Contributing Citizens: Modern Charitable Fundraising and the Making of the Welfare State, 1920–1966 (review)

The morning after voters elected Mike Harris premier of Ontario in 1995 on promises of extravagant cuts to social programs and income taxes, the United Way of Peterborough, Ontario, erected a sign at a busy intersection that said simply, ‘It’s all up to us now.’ The sign reflected a common belief that private charity and tax-funded welfare state policies are mutually exclusive, that as one recedes the other emerges, and vice versa. Welfare state historians have been arguing for a number of years that this is a misleading impression. In this history of the precursors to the United Way, the Community Chests, Shirley Tillotson demonstrates that the relationship between private charitable giving and the welfare state, far from a zero-sum game, was in fact a remarkably intimate one. Looking closely at campaigns in Halifax, Ottawa, and Vancouver from the 1920s to the 1960s, Tillotson sees the tax-funded welfare state and federated fundraising as ‘related elements in an evolving culture of contribution’ (131).

Rather than a story in which public replaces private, Tillotson’s is fundamentally a story of modernity. Community Chests were omnibus fundraising associations to which local charities subscribed, and as such reflected a drive for efficiency and universality in fundraising that drew from modern business practices and pointed the way towards the modern welfare state. Explicit performance of business practices was a way to increase donations, either by creating trust in the organization (through strict adherence to accounting procedures) or by seducing potential donors into caring about the objects of charity work (by adapting sophisticated advertising techniques to social uses). Chest fundraising, like the income tax–funded welfare state, began by targeting the wealthy but expanded by encouraging working-class Canadians to give according to their means, even going so far as to publish a model of contribution based on ability to pay that echoed, and indeed prophesied, the progressivity at the heart of modern income taxation. Ideas and practices developed by fundraisers became the basis for a new, more inclusive modern citizenship.

Both in fundraising strategies and in identifying needs, Tillotson shows that the Community Chests were often sites of innovation – and indeed explicitly positioned themselves as such in relation to taxfunded social welfare as it emerged. Not only did they establish a culture of obligation and the administrative practices that enabled the development of welfarist policies in the first place, they also made the case, after the creation of Unemployment Insurance and the Second World War, for non-means-tested publicly funded relief. In fact, the emergence of the post-1945 welfare state pushed Community Chest activists to make a sharp distinction between what public and private provision of welfare could and should do. As private fundraisers bankrolling private charity providers, they saw themselves as complementary to state-funded support for the needy, and insisted forcefully on the importance of generous public funding. Sensitive to potential criticism and eager to meet attainable goals, fundraisers resented having ‘to act as the safety valve for an inadequate public system’ (174).

Tillotson illustrates this thesis by tracing the institutional and personal histories of campaigns in Halifax, Vancouver, and Ottawa from the 1920s to the 1960s. These local studies show the networks of provincial, federal, and municipal politicians and civil servants, business leaders, newspaper editors, charity activists, and social workers involved in federated giving. Again and again, Tillotson shows the same people, the same problems, the same ideas, and the same techniques and solutions showing up in the various spheres and on both sides of the private-public divide. Contributing Citizens is, in this important sense, a great canvas of social life and political engagement that knowingly blurs the boundaries between social and political history, forcefully underlining how widespread the project of modernizing citizenship was, and how little meaning the abstract categories of public and private held in practice.

But while Tillotson’s focus on the Community...