philanthropy

1. The effort or inclination to increase the well-being of humankind, as by charitable aid or donations.
2. Love of humankind in general.
3. Something, such as an activity or institution, intended to promote human welfare.

[Late Latin philanthrōpia, from Greek, from philanthrōpos, humane, benevolent : phil-, philo-, philo- + anthrōpos, man, mankind.]

For more information on philanthropy, visit Britannica.com.

1. An activity performed with the goal of promoting the well-being of fellow man.

2. To dispense or receive aid in the form of a gift from funds intentioned for humanitarian purposes.

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Renowned investor George Soros is well known for his generous contributions to the Open Society Institute, a foundation that strives to promote humanitarian activities. His generous donations to improve the human condition is an excellent example of philanthropy.

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noun

1. Kindly, charitable interest in others: altruism, beneficence, benevolence, benignancy, benignity, charitableness, charity, goodwill, grace, kindheartedness, kindliness, kindness. See attitude/good attitude/bad attitude/neutral attitude, kind/cruel.
2. A charitable deed: benefaction, beneficence, benevolence, benignity, favor, kindliness, kindness, oblation, office (often used in plural). See give/take/reciprocity, kind/cruel.

Philanthropy is private action for the public good. Americans like to think of themselves as a generous people, although much of their generosity stems from their distinctive political culture, which encourages and even requires public-private partnerships. The development of a "third sector" of private, nonprofit organizations results primarily from the separation of church and state, a political arrangement that has given rise to hundreds of thousands of voluntary organizations, all seeking their own vision of the public good.

A distinction can be made between philanthropy and charity. The word "charity" derives from the Latin "caritas, " meaning unconditional love. Charity often refers to short-term relief, while philanthropy is normally applied to attempts at investigating and reforming underlying causes. While most giving in America is in the form of small contributions, much of it for religious purposes, a significant development has been the creation of large philanthropic foundations, which contributed over $27 billion in 2000. While this constitutes less than 10 percent of total voluntary contributions, it is heavily concentrated, and thus has great impact. There are around fifty thousand foundations in the United States, with assets of around $450 billion, although one-third of this sum is held by the top twenty-five foundations.

Philanthopy in the Colonial Period

Philanthropy, wrote Rockefeller Foundation director Warren Weaver, "is not a modern invention, " for "concern for one's fellow men extends back to ancient times." Private gifts for community purposes were not uncommon in the classical period, the most famous being Plato's gift of productive land as an endowment for his academy. Early Christians were commanded to give to the poor beyond their ability. Gifts of property were common in the Christian era, and were used to establish monasteries, hospitals, colleges, and other semi-public institutions. In the Middle Ages the church had primary responsibility for religious, cultural, service, and educational activities; thus, the seizure of the monasteries during the early phase of the English Reformation created practical problems. Queen Elizabeth sought a middle way between Catholic and Puritan purposes. Toward the end of her reign Parliament passed two major laws that shaped colonial philanthropic efforts.

The most famous was the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, which made church parishes "overseers of the poor" and established the principle of local responsibility for indigent populations. The Statute of Charitable Uses, passed the same year, provided for church supervision of charitable bequests, such as "lands, tenements, rents, annuities, profits, inheritances, " and listed legitimate objects of charity, including poor relief, education in "free schools" and universities, medical treatment, and care of widows and orphans.

The Puritans who came to New England in 1630 had a different theoretical basis for philanthropic activity. The first governor of Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop, imagined in his lay sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity, " a "city upon a hill, " a divinely ordered society of rich and poor with reciprocal duties. "We must be knit together in this work as one man, " Winthrop urged, so that "every man afford his help to another in every want or distress." The "care of the public" must supersede any private gain. Political enforcement through taxation, however, did not limit private gifts. Thus, John Harvard donated his personal library to the new colony's college.

The revocation of the Massachusetts charter after England's revolution of 1688 meant that government policy was no longer under the complete control of Puritan social theory. In this new context, cleric Cotton Mather, in his Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good (1710), urged congregations to develop voluntary organizations for social reform. Doing good was not a means of salvation, but rather an obligation to God and sound social policy, although Mather was careful to point out that giving wisely was better than giving generously.

Philanthropy in the middle colonies originated from a dissenting religious tradition and developed in the context of religious diversity. In 1681 Quaker William Penn established his colony as a "holy experiment" for religious refugees. Heavily influenced by Mather's Bonifacius, Benjamin Franklin introduced a secular spirit and self-help tradition into American philanthropy. His Junto, established in 1727, was a group of middling artisans who organized themselves for social purposes, and helped establish a free library, town watch, and fire company in Philadelphia. Franklin was instrumental in forming a voluntary militia to help defend the officially pacifist Quaker colony during the French and Indian War, and he established numerous other Philadelphia institutions, such as the American Philosophical Society, the Pennsylvania Hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania. These efforts were later jointly funded by taxation and private contributions. Many Philadelphians continued this tradition of civic philanthropy, including Benjamin Rush, who founded the Philadelphia Dispensary in the 1780s, the first free medical clinic in America.

The Great Awakening of the 1740s provided a major impetus to making philanthropy more a mass movement rather than a strictly upper-class phenomenon. New revivalist congregations needed voluntary support from their members, which not only required individual giving but also weakened support for established churches. Itinerant English evangelist George Whitefield preached throughout the colonies and encouraged giving for an orphanage in Georgia; one of the first colonywide fund-raising drives, it moved beyond the localism of the poor laws.

A New Order for the Ages: Revolutionary Disestablishment While important, colonial philanthropy was not significantly different from its historical antecedents. Far more profound were the fundamental changes that occurred between the Revolution and the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791. The idea of limited government, combined with the separation of church and state, created a distinctive political tradition that not only allowed for voluntary activity, but in fact required it. Revolutionary ideology, which considered strong governments as destructive of liberty, opposed centralized power along with government support for charitable and cultural activities. Beyond a vague provision for "the general welfare, " the Constitution severely restricted federal authority, leaving whole areas of the common good, such as education, health, and poor relief, to either the states or private effort. Constitutional theory encouraged this devolution of power, not only through federalism and representation, but also by acknowledging freedoms of religion, speech, and assembly. In his Federalist essays, James Madison argued that numerous competing factions and interests were the best means of preserving liberty and of providing for various definitions of the public good. Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom (1786), the precedent for the First Amendment, withdrew all governmental funding for religious activities, mandating a voluntary system of religious and charitable giving.

The status of nonreligious institutions, however, was at this point unclear. Jeffersonian democrats insisted that institutions that claimed to serve the public interest should be under state legislative control. This argument was rejected in the Dartmouth College Case (1819), in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the independence and autonomy of "eleemosynary, " or nonprofit, corporations. Relying upon the right of contract, Chief Justice John Marshall established the legal rights of all corporations by protecting their trustees from legislative interference.

This case opened the way for numerous private charitable organizations to pursue benevolent and philanthropic goals. Visiting in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America,"an immense assemblage of associations" for countless political, civic, and charitable causes:

Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; … 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.

These voluntary organizations competed against each other for contributions and acceptance. Occasionally they worked together in a so-called "benevolent empire" for moral improvement and social reform. Many had explicitly political aims, such as the abolition of slavery, while others concerned themselves with charitable activities.

Education and research relied heavily upon philanthropy. Before the Civil War hundreds of colleges were founded, mostly by religious denominations through private contributions, since Congress refused to establish any national university. One of the most famous philanthropic gifts was that of James Smithson, a British chemist who gave around $500,000 for "an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." After a decade of debate, Congress finally created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. Smithson's gift encouraged others in support of scientific research and public education, such as that of Abbot Lawrence for naturalist Louis Agassiz's laboratory at Harvard, Peter Cooper for the establishment of Cooper Union, and the founding of public libraries in Boston and New York.

During the Civil War both sides supported their respective war efforts through voluntarism. In the North the Christian Commission donated food, clothing, religious literature, and other supplies to troops, while the rival U.S. Sanitary Commission concentrated on coordinating local relief agencies, improving their administration, and reducing disease in military camps and hospitals. Funds were raised through "sanitary fairs" throughout the country that spread the voluntary spirit. Without compensation or accreditation, Clara Barton organized nursing care for wounded soldiers. She formed the American Red Cross in 1881 and served as its first president until 1904. Abolition societies pressured President Abraham Lincoln for emancipation and after the war, worked to establish the Freedmen's Bureau with federal funding. Other organizations flooded the postwar South with teachers and schools. Gen. Samuel Armstrong founded the Hampton Institute in Virginia and George Peabody established a fund for the "strickened South."

The Rise of Scientific Philanthropy

The rapid industrialization of American society in the late nineteenth century, combined with increased immigration, led to a series of social problems on a scale hitherto unimagined. Local-and religious-based philanthropy continued, of course, but urban conditions frequently over-whelmed traditional voluntarism. The social settlement house movement, exemplified by the founding of Hull House by Jane Addams in Chicago during 1889, sought to alleviate some of the worst conditions and encouraged the development of social science–based investigation of urban poverty.

That same year, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published his essay "Wealth, " in which he urged its "proper administration … so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship." Carnegie chastised "indiscriminate charity" as morally destructive, instead calling for support for institutions of self-help, such as universities, libraries, and museums. The man of wealth was to be "the mere agent and trustee for his poorer brethren … doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves." Carnegie implemented his "gospel of wealth" at first through gifts of libraries to communities that promised to support them. After selling his steel interests, however, he concentrated on establishing permanent institutions and foundations.

Carnegie's businesslike approach fit well with a progressive belief in scientific investigation. After experimenting with various institutional forms, three major philanthropists—Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Margaret Olivia Sage—created a new type of institution between 1907 and 1913, the general purpose foundation. Differing from the British model of a charitable trust, which restricted trustees to the specific wishes of donors, the American foundation often was established with broad purposes, much like a business corporation, thus giving enormous discretion to trustees and staff. Eschewing charity, these institutions followed Rockefeller's advice to focus upon attacking underlying conditions. "Money, " he said, "is a feeble offering without the study behind it which will make its expenditure effective."

While founding private organizations, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Sage each assumed that their creations would work closely with government, providing research and a sort of venture capital for public programs. Often philanthropy filled gaps in government policy, as when southern states refused to fund the construction of black schools. Rockefeller's General Education Board and the Julius Rosenwald Fund assisted in the construction of thousands of schools in the South. Another model was provided by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission, which concentrated on a public health campaign to eradicate hookworm, work later taken over by state and local governments.

In their early decades, foundations concentrated on the advancement of formal knowledge. Much of this effort focused on the basic medical sciences and the strengthening of university departments and medical schools. For example, the Carnegie-funded Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada (1910), by Abraham Flexner, profoundly transformed medical training, especially after the General Education Board began heavily supporting medical schools on the Flexner model. As one Rockefeller Foundation staff member described it, the goal was to "make the peaks higher" and to develop research infrastructures in basic academic disciplines.

The business-corporate model also rationalized charities, especially after the formation of the Cleveland Foundation in 1914. Initially consisting of local charities, such community foundations coordinated the distribution of funds in a given locality, as through Community Chests, and also offered modest donors the professional administration of funds.

Philanthropy and the Voluntary State

In the 1920s Carnegie and Rockefeller philanthropies, along with the Russell Sage Foundation, began emphasizing the importance of the social sciences, especially in their relation to government policy formation. Foundation money helped create a number of institutions, such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Social Science Research Council, and the Brookings Institution, and also strengthened university departments of sociology, economics, and public administration.

The emergence of Herbert Hoover as secretary of commerce and later as president increased the reliance of government upon private foundations in policy development. A network of university social scientists, supported by foundations, provided the expertise necessary for government programs, resulting in what might be called a voluntary state. Even before the Depression, Hoover sought expert advice on business cycles, old age pensions, unemployment insurance, and health care, which led to the publication of the monumental report, Recent Social Trends (1933). Many New Deal programs, such as Social Security, relied upon this type of research. One controversial program was the Carnegie Corporation support for studies on race relations, especially Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), which was significant in shaping the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision that barred segregation.

This public-private partnership existed also in international matters. The Senate's refusal to approve American membership in the League of Nations led to an increased involvement of philanthropy overseas. Rockefeller philanthropy had supported basic medical research in China, and after World War I that backing was expanded to research programs in Europe and Asia. Also created were various International Houses on major university campuses, along with scholarly exchange programs to encourage greater understanding.

The economic upheavals of the 1930s depressed foundation endowments and also forced a change in federal tax policy, as inheritance taxes became permanent in 1935. Henry Ford, Eli Lilly, and Robert Wood Johnson each created new foundations to shelter their wealth. The new tax laws also allowed for profit companies to give to charity, and later to form their own foundations, which they did increasingly after the 1950s.

Philanthropy During the American Century

As World War II approached, foundations helped in establishing preparedness, which included encouraging many refugee scholars, including Albert Einstein, to flee Europe. Foundations funded special programs, as in science and language training, that were critical to the war effort. After World War II, philanthropy became increasingly tied to American foreign policy, especially in the Cold War. The Ford Foundation, joined by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie philanthropies, became increasingly involved in international affairs, developing university-based area studies programs and various cultural activities that were indirectly anti-communist.

Foundations came under attack in the early 1950s, most significantly by two congressional committees. In 1952 the Cox Committee examined whether foundations were undermining the exiting capitalistic structure. Two years later the more McCarthyite-like Reece Committee investigated whether they were subversive. Foundations responded by increasing their public visibility and accountability and by moving closer to the political mainstream. One result of congressional scrutiny was the largest single grant in history, the Ford Foundation's gift of over $550 million in 1955 for private universities, medical schools, and hospitals. While relatively unimaginative, this gift helped offset the massive governmental funding of public universities.

The developing world was an area of significant philanthropic activity in the 1950s and 1960s. One major focus was on plant genetics, with the goal of increasing food production. Started initially by the Rockefeller Foundation in Mexico, such agricultural research was drastically expanded with Ford Foundation support in the 1960s, leading to the Green Revolution. The research targeted cereal grains such as rice, and resulted in dramatically increased food supplies. India even became a food exporter for the first time. Philanthropies also expanded studies in human genetics and family planning, which helped reduce population growth.

Foundations resumed major political engagement in the 1960s. Nelson Rockefeller, with significant support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, commissioned a series of policy studies in the late 1950s that became the basis of numerous initiatives in the Kennedy administration. The Rockefeller Foundation president, Dean Rusk, joined the administration as secretary of state and the president of the Carnegie Corporation, John Gardner, served as secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson. Gardner left in 1968 to form the citizens' lobby Common Cause, and later, Independent Sector to promote nonprofit organizations. McGeorge Bundy, the dean at Harvard, became Kennedy and Johnson's national security adviser, and left government to head the Ford Foundation. Under its public affairs director, Paul Ylvisaker, Ford began increasingly to address civil rights issues, supporting the Gray Areas Program in inner cities, funding voter registration drives, and backing the controversial Community Action Programs. Other philanthropic efforts included grants to explore Head Start programs and public television.

The increased visibility of foundation philanthropy led to new congressional investigations, such as one led by the populist U.S. representative Wright Patman starting in 1961. An indirect result was the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which restricted political activity, increased reporting requirements, and forced a payout percentage of foundation assets. Foundation reaction was generally supportive, and John D. Rockefeller III initiated the Filer Commission on

Private Philanthropy and Public Needs in 1973 to help strengthen and increase philanthropic effectiveness.

In response to the perceived leftward tilt of many mainstream foundations, more conservative foundations, such as the Olin Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Bradley Foundation, began developing strategies for a revival of conservatism. The presidential victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980 resulted in part from the strategic policy support of conservative foundations. By the 1980s there had emerged blocks of foundations that supported various sides of the policy spectrum. Reagan's partial dismantling of the social safety net increased the pressures on nonprofits and private philanthropy to make up for the decline in federal social spending. Also bringing attention to the role of private philanthropy was President George H. W. Bush's call for "a thousand points of light"—although Republicans have at least rhetorically favored small contributors over professional foundations. Democrats have relied upon their own philanthropic allies to fund the studies necessary for the continuation of favorite policies, as when the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supported Hillary Clinton's health care reform initiatives in the mid-1990s.

While the vast majority of philanthropy is devoted to domestic matters, the end of the Cold War led to an expanded international effort on the part of American foundations. The rise of Mikhail Gorbachev stemmed in part from Carnegie Corporation support in the 1980s, and soon after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ford Foundation established an office in Moscow. Financier George Soros formed the Open Society Fund to create the private Central European University and to encourage democratic pluralism in eastern Europe. In 1997 media mogul Ted Turner pledged a billion dollars to the United Nations over a ten-year period, the largest gift in history, in part to encourage others of the newly rich to donate more to philanthropic causes.

The Future of Philanthropy

After almost a century of criticism from the left, the right, and populists on all sides, what is significant is that philanthropy has become an accepted part of American political culture. Despite all the political involvement of foundation philanthropy in controversial policy areas, there have not been any congressional investigations for over thirty years. In the coming decades, philanthropy will become of increasing importance, as the passing of the World War II generation will lead to the greatest transfer of wealth in history, in the trillions of dollars. Much of that will be turned over to philanthropic foundations, which will continue America's distinctive tradition of encouraging private expenditures for public purposes.

Bibliography

Arnove, Robert F. ed. Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

Bremner, Robert H. American Philanthropy. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

The Chronicle on Philanthropy. Available at http://philanthropy.com. A biweekly publication that is an essential starting point for current philanthropic activity.

Dowie, Mark. American Foundations: An Investigative History. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

The Foundation Center. Available at http://fndcenter.org. Basic research on the largest foundations can be found here.

Hall, Peter Dobkin. Inventing the Nonprofit Sector and Other Essays on Philanthropy, Voluntarism, and Nonprofit Organizations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Hammack, David, ed. Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Karl, Barry D. "Foundations and Public Policy." In Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century. Vol. 1. Edited by Stanley Kutler. New York: Scribners, 1996.

Kiger, Joseph C. Philanthropic Foundations in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Kiger was the research director of the Cox Committee.

Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, ed. Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.

O'Connell, Brian, ed. America's Voluntary Spirit: A Book of Readings. New York: The Foundation Center, 1983.

The idea of philanthropy, of concern for the welfare of the human race, has from the beginning been so tightly interwoven with other aspects of the American experience that the strand is difficult to disentangle. To many, the survival of the colonies and the success of the new nation were works of philanthropy: John Winthrop, colonial governor of Massachusetts, spoke of the "city on a hill"; aspiring revolutionaries felt themselves to be forwarding "humanity's extended cause"; to the young Herman Melville "national selfishness [was] unbounded philanthropy"; to Abraham Lincoln the nation was the last best hope of earth. In the active sense, as well, the philanthropic purpose appeared with the first attempts at colonization. The Virginia Company and Massachusetts Bay Company charters included the propagation of the Christian religion among the principal ends of these enterprises; this aim was reflected in the work of John Eliot, the apostle to the Indians, and in the concern of Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall for the evangelization of Mexico.

Despite this background, accomplishments during the colonial period were small: the requirements of survival governed; missionary work among the Indians proved unrewarding and among black slaves was precluded as an interference with local self-government. The development of active American philanthropy dates from the first half-century of independence, which in this area, as in so many others, imposed an abiding structure upon American attitudes and institutions. Success in the Revolution produced a confidence in an American worldview in which philanthropy and self-interest happily appeared to coincide, and which led, in the external sphere, to a beginning export of American answers to the problems of the human race. In politics this brought forth a bias in favor of liberal revolution, self-determination, and economic freedom that would inform the conduct of foreign affairs through the period of Woodrow Wilson's missionary diplomacy, and beyond.

Faith in applied science and in the educability of mankind encouraged Americans to take service with foreign rulers in order to teach a generalized modernity, which focused in the early years on military skills, agriculture, and the mechanic arts. While proffering the gift of salvation, the greatest gift of all, an expanding foreign missionary movement took with it powerful cultural influences: literacy, educational systems, new techniques, civil servants, and advisers. With the growing wealth of America there developed a notable philanthropy in the narrower sense of the giving of money or goods or skills, first for the relief of disaster and subsequently for measures of constructive social policy and cultural preservation. Originally manifested in extemporized individual or group activity, these endeavors in time became institutionalized in such organizations as the American Red Cross and the major foundations, while their political and modernizing aspects attracted increased government participation.

The efforts to transfer American ideas, skills, and institutions to those "dwelling in darkness" had, prior to the development of American funding agencies, an inevitable admixture of careerism; nevertheless, the early work of individuals established precedents on which organized philanthropy, with its inherited assumption of the malleability of mankind, could subsequently build. The latter years of the eighteenth century saw the work of the American Tory, Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, in Bavarian administrative reform, and John Paul Jones's brief command of the Russian Black Sea fleet. The French Revolution attracted the helpful efforts of Joel Barlow, Thomas Paine, and Robert Fulton. New waves of revolution, first in the New World and then in the Old World, emphasized the relation between military skills and the universal benefits of freedom and self-determination: Americans held important posts in the revolutionary navies of Argentina and Mexico; the Greek War of Independence drew American philhellenes across the Atlantic; American naval constructors rebuilt the Ottoman navy after Navarino.

Limited Government

Over its course, American philanthropy has often reflected constitutional scruples about separation of powers. As secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson urged that, if government were to engage in philanthropy, it should be state governments—not the federal government—that should take up the cause. In 1793–1794 refugees from the black revolution in Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) received assistance from a mixture of private, state, and federal funds. In 1812, Congress appropriated $50,000 for earthquake victims in Venezuela. Generally, however, reservations as to the constitutional propriety of federal government action prevailed, the work remained voluntary, and help from the United States was limited to the occasional loan of a public ship to transport and distribute relief supplies.

Outside the area of federal funding, however, the situation was less clear-cut and constitutional scruples have not been so engaged. Rather than charge the federal government, Jefferson paid out of his own pocket for the transport of different types of plants to further agriculture while he tried via personal correspondence and private groups such as the American Philosophical Society to advance knowledge to those who would benefit, domestic and international. President Andrew Jackson, "acting in his private capacity," recommended a naval constructor to the Turks, and the Turkish request for agricultural experts brought favorable response from the Department of State. In various far places, missionaries, as citizens residing abroad, by mid-century became the occasional beneficiaries of diplomatic interposition or show of naval force, while their local knowledge at times made them helpful in diplomacy, as in the missions of Caleb Cushing to China and of Matthew C. Perry to Japan.

As contact with non-European societies increased, Americans served as generals in the Afghan and Chinese armies and as diplomatic representatives of the Hawaiian kingdom and the Chinese empire. The early nineteenth century also saw the first efforts to encourage economic modernization: the attempts of William Maclure to improve Spanish agriculture (1819) and the condition of the Mexican Indians (1828) proved abortive, but the 1840s witnessed the railroad building of G. W. Whistler in Russia and the response of American agronomists to a Turkish request for assistance in the introduction of cotton culture.

In contrast to the sporadic work of individuals in the antebellum years was the organized and continuing effort of the foreign missionary movement. The Reverend Samuel Hopkins's ideas of "disinterested benevolence," the sense of urgency deriving from the felt imminence of the millennium, new knowledge of far places, and the example of Great Britain stimulated interest in overseas evangelism: the founding of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810 was followed by that of denominational boards. From the small beginnings of the mission to India the work grew rapidly: by 1860 the American Board alone had deployed 844 men and women overseas, and the country's expenditures on foreign missions, concentrated on the Indian subcontinent and the Near East, exceeded $500,000 a year.

The effort to evangelize the world had significant secondary consequences. The emphasis on a Bible religion called for the translation of Scripture into the vernacular and stimulated the founding of schools. The imperative to do good and the need for access to closed societies encouraged the dispatch of medical missionaries: Peter Parker's dispensary at Canton in China, founded in the 1830s, was the first of many missionary-supported health care centers. The stress on the importance of the individual, whether in the conversion experience, in education, or in medical care, was emphasized, in a manner startling to the traditional societies, by the prominent role of women in mission work and by the early establishment of schools for girls; from this attitude also stemmed the attacks on caste, polygamy, suttee, prostitution, foot binding, opium, and rum.

But of all these by-products of the missionary enterprise, work in education proved the most important. The success of lower schools created a demand for more advanced instruction, a prospect so congenial to American preconceptions that the 1860s brought the founding of overseas colleges at Constantinople and Beirut. And whether in the area of conversion, medicine, education, or the status of women, the missionary enterprise emphasized not only the American view of the importance of the individual but also the idea of change, and of the possibility of breaking through layers of custom into a more open and modern world.

The emergence of a free black population in the United States following the Revolution had led an unstable coalition of antislavery advocates and slaveholders to found the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817, which sought to establish a refuge for free black men and women on the African coast and to further the evangelization of Africa. Even many genuine evangelicals believed that blacks and whites could not live together peaceably on the basis of equality, so strong was the racism prevalent in the North and South. Expecting black immigrants to serve as missionaries to Africa, the ACS helped purchase the land for Liberia in 1821 and the settlement of Monrovia was established in 1822. By the eve of the Civil War, some 15,000 free black men and women lived in Liberia, about 12,000 of them having voluntarily immigrated with the assistance of the ACS. The ACS had joined with state and federal governments to form the freedman's colony on the African coast, modeling their plan on the British colony for free blacks at Sierra Leone.

The period before the Civil War also saw the development of a tradition of relief of disaster, whether natural or human-made. In 1816 and 1825 the citizens of Boston and New York assisted Canadian victims of great conflagrations. Support of the Greek War of Independence in the years after 1823 led not only to the departure of volunteers but also to contributions totaling perhaps $250,000 and to the relief work of Samuel Gridley Howe. In the 1830s and again two decades later, famine relief was sent to the Cape Verde Islands. Despite the distractions of the Mexican War, the years 1847–1848 saw the greatest effort thus far, as more than $1 million worth of supplies was sent to the victims of the great Irish famine in more than a score of ships, two of which were on loan from the U.S. Navy. In 1860, when civil war and massacres in Lebanon led to a major refugee problem, missionary influence brought about the creation of an Anglo-American relief committee and the dispatch of supplies by naval store ship. In 1862–1863, at the height of the American Civil War, further funds were raised in response to another failure of the Irish potato crop, while humanitarianism and policy combined to provide $250,000 to assist Lancashire mill operatives suffering from the cotton famine.

Like much else in post–Civil War America, the philanthropic effort grew larger, richer, and more highly organized, while the transfer of skills to countries striving to modernize themselves continued on an expanded scale. American military men served the governments of Egypt, China, Japan, and Korea; and Americans advised the Japanese Foreign Office, the king of Korea, the Dalai Lama, and the Chinese viceroy Li Hungchang. In economic development, mining engineers like Raphael Pumpelly and agronomists like Horace Capron provided their expertise. In Japan, American teachers contributed notably to the new educational structure; in China, W. A. P. Martin became the first president of the Imperial University in Peking; in Siam, S. G. McFarland served as head of the royal school in Bangkok and superintendent of public instruction.

Although many of the teachers were laymen, some of the most distinguished—Martin and McFarland, for example—were products of the foreign missionary movement, which in these years increasingly concentrated its efforts on East Asia. Assisted by their new allies from the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Young Men's Christian Association, and supported by large gifts from the new fortunes of William E. Dodge, John F. Goucher, H. J. Heinz, John D. Rockefeller, and Louis H. Severance, the missionaries continued to export, together with their sectarian versions of God's word, their American bias in favor of modernization, resource development, health care, and education.

By the end of the century the effort overseas had created a network of Christian colleges reaching from the Balkans to Japan and had opened wide, for those who wished to enter, the doors to Western knowledge and to informed participation in the activities of an increasingly westernized world. So valued, indeed, had the educational enterprise become, that governments came to embrace the cause, as in proposals within the administration of Abraham Lincoln for the establishment of a Sino-American college, in the Chinese employment of the remitted excess of the Boxer Rebellion indemnity, and much later (and most notably) in the Fulbright Act of 1946, which transmuted overseas war surplus into an extensive program of educational exchanges.

If the missionary movement and its associated enterprises provided the chief vehicle for late nineteenth-century philanthropy in Asia, the new wealth deriving from finance and industry also found outlets in the Old World. In this area in the 1860s the pioneer modern philanthropist George Peabody led with gifts, in part intended to diminish Civil War tensions, of $2.5 million for English working-class housing. A concern for the preservation of other countries' valued pasts was evidenced in the founding of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1881) and the American Academy in Rome (1894). These years also saw the beginning of gifts by immigrants who had prospered in the United States to churches, libraries, orphanages, and the like in their countries of origin. With the new century the social concern evidenced in the Peabody gift reappeared in the contribution of Edward and Julia Tuck, retired in France, of a hospital, school, and park to the environs of Paris, and in the work of Joseph Fels, who, abandoning the manufacture of soap, spent largely to promote the single-tax doctrine abroad.

A similar solicitude for the social and cultural improvement of the advanced countries of western Europe informed the philanthropies of a most successful immigrant, Andrew Carnegie. Beginning in 1873 with a gift of baths to his Scottish birthplace, Carnegie subsequently gave Dunfermline a library, a park, and an endowment. His contribution of public libraries to American towns and colleges was repeated abroad; 660 in Great Britain and Ireland, 156 in Canada, and others in other dominions and colonies. In 1901 Carnegie gave $10 million to revive the Scottish universities, and in 1913 a like sum for the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust for "the improvement of the well-being of the masses." His gifts to the British Empire totaled $62 million.

For many philanthropists, Carnegie's philosophy regarding philanthropy remains the essence of the philanthropic ideal, as spelled out in The Gospel of Wealth (1900):

This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: first, to set an example of modest unostentatious living, shunning display; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds which he is strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgment, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.

Carnegie spent his later years implementing this ideal and in the process gave new shape to American philanthropy. His grants to Marie Curie and Robert Koch inaugurated American support of foreign scientific research. Transcending all national boundaries and reflecting the aspirations of the Progressive Era, he supported the peace and arbitration movements, as evidenced in his 1907 gift of the Hague Peace Palace and (following Edwin Ginn's establishment in 1910 of the World Peace Foundation) in the $10 million Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for "the speedy abolition of international war between the so-called civilized nations."

In contrast with the evangelical effort in the non-European world and the projects of individual donors in Europe and Canada, the relief of disaster long depended on the efforts of individuals on the spot and ad hoc appeals to the public at large. Such traditional methods provided relief for victims of revolution in Crete (1866) and for France during the Franco-Prussian War. On various occasions in the 1870s and 1880s missionary groups worked to mitigate hunger in Persia, China, and Turkey. But by this time new agencies were assuming an important role. A vigorous campaign by the New York Herald spurred relief of the Irish famine of 1880. Some $1 million in goods and services contributed to help victims of the Russian famine of 1892 owed much to the support of Western flour interests, concerned both for humanity and for the agricultural price level, and to the energy of Louis Klopsch, editor of the Christian Herald, whose subsequent campaigns—for example, in the Indian famines of 1897 and 1900—raised in the course of fifteen years more than $3 million in gifts averaging less than $3. Under the leadership of Clara Barton and with presidential support, the American National Red Cross (1881) provided both funds and an increasing continuity of administration for the relief of disaster abroad as well as at home.

Generally speaking, American relief efforts in the years before 1914 were unaffected by political developments. Famines in Japan and China drew generous response, but sympathy for Russia was seriously diminished by end-of-the-century violence against Russian Jews. In 1895–1896 concern for Armenian victims of Turkish atrocities led to congressional agitation for American intervention; and in 1897–1898 the collection of funds for Cuban relief was encouraged by President William McKinley, among others, in the hope of dampening pressures to intervene.

Growing Influence

During the twentieth century, American philanthropy was increasingly influenced by American foreign policy while the philanthropic ideal exerted a powerful influence on the formulation of foreign policy. Before World War I, as European colonial powers sought to acquire territory in the Americas, federal policymakers sought to prevent European interventions in the Caribbean and Philippines, which led them to fund public works projects and schools in the region. The Messina earthquake of 1908 resulted in an unprecedented congressional appropriation of $800,000 and a reconstruction program supervised by American naval personnel. And a public-private partnership resulted in a proactive agenda to prevent flooding in China. The agenda aimed to extend cooperation between the American Red Cross, the federal government, and private bankers.

World War I produced a vast outpouring of philanthropic activity abroad, and resulted in remarkable federal-state-private cooperation and cooperation of philanthropic and foreign policy agencies. Early in the war, the American Red Cross attempted to provide hospitals for both sides, but an upsurge of sympathy for Belgium and France produced a pro-Allied tilt to American philanthropy. In the United States there sprang up numerous pro-Allied relief groups, for care of the wounded, and for aid to widows and orphans. Most important was the feeding of nine million Belgians, as Americans contributed some $34.5 million, and established the worldwide reputation of its director, Herbert Hoover.

Following the American declaration of war, military and philanthropic mobilization marched together. A significant development was expansion of the Red Cross, which, with new leadership from finance and industry and vastly expanded membership and contributions, deployed some 6,000 workers to France and provided hospitals, relief supplies, and an antituberculosis campaign, as well as refugee resettlement. At the same time the newly founded American Friends Service Committee (1917) sent volunteers to help with reconstruction.

Far from demobilizing after the war, American relief efforts expanded, owing to a large infusion of federal government funds. In 1919, with Europe suffering from destruction, starvation, and disease, Congress established the American Relief Administration (ARA) under Herbert Hoover with an appropriation of $100 million; within a year, public appeals yielded an additional $29 million for assistance. The ARA emphasized feeding undernourished children and delivered large quantities of food. The aid was intended, moreover, to bolster feeble East European parliamentary regimes against the Bolshevik threat.

Despite opposition to Bolshevism, famine in Russia brought forth a vigorous response. Congress raised $20 million, and by 1922 the ARA, under the direction of Colonel William N. Haskell, operated 18,000 feeding stations in Russia, as public and private contributions grew to a total of $80 million. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee contributed to the peoples of Poland and the Ukraine. Some liberal groups, suspicious of the ARA's presumed aims, contributed several million dollars more.

In the Near East, the Ottoman Empire was beset by revolutionary activity, ethnic conflict, and Greco-Turkish warfare. Some urged the United States to accept a philanthropic mandate for the former empire, but when Congress failed to respond, they turned to private initiative, and between 1918 and 1924, they raised almost $90 million for Near East relief. Moreover, chaotic conditions in Turkey, Persia, and Armenia stirred missionary interests to raise almost $7 million by 1917, while concern for coreligionists in central Europe and Palestine yielded contributions of $15 million from Jewish groups in America. Coincident with these initiatives, Chinese famine relief produced gifts from both churches and government, and gave rise to an extensive program of work relief.

Despite the Senate's rejection of the League of Nations, American philanthropists were not isolationist; indeed, between 1919 and 1939 the philanthropic expenditures of American voluntary agencies averaged $63.5 million annually. As at earlier times, the pattern of giving reflected cultural and ethnic affinities: Europe and Asia received the lion's share and Latin America lagged far behind, as did Africa. Protestants contributed 47 percent of the total, which focused on Europe, India, China, and Japan; nonsectarian donors contributed 34 percent of the total and focused on Europe, the Near East, and China; Jewish contributors gave 12 percent and it went mainly to Europe and Palestine; and the Catholic portion, 7 percent, went mainly to Europe and China.

During the interwar period, philanthropy's attention focused on problem areas of the world involving large population groups. Civil strife in Ireland drew forth from the Irish-American community generous contributions for relief, as well as for support of independence. American Jewish donors provided more than one-third of the out-side support for the Jewish community in Palestine, while it also aided the resettlement of some 200,000 Jews in the Ukraine, Crimea, Poland, and Germany. In the case of China, the American public responded to the disastrous famine of 1927 and the Yangtze flood of 1931.

Natural disasters also called forth American responses, the most dramatic being for the great Tokyo earthquake of 1923, which left some 200,000 dead and 2 million homeless. The U.S. Asiatic Fleet and the Philippine Department of the Army sent supplies costing $6 million for immediate help; private donations totaled more than $12 million, including $1.5 million donated by Rockefeller foundations to help rebuild the University of Tokyo. American contributions amounted to almost three-quarters of total relief, but such generosity was vitiated by the ban on Japanese immigration, which was imposed by the same Congress that had funded emergency relief.

Between the wars, American foundations assumed an increasingly prominent role in the totality of American philanthropy, especially in cultural activities and health care. The Carnegie Endowment rebuilt libraries and supported large-scale academic studies of war. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., built the League of Nations Library at Geneva, while the Rockefeller Foundation financed foreign policy studies and international scholar exchanges. The Harkness family founded the Commonwealth Fund (1918), which dedicated itself to the welfare of mankind; and in 1930 the Pilgrim Trust gave $10 million to Great Britain for its "future well-being." The Rockefeller Foundation helped rebuild the University of Louvain and the cathedral at Rheims, and it under-wrote maintenance costs of Versailles and Fontainebleau, as it expanded the American schools at Athens and Rome.

Moreover, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and private individuals made sizable gifts to British, European, Canadian, and Mexican universities. Outside the Atlantic world, educational efforts were concentrated on the Near Eastern colleges, Hebrew University of Palestine, Chinese colleges, and surveys of educational programs in Africa and East Asia. James Loeb supported a psychiatric institute in Munich and George Eastman provided dental clinics in a number of European capitals. The Rockefeller Foundation funded work on parasitic and infectious diseases when it established Peking Union Medical College.

As world peace gave way in the late 1930s, American philanthropists watched with foreboding and, despite the U.S. Neutrality Acts, philanthropists engaged from the outset of the growing world crisis. In 1939 there developed a coordinated effort marked by cooperation between sectarian relief agencies, organized labor, and government. The Spanish Civil War drew American volunteers to the Loyalist side in opposition to fascism, but the Neutrality Acts dampened the spirit of giving and led to only $3 million raised for humanitarian assistance.

Relief funds followed the chronology of disaster and were sent to the Czechs after the Munich agreement, as well as the conquered Poles, Finns, Dutch, French, Greeks, and Russians as their countries were overrun. Especially notable was the rapid organization of a Russian relief effort and its impressive backing from professional and financial groups. In 1941 assistance provided to China by missionary organizations and the Chinese-American community gained new support when growing concern for Asia led to the organization of the United China Relief Agency with Eleanor Roosevelt as honorary chairperson.

By far the greatest assistance went to Britain, as the mother of parliaments stood alone against the Nazi threat. The Bundles for Britain campaign was followed by a dispatch of ambulances and medical personnel, and by the summer of 1941, British War Relief achieved backing from business and labor and raised more than $10 million and $90 million had been raised for overseas war relief by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. Department of State coordinated these efforts and by 1945 the number of relief agencies had been reduced from 300 to 90.

The Axis occupation of Europe posed the difficult ethical question of whether the subject populations should be helped, for fear of assisting the occupying Axis powers. Although Herbert Hoover strongly urged feeding the victims of Nazi aggression, the opposite view prevailed. Only about $2 million went to relief in Nazi Germany. Congress appropriated $50 million for relief, which was administered by the Red Cross, and more than half went to Britain and none to occupied areas.

By 1945 organized labor emerged as a major donor and together with religious and ethnic groups, it raised the annual total of private giving for overseas assistance to $234 million. By this time, government coordination had coalesced voluntary agencies, and total contributions, between 1939 and 1945, included $54 million for Russia, $38 million for Great Britain, $36 million for Palestine, $35 million for China, and $30 million for Greece.

However impressive, this private assistance was not nearly enough. As increasing needs called for increased response, and as relief supplies followed the armies into liberated areas, stop-gap governmental efforts were succeeded first by interallied coordination and then by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), headed by Herbert H. Lehman. The work of UNRRA, on a wholly new scale, was of necessity largely American-supported: of almost $4 billion dispensed between 1943 and 1947, 70 percent was provided by the United States. Again with victory the demands increased. In the theaters of conflict the destruction vastly exceeded that of World War I, an enormous refugee problem existed, and dislocations between city and countryside threatened a dangerously deteriorating food situation.

Although some Americans, relieved of the strains of war, evinced a willingness to let the world be, most still saw a compelling need to help, both on ethical and humanitarian grounds and for reasons of policy, as they sought to further democracy, stability, peace, and prosperity, reminiscent of the period after World War I. Given the tensions that later developed, it is worth noting that the appeal of Russian relief, so strong during the fighting, survived the moment of victory: $32 million in cash and kind was provided in 1945 and assistance continued into 1946. But soon the Soviets declared their independence of outside aid, while the coming of the Cold War brought the containment of communism into the forefront of motives for reconstruction.

The response of the voluntary agencies in the immediate postwar period was impressive: expenditures between 1945 and 1948 totaled $1.1 billion. For the government, withdrawal from UNRRA on grounds of bad administration and ideological conflict was followed by support of the International Refugee Organization; by implementation of the Marshall Plan, a mixture of policy and humanitarian objectives between 1948 and 1952; contribution of some $13 billion to the rebuilding of postwar Europe; and by the Food for Peace program inaugurated in 1954 under the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act.

The postwar years were also marked by a "remarkable partnership" of public and private efforts founded on the extemporized successes of private agencies in postwar Germany and Japan; by the contributions of American Jews, who taxed themselves more heavily than any other sectarian group; and by the innovative Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere (CARE), which advanced from early shipment of surplus army rations to the large-scale movement of surplus agricultural products and whose deliveries grew in value from $500,000 in 1946 to $54 million in 1955. Whether all this generosity, if such it can be considered, was adequate to the need may be argued. Perhaps the best assessment comes through comparison of this treatment of liberated and conquered peoples with that provided by other nations in other campaigns.

In the 1950s, as European reconstruction progressed, the focus of overseas philanthropy shifted back to the less developed world: after 1958 more than half of disposable resources went to non-European areas. This shift also emphasized the surprising vigor of the missionary movement, now more than ever equated with social welfare, to which in 1956 American Protestants contributed some $130 million and American Catholics some $50 million. In the early 1950s, indeed, Protestant groups spent more for overseas technical assistance than the United States and the United Nations combined, and their accomplishments provided precedents for governmental action: the Point Four program, launched in 1950, early modeled itself on the Near East Foundation; a decade later the Peace Corps drew on the experience of the interdenominational International Voluntary Services (1953).

These private and public efforts were accompanied by expanded activity on the part of the larger foundations, which greatly increased their contributions to projects concerned with international affairs. Of these institutions, two were preeminent. Shifting its focus from its prewar concern with the eradication of disease, and following in the steps of such nineteenth-century pioneers as Horace Capron, Charles J. Murphy, and David Lubin, the Rockefeller Foundation took as its major goal the modernization of agriculture in the developing countries. Among the striking results were a doubling of Mexican food production between 1943 and 1963 and that of India between 1951 and 1971, and the establishment in 1960 of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.

Important assistance in establishing the Rice Institute came from the Ford Foundation, a new giant of philanthropy, whose resources of $3.6 billion (1968) enabled it to provide more than a quarter of all foundation grants devoted to international affairs. In pursuit of its ambitious aims, reminiscent of Andrew Carnegie, of the "establishment of peace," the Ford Foundation undertook extensive efforts to attack poverty, hunger, and disease, and to further social science and planning. And as birth rates steadily threatened to outstrip production, notwithstanding the successes of plant geneticists in producing high-yield varieties ("Green Revolution"), foundations and government agencies alike edged delicately into stabilizing population growth.

Except for Liberia, American philanthropy had stayed away from Africa, but neglect shifted somewhat in the 1970s, partly owing to the emergence of an African-American lobby. During the 1920s and 1930s, African Americans had protested against U.S. occupation of Haiti and Italian aggression in Ethiopia via traditional channels like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but it was in the 1970s that African Americans organized groups devoted solely to the purpose of influencing American foreign policy and leveraging private and government aid for Haiti and Africa. Following the congressional elections of 1970, African Americans in the House of Representatives organized the Black Caucus.

In March 1971 the Black Caucus urged President Richard Nixon to enact economic sanctions against minority white rule in South Africa. In Washington in May 1978, U.S. Congress Representatives Charles C. Diggs, Jr., and Andrew Young, among others, organized TransAfrica, Inc., a mass-based African-American foreign policy lobby. As leader of TransAfrica, Randall Robinson helped orchestrate an economic blockade against South African apartheid and TransAfrica established itself as the foremost voice for expressing African-American opinion on foreign policy issues. In 1986, when President Ronald Reagan vetoed a ban of loans and investments in South Africa, African Americans regarded it as hostile to their interests. In October, Congress overrode the presidential veto, as it responded to the lobbying of TransAfrica and white liberal opinion. South Africa is now free from apartheid partly because of the U.S. economic sanctions enacted following 1986. And once apartheid was eliminated, TransAfrica and other groups shifted their focus from imposing an embargo to leveraging increases in private and government grants to South Africans and to fighting the scourge of AIDS in Africa.

Meanwhile, as head of TransAfrica, Robinson's highly publicized twenty-seven-day hunger strike, which called upon President William Jefferson Clinton to restore democratic rule in Haiti, led the president to initiate new policies toward the repressive military dictatorship in Haiti. President Clinton intervened there with a force of 20,000 U.S. troops, which resulted in the restoration of the democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to the presidency of the former French West Indian colony. Robinson has helped leverage private and government assistance for Haiti while the George Soros Foundations provided private assistance to island republics and southern Africa.

George Soros and the Capitalist Threat

A leading global philanthropist, the Hungarianborn George Soros was attacked as a corporate raider, a speculator who achieved billionaire status via fluctuations in stocks, commodities, and currencies, but he has also been recognized as a billionaire who, like others before him, seemed determined to give away much of his money. He also received substantial attention because of the books he wrote that sought to explain his ambitious agenda for strengthening democracy and the rule of law on a global scale. Born in Budapest, he moved to England in 1947 and graduated from the London School of Economics; he moved to the United States in 1956 and founded the Open Society Fund (1979) and Soros Foundation–Soviet Union (1987). Soros's goals were "to help open up closed societies, to help make open societies more viable, and to foster a critical mode of thinking." He established some thirty semiautonomous foundations, principally in central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union but also in Guatemala, Haiti, and southern Africa. Established in 1993 in New York City, his Open Society Institute provided administrative, financial, and technical support, as well as establishing network programs to address certain issues on a regional or network-wide basis. In 1997, the various Soros foundations spent a total of $428.4 million on philanthropic activities. Along with the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper and others, Soros juxtaposed totalitarian ideologies with recognition that nobody has a monopoly on truth. Different people have different views and different interests, and he notes a need for institutions that encourage people to live together in peace and respect democracy and the rule of law. His goal was to protect individual rights and ensure freedom of choice and freedom of speech, and as an ardent supporter of toleration, he sees questions of choice and freedom as keys to the open society. By 2001, Soros had donated $1 billion: $350 million in 1997, including $50 million to a fund to help legal immigrants, and $100 million to set up Internet centers at universities in Russia. Soros's donations strengthened U.S. commitments in Eastern Europe and helped compel the realization that the region was vital to American foreign policy.

Ted Turner and Philanthropic Competition

Robert Edward "Ted" Turner, CNN founder and Time Warner vice chairman, announced on 18 September 1997 that he would donate $1 billion ($100 million per year in Time Warner stock) over the next decade to United Nations programs. Speaking of his gift, Turner said, "This is only going to go for programs, programs like refugees, cleaning up land mines, peacekeeping, UNICEF for the children, for diseases, and we're going to have a committee that will work with a committee of the UN so that the money can only go to UN causes." He announced that his goal was to stimulate philanthropic competition, and his grant of $1 billion was intended to raise the bar to a new level.

Starting in 1970 with a single UHF television station in Atlanta, Turner's business grew into a global colossus that included cable channels, movie studios, and professional sports teams. He started his TBS satellite superstation in 1976 and CNN in 1980. In 1996, Turner gave away $28 million, mainly to environmental causes, so the donation of $1 billion to the UN was a departure for him. Because the UN could not legally accept money from individuals, Turner created a foundation to spend the money and administer the programs, which he expected to focus on job creation, eradication of land mines, expansion of education, and research on global warming. He also became a fundraiser for the United Nations and actively sought publicity both for himself and for a number of causes, such as the environmental movement and world peace. His gift of $1 billion to support the United Nations was considered at the time the largest single donation by a private individual. By comparison, all charitable giving by Americans in 1996 was approximately $120 billion. "Few Americans," noted Newsweek, "have cut such a swath through life." Turner's donations strengthened the United Nations as a platform for the resolution of world conflicts and a commitment to international peace.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates, in 2001 the world's richest person, had a personal philosophy of philanthropy that seemed to reflect the views of Andrew Carnegie: "If they want to put in the consent decree that I'm going to give away 95 percent of my wealth, I'd be glad to sign that." A Harvard dropout, Gates had seemed an unlikely successor to his overachieving parents. His father was a prominent Seattle attorney, and his gregarious mother served on charitable boards and ran the United Way. At age thirteen Gates wrote his first computer program, at a time when computers were still room-sized machines run by scientists in white coats. In December 1974, his friend Paul Allen showed Gates a Popular Mechanics cover featuring the Altair 8800, a $397 computer that any hobbyist could build. The only thing the computer lacked, besides a keyboard and monitor, was software. Following complex developments, the company Gates and Allen formed, Microsoft, introduced the Windows operating system, and by 1993 Microsoft was selling a million copies of Windows a month. In 1986, when Microsoft went public, Gates became a paper billionaire at the age of thirty-one. Meanwhile, he increased his charitable giving: He earmarked $750 million over five years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, which involved an alliance with the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, UNICEF, pharmaceutical companies, and the World Bank.

In 1999 the Gates Foundations awarded more than $2 billion in grants, including what is believed to be the largest single private grant in U.S. history—$750 million to the global vaccine program over a five-year period. His vaccine project specifically targeted HIV and AIDS, which he identified in a speech in Redmond, Washington, on 18 October 2000 as having potentially dramatic consequences for the infrastructure of many countries, including Botswana. He also joined with Ted Turner on the vaccine program to give $78 million to eradicate polio from the world by the end of 2000. Gates's donations helped alert the world to the problems of disease as problems of international relations and of American foreign policy.

Conclusion: the Critics

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, American philanthropists could point with pride to two centuries of giving and voluntary association for the good of humanity abroad. But as some critics have suggested, the American philanthropic tradition reached a crossroads arising from the broader context of American diplomacy and from unprecedented criticism from abroad and at home.

The advent of America's hyperpower status since the collapse of the Soviet Union led many to turn a critical eye toward the United States and its philanthropy. As the hegemonic power in the world, even American allies and friends sought to portray the United States as part of the problem, not the solution. American missionaries were criticized as self-righteous meddlers and cultural imperialists and U.S. foreign aid as philanthropic imperialism. Foundations came under attack, as when missionaries were criticized for accepting tainted Rockefeller oil money. Critics suggested that American philanthropy was corrupted by excessively close connections to U.S. foreign policy. Some foreign critics interpreted American philanthropy as the last refuge of Western colonialism.

Some accusations were true enough, but the goals of salvation, survival, or modernization, were always among American philanthropy's goals, and the foundations, like the missionaries, emphasized the unity of mankind and tried to downgrade the importance of nationalism, political frontiers, and political differences. Such attitudes were reflected in practice, for not all private charities cooperated with the U.S. government, and most had reservations. Fidel Castro's victory in Cuba in 1959 moved the Ford Foundation to direct a major effort toward Latin America. Still, the philanthropic ideal remained deeply rooted in the American people.

Far more significant than any politicizing of philanthropy has been the continued influence of the philanthropic ideal on the conduct of American foreign relations. Persistent hope for liberal causes were exemplified in the nineteenth century by James Monroe and Richard Rush during the French and Latin American revolutions, in the reception accorded the Hungarian revolutionary Lajos Kossuth in the United States in 1851, and in Daniel Webster's attacks upon the Habsburg Empire. Moreover, the U.S. view that expanding trade has advanced civilization informed early American commercial treaties with the Islamic world and the Far East and U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Although open to charges of racism, an important domestic philanthropic concern underlay the founding of Liberia in 1847, as did a genuine desire to enhance the welfare of African Americans. Persistent American belief in self-determination gave American policy an anticolonial bias and led to diplomatic support for weak regimes against their more powerful oppressors.

President Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights during the second half of the 1970s was well received around the world and seemed to be an extension or reflection of earlier pronouncements of his predecessors. Early in the twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson had noted that it was "a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in terms of material interest"; as Wilson had led the American nation into World War I, he had defined American war aims as seeking "no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make." In later periods of crisis, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered the Four Freedoms to the world, and his successor, Harry S. Truman, noted that "it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation," while John F. Kennedy in the 1960s promised that America would "pay any price … to assure the survival and the success of liberty." At times, however, philanthropy has been ill advised; at times change has proved destabilizing, as expectations rose faster than performance. Often results did not materialize, as custom proved resistant and ruling groups were averse to the American plan. Some recipients were resentful of gifts and donations, feeling that being unable to reciprocate to a gift from the United States has brought dishonor upon them. Indeed, it would be possible to write about U.S. philanthropy from the perspective of recipients rather than donors and arrive at much different conclusions.

As critics have noted, a danger of both foreign aid and philanthropy has been entanglement in the local politics and power struggles occasioned by wars, famines, and natural disasters. In Africa, CARE unwittingly assisted a Somali dictator in building a political and economic power base; and the United Nations, Save the Children, and many other groups provided raw materials for ethnic rivalries. A case of frustrated ambitions has been that of India, where an assistance program measured in billions of dollars turned out to be a holding operation, ending in mutual disillusionment, even before population explosion, limited resources, and an energy crisis suggested a very different future.

Some critics have rejected American foreign aid and private philanthropy abroad, but they have failed to acknowledge the good that has been achieved, as in education and health care. Faced by such critics, some have suggested that, if America perfected its own ideals at home, perhaps America's greatest gift to the twenty-first century would be its example rather than its philanthropic aid packages and coercive powers. So, perhaps it is now possible, given current skepticism, to achieve a new balance, one that recognizes the virtue of limiting American political intervention abroad and yet acknowledges the genuine achievements of America's philanthropic tradition. And while seeking a new balance, it may be useful to keep in mind Bill Gates's insight that it is at least as difficult to give money away as it is to make money.

Bibliography

Anheier, Helmut K., and Stefan Toepler, eds. Private Funds, Public Purpose: Philanthropic Foundations in International Perspective. New York, 1999.

Arnove, Robert F., ed. Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad. Bloomington, Ind., 1980.

Chambers, Clarke A., and Beverly Stadum. An Exploration of New Themes in the Study of American Philanthropy Arising from Archival Research. Bloomington, Ind., 1998.

Curti, Merle Eugene. American Philanthropy Abroad: A History. New Brunswick, N.J., 1963. Though dated regarding its context and inclusiveness, still the best survey.

Curti, Merle Eugene, and Kendall Birr. Prelude to Point Four: American Technical Missions Overseas, 1838–1938. Madison, Wis., 1954.

Daniel, Robert L. American Philanthropy in the Near East, 1820–1960. Athens, Ohio, 1970.

Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. Ithaca, N.Y., 1966.

——. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York, 1999. This work and the preceding book discuss the antislavery movement as a form of philanthropy.

DeConde, Alexander. Ethnicity, Race and American Foreign Policy: A History. Boston, 1992. Provides fresh insight on politics of foreign policy.

Dennis, James S. Christian Missions and Social Progress: A Sociological Study of Foreign Missions. 3 vols. New York, 1898–1906. Discusses nineteenth-century philanthropy.

Field, James A., Jr. America and the Mediterranean World, 1776–1882. Princeton, N.J., 1969. Information on early American philanthropy.

Ilchman, Warren F., Stanley N. Katz, and Edward L. Queen II, eds. Philanthropy in the World's Traditions. Philanthropic Studies Series. Bloomington, Ind., 1998. Information on philanthropy in Western and non-Western societies.

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Lewis, Robert Ellsworth. The Educational Conquest of the Far East. New York, 1903.

Maren, Michael. The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. Glencoe, Ill., 1996. Twentieth-century philanthropy.

Miller, Christopher L. Prophetic Worlds: Indians and Whites on the Columbia Plateau. New Brunswick, N.J., 1985.

Morris, David. Gift from America: The First Fifty Years of CARE. Atlanta, 1996.

Nichols, Bruce, and Gil Loescher, eds. The Moral Nation: Humanitarianism and U.S. Foreign Policy Today. South Bend, Ind., 1989.

Osgood, Robert Endicott. Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century. Chicago, 1953.

Saillant, John. Black, White and "The Charitable Blessed": Race and Philanthropy in the American Early Republic. Bloomington, Ind., 1998.

Schneewind, Jerome B., ed. Giving: Western Ideas of Philanthropy. Bloomington, Ind., 1996.

Schrift, Alan D., ed. The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. New York, 1997. Provides anthropological perspectives on gift giving.

Schwantes, Robert S. Japanese and Americans: A Century of Cultural Relations. New York, 1955.

Wall, Joseph Frazier. Andrew Carnegie. 2d ed. Pittsburgh, 1989.

— James A. Field, Jr., and Tim Matthewson

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"Philanthropist" redirects here. For the TV series, see The Philanthropist (TV series). For the academic journal, see The Philanthropist.

Philanthropy is the effort or inclination to increase the well-being of humankind, as by charitable aid or donations.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Philanthropy in the USA 2.1 "Voluntary Associations" 2.2 Benjamin Franklin 2.3 The American Revolution 2.4 19th Century: Disintegration 2.5 Philanthropy's Contributions to American Life 3 Modern Philanthropists 4 Views 4.1 Philosophy 4.2 Politics 5 Uses of the word 5.1 Conventional usage 6 Largest individual bequests 7 See also 7.1 Lists 8 References 9 External links

Etymology

It is generally agreed that the word was coined 2500 years ago in ancient Greece, by the playwright Aeschylus, or whom ever else wrote Prometheus Bound (line 11). There the author told as a myth how the primitive creatures that were created to be human, at first had no knowledge, skills, or culture of any kind—so they lived in caves, in the dark, in constant fear for their lives. Zeus, the tyrannical king of the gods, decided to destroy them, but Prometheus, a Titan whose name meant “forethought,” out of his "philanthropos tropos" or “humanity-loving character” gave them two empowering, life-enhancing, gifts: fire, symbolizing all knowledge, skills, technology, arts, and science; and “blind hope” or optimism. The two went together—with fire, humans could be optimistic; with optimism, they could use fire constructively, to improve the human condition.

The new word, philanthropos, combined two words: philos, or “loving” in the sense of benefitting, caring for, nourishing; and anthropos— “humankind”, “humanity”, or “human-ness”. Prometheus did not “love” the proto-humans individually, because at that mythical point in time individuality did not yet exist—that requires culture. What he evidently “loved”, therefore, was their human potential—what they could accomplish and become with “fire” and “blind hope”. The two gifts in effect completed the creation of humankind as a distinctly civilized animal. 'Philanthropia'—loving what it is to be human—was thought to be the key to civilization.^[1]

The Greeks adopted the “love of humanity” as an educational ideal, whose goal was excellence (areté)—the fullest development of body, mind and spirit, which is the essence of liberal education. The Platonic Academy's philosophical dictionary defined Philanthropia as: “A state of well-educated habits stemming from love of humanity. A state of being productive of benefit to humans.” Philanthropia was later translated by the Romans into Latin as, simply, humanitas—humane-ness. And because Prometheus’ human-empowering gifts rebelled against Zeus’ tyranny, philanthropia was also associated with freedom and democracy. Both Socrates and the laws of Athens were described as “philanthropic and democratic”—a common expression, the idea being that philanthropic humans are reliably capable of self-government.

Putting all this together in modern terms, there are four relatively authoritative definitions of “philanthropy” that come close to the Classical concept: John W. Gardner’s “private initiatives for the public good”; Robert Payton’s “voluntary action for the public good”; Lester Salamon’s “the private giving of time or valuables…for public purposes” and Robert Bremner’s “the aim of philanthropy…is improvement in the quality of human life”. Combining these to connect modern philanthropy with its entire previous history, “philanthropy” may best be defined as, “private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life.”

This distinguishes it from government (public initiatives for public good) and business (private initiatives for private good). Omitting the definite article “the” with “public good” avoids the dubious assumption that there is ever a single, knowable public good, and in any case people rarely if ever agree on what that might be; rather, this definition merely says that the benefactor intends a “public” rather than an exclusively “private” good or benefit. The inclusion of “quality of life” ensures the strong humanistic emphasis of the Promethean archetype.

The Classical view of philanthropy disappeared in the Middle Ages, was rediscovered and revived with the Renaissance, and came into the English language in the early 17th century. Sir Francis Bacon in 1592 wrote in a letter that his “vast contemplative ends” expressed his “philanthropia”, and his 1608 essay On Goodness defined his subject as “the affecting of the weale of men... what the Grecians call philanthropia.” Henry Cockeram, in his English dictionary (1623), cited “philanthropie” as a synonym for “humanitie” (in Latin, humanitas) — thus reaffirming the Classical formulation.

Philanthropy in the USA

"Voluntary Associations"

At this same time English Colonists were coming to America, and here philanthropy flourished as a practical necessity. Land was plentiful and cheap, so labor was scarce and costly, and in any case the Colonists had no cash to pay for it. Entire communities had to be built from scratch, so with all the major projects that needed to be accomplished—barn-raising, road-building, schools, hospitals, orphanages, firefighting, public safety, whatever—they were either done by volunteers or they were not done. With not enough cash for charitable donations and a great deal of public good needing to be done, philanthropy in Colonial America was expressed mainly by volunteering.^{[citation needed]}

What emerged in this way was a culture of collaboration. Colonial society was built by volunteers, or as Alexis de Tocqueville later referred to them, “voluntary associations” — which is to say, "private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life". He observed that they permeated American life, were a distinguishing feature of the American character and culture, and a key to American democracy.^{[citation needed]} Americans, he said, did not rely on others — government, an aristocracy, or the church — to solve their public problems; rather, they did it themselves, through voluntary associations, which is to say, philanthropy, which was characteristically democratic.

One of the first, if not the first of these, was also one of the first American governments: the Mayflower Compact of 1620.^{[citation needed]} The Pilgrims, still offshore but in American waters as it were, declared that they “solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation.” The first corporation, Harvard College (1636), also in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was a philanthropic voluntary association created to train young men for the clergy.

As was typical in that period, American philanthropic associations had ideological dimensions. Three of the leading English colonies—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia—were styled “Commonwealths”, which meant a purportedly ideal society in which all members contributed to the “common weal”—the public good.

A leading promoter of this Classical and Christian ideal was the preacher Cotton Mather, who in 1710 published a widely read American classic, Bonifacius, or an Essay to Do Good. Mather seems to have been concerned that the original idealism had eroded, so he advocated philanthropic benefaction as a way of life. Though his context was Christian, his idea was also characteristically American and explicitly Classical, on the threshold of the Enlightenment.

"Let no man pretend to the Name of A Christian, who does not Approve the proposal of A Perpetual Endeavour to Do Good in the World.… The Christians who have no Ambition to be [useful], Shall be condemned by the Pagans; among whom it was a Term of the Highest Honour, to be termed, A Benefactor; to have Done Good, was accounted Honourable. The Philosopher [i.e., Aristotle ], being asked why Every one desired so much to look upon a Fair Object! He answered That it was a Question of a Blind man. If any man ask, as wanting the Sense of it, What is it worth the while to Do Good in the world! I must Say, It Sounds not like the Question of a Good man.” (p.21)

Mather’s many practical suggestions for doing good had strong civic emphases—founding schools, libraries, hospitals, useful publications, etc. They were not primarily about rich people helping poor people, but about private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life. Two young Americans whose prominent lives, they later said, were influenced by Mather’s book, were Benjamin Franklin and Paul Revere.

Benjamin Franklin

Regarded in his own time as “the first great American,” lionized in 18th-century Europe and America as a model of American values, and especially of the Enlightenment in America, the key to his life was his Classical, and classically American, philanthropy. He self-consciously and purposefully oriented his life around volunteer public service. Even his political rival in France, John Adams, avowed that “there was scarcely a peasant or citizen” who “did not consider him as a friend to humankind.” Immanuel Kant, the leading philosopher of the German Enlightenment, called Franklin the “new Prometheus” for stealing fire from the heavens in his scientific experiments with lightning as electricity, for the benefit of mankind. Franklin had direct connections with the Scottish Enlightenment; he was called “Dr. Franklin” because he had been awarded honorary degrees from the three Scottish Universities—St. Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh—and while travelling there he had personally befriended the leading Scottish Enlightenment thinkers.

In Philadelphia, Franklin created perhaps the first personal system of civic philanthropy in America. As a young tradesman in 1727, he formed the “Junto”: a 12-member club that met on Friday evenings to discuss current issues and events. One of the four qualifications for membership was the “love [of] mankind in general”. Two years later (1729) he founded the Philadelphia Gazette, and for the next thirty years he used the Junto as a sort of think-tank to generate and vet philanthropic ideas, and the Gazette to test and mobilize public support, recruit volunteers, and fund-raise. This system was heroically productive and beneficial, creating America’s first subscription library (1731), a volunteer fire association, a fire insurance association, the American Philosophical Society (1743-4), an “academy” (1750—which became the University of Pennsylvania), a hospital (1752—through fundraising with a challenge grant), the paving and patrolling of public streets, the finance and construction of a civic meeting house, and many others.

In 1747 the Pennsylvania Colony was disrupted by violent conflicts with Indians in the west, and with French-Canadian privateers in the lower Delaware River. The government in Philadelphia was Quaker, hence pacifist, and did nothing. Franklin, increasingly frustrated with this inaction, consulted his Junto, and published a pamphlet, Plain Truth, declaring that Pennsylvania was defenseless unless the people would take matters into their own hands. He proposed a “military association” to raise funds and a private militia, and within a few weeks it had recruited more than a hundred companies, with over 10,000 men-at-arms, and raised over £6,500 in a public lottery. This was a prototype of the American Revolution.

The American Revolution

The Classical view of philanthropy provided the conceptual model, and voluntary associations the procedural model, for the American Revolution. The Revolution began in Concord, Massachusetts—arguably one of the epicenters of American philanthropy. “Here once the embattled farmers stood,/ And fired the shot heard ‘round the world.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn"

The 'farmers' referred to in this line were the “Minutemen”, voluntary associations of farmers who would be ready to leave their farms and take up arms against the British. They were warned by observers and riders, most famously by Paul Revere, an avid and leading volunteer in many civic causes, who had organized a voluntary association of troop observers and riders like himself to rally the towns around Boston.

The Continental Army was manned by volunteers, and financed by private donations; its Commanding General, George Washington, served without pay as a volunteer, explicitly pro bono publico—for the public good. He often signed his letters, “Philanthropically yours”.^{[citation needed]}

Throughout the Colonies, the commitment to independence had been cultivated by innumerable voluntary political associations, such as the Sons of Liberty.

The Founders at Independence Hall in Philadelphia acted as a philanthropic voluntary association. The Declaration of Independence was the first instance in history in which the creation of a national government was formally preceded by an idealistic mission statement—routine in voluntary associations—addressed to, on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind. The Declaration concludes with a voluntary pledge by the Founders as individuals “to each other” of their personal lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

The first form of government proposed for the new nation was called an “Association”. The final form, the United States Constitution, proceeded as a voluntary association, also beginning with a mission statement and—another “first” in history—ratified by vote of its individual members, "The People". The Constitution’s “Preamble” featured private initiative, public good, and quality of life:

“WE THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Finally, in the very first Federalist Paper, page 1, paragraph 1, Alexander Hamilton launched the Founders’ argument for the Constitution’s ratification, by noting that “it is commonly remarked” that in creating this new nation, Americans were acting on behalf of, and for the benefit of, all mankind. “This” he wrote, “adds the inducements of philanthropy to those of patriotism.”

And “commonly remarked” it was—: In 1776, Thomas Paine had written in Common Sense, his very popular and influential tract for independence:

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind (emphasis here) are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested.”

As Ben Franklin had said to the French about the American Revolution: “We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature.”

The “philanthropy” Hamilton was talking about was not “rich helping poor”, but private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life. Classical philanthropy had become classically American. The United States was not only created by philanthropy, but also for philanthropy—to be a philanthropic nation, a gift to humanity, squarely in the Promethean tradition.

19th Century: Disintegration

The Founders’ synthesis, of the Classical view of philanthropy with American patriotic voluntary associations, did not sustain its cultural leadership. The Enlightenment, of which it was the quintessential American expression, was swept away in Europe by the French Revolution, Napoleon, and Romanticism. In America, the early history of the Republic saw rapid, tumultuous, growth and a sorting-out of what had been accomplished. The onset of the Industrial Revolution, waves of immigration, urban growth and westward expansion, together with shifting political practices and a new cast of characters in political leadership, combined to dissolve the philanthropic culture and spirit of its founding.

That disintegration was noticed and regretted. The blossoming of American literature in the 19th century, with Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and others, was essentially a protest against the disruptive forces of technology, urbanization, and industrialization, and in their wake the perceived loss of classical American values. On the other hand, this movement was evidence that the flame of philanthropic, practical, idealism had not died with the Founders.  In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the philanthropic spirit of the Revolution in his “Concord Hymn,” quoted above, and in his 1844 essay “The Young American,” he wrote,

“It seems so easy for America to inspire and express the most expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, healthful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, of the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, she should speak for the human race. It is the country of the future.”

The flame was still alive in 1863, whens, as Garry Wills has shown, President Abraham Lincoln codified and enshrined the classic conceptualization of our country's mission in his Gettysburg Address, speaking of “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”.

Philanthropy's Contributions to American Life

The philanthropic spirit and practical necessity of voluntary associations and their attendant collaborative culture moved west with the frontier throughout the 19th century, thus reinforcing the “philanthropic and democratic” development of the American character.  All of private education and of religion in America have been necessarily philanthropic, but beyond those every reform movement in our history — e.g., anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, environmental conservation, civil rights, feminism, and various peace movements—began as philanthropic voluntary associations. Many were, or were regarded as, counter-cultural and even outrageous when they first arose, but all were “private initiatives for public good, focusing on quality of life”.

American philanthropy has met challenges, and taken advantage of opportunities, that neither government nor business ordinarily address. The other sectors certainly affect American quality of life, but philanthropy focuses on it.

Philanthropy is a major source of income for fine arts and performing arts, religious, and humanitarian causes, as well as educational institutions (see patronage). 

Modern Philanthropists

In 1982, Paul Newman co-founded the Newman's Own food company and donated all after-tax profits to various charities. Upon his death in 2008, the company had donated over $250 million to thousands of charities.

During the past few years, some high profile examples of philanthropy include Irish rock singer Bono's campaign to cancel Third World debt to developed nations; the Gates Foundation's massive resources and ambitions, such as its campaigns to eradicate malaria and river blindness; and billionaire investor and Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett's donation in 2006 of $31 billion to the Gates Foundation.^[2]

Philanthropy is facilitated by development professionals and fundraisers. Donor relations and stewardship ^[3] professionals support the development profession by recognizing and thanking donors in a fashion that will cultivate future giving to nonprofit organizations. The Association of Donor Relations Professionals (ADRP) ^[4] is the first community of stewardship and donor relations professionals in the United States and Canada.

Views

Philosophy

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The purpose of philanthropy is also debated. Some equate philanthropy with benevolence and charity for the poor. Others hold that philanthropy can be any altruistic act that fulfills a social need that is not served, is under-served, or is perceived as unserved or underserved by the market.

Some believe that philanthropy can be a means to build community by growing community funds and giving vehicles. When communities see themselves as being resource rich instead of asset poor, the community is in a better position to solve community problems.

Philanthropy responds to either the present or the future needs.^[5] The charitable response to an impending disaster is an action of philanthropy.^[5] It offers immediate honor for the philanthropist, yet requires no foresight. Responding to future needs, however, draws on the donor's foresight and wisdom, but seldom recognizes the donor.^[5] Prevention of future needs will often avert far more hardship than a response after the fact.^[5] For example, the charities responding to starvation from overpopulation^{[neutrality disputed]} in Africa are afforded swift recognition.^[6] Meanwhile, philanthropists behind the U.S. population control movement of the 1960s and 1970s were never recognized, and are lost to history.^{[neutrality disputed][5]}

Politics

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Philanthropists are often popular and become known to the public as "good" or even "great." Some governments are suspicious of philanthropic activities as possible grabs for favor, but still allow special interest groups to form non-governmental organizations.

Uses of the word

Conventional usage

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By the conventional definition of philanthropy, donations are dedicated to a narrowly defined cause and the donation is targeted to effect a recognizable change in social conditions. This often necessitates large donations and financial support sustained over time.

The need for a large financial commitment creates a distinction between philanthropy and charitable giving, which typically plays a supporting role in a charitable organization initiated by someone else. Thus, the conventional usage of philanthropy applies mainly to wealthy persons, and sometimes to a trust created by a wealthy person with a particular cause or objective targeted.

Many non-wealthy persons have dedicated – thus, donated – substantial portions of their time, effort and wealth to charitable causes. These people are not typically described as philanthropists because individual effort alone is seldom recognized as instigating significant change. These people are thought of as charitable workers but some people wish to recognize these people as philanthropists in honor of their efforts.

A growing trend in philanthropy is the development of giving circles, whereby individual donors—often a group of friends—pool their charitable donations and decide together how to use the money to benefit the causes they care about most. The re-emergence of philanthropy in recent years, led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, which involves applying the techniques of business to philanthropy has been termed philanthrocapitalism.'^[7]

Largest individual bequests

• $31 billion from Warren Buffett to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (initial value of the gift)^[8]
• $424 million from managers of the Readers Digest fortune to the Metropolitan Museum of Art^[9]
• $200 million from Joan B. Kroc to National Public Radio in 2003^[9]
• $100 million from John D. Rockefeller to the Rockefeller Foundation, 1913-1914^[10]
• $100 million from Henry and Betty Rowan to Glassboro State College^[11]

See also

• Altruism
• Association of Donor Relations Professionals
• Charitable organization
• Charitable contributions (tax aspects)
• Charity (practice)
• Foundation (nonprofit organization)
• Giving Circles
• High impact philanthropy
• Microgiving
• Misanthropy
• Non-profit organization
• Venture philanthropy
• Volunteer* Volunteerism
• Youth philanthropy
• GivingPoint

Lists

• List of philanthropists
• List of wealthiest foundations

References

1. ^ The Classical etymology and history of philanthropia has received increasing attention among scholars. See McCully, George: Philanthropy Reconsidered, A Catalogue for Philanthropy Publication, Boston, 2008; and Sulek, Marty: On the Classical Meaning of Philanthropia, in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly OnlineFirst, March 13, 2009 as doi:10.1177/0899764009333050.
2. ^ "Gates: Buffett gift may help cure worst diseases". MSNBC. 2006-06-26. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13541144/. Retrieved 2008-05-20. 
3. ^ "Stewardship & Donor Relations," Entrepreneur.com
4. ^ Association of Donor Relations Professionals
5. ^ ^{a b c d e} Rohe, John F. (2002-01-01). "Chapter 6: Prophesy and Charity". Mary Lou and John Tanton: A Journey into American Conservation. FAIR Horizon Press. ISBN 978-0971007901. 
6. ^ "Buzz (news and commentary blog)". onPhilanthrophy. http://flip.onphilanthropy.com/news_onphilanthropy/africa/. 
7. ^ The Economist
8. ^ "Implementing Warren Buffett's Gift". Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Pages/implementing-warren-buffetts-gift.aspx. 
9. ^ ^{a b} "Billions and Billions Served, Hundreds of Millions Donated". New York Times. November 7, 2003. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04EFD81439F934A35752C1A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all. Retrieved 2008-07-28. "National Public Radio announced yesterday that it had received a bequest worth at least $200 million from the widow of the longtime chairman of the McDonald's restaurant chain. ... Few cultural institutions have been the beneficiaries of gifts as large as that received by NPR, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy. One of the largest, worth $424 million, was given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by foundations built on the Reader's Digest fortune." 
10. ^ Rockefeller Foundation
11. ^ Gurney, Kaitlin. "10 years later, Rowan still reaps gift's rewards - Rowan Milestones", The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 9, 2002. Accessed August 1, 2007. "Rowan University catapulted onto the national stage a decade ago when industrialist Henry Rowan gave sleepy Glassboro State College $100 million, the largest single sum ever donated to a public institution.... Rowan and his late wife, Betty, gave the money on July 6, 1992, with just one requirement: that a first-rate engineering school be built. In gratitude, Glassboro State changed its name to Rowan College."

External links

Look up philanthropy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Joseph and Matthew Payton Philanthropic Studies Library
• Philanthropic Studies Index
• History of Philanthropy, 1601-present compiled and edited by National Philanthropic Trust
• A Bourgeois Duty: Philanthropy, 1896-1919 — Illustrated historical essay
• PDF file from the Hudson Institute at The Index of Global Philanthropy 2006 83 page.
• Association of Donor Relations Professionals
• PRO: Philanthropy Resources Online

v • d • e Topics related to charity Main topics Philanthropy · Alms · Tzedakah · Zakat · Tithe · Altruism · Gift · Donation · Alternative giving · Youth philanthropy · Volunteering · Noblesse oblige Organization types Voluntary association · Non-profit organization · Non-governmental organization · Registered charity, Charitable trust · Foundation · Private foundation · Charitable organization  · Public-benefit nonprofit corporation · Mutual-benefit nonprofit corporation · Religious corporation Additional topics Charity Navigator · Charity badge · List of charitable foundations · List of wealthiest charitable foundations · Click-to-donate site · Halukka · Meshulach · Master of Nonprofit Organizations · Charity/thrift/op shop

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - filantropi, menneskekærlighed

Nederlands (Dutch)
filantropie, mensenliefde

Français (French)
n. - philanthropie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Philanthropie, Menschenliebe

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - φιλανθρωπία

Italiano (Italian)
filantropia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - filantropia (f)

Русский (Russian)
филантропия

Español (Spanish)
n. - filantropía

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - filantropisk verksamhet

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
博爱, 慈善, 仁慈

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 博愛, 慈善, 仁慈

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 박애(주의), 자선 , 자선행위

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 博愛, 慈善, 慈善活動

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) حب البشر, البذل في سبيل الإنسانيه‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮צדקה, נדבנות, אהבת הבריות‬

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