American Foundations: Roles and Contributions

12. Foundations as Cultural Actors

262 12 Foundations as Cultural Actors james allen smith America’s largest foundations arrived late on the cultural scene.1 When the major philanthropic enterprises of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Sage, Harkness, and Rosenwald got under way in the years around 1900, their principal focus was on medicine, public health, education, and social science. Long before these endeavors, however, many wealthy Americans had already been hard at work establishing museums, libraries, symphonies, and opera companies. Foundations were not their preferred vehicle for supporting cultural interests. Only in the 1920s, with foundations well established, did some foundation leaders begin to ponder their own absence from the cultural sector. The head of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Division of Studies, Edwin R. Embree, asked plaintively, “Of what good is it to keep people alive and healthy if their lives are not to be touched increasingly with something of beauty?”2 Why the neglect? What inhibited the major foundations in their support of arts and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century? The most obvious answer is that large general-purpose foundations represented an institutional 1. Culture and cultural are problematic words. They invite a separate essay, if not another book. For the sake of convenience, this chapter relies on the “arts, culture, humanities” definition from the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities of the National Center for Charitable Statistics. But it should be remembered from the outset that usages change. Much of this chapter covers ground that precedes these classifications. In the first half of the twentieth century, when foundation staff members spoke of the humanities, they subsumed the arts under that rubric. 2. Quoted in Fosdick (1989, p. 238). foundations as cultural actors 263 and intellectual break with past charitable practices. The founders famously described their work as scientific philanthropy, seeing their role as a search for the root causes of social problems. They were explicit in rejecting older notions of charity that had brought about only temporary amelioration of human suffering and had made little headway in analyzing or solving systemic social ills. As they focused on building research institutions and bolstering various professional domains, they often described their philanthropy as wholesale rather than retail giving. Arts patronage was clearly old hat. The realms of arts and culture thus remained marginal to the interests of the turn-of-the-century foundations. But other realities also inhibited the large foundations in supporting the nation’s cultural life. By the early 1900s, some of the nation’s most prominent cultural institutions were already flourishing. They were the product of post– Civil War economic growth and the expanding cultural horizons of Americans. Wealthy and even not-so-wealthy citizens had begun to travel abroad for pleasure and study. In their European wanderings they had discovered all sorts of urban amenities. They had seen magnificent museums and art collections while visiting London and Florence, heard symphony orchestras in Berlin and Leipzig, strolled through parks and zoos in Paris and Antwerp. Some began to collect books, manuscripts, and works of art as they traveled; some stayed abroad to study music at European conservatories. Long before general-purpose foundations entered the scene, new patterns of cultural philanthropy had taken shape. Urban elites undertook projects for civic betterment—museums, libraries, botanical gardens, parks, and war memorials—enlisting their peers, engineering broad-based public fund-raising campaigns, and often turning to municipal governments for help. Although the precise forms varied from place to place, public-private partnerships were common , with city governments donating a building site or agreeing to pay specific operating costs. According to one estimate, municipal governments provided as much as 40 percent of aggregate museum construction costs between 1870 and 1910.3 Individual donors, large and small, gave the rest. Major cultural institutions emerged: Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (in 1870) and Symphony Hall (1900), the New England Conservatory of Music (1867), New York’s Metropolitan Museum (1870) and Metropolitan Opera (1880), Chicago’s Art Institute (1879), and Detroit’s Institute of Arts (1882), among others. A number of smaller and still vital cultural institutions also took nascent shape in the late nineteenth century. Zealous private collectors brought enduring institutions into being, including New York’s Morgan Library (built from 1902 to 1906) and Frick Collection (created in 1919 and opened in 1931) and Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (opened in 1903) among them. 3. Fox (1963, p. 51). [3.142.53.68] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 07:20...