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  • Traitors to Their Class
  • Peter Dreier (bio) and Chuck Collins (bio)

The Occupy Wall Street movement has challenged the privilege of the richest Americans, but a handful of people within the top 1 percent support the movement’s goals of redistributing wealth and power. They are part of a proud tradition of wealthy people who found common cause with the poor, the working class, and progressive movements for social justice.

For more than a century, most philanthropy—made possible by federal laws that provide tax breaks in exchange for charitable giving—has ignored progressive movements. Instead, it has focused on giving to elite institutions, such as museums, symphonies, private universities that primarily serve affluent students, and land conservancies around private estates. When philanthropists and foundations donate to the poor, it is primarily to institutions that provide services and handouts—such as homeless shelters and soup kitchens—not organizations that mobilize people to challenge the status quo. Understandably, most philanthropy by the rich has not been concerned with challenging the economic and political system.

Throughout American history, however, a small number of rich radicals and prosperous progressives has donated money to keep the Left and its organizations going. Motivated by religious and secular views about slavery, women’s rights, racial bigotry, peace, poverty, and labor—and impressed by the courage and commitment of activists—they invested their hearts and their money in movements for change.

For example, a group that called itself the “Secret Six” funded much of the movement to end slavery. These wealthy abolitionists helped elect Charles Sumner to Congress, funded William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper (the Liberator), supported the work of Frederick Douglass, and secretly financed John Brown’s anti-slavery organizing, including his attempted insurrection at Harpers Ferry in 1859.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, many wealthy benefactors—mostly women like Jane Addams, who founded the settlement house movement—contributed their time, talent, and money to the Progressive Era battle against slums and sweatshops. [End Page 86]

In 1908, Irene Lewisohn—a German-Jewish philanthropist—offered money to Rose Schneiderman—a poor Polish immigrant and a fiery socialist union organizer among New York garment workers—to complete her education. Schneiderman refused the scholarship, explaining that she could not accept a privilege that wasn’t available to most working women. Instead she convinced Lewisohn to provide her with a salary that would allow her to become an organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), which mobilized upper-class and middle-class women on behalf of the immigrants’ union campaigns. (It was through working with the WTUL that a young Eleanor Roosevelt was first exposed to the suffering of the poor, an experience that transformed her into a lifelong progressive.)

During the great Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909 and 1910 (the largest strike by American women workers at the time), the WTUL raised money for the workers’ strike fund, lawyers, and bail money, and even joined the union members on picket lines. Schneiderman referred to them as the “mink brigade.”

One of them was Alva Vanderbilt Belmont. After her second husband, Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, died in 1908, Belmont put herself and her fortune at the service of the struggle for women’s rights and social reform. She hosted meetings for feminist groups at her Newport, Rhode Island mansion, paid for the U.S. tour of English suffragist Christabel Pankhurst, supported the WTUL, and donated funds to the socialist magazine the Masses. During the Uprising, Belmont organized fundraising events and spent nights in court paying off the fines of arrested strikers.

A week after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire killed 146 women workers in March 1911, Anne Morgan—daughter of Wall Street tycoon J.P. Morgan—rented the Metropolitan Opera House for a meeting to memorialize the victims, hoping to mobilize the city’s wealthy and middle-class reformers around a unified voice for action. Their influence played an important role on behalf of the landmark labor laws passed by the New York legislature after the fire.

Wealthy progressive activists made their presence known during the eras of the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement. Julius Rosenwald—co-owner of Sears, Roebuck...

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