-
6 Blurred Boundaries, Hybrids, and Changelings The Fortunes of Nonprofit Organizations in the Late Twentieth Century
- SAR Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
6 Blurred Boundaries, Hybrids, and Changelings The Fortunes of Nonprofit Organizations in the Late Twentieth Century Peter Dobkin Hall For twenty years I have been trying to describe and analyze the historical development of the “third,” “independent,” or “nonprofit” sector . My earlier attempts (Hall 1982, 1987) treated the phenomenon as a straightforward historical narrative: I began at the beginning and worked my way to the end, from Elizabeth I’s Statute of Charitable Uses to the 1969 Tax Reform Act and beyond. Sometime in the late 1980s, I became increasingly uncomfortable with this approach. How could I write the history of something—the “nonprofit sector”—that only began to be defined as such a decade earlier and in the recognition of which my colleagues and I had played a central role? So I turned my energies to writing about the “invention” of the nonprofit sector, describing the historical development of its various institutional strands—the arts, charity, education, health care, social welfare, and religion—and devoting increasing attention to why scholars , policymakers, and social activists had, beginning in the 1970s, needed to construct conceptual frameworks that would enable them to treat the whole range of eleemosynary activity as a coherent and definable “sector” of organizations and activities (Hall 1992a, 1992b). In the course of this work, I became aware that virtually the whole community of scholars studying philanthropy, voluntarism, and nonprofit organizations , myself included, had overlooked a very important fact. We had all assumed that Tocqueville was right when he wrote that Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which 147 all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. (Tocqueville 1945 II:114) I already had good reason to suspect that Tocqueville’s iconic assertion was wrong. My 1973 dissertation on Boston merchant families had shown that most of Boston’s associations, proprietary and eleemosynary, had been established only a decade or two before the Frenchman’s visit to America. My 1982 book, The Organization of American Culture, had focused on the debate over the status of associations and corporations as a central feature of early American politics. And, during the late 1980s, I had written detailed accounts of the emergence of “organizational cultures” in early-nineteenth-century Connecticut, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, all of which demonstrated that the establishment of private associations had been fiercely resisted and, in most places outside New England, had taken very different forms from the standard civil privatist model delineated by Tocqueville (Hall 1987b, 1988). But the statistics on charitable tax-exempt organizations included in Burton Weisbrod’s important 1989 book, The Nonprofit Economy, really made the point. The appendices to the volume, which contained the IRS figures for nonprofit organization establishments from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, showed that the charitable tax-exempt universe had grown from 300,000 organizations to nearly a million in a twenty-year period. Other information, such as the testimony of PETER DOBKIN HALL 148 [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:48 GMT) Treasury Department officials to Congress, pushed these numbers backward. In 1940, the IRS commissioner testified, there had been only 12,500 registered tax-exempt organizations; in 1950, he estimated their number at about 50,000. Pushing Weisbrod’s statistics forward added to the panorama of an explosion in the population of nonprofits. By the early 1990s, they were estimated to number over one and a quarter million . Setting aside quibbles about the meaning of government registration statistics (clearly, changes in the tax code during and after the Second World War gave many already extant organizations incentives to apply for tax-exempt status), it seemed clear that the “nonprofit sector ”—the universe of charitable tax-exempt organizations—was not a venerable...