The Coming of Mass Philanthropy
Turning large fortunes into public assets for the good of mankind was a huge project. But what gave philanthropy even more of a central place in modern American life was the simultaneous creation of a people’s philanthropy—or mass philanthropy—that engaged the large American middle and working classes in their own welfare.
Philanthropy would not be a democratic value if it remained the domain of the wealthy. Only when the rest of the population aligned its old welfare institutions and charitable habits to the systematic search for the common good would philanthropy become a national commitment. One requirement for effective mass giving was the creation of a culture of giving, where making contributions in response to mass appeals would become routine. Another was the ability to reach everyone. National fundraising campaigns like the March of Dimes canvassed the entire population in large and small cities alike, while local do-good associations federated into community chests across the country. The managers for these new charities worked out a division of labor between new charity professionals and legions of volunteers. Together, they devoted mass campaigns to the open-ended scientific program of foundations as well as to the traditional goals of local charities.
There had been dramatic occasions in America when fundraisers had bypassed the church and lodge, where appeals were normally made, to collect money more widely. American communities improvised fundraising campaigns across the country for great humanitarian causes. The U.S. Sanitary Commission collected its funds for the wounded of the Civil War. In Virginia City, Mark Twain famously described how the money was raised: “If the town would only wait an hour, an office would be ready, books opened, and the Commission prepared to receive contributions” from “the clamorous multitude.”1 After the Civil War, several tragedies abroad generated special campaigns such as auctions, benefits, theatricals, concerts, and entertainments to help the victims, as when rescuing the starving Irish in the late 1870s or mobilizing against the massacres of Armenians in the mid 1890s.2
But it was the Progressives’ promotion of “collective responsibility,” as Theodore Roosevelt put it, that set American mass philanthropy on its course.3 The leaders of the new mass philanthropy—promoters of the public health movement, heads of federated community institutions, social workers, and reformers—discovered early in the century, in social worker Lilian Brandt’s words, “large subterranean pools of benevolence” upon which they drew.4 The difficult part was to tap those pools. They spent much energy on finding ways to accomplish this, and their efforts were rewarded—though what they marketed was not a consumer good but a cause in need.
The Idea of Mass Philanthropy
Institutionalizing mass philanthropy began in earnest in the public health movement—specifically in the fight against tuberculosis—at the turn of the twentieth century. The fundraising techniques developed during this era made it possible to envision a drastic change in the giving habits of Americans.
Americans normally contributed to local charities. In his 1906 book on the need for a living wage, Father John Ryan, who would become an important Catholic supporter of the New Deal, reported on workers’ giving habits. He based his analysis on a survey (conducted for the Bureau of Labor) of 2,132 families with an average annual income of $687 and an average size of 5.7 persons. Workers gave 1.5 percent of their annual income to their church for church maintenance as well as charitable causes. They gave another 1.8 percent to labor and other voluntary associations, though in most cases this was a form of insurance. Many of the contributions went to ethnic organizations with burial benefits. They gave an additional 0.4 percent for informal charity, unmediated by church or lodge, to help friends and neighbors in distress.5 Working-class budgets collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm these figures.
Thrift was also an important part of ordinary Americans’ lives. The Charity Organization Society volunteers, as well as the new crop of professionally trained social workers encouraged all people of modest means to save money as much as they could. They valued thrift as both a means of personal improvement and a minimum safety net. Social worker Mary Wilcox Brown reported in The Development of Thrift (1899) on success in inculcating frugality in the laboring classes via cooperative savings, building and loan associations, and people’s banks.6 Margaret Byington reported on the effort workers made to save in her contribution to the 1908 Pittsburgh survey of working-class life.7 While expressing some reservations about the pitfalls of excessive saving, Father Ryan shared the same conviction. Noting that workers paid almost 1 percent of their income for property insurance, up to 3 percent for life insurance, and up to another 3.25 percent for sickness and death benefits to a combination of fraternal associations and insurance companies, he expressed the hope that they would eliminate insurance and death benefits spending through savings.8
Now a tuberculosis association was proposing an entirely new formula to donor and beneficiary alike: Make giving a form of safety net against broader threats. Invest some money for the common good as well as your own in a philanthropy devoted to eradicating a major cause of impairment and death.
With the germ theory of disease as their scientific grounding, reformers supported an intense educational campaign against tuberculosis. The Census Bureau estimated in 1908 that tuberculosis alone accounted for 11 percent of all American deaths—and one quarter of New York City children were affected.9 Only pneumonia was worse. But as President Theodore Roosevelt’s Committee of 100 on National Health described it succinctly in 1908, “the weak and spasmodic efforts of charity” were not effective to respond to the scourge of tuberculosis.10
The campaign against it was slow to pick up. In 1892—ten years after German bacteriologist Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bacillus—Dr. Laurence L. Flick, a recovered American patient who had become a physician, started the Pennsylvania Society for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, the first group dedicated to fighting the disease. For eight more years, the Pennsylvania society remained the only such organization in America, with fewer than one hundred members. A second society formed in Toledo in 1900. In 1903, Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf founded a third association in New York.
The National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis was finally launched in 1908 after Knopf asked the New York City Charity Organization Society to sponsor a Committee on the Prevention of Tuberculosis.11 Edward Devine, Charity Organization Society secretary, and Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement House in the Lower East Side, were instrumental in launching the national organization. Separately, the New York State Charities Aid Association set up a Committee on the Prevention of Tuberculosis in 1907.
But the alliance between the rich and reformers, which had worked so well in higher education (chapter 1), did not immediately materialize in public health. Despite the commitment by progressive reformers and the worthiness of their goals, no big donor emerged to take the lead in funding the eradication of tuberculosis. In fact, no large philanthropist had yet targeted any specific disease at the time the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis was created. It would be another two years before the Rockefellers began their battle against hookworm in the American South in 1910.
The concept of mass fundraising to fight tuberculosis reached the United States by chance. The Danish-born immigrant Jacob Riis, well known as a pioneer photographer of tenement life and campaigner to clean up the slums, had seen six brothers die of tuberculosis. In 1904, he received a Christmas letter from Copenhagen bearing a peculiar seal in addition to the traditional postage stamp.12 A Danish postal official had had the idea, embraced by his government, of selling the seals to raise money to build a local hospital for children with tuberculosis. Three years after Riis received the remarkable letter, construction of the hospital near Copenhagen was complete. Riis told the story of this highly successful “penny subscription” in Outlook, urging the duplication of this type of fundraising in the U.S. He pointed to the fact that “no millionaire” had come forth “to endow” the fight against tuberculosis and went on to say that “no millionaire” was “wanted,” that the job would be “far better done by the people themselves.” Riis added: “Five years of that sort of campaigning, and we ought to be on the home-stretch.”13
The seal idea was picked up by a young member of the editorial board of Outlook, Emily Bissell, who, as secretary of the Delaware Red Cross, wanted to join a physician cousin in supporting a tuberculosis sanitarium in Delaware.14 Bissell convinced the Red Cross to sell the seals at Christmas time to benefit the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. Teaming up with the Red Cross, an increasingly important player in the management of natural disasters, was an important step. The Red Cross would later take the lead in developing volunteerism and fundraising during World War I, but it committed itself at this moment only to the sale of Christmas seals for the tuberculosis society. It made them available in post offices around the country, a location ordinary Americans could easily get to (for the same reason, the federal government would install postal savings banks in 1911).15 At Bissell’s local Wilmington post office, where the first seals were sold, the Red Cross displayed a promotion sign: “These stamps do not carry any kind of mail but any kind of mail will carry them.”16
Here was the original impulse for this successful early-twentieth-century mass-fundraising effort. The 1908 seals campaign, which raised $135,000, provided ample encouragement to repeat such appeals. In his landmark history of fundraising, Scott Cutlip described the seals campaign as a turning point in the acceptance of mass philanthropy by the American population. Within just eight years, by 1916, the sale receipts topped the $1 million mark. By the mid-1960s, a mailing of 40 million letters brought in $26 million.17
The idea originated in Denmark, but as Riis put it, “Denmark is a small country.” America, in contrast, was a vast nation that had not only a tradition of charitable giving, but also large organizational capabilities, and so it is no surprise that it was in the United States that the potential of the seals campaign was realized. Such a broadening of philanthropy through a close attention to raising money in the population at large was a project for the age of mass marketing.
One innovation led to another. Charles de Forest (radio pioneer Lee de Forest’s brother), who ran the seals campaign for the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, had the idea of expanding the market for the stamps by using children as “crusaders” in their neighborhoods in 1915.18 In 1919, the National Education Association recommended that every elementary school in the country use the crusade-style of health education promotion. The better the children performed health chores like washing hands and brushing teeth, the higher their rank as “crusaders” in the Modern Health Crusade. There were three million “crusaders” in the U.S. in 1919.19
This is how, presented with a new idea, the tuberculosis association began to compete for the small amounts of cash that social workers had heretofore wanted American workers to put into savings accounts.20 While big money philanthropy had required some key legal changes before it could take off, fundraising in the mass necessitated a change in financial strategy on the part of working-class families. Ordinary Americans were asked to reallocate small sums they would have saved for personal use in hard times as gifts to large organizations for the collective good. This was an important conceptual transformation, which took time to mature. People of small means had to learn how to balance thrift and gift, and even to view them as complementary behaviors. In the end, they came to think of mass philanthropy as a form of public thrift.21
With its lead in mass fundraising, the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis stimulated many of the other institutions in the matrix of giving to join in fighting the white plague. One indirect result of these alliances was that participants saw how they could use mass philanthropy for their own ends.
The new general-purpose foundations (see chapter 1), with their commitment to solving large social dysfunctions by addressing their root causes, finally developed complementary programs. Homer Folks, the commissioner of public charities in New York, who sat on both the Charity Organization Society committee and the board of the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis, was responsible for establishing the first municipal hospital for tuberculosis in New York City. He turned to the Russell Sage Foundation, where he had the ear of first director John Glenn, a social worker from Baltimore, for administrative funding of the national association. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., personally contributed as well.22 The Rockefeller charities, having by then targeted hookworm in the South, joined the tuberculosis fight by initiating a vast operation in war-ravaged France. Other big donors, who had been initially missed, contributed to the crusade against the disease. Railroad magnate James J. Hill gave $100,000 for research to New York doctor and health officer Hermann M. Biggs, who was caring for Hill’s wife.23 Henry Phipps, Carnegie’s old friend from very early railroad days, helped Dr. Flick establish the Tuberculosis Institute in Philadelphia, essentially a research laboratory. The Russell Sage Foundation and Anson Phelps Stokes (who gave to African-Americans in the South) helped bankroll the Saranac Sanitarium in New York’s Adirondacks.24
Other funding partners in the fight against tuberculosis came from business, labor, and government. Life insurance companies naturally invested in reducing mortality among their customers, and these definitely included the working classes. Metropolitan Life paid for a major study of tuberculosis in Framingham, Massachusetts, and underwrote a large educational campaign.25 The Modern Woodmen of America funded a sanitarium in Denver, which opened in 1908 and housed many patients through the 1920s. The Woodmen taxed its members across America to pay for the sanitarium and even used it as a selling point to attract new members. State boards of charities and local governments sponsored traveling exhibits and educational campaigns.26 In New York State, thanks to Folks’s efforts, reporting tuberculosis cases became law in 1908. The Board of Health was reorganized in 1913 and professionalized with the provision, pushed for by Biggs and Rockefeller Institute director Simon Flexner, that health workers could be hired from anywhere in the country, thus freeing the board from local political appointees. Other states followed suit. Among the reformers, Baptist minister and leader of the Social Gospel movement Walter Rauschenbusch wrote a prayer for the “Tuberculosis Sunday” services held in churches and schools.27
The first campaigns were notable for eliciting support from a spectrum of groups and for establishing the first tentative links among diverse charities, hospitals, churches, ethnic associations and fraternal organizations in a common philanthropic movement. Mass philanthropy was the engine of a national collaboration that would only grow in the twentieth century to sustain long-term battles against other life-threatening diseases. Between 1904 and 1916, the number of dispensaries and clinics for tuberculosis multiplied from 18 to 455. During the same years, local voluntary associations invested in the campaign jumped from 18 to 1,324.28 Edward T. Devine pointed out in Charities that the association made itself “of direct practical value in legislation, in the education of the public, and in bringing about a coordination of philanthropic, medical and educational agencies for the conquest of the great scourge.”29 Funds raised to fight the disease were critical to opening sanitariums.30
The large fundraising mobilization around a single cause and the recruiting of volunteer crusaders was the great change. In 1905, no more than 5,000 Americans were actively working on the prevention of tuberculosis. By 1915, the “army,” as the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis liked to call all engaged in active campaigns, numbered up to 500,000 people at certain times of the year, including children busy selling seals.31 The campaigns naturally rested on—but also went well beyond—the existing institutions of lodge and church to broaden their appeals. A growing number of Americans responded to these pleas by absorbing the expenses as part of the regular family budget. A “people’s philanthropy” had emerged, based on the abstract concept of reciprocity between giver and recipient.
At the same time, community leaders across the country experimented with federated fundraising drives to pool resources for community work. They wanted not only to increase overall participation in funding social welfare, but also to apply more professional methods of accounting and spending to a multitude of parochial concerns. Different charities broadened their appeals locally by launching a community chest movement of cooperating with others in fundraising. In federating, chest leaders wanted to free themselves from depending on the very wealthy as well as to bypass the identity politics of neighborhoods and parishes and the mutual avoidance of the lodges. They were attuned to the collective possibilities of a “metropolitan community,” as sociologist Roderick McKenzie called it, one that included a city and its suburbs, where size and diversity would be assets in fundraising drives.32 The principle that prevailed in the tuberculosis campaign—small financial investments in the collective welfare by as many people as possible—appealed to them.
In joining a community chest, local social service agencies combined their individual fundraising campaigns into one and subjected themselves to a common procedure for parceling out the money raised. The Charity Organization Society had heretofore promoted cooperation among charities as a means of efficiency—to avoid duplication of aid to the poor. The new federating effort in raising money, although not free from elite influences, had a different inspiration and purpose altogether. The idea was, as a social worker explained it in The Survey, to turn the entire community into “an entity possessing a conscience and a will.”33
There were a few early attempts to federate fundraising. In Denver, Colorado, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders had launched a common fundraising drive in 1887 (wishing to replicate a similar campaign in Liverpool, England), but it brought only modest returns.34 More successful financial federations took hold in Jewish communities. United Jewish Charities were established in Boston (1895), Cincinnati (1896), Chicago (1900), Philadelphia, Detroit, and Cleveland (1904). A broader interfaith Federation of Allied Charities was successfully established in Elmira, NY, in 1910.35
It was in John D. Rockefeller’s hometown of Cleveland, albeit without his help, that the community chest movement began in earnest. At the time, no more than 4 percent of American urban households could be counted on to give to welfare/social-work agencies. Half of 1 percent—the classic progenitors of “noblesse oblige”—contributed 96 percent of all collected funds. To find more donors, the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce launched the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy in April 1913, after five years of study.36 Under the chamber’s impulse, the chest retained a distinctly Protestant leadership. Social workers active in the local efforts of the Americanization movement that spread across the industrial belt contributed not to a philanthropic melting pot but to a significant pooling of fundraising resources across ethnic and religious boundaries.
The New York Times noted the big idea: the campaign promised donors they would be spared from multiple solicitations. They would be “immune from the separate appeals of the institutions represented.” In tune with the wider philanthropic spirit of attacking large problems, the new Cleveland federation proposed to spend part of the money for “broad social and philanthropic education.”37 “A broadly based constituent board” made up of leaders of major community groups governed the chest and made a commitment to sound money management.38 This finally moved Rockefeller, who was an advocate of federating in corporate affairs, to send a pledge larger than all his previous gifts to the separate charities. Rockefeller believed “the spirit of combination and cooperation” would “eventually prevail in the art of giving,” just as it had in business, much of it under his managerial wizardry.39
In these years, social work was becoming more than a calling left to volunteers. It was turning into a profession, one that would help overcome social fragmentation in communities. As social workers became concerned with setting terms of membership in their new profession, they committed to learning how to fund their activities.40 Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching reformer Abraham Flexner believed social workers could not claim professional status, for they knew no special skills. But social workers were anxious to acquire just such skills, fundraising among them.41 In 1898, the New York Charity Organization Society launched a six-week summer school in “philanthropy” and began developing a social-work curriculum. Other cities followed suit. This was the beginning of specialized schools of social work and social-work departments in colleges, and in 1917 the National Conference of Charities and Correction changed its hoary name to the “National Conference of Social Work.” In the early years, social workers adhered to the Charity Organization Society emphasis on cooperation and central registrations to coordinate local relief, family service, and other welfare agencies, even as they worked on a more personal understanding of welfare recipients. They now developed mechanisms of fundraising with the help of Chambers of Commerce across the country in responding to the many requests for funds.
It was perhaps not entirely an accident of history that the same Clevelanders who pushed for federation in fundraising created the following year another long-lasting new philanthropic institution—the community foundation—this time distinct from the Federation for Charity and Philanthropy, to raise money from middle-class and modestly wealthy Americans rather than the masses. In 1914, a local banker and attorney by the name of Frederick Harris Goff (whose wife was among the initial trustees of the chest) pioneered the idea of the community foundation. Goff, who had represented the street railways in their tense negotiations with Cleveland mayor Tom Johnson, was a skillful broker. As a former attorney turned banker with a wide network of acquaintances, he frequently advised clients at many different levels of wealth on how to write their wills. Noting a lack of creative philanthropic ideas in these wills after the immediate family was provided for, he suggested gifts to community institutions for community-wide welfare. Once again, the bequest language reflected the larger transformation impulse embedded in the foundations set up by much wealthier Americans. Goff’s clients promoted the “well-being of mankind” but targeted their gifts to local needs.42
Goff was inspired by Arthur Hobhouse’s The Dead Hand: Addresses on the Subjects of Endowments and Settlements of Property (1880), a collection of papers the British judge and charity commission member had read before the Social Science Association. In the margins of the book, Goff, who was familiar with the recent legal changes regulating giving, noted the need to keep philanthropic funds free from obsolete donor intent. Hobhouse made the point that endowments should be free from the “grip of the dead hand” and overseen by a “living and reasonable owner of property.”43 To that end, Goff proposed a turnover of community foundation trustees to keep them attuned to the needs around them. The community foundation would keep its investment and distribution arms separate. Affiliated banks would manage the funds. New civic leaders who held positions of trust in the community and had reputations for probity would be periodically chosen to distribute the money earned by the funds.
Goff emphasized the community foundation concept as a means of democratizing philanthropy. In his program for open-ended gifts, he was obviously following transformations pioneered by the large foundations. Called to testify in Congress before the 1915 Walsh Commission, which excoriated the Rockefellers, Goff had a chance to place community foundations in a democratic context. He insisted that disbursement was entirely in the hands not of a self-perpetuating board but of a committee of citizens regularly renewed. Eager to distance himself from the very wealthy, Goff also insisted that “the donors may indicate a desire for a certain period of time to have the income from their trusts expended in a certain way, but there is lodged with the committee on distribution the power to do otherwise should it see fit.”44 This was good copy and also powerful. The idea took off, and other community foundations soon sprang up.
In the long run, the two mechanisms—the community chest and the community foundation—led to distinct outcomes. The chest movement eventually became the United Way, with affiliates in many American communities. With the Combined Federal Campaign entrusted to its national organization, it has become a very big part of today’s mass philanthropy. The community foundation has kept its local focus. Community foundations have generated funds from local, medium-sized estates for community projects, not from the poor as Goff had, perhaps wishfully, hoped. Nonetheless, the two projects sprang from a common idea of pooling resources in an enlarged community. Both promoted an original synthesis between charity and philanthropy, between volunteers and professionals, between lodge and town, between rich and average Americans, based on a vision of a metropolitan society.
Fundraising in World War I: A Giant Leap
As part of the dramatic mobilization required by the First World War, the Federal government drew on philanthropy’s expertise in mass fundraising and further established charitable giving as a permanent feature of twentieth-century life. The intensity of the effort reinforced the perception that giving was part of being an American. The way the fundraising was conducted added to a dramatic increase in the scope and outreach of philanthropic organizations, as well as their level of interaction with one another.
The government oversaw the work of the Red Cross, the one humanitarian organization with a federal charter; it entrusted other mass fundraising drives to other organizations. The community chest movement dramatically expanded. A host of institutions, large and small, joined the matrix of giving. At the same time, many Americans of modest means “learned for the first time the joy and dignity of giving.”45 While 5,000 in a city of 300,000 people had given to various causes before the war, that number now jumped to 55,000 individuals.46
Broad humanitarian efforts began as soon as hostilities broke out in Europe, before direct American involvement. Some especially able figures, mining engineer Herbert Hoover among them, rose to prominence through their World War I humanitarian work. Hoover set the tone in 1914 when he gave up his ambition to become president of Stanford University and, from London, launched the Commission for Relief in Belgium (with the unofficial sanction of the U.S. government), a temporary committee to secure basic foodstuffs in Belgium and the occupied areas of northern France for civilian populations on the verge of starvation.47 Hoover paid expenses for some of the staff out of his own pocket; volunteers joined. As a result, the commission kept its overhead administrative cost at less than half of 1 percent, while soon dominating the American effort to bring humanitarian relief to war-devastated regions. The CRB distributed a total of $894,797,000, including contributions from the English and French governments, and American government loans. For food and other basic needs, the CRB raised from governments and individuals the very large sum of $259,600,000 between 1914 and 1920. Of this amount (equivalent to the annual income of over 250,000 Americans, or 75 percent of the Federal taxes collected in 1913) Hoover raised 20 percent from charitable contributions worldwide, 14 percent if only American private contributions are calculated.48
Other efforts sprang up at the intersection of governmental and private action. The American Relief Clearing House in France and the War Relief Clearing House in the United States, the latter under the able leadership of General Electric’s Charles Coffin, coordinated the donations in kind and cash from over 6,000 American relief organizations, ranging from the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.49
Significant as these efforts were, Americans intensified their fundraising dramatically when they entered the armed conflict in 1917. This led to the definitive breakthrough in mass philanthropy. The federal government lent its full force to mass fundraising by officially sponsoring massive appeals by the Red Cross and the United War Work Campaign. A host of other institutions joined in the effort to raise money.
President Wilson appointed Henry Davison (of J. P. Morgan & Co.) in 1917 to head a New Council of the Red Cross. Davison immediately launched the war campaign with a public request for funds. This was a real new beginning for the still-small organization with a checkered history and an ill-defined sense of mission. Its motto—“Everything is needed; everything is welcome”—was a tacit admission that there was no consensus on goals in disaster relief operations. In 1889, the New York World had denounced the Red Cross for giving help out too easily, hence “introducing pauperism” among Johnstown flood victims. Local charities had not cooperated well with the Red Cross in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake (1906).50 More targeted rescue operations after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City (1911), or the sinking of the Titanic (1912) had gone better, but the leadership worried that chapters mobilizing only for “the raising of money and supplies in response to relief appeals gradually lose interest.” The tuberculosis campaign helped the Red Cross’s national visibility, but the organization itself did not conduct national fundraising before America’s entry into the war. In the wealthy Massachusetts town of Manchester-by-the-Sea (population of 2,700), churches and other groups raised money for the Red Cross disaster relief fund by selling lemonade, ice cream, and candy. Bag sales could only go so far, however.51 Red Cross leader Mabel Boardman complained that the Japanese Red Cross was significantly better organized and funded than the American.52
National priorities and the federal government’s new directive to the Red Cross changed this in short order. With 2.8 million American draftees departing for the front, Davison set a goal of $100,000,000 to be raised in mass collections in one week from June 18 to 25, 1917. He exceeded that goal by $15,000,000. A second campaign a year later raised $181,000,000—the “most stupendous fund-raising effort by a voluntary relief society that the country had ever known,” remarked an observer.53 In short order, the Red Cross became America’s biggest mass charity, funded with the small contributions that the average American made in response to appeals at gatherings in churches, schools, theaters, and social clubs. The number of Red Cross chapters in the nation leaped from 107 chapters to 3,864, with membership growing from 16,708 members to more than 20 million between 1914 and 1918. More than 8 million adults served as volunteer collectors. Another 11.5 million youth claimed membership.54
The United War Work Campaign to aid prisoners of war, American troops abroad, and suffering civilians in 1918 was another instance of successful mass philanthropy inspired by the war. Here too the federal government played a role in its launching. Raymond Fosdick, a young lawyer who had worked for the Rockefeller Bureau of Social Hygiene before the war and was now chairing the Commission on Training Camp Activities, initiated the mass appeal at the request of President Wilson and Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. John R. Mott, a leader of the YMCA and the growing international ecumenical and Christian student volunteer mission movements, directed the campaign seeking $170,500,000. The Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, which was the day scheduled for the drive to open. Mott immediately responded by redirecting the purpose of the campaign to peace readjustment. In a famous telegram, he instructed all operation participants to work to prevent the “period of demobilization” from becoming a period of “physical and mental demoralization.” Not even the deadly influenza epidemic stopped the volunteers’ door-to-door solicitations. Because of the flu, 40 percent of collectors in one state had to opt out of the collection, but the others combed the countryside in their Fords wearing gauze masks as they rang doorbells.55 Only a few days later, the campaign had gone over the $200,000,000 mark, significantly exceeding its initial goal.
The United War Work Campaign efforts depended on new developments in the community chest movement, which made it possible for its drives to reach all the way down to virtually every American at the county and city levels. New war chests emerged across America as combinations of local charities and churches, as well as local branches of national charities (e.g., Knights of Columbus, Elks, YMCA and YWCA, Salvation Army). They became the locus for billions of dollars of American donations and for the purchase of Liberty and Victory bonds in 1917 and 1918.
By the summer of 1918, there were war chests in over 300 cities, where the prewar experiment in federated fundraising was transformed into a national phenomenon. They penetrated deeply into the population. The forty-three principal war chests, drawing on an aggregate population of 7,068,750 reached 2,273,216 donors or 32 percent of their population—more than one per family.56 Appeals were dedicated to the war cause and parts of the collected funds returned to the various agencies involved in the local collections. “Sixty funds in one” said one chest; “Humanity calls you” another.57 Almost all of these war chests were participating members of the larger United War Work whirlwind.
The Red Cross was not a part of these joint community efforts, because it preferred to keep direct control over its local branches. But local Red Cross headquarters were often used to organize war chests, and volunteers overlapped across organizations. In addition to war work, war chests in Cleveland, Detroit, Toledo, Indianapolis, and Rochester included in their appeals the provision of funds for local welfare, thus adding to the momentum for community chests after the war.
The federal government had ordered this massive fundraising for humanitarian purposes while leading its own campaign to convince the American population to invest in government bonds. This was necessary because the new income tax aimed at the wealthy was designed to cover only about a third of what was sufficient to finance the war; the remaining two thirds had to come from borrowing. Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo therefore oversaw the sale of Liberty and Victory loans, which were government bonds issued to the public for coupon rates of between 3.5 to 4.5 percent. The newly created Federal Reserve kept interest low to help buyers in the securities market absorb the Treasury issues, while the Capital Issues Committee attempted (but not successfully) to prevent corporations and municipalities from issuing competing securities.
The bond campaign followed a strategy closely intertwined with the mass philanthropic movement, that is, of deep penetration into the recesses of local communities. People were constantly exposed to exhortations to give. Liberty and Victory loan drives, designed around local “precinct captains,” drew heavily on the volunteers of mass philanthropy, such as the Boy Scouts, to go door-to-door to solicit funds for the war effort. They also included provisions for payroll deductions to ensure that workers’ contributions were collected before they attended to other costs of living. Raising money in the mass was integral to the federal government’s propaganda effort entrusted to George Creel’s Committee on Public Information. Banks across the country helped their customers invest in the war; volunteers canvassed neighborhoods; preachers called on their parishioners; four-minute men spoke at intermissions in theaters. As a result, the four Liberty Loan campaigns (two in 1917, two in 1918) and the Victory loan campaign of early 1919 elicited a massive response from Americans in all walks of life. Frank Vanderlip, the president of National City Bank in New York City, surveyed the sale of war bonds in January 1918, noting “an almost religious fervor that has been manifested in the sale of these bonds.”58 This fervor played a role in enshrining philanthropy as part of American culture.
Liberty and Victory bond loan drives engaged more than 66 million Americans as subscribers for a rough total of an astonishing $25 billion to assist with funding the war.59 The government bond market led also to much speculation. Small investor-patriots bought liberty bonds at face value and then sold them off when they needed the money but their value was falling, at which point more speculative investors swooped in to take up the government bonds at a discount. In other cases, bond buyers were chasing higher returns and traded their bonds for stocks from often-shady promoters.60
With money changing hands so rapidly, many small institutions were now organizationally linked in the matrix of giving. Everywhere groups of citizens who joined for one cause or another—Armenian relief, Syrian relief, the Jewish fund, soldiers’ comfort, and prisoners’ camps—were part of a common movement.61 Some worked with the Red Cross, while others remained independent. Most collaborated, regardless of their philanthropic roots.
Large elite philanthropic institutions cooperated closely with the mass philanthropic movement and exchanged leaders, who as a result thought of philanthropy in more inclusive terms. The Rockefeller Foundation appointed Wycliffe Rose, the head of its International Health Division, as director of its own War Relief Commission. Ernest Bicknell, who had distinguished himself in the Red Cross rescue effort after the San Francisco earthquake and who had become its first full-time administrator in 1908, represented the Red Cross at that Rockefeller war commission.62 As the Red Cross was the largest coordinating body, the foundation deferred to it, maintaining a leadership role only in the fight against tuberculosis in France. Livingstone Farrand, former secretary of the American Tuberculosis Society and first director of the Rockefeller Tuberculosis Commission in France in early 1917, became chairman of the Red Cross after the war.63
In many cases, wealthy donors and grassroots fundraising projects targeted the same causes. Anna Harkness (whose deceased husband Stephen had been one of the original Standard Oil investors) established the Commonwealth Fund in 1918, promoting child welfare, health, and education. The fund contributed to relief and rehabilitation in Central Europe, but so did modest Americans who had roots in the region, recent immigrants, and even refugees who engaged in wartime Diaspora philanthropy.64
While some fundraising persistently remained particular to one group (some Jewish fundraising, for example, over Julius Rosenwald’s objection), and despite intense improvisation, the war effort led many organizations to share resources for a common purpose. At home, the YMCA cooperated with the National Catholic War Council and the Jewish Welfare Board.65 At the front, the YMCA opened “foyers” in collaboration with the French army for French troops.
Wartime fund raising relied on mass advertising to penetrate deeply into the population. The federal government, the Red Cross, and the United War Work all hired major publicists, who advertised giving for the war just as they advertised consumer goods for other clients. For the United War Work, Bruce Barton, one of America’s greatest publicists (he later masterminded GM’s marketing in the 1920s), took care of the publicity.66 The Red Cross War Council got help from Ivy Lee, public relations counselor for the Rockefeller interests during the deadly labor violence of 1913. Red Cross chair Davison called in fundraiser Charles Ward, who in turn enlisted Lyman Pierce. These two public relations men with experience managing YMCAs had promoted the idea of the “blitz” fundraising campaign in which an organization concentrates large resources on canvassing all possible respondents quickly and mobilizing them for a cause. Focusing everybody’s attention on specific programmatic goals for a brief period of time brought in significantly more money than a more diffuse campaign. This was the first instance of what Arnaud Marts, one of the first professional fundraisers (who trained with Pierce) termed the “modern ‘whirlwind’ campaign.”67 In New York City in 1913, Ward and Pierce had led the YMCA and YWCA in a campaign to raise four million dollars in “one week.”68 Now they helped the Red Cross divide the nation’s cities and towns into units, establish local committees, set fundraising quotas, and put all to work, from Hollywood stars to the Boy Scouts.
All this fundraising naturally led to greater sophistication in targeting different social classes. In Springfield, Ohio, leaders of the war chest decided that 40 percent of the total should come from wage earners, 30 percent from people with larger incomes, and 30 percent from corporations. The poor should give the equivalent of about one hour of income per month, while more privileged workers should go to one day a month or 4 percent of income.69 In Elmira, New York, the tables the war chest provided suggested that those with salaries between $500 and $1,000 give $1 per month, those with $4,000 to $5,000 salaries, $20 per month. All should realize, the war chest insisted, no doubt wishfully, that “one hundred cents out of every dollar that he contributes will go directly for war needs.”70 Moreover, war chests aggressively campaigned among local businesses, making corporate giving an important new partner in mass philanthropy.
The principal fundraisers took on the rich, who responded. J. P. Morgan gave $1,000,000 and Henry Ford, his peace ship a thing of the past and his factory operating for the government “without one cent of profit,” gave ambulances valued at $500,000 to the Red Cross.71 For the United War Work, Mott himself focused on the “big givers” like John D. Rockefeller, Jr., (who was campaign chair for New York State) and U.S. Steel’s George W. Perkins, and also approached Americans living abroad via his international YMCA contacts and branches.72 Campaign managers reported impressive results among other social classes. Pierce at the YMCA reported “middle class giving on a hitherto undreamed-of scale.” Postville, Iowa, Mott’s tiny hometown, contributed $2,800 to the United War Work.73 A female volunteer for a war chest encouraged other women to postpone buying new hats and give for the war instead. Her solution was simple: “Ladies, do touch up your old hats by moving around your birds of paradise.”74 In Switzerland County, Indiana, sixteen-year-old Robert Gross gave all that he had saved for a new suit to the local war chest when the solicitor came to his family home. Some school children and girls working in offices, stores, and factories repeatedly gave so much as to be left hungry.75
In marketing giving among the working classes, the federal government-philanthropic partnership dwelled specifically on the moral connection between “saving” and “giving” that earlier social workers had pointed out. In her Development of Thrift, Mary Wilcox Brown had observed the personally beneficial effects of giving. Persons engaged in philanthropy almost “inevitably become more simple and frugal in their own way of living.”76
As if to make the point that investing in victory was another form of savings, the Treasury Department designed a program to sell “thrift stamps.” Not large or particularly ornate, thrift stamps were roughly the size of a standard postage stamp and cost 25 cents each. With the first purchase of a thrift stamp, the purchaser was “given a card containing spaces for 16 thrift stamps, with the expectation that when the card was filled, this having a value of $4.00, it would be exchanged for a war savings stamp, or as it was sometimes called, a war savings certificate.”77 At maturity, on January 1, 1923, the Federal Reserve Banks would pay to the purchaser at any post office a total of $5 per certificate issued as of January 2, 1918. The ability to redeem at any post office (e.g., as opposed to a national, state, or federal bank) made this outreach national and gave the stamps an appeal to rural and urban Americans alike.
To help subsume the thrift movement into the war drive, the YMCA launched a “Thrift Movement” and “Thrift Week” observance in 1916. “Thrift Week,” symbolically opened on Benjamin Franklin’s birthday (January 17), aimed to encourage funding the war. English teachers were recruited for the effort. A 1918 editorial in the English Journal directed teachers to explain grammatical and stylistic “conventions” “as the accessory of clearness and force in persuading one’s hearers to buy Liberty Bonds or save for Thrift Stamps.”78 The students could take the message home. With public officials and civic leaders together articulating the view that funding the war was a form of public thrift, giving in this instance took on the aura of thrift.
Contributing to the war effort was also marketed as national duty and a means to victory. It made individual giving part of American culture for generations to come. But not all of this giving was really voluntary; it was sometimes the result of what might be called compulsory voluntarism. Giving to appeals became a public measure of every American’s patriotism. Gone were the early days of the European war when groups of German Americans could object to the fundraising effort on behalf of the Entente and offset it with their own, which had led to violent encounters in Midwestern communities. Or when the government felt it was necessary to launch a special campaign in New York among Russian Jews, who had escaped pogroms, to support Russia against Germany. Giving was often enforced, being voluntary in name only. Employers not infrequently told workers how much to give and sometimes took that amount out of pay envelopes without workers’ full consent. Eugene Crippen, like every worker at the Willys-Morrow motorcar plant in Elmira, New York, had no option but to give one week’s wages through payroll deduction so that the company would meet its targeted $100,000 in war contributions.79 With the war, responding to fundraising appeals became not only an act of generosity but also a test of nationalism and obedience. Before America’s entry into the armed conflict in April 1917, fundraising had been much less demanding. But in 1917 and 1918, it was turned into a mechanism for enforcing loyalty, and giving became a tangible proof of it. The Red Cross abandoned any pretense of relying only on voluntary contributions. In Josephine County, Pennsylvania, whenever a parent or guardian refused to approve the signing of a loyalty pledge by a child, the Junior Red Cross reported the person to the local board of the National Council of Defense. War chests did much the same with those they perceived to be “slackers,” as the chest in Switzerland County, Indiana, called the better off people who refused to give.
Coercion prompted suspicion. In Cleveland, Ohio, the very place where the federated movement had initially taken off (in the years when now Secretary of War Newton Baker had been mayor), citizens concerned about the bona fides of the charities and about the infringement of their freedom launched a National Investigation Bureau of War Charities in 1918 to evaluate war relief organizations before endorsing them.80 Intransigence at home towards civilians who did not give money or not enough of it mirrored that on the front where dissent could not be tolerated. But at the same time, humanitarian work gave many a conscientious objector a viable alternative to direct military engagement. American Quakers launched the philanthropic American Friends Service Committee in April 1917 for this very purpose.81
The scale and scope of World War I fundraising obviously rested on the collaboration of many of the institutions of civil society (from organizations like the Red Cross to churches, libraries, and elementary schools that served as the natural sites for collection), while the federal government put its full power behind the bond drives. The war emergency helped make fundraising a permanent fixture of the country’s routine. “Giving” became a symbol of American nationalism and a measure of citizenship. Europeans understood the movement as a special additional contribution by the American people to the cause of democracy.82 It is in this context of massive government and civil-society investment in the techniques of fundraising that Americans created a mass philanthropy of unprecedented magnitude that continued to operate long after the mobilization effort, when giving was once again strictly voluntary.
Widening the Circle of Giving
The great expansion of mass giving led to the professionalization of philanthropy. Before and during World War I, volunteers raised most of the money. But after the war, full-time professionals organized specialized fundraising firms and sold their services to colleges, churches, hospitals, and cultural institutions. While injecting a new level of expertise into the process, fundraising firms were primarily mobilizers and consultants. They still relied in large part on their clients and the volunteers they recruited among university alumni or church parishioners to do the actual fundraising. Thus professionals and volunteers came to coexist in mass philanthropy. They oversaw its postwar consolidation and its success in the 1920s.
Fundraising firms took off rapidly after 1919. Charles Ward ended a thirty-five-year career as YMCA secretary to establish in 1919 the firm of Ward & Hill Associated, which soon became Ward, Hill, Pierce & Wells. Many others followed his lead, including Marts & Lundy, Ketchum, and Tamblyn & Brown. There were twenty well-known fundraising consulting firms in New York City by the end of the 1920s. The growth of professionalism raised the level of giving. The fundraising firm of John Price Jones reported that by 1929 the average philanthropic contributions of all persons filing income-tax returns had almost reached the record wartime level achieved in 1917.83
Institutions of higher education, as they had been the first beneficiaries of big-money philanthropy, became professional fundraisers’ biggest clients. Already in 1914, Ward had assisted the University of Pittsburgh with an alumni drive relying on what had come to be known as the “every-member canvass” method.84 John Price Jones left the deepest imprint in academia. Graduated from Harvard in 1902, Jones was loaned in 1917 by the advertising firm where he was employed, to work on the Liberty loan drives in New York City.85 After the armistice, Jones directed the Harvard Endowment Fund campaign. Taking the college well beyond State Street, as Boston financial circles are called, he raised an unheard of $14.2 million from alumni in less than one year. In November 1919, the month the campaign was completed, Jones incorporated his own John Price Jones Company. Dismissive of earlier efforts by YMCA “Christers,” “High Price Jones,” as he was nicknamed, directed fourteen fundraising campaigns for universities between 1919 and 1925.86 At a cost of 2.34 percent, he raised a total of $68 million for academic endowment and plant.87 He also advised schools where collectors worked on salary, not on a percentage of total funds raised. Other fundraising firms orchestrated the work of church parishioners. Tamblyn & Brown guided Episcopal Bishop William T. Manning in 1925 in building the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Morningside Heights in New York City.88
Health associations, which had initiated the mass philanthropy movement and had accelerated the professionalization of social work, called on fundraising firms to assist them. Tamblyn & Brown led a campaign for the Missouri chapter of the American Society for the Control of Cancer that aimed at putting to rest the idea that cancer was a disease brought on by personal indulgence. The firm orchestrated speeches, distributed literature and newspaper articles, prepared slides in movie theaters, designed bus posters, and insured the showing of films distributed by the YMCA. The society canvassed, on its own, various populations in New York State in census-like fashion. Its Rochester chapter designed a three-year campaign by estimating potential returns on the basis of the population in surrounding counties.89
Civic institutions came to rely on fundraising firms. Founded in 1913 by the publishers of American City magazine, the American City Bureau assisted only three local chambers of commerce with their fundraising campaigns in 1914. But in the six months following the signing of the Armistice, it helped carry out thirty fundraising campaigns to prepare cities for the “new era of peace.” The American City Bureau expanded rapidly throughout the 1920s as civic groups sought its advice about how to gain greater membership and money from philanthropic appeals. It also ran exhibitions of local and foreign city planning and annual Summer Schools of Community Leadership.90 Progressive boards of trustees and staff in large museums, libraries, and symphonies increasingly sought professional advice to gather cultural capital and broaden their appeal to middle-class visitors and donors.91
To become a professional fundraiser was, according to some, rather easy. “Almost anyone of good appearance with a flair for selling, organizing, and publicizing could conduct successful campaigns to raise moderate sums for popular causes,” said Cornelius Smith, a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun and a cofounder in 1919 of the fundraising firm of Will, Folsom, and Smith.92 But there was a need for agreed-upon qualifications as well as rules of engagement. In 1935, nine major fundraising firms created the American Association of Fundraising Counsel, which established a fair practice standard. For Arnaud Marts, a two-time president of the AAFRC, this event signaled the professionalization of fundraising, though it would take another twenty years before social critic Vance Packard would actually popularize the term “fundraiser” in The Hidden Persuaders (1957).93
The broadening of the circle of giving, a consequence of professional fundraising, was a significant social transformation. Membership organizations benefited from it. Although the NAACP, founded after the Springfield riot of 1908, had always been open to all individuals regardless of color as well as to members of all churches or lodges, more than half its income in 1914 still came from only fourteen big donors like Julius Rosenwald. By 1919, after an extensive membership campaign, some 62,300 members tripled the NAACP’s income with their dues and contributions.94 The following year the membership increased by 46 percent to 91,203, and the number of branches leaped by 70 percent to a total of 310. From then on, most of the funding for the NAACP’s work came from black Americans through modest dues, contributions, and the proceeds of local events.
Not every organization relied on the advice of a high-profile fundraiser, but all sought to build on the war momentum and keep giving high. Community foundations continued to foster “the mental, moral, and physical improvement” of residents.95 Young Raymond Moley, who would later join the early New Deal, headed the Cleveland Foundation after the war. He oversaw numerous surveys that helped strengthen the city’s civic institutions. By 1930, twenty-one American cities had community foundations with assets in excess of $100,000.96
The community chest movement spread from about forty cities in 1919 to about 350 by 1929. As one participant put it, the more people participated, the more understood that giving was one of “the real responsibilities of citizenship.”97 But gone was the wartime coercion. In 1920, community chests raised $19 million; by 1930, the figure had increased almost three-fold to $75 million. With chambers of commerce promoting the chests, many contributions now came from corporations (29 percent in Milwaukee; 26.5 in Cincinnati; 35.5 in Memphis; 48.8 in Seattle in 1929).98 The proportion of individuals in the general population who contributed to a charitable organization grew with alacrity as well. By 1928, one in five citizens in Toledo contributed to a community fund; in Dayton, slightly more than one in four, in Cleveland, two in five; in Cincinnati, just under one in five; in Columbus, just over one in ten.99 In 1930, Boston, Chicago, and New York were the only major cities without community chests. Part of the reason was the mutual avoidance among Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant charities in these cities that persisted well into the Great Depression.
Despite these achievements, in the self-serving judgment of some New Dealers, the community chests of the 1920s promoted social and political conservatism. Abraham Epstein (known for his work in the Social Security Administration) criticized them for concerning themselves not with large social reforms that would address the root causes of poverty, but with promoting case-by-case individual “adjustment” to existing social conditions and norms, in the manner of old-style charities. They did not support the federal program for mothers’ pensions out of a fear of potential political favors being played out in their distribution. They gave only lip service to the child-labor amendment crusade. “The only spirited enthusiasm they evidenced,” Epstein complained, “was during the annual ‘zip-zip’ community chest drives for funds.”100 But in fact, the federation movement was a critical phase not only in the professionalization of social work but also in the extension of the welfare state. The movement drew the attention of communities across the country to local welfare issues and eventually helped dramatically expand the pool of public funds. Several members of the New Deal “Brains Trust” had their first encounters with welfare in working with the community chests.
Although the New Deal eventually denied private agencies access to federal funds (see chapter 4), President Roosevelt himself and some of his advisers were critical players in the expansion of mass philanthropy. A great boost to mass fundraising came from the national campaign against poliomyelitis. Just as Harry Hopkins, the architect of the New Deal’s recovery programs, had once led the tuberculosis campaign, his boss spearheaded the fight against polio, the disease that afflicted him.
Franklin D. Roosevelt first went to Warm Springs, Georgia, in 1924, seeking the therapeutic effects of the town’s waters. In 1926, he purchased the property from George Foster Peabody, the philanthropist who had funded the Southern Education Board earlier in the century (see chapter 1). FDR established the nonprofit Warm Springs Foundation with the help of his former law partner, Basil O’Connor. O’Connor believed that a successful election in 1932 would be the key to raising money for polio, and events proved him right. In 1933, he initiated a mass fundraising campaign in Georgia instead of limiting his appeals to wealthy Georgians. As a result, the people of Georgia contributed over 60,000 gifts “ranging from a dime to $5,000,” and “from farm produce to hand-made articles,” for the construction of a new hospital building for infantile paralysis, to be named Georgia Hall.101 From then on, the circle of donors grew. Beginning in 1935, postmasters in many communities nationwide, and not only Democrats, organized “President’s Birthday Balls.” O’Connor thought they could raise $100,000. But with FDR as the public face of the campaign, they collected $1 million the first year.102
In January 1938, Roosevelt established the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Former vaudeville star comedian and Democratic fundraiser Eddie Cantor coined the phrase “March of Dimes,” a play on the name of the popular newsreel feature “The March of Time,” and he appealed to radio listeners all over the country to send their dimes directly to the White House. The campaign proved hugely successful. In 1939 the national office initiated a “Mile O’Dimes” campaign, with towns competing to produce the “longest line” of coins. In 1940, O’Connor organized the viewing of short polio movies at theatres around the country where a “March of Dimes mother” would pass through the audience collecting donations. The most famous of these short clips was “The Crippler.”103 Soon after began the so-called “porchlight campaigns.”104 People turned on their lights to announce that they would welcome a campaign volunteer to their door. Thus the March of Dimes reinvigorated the techniques of neighborhood canvassing initiated in the fight against tuberculosis before World War I and used extensively thereafter by the Red Cross, the United War Work, and the war chests. With the March of Dimes, grassroots campaigning again connected all (willing) citizens in a great philanthropic chain that linked the White House to modest houses in remote communities and indeed to just about every dwelling and workplace in America.
In 1928 the American Mercury, edited by H. L. Mencken, focused attention on the changing locus and operation of organized giving by highlighting the rise of new professional fundraising techniques and new forms of philanthropic management. Referring to a “Big Wind” sweeping across American philanthropy, the magazine observed: “Where money-getters on the prowl once devoted themselves almost solely to the Big Money Boys, they now seek to be democrats, giving everybody, high or low, a fair chance to do his bit for the Worthy Cause.” Fundraisers claimed that their newfound profession status enabled them to reach deeper into society, and, as the magazine rightly observed, profit much themselves in the process. “Instead of chasing after fat checks of six figures, they snatch up whatever is offered—dimes and nickels, and even pennies. And what was once a simple art, practiced exclusively by amateurs, is now in the hand of Science and Organization. It has become, indeed, a Great Profession, with trained specialists who, for a fee and expenses, stand ready day or night to raise funds for any Great Cause.”105
Philanthropy as Part of the Standard of Living
With each successive drive, participating in mass philanthropy became more firmly established as an American value and even as a part of the American standard of living in the sense that a greater number of families would routinely budget small contributions.
The mass philanthropic movement could not have kept its wartime momentum in the 1920s without a rising standard of living. There was a steady increase in disposable income. Counting in 1914 dollars, average annual pay went from $696 in 1914 to $898 in 1929, a 29 percent jump. Therefore more Americans had the means to give some money away periodically to philanthropic causes.106
Earlier appeals for humanitarian causes at home or abroad had called on Americans’ Christian sense of charitable duty, while appeals for national emergencies invoked patriotism. Increasingly campaigners added to their pitch the donors’ contribution to their own well-being. In appealing to ordinary Americans, fundraisers expanded on the earlier notion of a public thrift. They emphasized that it was in the givers’ self interest to contribute to the common cause, because they would ultimately benefit from the expected results. To the extent that the money raised would help eradicate diseases, create a healthier environment, lengthen life, and other such collective enterprises in which all Americans stood to gain, a personal contribution was an investment in a safety net for all that was well worth the momentary sacrifice. Giving for all competed with saving for oneself and one’s immediate family. But with greater disposable income and clear collective goals, the two behaviors became increasingly intertwined and nonexclusionary.
This self-taxing for the common good is what Tocqueville labeled “self interest properly understood” when he observed and codified Americans’ involvement in voluntary associations in Jacksonian America.107 This same principle that once motivated participation in community institutions was now also driving contributions to larger national organizations through mass philanthropy.
In How Much Shall I Give? (1921), social worker Lilian Brandt assessed these changes with the war over and the community chests again on the rise. Brandt argued that the federation of philanthropy and the new techniques of mass fundraising implemented during the war had democratized giving in important ways. Although skeptical at times, she concluded: “In the last year or two, with the shifting of what might be called the center of comfort from the professional class and those whose income is derived from conservative investments to the wage-earning group, individual societies have been trying to get more support from the industrial classes.” Brandt noted that in “cities where joint appeals have been made, it has been demonstrated beyond any possibility of doubt that much larger sums and the substantial interest of a much larger proportion of the population can be assured, and that the support of social work can be made a genuine community responsibility instead of being left to a handful of the relatively well-to-do.”108 “What was once the task of the privileged few has become the job of the common man,” a community chest worker remarked in 1924.109
A small group of economists who in the 1920s conducted family budget studies focused on giving, showed that families planned their contributions to mass philanthropy alongside other regular expenses. In the budgets the economists worked out, they estimated what the American worker could “afford to give.” While debating the degree to which philanthropy had been democratized, these economists took for granted that every citizen should give some money routinely. Writing in 1920, Harvard political economist T. N. Carver saw greater thrift and a higher wage-based standard of living as opening possibilities for targeted philanthropic engagement.110 In “What Can a Man Afford?,” published in 1921, Carl Joslyn, an economist more prone to moralizing than his colleagues, argued that individual Americans would be able to give more to charity if they would only spend less of their discretionary income on drinking and going to the movies. From a large number of family budgets, he estimated that a single American making $10,000 a year could give as much 5.35 percent of his income. He suggested only 0.28 percent for a family of six with an income of $1,800. Joslyn saw this giving as something most Americans with a “heart” and a “dollar” should do as one of the “elemental joys of life” in order to contribute to “the happiness of that great multitude of fellow-beings called ‘society.’ ”111 Giving money that might otherwise be used for consumption was, like thrift, an expression of virtue and also of regard for the well-being of society, and forethought. It was not only more altruistic than thrift but also more useful, including to the giver.
Surveying the standard of living for farmers and their annual budgets in 1929, Ellis Kirkpatrick, an expert agricultural economist in the Division of Farm Population and Rural Life at the Department of Agriculture, found that “closely allied with the church contributions is the expenditure of $1.10 per family for Red Cross and other welfare, by the 2,886 farm families” [in a survey of eleven states across the nation].112 This was a part of purchasing “advancement goods”—a category that comprised “schooling, reading matter, organization dues, church, the Red Cross and other welfare”—and would prove of personal benefit as well as being a public or civic duty.113
We see similar patterns emerge in the results of a later study of those living on moderate incomes. For clerks as well as streetcar men and their families in the San Francisco Bay region in 1933, Emily Huntington and Mary Luck found that fully 93 percent reported donating on average 1.5 percent of their annual earnings to church, charity, or other organizations during the hard Depression year 1933. Eighty-eight percent of these families donated to organized charity, while 61 percent gave to the church. Remarkably, many family budgets included a line item dedicated exclusively to the Red Cross.114
The San Francisco study captured the most important trend. Individual giving remained at the same level but there were many more givers. Even though Joslyn’s hope for greater family giving was not realized, the numbers of givers and total philanthropic giving went up markedly in the 1920s. On average, 3 percent of the population of a city gave to philanthropic causes in 1900, but by the 1920s, the percentage jumped to 35. By 1928, more than 100 million Americans were giving more than $2.5 billion dollars per year for philanthropic causes. These numbers increased from $1.75 billion in 1921 to $2 billion in 1924, and they continued upward.115 Many Americans had adopted an ethic of giving.
Given the relatively constant proportion of religious and secular giving, the economist Willford King confirmed the democratization of giving in a study of New Haven in the 1920s. He underscored that the number of givers increased, and with it the dollar amount going to philanthropic organizations. “In this city, at any rate,” King wrote in 1928, “it is not true that all that has occurred has been a substitution of a few large organizations for many small organizations.”116 Community chests and the Red Cross demonstrated these changes. During the early years of the Depression the chests built on the notion of American philanthropy as public thrift and were able to meet a significant amount of the nation’s need. In some instances they even raised larger sums than they had in previous years. “In every city,” reported the Association of Community Chests and Councils in November 1930, “a large part of the increase has come directly from job-holders—persons who may at any time have to turn to the chest for aid.”117 The association saw giving as a form of social insurance. Reciprocity was the key. President Herbert Hoover, himself a former administrator of World War I philanthropic efforts at home and abroad, hoped to rely on these organizations to stave off national calamity (see chapter 5).
“Giving is regulated by habit and tradition,” noted President Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends in 1933. In responding to mass appeals, the many had become participants in philanthropy. The committee reported that Americans’ private giving “for purposes of public interest” was predictable and “irrespective of income, tax rate, or any external circumstance.”118 John Price Jones underscored, in the first issue of Public Opinion Quarterly in 1937, that mass giving had withstood the worst of the depression.119 It had become a routine part of American life. While public opinion determined the success of any mass campaign, it affected the choice of a philanthropy but not the underlying philanthropic impulse.