black education from within bureaucratic systems committed to Jim Crow, which they had no means or inclination to challenge directly. The General Education Board and the Slater Fund created county training schools, basically elementary schools with an emphasis on training African-Americans for agriculture or domestic service. These schools epitomized the unequal hybrid system that private foundations and Southern state bureaucracies were developing. The General Education Board funded operations partially, but insisted that the buildings be state-owned and that the state, county, or district tax itself at least $750 annually to support the schools. According to one estimate, for blacks age fifteen to nineteen, these training schools (which covered the basics of an elementary education) were the sole source for education in 293 of 912 counties in fifteen Southern states. By 1929, there were 368 county training schools, with Slater and the General Education Board giving $135,866 in that year for their support and public funds another $1,888,852.77

Despite the leverage, the results were limited. On the one hand schooling for blacks increased and literacy improved. On the other, the inequality between spending for whites and blacks worsened dramatically within state systems. In 1890, Alabama’s expenditures per white pupil were 18.4 percent greater than those for black pupils. By 1911, the figure had risen to 459 percent!⁷⁸

Philanthropists and educational reformers sincerely believed that education would eventually lead to civil rights. In this conviction, they differed from the biological racists who implemented Jim Crow. But they had faith in official pronouncements that held little promise. Charles Brantley Aycock, governor of North Carolina from 1901 to 1905 and a leader of the universal education movement, proclaimed his support for disenfranchisement, but with the proviso that blacks should have the means to regain suffrage through education. He supported in good conscience this anachronistic version of liberalism—a Southern version of the selective franchise of nineteenth-century Europe—at a time when Northern Democratic machines were naturalizing millions of illiterate immigrants to America and giving them alms to turn them into loyal Democratic voters. Even African-American victims put the best face on disenfranchisement by openly harboring the hope that education would eventually ensure access to the polls. Booker T. Washington told the Louisiana disfranchising convention: “In the degree that you close the ballot box against the ignorant, you open the school house.”⁷⁹ Disenfranchisement significantly undermined the philanthropists’ work. With blacks excluded from politics, reformers in state systems of education could not find the political support to serve them with tax money. Education for the freemen became a never-to-be-lifted prerequisite to political rights.⁸⁰

Under these tough circumstances, philanthropists understood that the best they could hope for was to turn African-American communities into active partners in their own education. Even if the philanthropic alliance between the rich and reformers in state departments of education failed to overcome white supremacists, it could still help Southern African-American communities help themselves.

In practice, the General Education Board allocated no more than 10 percent of its expenditures between 1902 and 1918 to Negro education.81 Because philanthropic support could never replace proper state appropriations, its strategy was to provide promoters of African-American education within the state systems access to funds protected from political oversight. It was then up to these sympathetic insiders on the ground to foster an educational creed in the poorest and most discriminated-against communities.

The General Education Board thus helped to establish and directly funded dedicated supervisors of Negro schools (who were initially white) within state departments of education. By 1920, all Southern states had such a position. Wycliffe Rose, the University of Tennessee educator who became head of the General Education Board after administering the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission and heading the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, expanded this cooperation with state departments of education in the 1920s by funding additional supervisors of rural black schools.⁸² The initial means of intervention were again quite modest for a region as big as the South, but in the end they grew and added educational opportunities from within.

Thus Jackson Davis, the superintendent of schools in Henrico County, Virginia, began a program of visitations to black rural schools by black supervisory teachers. Davis used monies given the Southern Education Board in 1905 by Anna Jeanes, a wealthy Philadelphian, for the express purpose of black education (upon her death a year later, a separate Jeanes Fund was created). Davis’s idea for supervising teachers came from the work of Virginia Randolph, a black teacher in his district.⁸³ She was so effective that he sent her around to improve the quality of other schools and to raise local awareness of them. Some black teachers resisted the supervision. Reformers like Davis did all they could to encourage communities to cooperate and invest energy in the program—for example by making all preachers honorary members of the teacher’s association, an important recognition of the significance of local churches in educational pursuits.84 The General Education Board began paying Davis’s salary in 1910. Davis later reported: “I have never come in contact with any finer character than some of the Jeanes teachers. They have gone back into the back country, worked under all sorts of hardships, have traveled in all kinds of conveyances and walked oftentimes in all sorts of weather. They have been patient with the people in their ignorance and prejudices. They succeeded in organizing the people into school community associations and bringing to bear the united sentiment of the community in favor of better school buildings, longer terms and more practical work in the schools by introducing simple industries. The school ceased to be known as the ‘public free school,’ contemptuous accent on the ‘free,’ but became ‘our’ school, and the new buildings that were put up represented real sacrifice and devotion. The schools lost their isolation. They became tied up with the life of the people. Now this began to create a demand for a different kind of teaching. People began to appreciate the schools more and to send their children more regularly and to contribute to the lengthening of the term.”⁸⁵ Davis remembered that poor black people building their local schools themselves, no matter how unassuming, and doing so without public assistance save for the teacher’s modest salary, “discovered themselves as a community and no one could see their pride of achievement without being aware of its deep significance.”⁸⁶ By 1939, the Jeanes Fund had placed African American supervising industrial teachers—known as the “Jeanes Teachers”—in at least 505 counties in thirteen states. Jeanes teachers also sometimes acted as assistants to county superintendents.

Davis devoted a lifetime to establishing such linkages in the South, working from the inside to improve black education within the framework of white supremacy.⁸⁷ He was convinced that “the South cannot be forced against its will.”⁸⁸ If it were, the work would fail just like that done during Reconstruction. All that could be done within his lifetime, he was convinced, was to plant seeds of social justice by means of a tough community-by-community strategy of empowering the victims. Like Booker T. Washington, he was willing to accept disenfranchisement now in return for participation later.

The idea of empowering victims was taken to a regional scale by Julius Rosenwald, who had rapidly emerged as the greatest giver to the cause of Southern black education. By the end of his life in 1932, Rosenwald had helped construct 5,357 school buildings in the black South. As much as 40 percent of all black children enrolled in school in that year attended Rosenwald schools. Unlike the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, under the able leadership of former Rockefeller employee Edwin Embree, demanded that communities, in addition to local governments, cost-share for each school.89 As a result, black families increasingly contributed to this hybrid system of educational funding. This is a major achievement not to be overlooked. Poor blacks were willing to endure much sacrifice to educate the children. As Booker T. Washington had advised early on, the community contributed to the cost of lumber and bricks. Sears, Roebuck & Company provided window sashes, doors, nails, screws, paint, and blinds at the lowest possible cost.⁹⁰ Much labor was contributed by the community.

Horace Mann Bond, a young black intellectual trained by Robert Park and Franklin Frazier at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, who worked while a doctoral student for the Rosenwald Fund in Louisiana, estimated that of the $28 million it cost to build these schools, black families had contributed almost 17 percent. More often than not, communities themselves organized and raised the money internally and then applied to the Rosenwald fund. Some of the money they borrowed.⁹¹ Community investment leveraged contributions from Rosenwald and, in some cases, led to a general appropriation from tax funds. This was heroic work carried out under the constant threat of white violence. Bond, who witnessed the aftermath of a lynching, reported he was always afraid he “might do something that would bring harm or suspicion directed at the Negroes with whom I dealt.” His wife Julia thought the community was “at the mercy of whatever impulse may come over these white people.”⁹²

The attempt to have communities of recipients directly seek resources from the state is rich in lessons. For the next half century, most African-Americans would receive their education from a hybrid network of religious schools, state elementary schools built with a mix of state, philanthropic, and African-American money, some high schools, and a handful of colleges that philanthropists supported. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s maternal grandmother and mother were both educated at Spelman. Martin Luther King, Sr., made his way to Morehouse after much self-schooling and, following a long courtship, married Alberta Williams, whose father ministered to the elite Ebenezer Baptist Church. Their son, Martin, Jr., would follow him to Morehouse.93 That modest black educational institutions eventually produced America’s greatest civil rights leaders is the culmination of an important story many times tragically sidetracked yet at the heart of the American philanthropic movement. These educational institutions trained a generation of leaders who exposed national failures while using their schools, in conjunction with their churches, to launch a civil rights revolution.

Embracing the Humanitarian Movement

Philanthropy’s Southern educational strategy was directed partly towards schooling the freemen. Philanthropists also financed improvements in farm productivity and public health, the other two big issues that defined Federal Progressive-era public policy for the economic improvement of the South. They then turned these Southern economic projects into an international humanitarian movement for global health and development.

In 1908 President Theodore Roosevelt had turned to the Russell Sage Foundation to fund his Country Life Commission, aimed at improving life on the farm. At the same time, the Rockefeller General Education Board’s farm demonstration program, under agriculturalist Seaman Knapp’s leadership, became part of a national system of agricultural extension agencies carried on through the state agricultural colleges. The program led to the 1914 Smith-Lever Act, the federal legislation that greatly expanded farm demonstration for soil conservation and increased yield with matching federal-state grants, and the 1917 Smith-Hughes Act, which created a Federal Board of Vocational Education.94

It was as part of this wave of reforms that plans were first formulated at a meeting of the Southern Education Board for the organization of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the eradication of hookworm disease in the American South. Easily transmitted through the skin, the disease affected primarily those who walked barefoot on the contaminated soil around unsanitary latrines. As one of its effects was to sap energy, the disease reinforced the stereotyping of the poor as lazy. It was soon discovered that whites were actually more susceptible than blacks to catching the obstinate parasite.⁹⁵ The program to fight it began in Virginia in 1910 under the direction of Tennessee educator Wycliffe Rose, whose objective was to create state-funded boards of health partly overlapping with the new state educational systems he had had a hand in fostering. School buildings housed the dispensaries where, by 1914, one million patients had been examined. Rose launched a vast educational campaign as well as research on vaccination. But progress in killing hookworm and raising life expectancy was not easily measured as the bureaucratic-educational-philanthropic coalition had again to overcome much local resistance to outside interference in Southern lives.⁹⁶

In extending their reach abroad, philanthropists exported their Southern work. The Rockefellers hoped to make their agenda of public health and farm productivity a pattern for the world.⁹⁷ The International Health Commission they created in 1913 was a direct outcome of the Southern Sanitary Commission and its efforts to fight hookworm. Wycliffe Rose, who had led the hookworm campaign, became its head, and many of the same personnel were involved in both programs. From Virginia, the program moved to Egypt, then to Ceylon; and beginning in 1917 to Brazil, to Mexico, and the Andes. It included research on other diseases such as malaria and yellow fever as well. From Virginia to the Andes, it was the same effort at stemming hunger and disease, built on a new scientific foundation. Some participants in the program were in fact more interested in conducting scientific research than in establishing lasting health and educational structures abroad, but the two worked in tandem.

Carnegie was not interested in these issues. He extended his church organ and library programs to the British Isles, and he funded the peace movement in France and Germany, but global war soon stood in his way.98 The Rockefellers and their associates, however, wanted to eradicate disease and improve agricultural yield where they could. They meant to ignore national boundaries as much as possible. They pursued goals applicable in peace and war, in free and occupied lands. They did not even feel seriously challenged by initial American claims of neutrality in the Great War but did join the American war effort in 1917. In war-torn Europe, the philanthropists said, the battle against the flu epidemic and “germs” became part of a larger war against Germans. Indeed almost half of the 116,516 American casualties in the Great War died of the flu. Rockefeller’s International Health Commission intensified its medical work in France, again under the leadership of the ubiquitous Wycliffe Rose, who managed to overcome French bureaucratic rules. The British Empire was another matter. In British Guiana, Rockefeller officials became disgusted with the lack of cooperation from imperial institutions running “an empire on the cheap.”⁹⁹ In parts of India, and in Ceylon, local planters, interested only in their own protection against hookworm and the sanitation of their own grounds, refused to collaborate in the larger pursuit of public health.

No matter the difficulty, starting with their efforts to build educational institutions and address racial disparities in the South, philanthropists put science to the service of humanitarianism. Their commitment would be long lasting and integrated into the larger American civilizing mission. While lingering division over “tainted money” became irrelevant, failure in the American South mattered if American philanthropists were to promote an American example. Early philanthropic efforts pointed to a still familiar dilemma of American influence in the world—that of projecting abroad American solutions that had not yet reached fruition at home and were not easily applicable to local conditions far away. British planters in India and Ceylon could readily point to persisting American racism to dismiss the philanthropists’ efforts, and they did. The moral dilemma would haunt Americans throughout the century: “What is your right to give lessons if you can’t put your own house in order?”

Philanthropy’s goals and its rhetoric were universal; its practice, however, was often shaped by opportunities and regressive ideologies. In the American South, philanthropists had become complicit with structures of inequality in order to achieve some of their goals. But the persistent application of large financial resources for the good of mankind—with tangible results like the American research university or modern medicine—gave the philanthropic movement a moral integrity that even its fierce detractors have never been able to deny and from which many have benefitted.