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Philanthropy as Investment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Peter Dobkin Hall
Peter Dobkin Hall*
Affiliation:
Program on Non-Profit Organizations, Institution for Social and Policy Studies Yale University
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Type
Essay Reviews
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1982 , pp. 185 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

1. See Bender, Thomas, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, 1978).Google Scholar

2. One of the better summaries of the debate over the causes of economic growth is contained in McClelland, David, The Achieving Society (Glencoe and New York, 1969).Google Scholar

3. Cochran, Thomas, “The Role of the Entrepreneur in Capital Formation,” in National Bureau of Economic Research, Capital Formation and Economic Growth (Princeton, 1955).Google Scholar

4. For an interesting discussion of the use of social theory by historians and others in the 50s, see Rogin, M.P., The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, 1969). Also useful are William Domhoff, G., C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Boston, 1968) and Connolly, W.E., ed., The Bias of Pluralism (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

5. Hofstadter first used social theory in Age of Reform (New York, 1955), a book in which he made much of the educational backgrounds and institutional affiliations of the Progressive reformers. His later work on education included, The Development of Academic Freedom (with Walter P. Metzger—New York, 1955), Higher Education, A Documentary History (with Wilson Smith—New York, 1961), and The Progressive Historians (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

6. Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York, 1960).Google Scholar

7. Among Conant's many works on the central importance of education are The Harvarad Report on General Education (Cambridge, 1945), Education in a Divided World (Cambridge, 1948), Education and Liberty (Cambridge, 1953), The Citadel of Learning (New Haven, 1956), and The Revolutionary Transformation of the American High School (Cambridge, 1959). A long time supporter of federal aid to education, he was instrumental in the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950.Google Scholar

8. Educational scholarship bearing on this viewpoint includes the work of Mattingly, Paul, McLachlan, James, Katz, Michael, and Veysey, Laurence. Institutional history includes the work of Rothman, David, Weibe, Robert, Bledstein, Burton, and Noble, David S. In some cases, as with Weibe, Bledstein, and Katz in his more recent work, the scholarship presents itself simply as social history, without any particular attachment to the body of educational research from which it originated.Google Scholar

9. For an interesting if controversial effort to deal with the altered relation between history and social theory, see Stinchcombe, Arthur, Theoretical Methods in Social History (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

10. Cochran, Thomas and Miller, William, Men in Business (New York, 1952).Google Scholar

11. Chandler's, early work, especially Strategy and Structure (Cambridge, 1962), was far more broadly based than his acclaimed but distressingly technologically deterministic, The Visible Hand (Cambridge, 1977). Other interesting work in this genre includes Cochran, Thomas, Railroad Leaders (Cambridge, 1953) and Perkins, Edwin, ed., Men and Organizations (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

12. Veysey, Laurence, “Rereview of The Emergence of the American University,” in American Journal of Education (November 1981).Google Scholar

13. One reason why Veysey's assertions must be carefully examined is because of the policy implications that flow from them. A good example can be seen in Veysey's own recent writings, including his recent reply to Jacques Barzun's critique of American universities in the New York Review of Books (4 March 1981). Fearing that the New Right might use the work of the social historians of education as a basis for attacks on the university, Veysey assures his readers: 1) that universities are peripheral and 2) that universities have been doing a perfectly wonderful job of conducting its tasks of teaching and research.Google Scholar

14. Digby Baltzell, E., Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia: Two Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership (New York, 1980).Google Scholar

15. Folsom, , Urban Capitalists, 146–47.Google Scholar

16. Ibid., 149.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., 123–25, 151.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., 115–116.Google Scholar

19. Ibid., 130.Google Scholar

20. Ibid., 131.Google Scholar

21. Ibid., xi–xiv.Google Scholar

22. See Veysey, in New York Review of Books (4 March 1980).Google Scholar

23. See Kolko, Gabrial, “Brahmins and Businessmen,” in Wolfe, Kurt and Moore, Barrington, ed., The Critical Spirit (Boston, 1969). See also Carosso, V.Y., Investment Banking in America (Cambridge, 1970).Google Scholar

24. The relation between sectors has been extensively documented in Story, Ronald, The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, 1979) and Hall, Peter D., “Family Structure and Class Consolidation among the Boston Brahmins” (unpublished dissertation, SUNY at Stony Brook, 1973). See also my article, “The Model of Boston Charity” in Science and Society (Winter 1974).Google Scholar

25. White, Gerald T., The Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company (Cambridge, 1957).Google Scholar

26. This channeling of endowments into the for-profit sector was not unique to Boston, though Boston was conspicuously more successful in doing so than other places. The treasurers' records at both Harvard and Yale show that endowments were a major source (indeed, the only source, of institutional capital in the colonial period. Yale's endowment was used in the 1820s to subscribe extensively to the stock of the Eagle Bank of New Haven. When the bank failed in 1828, the college's losses were so severe that it was forced to mount its first capital fund drive. [see Hall, P.D., The Organization of American Culture (New York, 1982), 163–172]. Nor were the entrepreneurs of the Lehigh Valley ignorant of the method. Lehigh University's financial troubles in the 1890s stemmed from its heavy investments in enterprises operated by Asa Packer and his relatives.Google Scholar

27. “Harvard College and Massachusetts General Hospital v. Francis Amory,” 9 Pickerings Reports 446 (1830).Google Scholar

28. Noble, David S., America by Design (New York, 1979).Google Scholar

29. See Hall, P.D., Review of Ronald Story, The Forging of an Aristocracy in American Journal of Education (May 1981).Google Scholar

30. On New York institutions, see Smith, J.G., Memorial History of New York and the Hudson River Valley, vol. IV (New York, 1892). Smith's account of New York City's private cultural institutions includes 19 privately funded libraries open to the public (not counting the libraries of educational institutions), 3 art museums, 4 hospitals, 4 medical schools, and 5 colleges. It is important to note, however, that the multiplicity of New York institutions weakened the overall impact of philanthropy by dividing it among too great a number of competing institutions. This tendency towards fragmentation began to be overcome after 1893, in the wake of the debate over the failure of the Tilden Trust. Thus, in the library field for example, the separate institutions began to merge under the auspices of the privately-funded New York Public Library, which brought together the Astor and Lenox libraries.Google Scholar

31. On the failure of the Tilden Trust and the transformation of the legal context of New York philanthropy, see Ames, J.B., “The Failure of the Tilden Trust” in Ames, , Lectures in Legal History (Cambridge, 1913), 226ff, and Scott, A. W., “Charitable Trusts in New York” in New York University Law Review 26 (April 1951) 251ff.Google Scholar

32. On this see Noble, , America by Design and Ewen, Stewart, Captains of Consciousness (New York, 1978).Google Scholar

33. On the Scots-Irish in Easton, see Heller, R.J., History of Northampton County, Pennsylvania (Easton, 1924).Google Scholar

34. On LaFayette College, see Heller, , Northampton County, Skillman, D.B., The Biography of a College, Being a History of the First Century of the Life of LaFayette College (Easton, 1932), and Coffin, S.J., The Men of LaFayette (Easton, 1891).Google Scholar

35. Heller, , p 337 ff.Google Scholar

36. Allentonians were, in the years before the Civil War, victimized by several dubious banking schemes. The first involved the failure of the Northampton Bank in 1843. This institution had been founded in 1811. After the dismantling of the Bank of the United States and the suspension of specie payments, the bank's officers, their notes no longer tied to their currency reserves, began speculating recklessly and lending money on questionable collateral. They used trusts and endowments as major sources of capital, most notably the resources of Allentown's Homeopathic Medical School, the Presbyterian Church, and the Allentown Academy. When the bank failed in 1843, it brought about the collapse not only of these institutions, but many private fortunes as well. Feelings against the officers were so intense, that their attorneys successfully petitioned the state legislature for a change of venue for the civil and criminal proceedings launched against them. Those who had not learned their lesson in '43 had an opportunity to be fleeced in the early 1850s, when Moses Yale Beach, a clever Yankee speculator organized the short-lived Lehigh County Bank, which was ultimately closed by the courts. Not until the 1880s did the city's mercantile community overcome its distrust of corporate banking. Roberts, Although C.R., et al., History of Lehigh County (Allentown, 1914) gives some attention to these matters, the dockets of the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas still contain the most complete account of these disasters. See also Hall, Karyl Lee Kibler and Hall, Peter Dobkin, The Lehigh Valley—A History (Woodland Hills, California, forthcoming).Google Scholar

37. On this, see Hall, P.D., The H.C. Trexler Estate of Allentown, Pennsylvania (New Haven, 1981).Google Scholar

38. On Muhlenberg's importance to the city's commercial and professional communities, see Roberts, , Lehigh County and Ochsenford, S.E., Muhlenberg College (Allentown, 1892).Google Scholar

39. Friede, E.B., “Cooperation Conquers: The Response of Allentown's Entrepreneurial Community to the Great Depression of the 1930s,” Lehigh County Historical Society Proceedings 32 (1978), 114ff.Google Scholar

40. On the denominational issues in the founding of Muhlenberg College, see Richards, H.M.M., A History of Muhlenberg College, 1916–1962 (unpublished mss., Muhlenberg College Library, Allentown, Pa., 1965).Google Scholar

41. The organized effort to preserve Pennsylvania-German begins in the 1870s, with the publication of Horne's, A.R. Pennsylvania-German Manuals. These volumes, while extravagantly praising the contributions of Pennsylvania-Germans to American life and anthologizing in written form substantial amounts of Pennsylvania-German dialect literature, also are concerned with integrating the Germans into the cultural and economic mainstream. Thus the manuals contain not only German-English dictionaries and bilingual texts for the dialect literature, out also contain commercial guides to Allentown's stores and shops. Horne, A.R. was a leading educator and educational journalist. By the 1890s, leading Pennsylvania-German businessmen and professionals had formed the Pennsylvania-German Society (1891) and, in 1935, the Pennsylvania-German Folklore Society. In all of these efforts, preservation goals were subsidiary to the desire to mainstream the German population. See, in this regard, Rosenberger, H.T., The Pennsylvania-Germans, 1891, 1965 (Lancaster, PA,) 1966.Google Scholar

42. The Allentown connection to Lehigh is detailed in the biographical section of Roberts, , Lehigh County.Google Scholar

43. The directors of these corporations are listed in the various editions of Moody's Manuals.Google Scholar

44. The Report on the Status of the Endowment Fund as of February 10, 1928 (New Haven, 1928), shows that 82 Yale alumni were living in Scranton. Of them, 58 (71%) subscribed a total of $62,555—an average donation of $1079 per alumnus. Of the alumni in the 55 cities reported on in this document, Scranton alumni rated eleventh in the size of average donation.Google Scholar

45. On the Belins, see Yale, Class Books for 1863, 1895S, 1899, 1901S, 1908S, 1924S, and 1939.Google Scholar

46. Skinner, B.F., Particulars of My Life (New York, 1979).Google Scholar