Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION During the weeks following its founding in early spring of 1907, the Russell Sage Foundation did something that established it as a kind of unofficial keeper of the larger philanthropic idea. The foundation trustees invited critical comment from various academics and social policy intellectuals, not so much on the particulars of its yet-to-exist program as on the underlying concept of creating knowledge for “social betterment.” In the ensuing decades, the foundation would make philanthropy the topic of full-fledged research programs. But it is to that original question, and in that original spirit, that my historical inquiry is cast. Its aim is to look to the past to understand the nature of the most important challenge facing that original philanthropic idea today. At the heart of that idea was the core and enduring conviction that rational, scientific understanding of society and its problems is both a sign and an instrument of purposeful social advance.1 The role of scientific research, as envisioned at the Russell Sage Foundation , would be to transcend personal bias, ideology, and partisan political interest to shape and inform reasoned public debate. In promoting the advancement of knowledge, private philanthropy in turn would serve not its own but an objective, discernible public interest . Equally important at the outset, the pursuit of knowledge would itself be anchored in the hope of resolving the prevailing “social question” of the day. The concept of the social question in 1907 was very much tied to the exploited condition of labor. In fact, it was fluid enough to be able to encompass a series of questions and problems—the urban problem, the poverty problem, Henry Demarest Lloyd’s problem of “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” W.E.B. Du Bois’s great problem of the “color line”—that all pointed to a fundamental disparity between social and economic conditions and political democracy. As such, the social question was a powerful metaphor for a wide array 1 of social problems, and, at the Russell Sage Foundation, a way of organizing its philanthropic work. Thus, at its founding—an era of vast economic and social inequalities and a deepening ideological and political divide—the Russell Sage Foundation would look to social research as an essential instrument in the work of ameliorative social reform. The content of that work would be heavily empirical, but its framing of the issues would be ideological as well as practical. In this instance, it would carve out the boundaries of a diversified, often internally conflicted “new liberalism” within the vast space between laissezfaire and socialist extremes.2 As a first order of business, it would take hold of and reframe the social question to emphasize its roots in objective social and economic conditions that were themselves amenable to reform. It was this effort to, in effect, socialize the social question that most consistently linked the new philanthropy to the progressive as well as the longer new liberal reform tradition, and that would eventually draw it into the orbit of the New Deal. Later, taking a new approach to the social question, the Russell Sage Foundation would remake itself. It would do so within an emerging tradition of philanthropic knowledge-building that, in the context of cold war and widening postwar affluence, became increasingly detached from the immediacy of reform politics and the social question, even as its ambitions for social science grew. Although couched once again in the neutralizing language of advancing knowledge and promoting the public interest, these ambitions were keyed to the needs of post–World War II liberalism, now struggling to construct a political and ideological program that would reconcile its incomplete commitments to racial justice and economic security with the global crusade against communism.3 Philanthropy would contribute to this project of reconciliation with a massive expansion of theoretical and applied research. The theoretical was to focus on behavioral and cultural theories of democracy , social stratification, and economic modernization; the applied on reducing social problems to containable root causes that could in turn be resolved through existing institutions of civil society, the private market, and—most of all—enlightened government policy. Social Science for What? 2 Of course, in claiming theirs to be an apolitical, nonideological purpose, foundations were exercising a degree of political and ideological control, not in the least by treating key tenets of the socalled liberal consensus as beyond ideological contention, but...