“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

Philanthropy is a pervasive presence in American life. Giving to United Way campaigns, university fundraising drives, foundation grants—even putting money in the basket at religious services—all constitute acts of philanthropy. The institutions that these activities help to support are also familiar features in American cities and towns, from universities and hospitals to Boy Scout troops. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the term provided an umbrella for both giving and voluntarism, encompassing a wide array of social reform movements as well as charitable institutions. Since the Gilded Age, however, it has increasingly been associated with large gifts from the extraordinarily rich—men like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, George Soros, and Bill Gates—despite statistical evidence that Americans give fairly generously at all income levels, and that the big foundations of the Rockefellers and Gateses constitute only a small segment of American generosity.

Olivier Zunz sets out to chart this massive infrastructure in his history of twentieth-century American philanthropy. In keeping with shifting definitions, his focus is on cash rather than volunteer time, blending the history of foundations with mass-based fundraising campaigns such as the United Way and the March of Dimes. In the process, he manages to convey a broad sweep of philanthropic practices, encompassing both the very rich and donors of far more modest means. The book’s great strength is the way in which he links these activities to federal domestic and foreign policymaking, underscoring philanthropy’s political roles with a bold clarity.

He begins with some fairly familiar material on the first foundations, trekking through such well-known terrain as Andrew Carnegie’s role in launching the academic pension system TIAA-CREF, Rockefeller’s hookworm campaigns, and major gifts for the creation of modern universities at century’s end, which he describes as the “direct conversion of massive capitalist wealth into public assets, under the guidance of the wealthy themselves and their wise advisors.” (p. 9). The growth in the number of millionaires in the years bracketing the turn of the century was stunning, rising from approximately 100 in the 1870s to over 40,000 by 1916. Only a tiny fraction of these fabulously wealthy individuals created foundations or universities, an obvious fact that nonetheless could have been underscored more vividly. Zunz also occasionally credits this handful of institutions with more power than they actually had, as when he claims that the work of the Peabody Fund during Reconstruction played “an instrumental role in promoting national unification” [p. 10], and that post-Reconstruction philanthropy served as a template for “lifting parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa out of poverty, disease and ignorance” [p. 11].

The second chapter surveys a number of mass-based, federated fund drives between the 1910s and the 1930s—from Liberty Bonds and wartime relief to the Red Cross, United Way, antituberculosis campaigns, and the March of Dimes—linking them to rising income levels and a longstanding tradition of generosity that includes laborers as well as the very rich. For Zunz, this “people’s philanthropy . . . engaged the large American middle and working classes in their own welfare” (p. 44). His analysis might have been sharpened by placing this kind of mass-based giving in a longer historical perspective, linking it to patterns of religiously inspired giving via the Benevolent Empire organizations of the early nineteenth century. Americans learned to give small amounts on a regular basis early on; twentieth-century fund drives built on these patterns and secularized them, providing funds on a new scale.

Philanthropy in America picks up as it moves into more political issues, which are the heart of the book’s strength. The relationship between philanthropy and the state is constantly changing, involving trends that Zunz dissects with considerable élan. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the courts, legislation, and federal policies pushed philanthropy to be apolitical, focusing on education rather than advocacy or direct political action, themes reiterated in the 1919 Treasury regulations, the Revenue Act of 1934...