One of my goals is to explore what happened to change our ruling wealthy elite donor class as Justice Antonin Scalia called them whom he told lack the Christian value of love adequate to sustain the success of capitalism but admitted to no solution on what to do to change them. He also blamed lack of gratitude by those in the entitlement class (my paraphrase) to whom expectation of government handouts basically, also an absent Christian virtue he didnt know what to do to change. The latter I will leave to others to the extent that the reality exists. I know my own experience now suggests otherwise, as my gratitude runs deep as does my sense of responsibility to give back, albeit, now not as a tax paying member but you know if youve known me for awhile, I work for free now on behalf of our national interests & mental health activism with social reforming plans outlined for future creative entertainment/workshop vehicles (newbies see links on profile page) for educating mass audiences & elevating/enhancing lives of those with mental health disorders. But, I bow to Bill Clinton in humble thankfulness for the easily accessible student loans and readily well funded Pell grant program, as a recipient of two degrees thanks. I am eternally grateful for the ability to fight hunger I would have faced at a few different points during my life if not for SNAP and SSDI now since losing my job those 7 years of degree seeking education had prepared me. Hence, my career choice lost too (the most debilitating loss ever and destablizing, depression inducing hard to recover from loss as severe as I have ever known) after admission of my bipolar illness in the field where I was supposed to be and still am on the other side of the proverbial couch (in Freud or perhaps Woody Allens psychoanalysts office terms, at least). It was immediately following my self-exposure of diagnosis (not other identified by behavior anomalies) despite much evidence to the contrary- summa cum laude>ungrad cum laude>grad school, excellent professional performance reviews over multiple consecutive years for two different social services agencies, one the largest in Hawaii that hired me away from the first with a $10K/per annum salary increase and far superior benefits). I became an immediate POTENTIAL liability following their discovery of my diagnosis. But, I digress. I am interested in how and what changed and can we return todays far different comparable class of ruling wealthy elite, Romney/Koch types, back to their Gilded Age counterparts consciousness of personal/professional responsibility for use of their great wealth for building our nation and the workers to whom they are beholden for such immense good fortune. Hence, gratitude. Unlike Scalia, Id say its not just missing Christian value of love but the lack of thankfulness to a nation/workers from the donor class too. Remember when Obama tried to tell them,you didnt do it alone and Koch et al ads turned it around to make him a socialist or something vs. the Ayn Randian, self-deluded superior, job creator rugged individualistic, bootstrap pulling, ubermensch, elevated over and above all as business moguls and of course job creators. All former inclusion of collectivist ideals tossed aside that earlier donor class held seemingly innately and understood. Is it the fact the earlier cohorts were actually the poor bootstrap pullers, self-generating, innovators not heirs to established fortunes (a real entitled class, privileged from birth through best educations, to inherited businesses and/or Skull & Bones type connections, etc). Therefore, they believe themselves entitled to whatever they eye NEXT (US government functions dismantled, tax dollars saved, lowest wages/fewest benefits OMG mandated Obamacare) like spoiled kids because thats how its always been as a result of never having to work too hard or know what is was to be a low income, struggling, have not EVER, like their early counterparts. Instead of collective ideals carried on to build our nation, todays comparable group are proactively dismantling our national interests, guilty of perhaps, the greatest level ever of Federal income tax evasion in offshore havens, $32 trillion known). The snakeoil sales con job of Reagans trickle down (with 18 tax increases was it) or Bush IIs actual HUGE cuts for corporations and con job on us all that the job creators would invest in national best interests with expansion to address massive unemployment during his administration (when it first began). 2.5 million jobs lost to cheapest labor nations just last year (Obama has tried to get congress to provide incentives to come back bills versus the Bush incentives for outsourcing jobs to cheapest labor nations, but...) destroying our middle class with profit only motivation, devoid of whats in the national best interest or workers helping to build great multi-nationals-okay Clinton & NAFTA have to get some blame here and God only knows the further damage TPP deal conceivably will contribute to our middle class demise. to a collectivist consciousness, gratitude for national contribution to amassing wealth and sharing of prosperity with heart for people less fortunate and a desire to offer hands out and up to help them. The great philanthropists (Gilded Age) hoped to use their resources to turn the working class into the middle class. Nor is it particularly surprising that they would do so. After all, a good many of the great industrialists had started life in the working class. Carnegie himself was born to a painfully poor Scottish weaver, and took his first job at age 13, working in a cotton mill, putting in 12-hour days, 6 days per week. John D. Rockefeller and Jim Fisk had been born to peddlers, while financiers Daniel Drew and Jay Gould were raised on hardscrabble farms. One study has found that the generation with the largest percentage of its “business elite” to have emerged from the ranks of the “lower” or “lower middle” classes was the generation born between 1820 and 1849. The Benevolent Trusts, when they come,” wrote Rockefeller in his 1908 memoirs, “will look the facts in the face; they will applaud and sustain the effective workers and institutions; and they will uplift the intelligent standard of good work in helping all the people chiefly to help themselves.” Rockefeller was clearly thrilled by the prospect. “When it is eventually worked out, as it will be in some form, and probably in a better one than we can now forecast, how worthy it will be of the efforts of our ablest men!”By the turn of the 20th century, Carnegie had achieved wealth on a scale almost unimaginable in Tocqueville’s America. He then dedicated his life to giving away as much of his fortune as he could. Carnegie and the other great business leaders of his generation inaugurated a golden age of American philanthropy. Their achievements, unfortunately, are often misunderstood, and their motivations are unfairly maligned. It is time to set the record straight. As the Carnegie Corporation of New York celebrates its 100th anniversary, it is well worth our while to step back and reconsider the man, his peers, and their philanthropic legacy. >>>Whatever else may be said of them—and there is much to be said—they created real and enduring wealth. Moreover, the wealth they created benefited all Americans. They introduced new products. They discovered startling efficiencies. And they launched businesses that created millions of new jobs. Americas great business leaders created real and enduring wealth that benefited all Americans. To this day, the sheer creativity of the late 19th century is striking. A quick trip to the grocery store testifies to the era’s ingenuity. Pillsbury flour products owe their existence to Charles Pillsbury, who revolutionized the milling process and opened vast new markets for the hard winter wheat of the Dakotas. Hershey chocolates came into existence because Milton Hershey discovered a way to mass-produce milk chocolate. Campbell’s soups are the result of the partnership between Joseph Campbell and John Dorrance, who slashed transportation costs by discovering a way to halve the amount of water in canned goods. Equally inventive were Gustavus Swift and the Armour brothers with meatpacking, Henry Heinz with pickling, and Adolphus Busch with brewing. The list goes on. Less visible than the flood of new products were the efficiencies the era introduced. As American industry expanded and became more efficient, it provided a rapidly growing population with a steady stream of jobs. One study finds that real non-farm earnings rose more than 60 percent between 1870 and 1900. Another shows that wages grew, in real terms, from $1.00 daily in 1867 to $1.90 daily in 1893. But perhaps more striking evidence is found in the tens of millions of immigrants who ...swarmed to the United States in this period—sensing, as they did, that in America they could make more, live better, and rise faster than anywhere else on earth. ...It was an invitation to opportunity—placing, as Carnegie famously put it, within its reach the ladders upon which the aspiring could rise. None of this is to say that businessmen in the Gilded Age were angels. They could be ruthless. They could be greedy. But they channeled their very real flaws into very productive channels, opening opportunity and creating real and lasting wealth. They did not simply inflict transaction costs. They were not robber barons. Mark Twain in his final years; without Rogers, Twain acknowledged, he would likely have gone bankrupt. Henry Clay Frick built up a world-class collection of Old Masters paintings, which he donated, with a $15 million endowment, upon his death to the city of New York. J. P. Morgan He was a genuine polymath, fluent in French and German, steeped in literature and the arts, whose aptitude for mathematics prompted one of his professors at the University of Göttingen to encourage him to consider an academic appointment. Morgan began collecting art while touring Rome, not long after finishing at Göttingen at the age of 19. It was the start of a lifelong love affair with the fine arts. He was the driving force behind the rise of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, serving as president and donating extensively from his personal acquisitions. “Almost single-handed, Morgan turned the Metropolitan from a merely notable collection into one of the three or four finest anywhere,” writes historian and art critic Paul Johnson. “Morgan obviously employed experts . . . but it is astonishing how few mistakes he allowed them to make on his behalf.” The Morgan Library Morgan was a man of truly catholic interests. In addition to his lifelong engagement with the arts, he was deeply interested in the natural sciences. A trustee of the American Museum of Natural History for 44 years, Morgan served on the board from the museum’s opening in 1869 until his death in 1913. He was often the museum’s lead donor—frequently giving under condition of anonymity—and he served as vice president, treasurer, and finance committee chairman. Among his many contributions to the museum, notes Strouse, were “collections of minerals, gems, meteorites, amber, books, prehistoric South American relics, American Indian costumes, fossil vertebrates, skeletons, and the mummy of a pre-Columbian miner preserved in copper salts.” He quietly underwrote the salaries of scores of Manhattan clergymen and contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars—$500,000 in 1892 alone—to the construction of Manhattan’s (as-yet unfinished) Cathedral of St. John the Divine. This hardly exhausts Morgan’s intellectual interests or his philanthropy. Some of them were quite explicit about their desire to use philanthropy to undercut communist influences in the labor movement. Nevertheless, some of the most impressive philanthropy of the Gilded Age was done quietly. During his lifetime, Rockefeller provided some $70 million to the University of Chicago, all the while insisting that not a single building bear his name—even rejecting an image of a lamp on the university seal, worried that it would be seen as a nod to Standard Oil. Perhaps the greatest anonymous donor of the era was George Eastman. Eastman was the founder of Eastman Kodak, the entrepreneur who turned photography from a profession with prohibitively high startup costs into an affordable hobby for the middle class. He was also one of the most accomplished philanthropists of early–20th century America. Biographer Elizabeth Brayer estimates that Eastman gave away about $125 million, almost all within his lifetime. “Men who leave their money to be distributed by others are pie-faced mutts,” he said in 1924. “I want to see the action during my lifetime.” He ranks as the third-most-generous philanthropist of the era, behind only Rockefeller and Carnegie. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman gave nearly $20 million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—all of it pseudonymously, under the name “Mr. Smith.” Without his crucial intervention, Boston Tech (as the school was commonly known) would likely have remained a small land-grant school serving commuter students. George Eastman Eastman dedicated himself to quiet (but not anonymous or pseudonymous) philanthropy, supporting dental clinics, musical conservatories, and, especially, MIT, the University of Rochester, the Hampton Institute, and the Tuskegee Institute. >>>>>Rosenwald gave nearly $70 million over the course of his lifetime for the education and advancement of African Americans throughout the rural South. He led the construction of 5,357 primary schools, shops, and teachers’ homes throughout 15 states. Through it all, he declined to give anonymously, for reasons he outlined in November 1912, in a speech he gave in Philadelphia to the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences. In his lecture, Rosenwald urged his fellow donors to avoid anonymous gifts, arguing, as biographer Peter Ascoli put it, that “the name of the donor often carried as much weight as the gift itself and might encourage others to give.” Myth 6: The great philanthropists turned to charity out of guilt. Andrew Carnegie “never quite washed away the bloodstains from the Homestead debacle, although the >>>>$350 million he gave to literacy, world peace, and numerous other worthy causes bought him as much earthly forgiveness as a man could ask,” writes historian H. W. Brands in his 2010 book American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism. “Like Carnegie, Rockefeller sought absolution by lavish philanthropy.” The imputation would likely have confounded either man. For one thing, it was not an era when businessmen either felt or were expected to feel remorse for their success. They saw themselves as self-made men, conquering a continent and propelling the United States into the forefront of nations. “To imagine that such men did not sleep the sleep of the just would be romantic sentimentalism,” wrote Richard Hofstadter. “In the Gilded Age, even the angels sang for them.” But even leaving aside the spirit of the age, the idea that the great philanthropists were motivated by guilt ignores an important piece of historical evidence. Neither Carnegie nor Rockefeller—nor, for that matter, a number of others—turned to philanthropy after making their fortunes. Some did, of course, although that need not mean they did so out of guilt. Many others, however, including both Carnegie and Rockefeller, took up charity early in their lives, increasing their giving as their fortunes grew. In December 1868, a 33-year-old Carnegie sat down with a stub-nosed pencil and a scrap of paper. He and his mother had just moved into the posh St. Nicholas Hotel on lower Broadway, but a certain melancholy seemed to have settled over him. He itemized all of his investments and calculated his net worth and annual income. With assets of roughly $400,000—about $75 million today, estimates biographer David Nasaw—and an income over $56,000, he seemed to have become dissatisfied with his life. Carnegie proceeded to write a letter to himself. In two years, he decided, >>>>>“I can so arrange my business as to secure at least 50,000$ per annum. Beyond this never earn—make no effort to increase fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes. Cast aside business forever except for others.” He intended to “settle in London” and take >>>>>“part in public matters especially those connected with education & improvement of the poorer classes.” After all, he concluded, “Man must have an idol—The amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry.” Rockefeller was committed to philanthropy from an even younger age. His pious and frugal mother had encouraged her children to drop pennies in the Sunday collection plate. Her lessons obviously stuck; years later, Rockefeller would credit her as the inspiration for his philanthropy. From the time he started working, he kept a small, red account book—Ledger A—in which he detailed his every expense. Even as a teenager, he was remarkably generous. As a first-year clerk, he regularly donated 6 percent of his wages to charity, and some weeks he gave considerably more. m an early age. In his early teens, he began making regular contributions to St. Luke’s (and, later, Trinity) Episcopal Church; before his 18th birthday, >>>>he recorded a donation of $1 to a crippled boy. In his late 20s, while struggling to keep up a growing family, >>>>Julius Rosenwald made small but regular contributions to the Hyde Park Protective Association and the Associated Jewish Charities. By the age of 32, J. Pierpont Morgan was already an established presence within New York City. He helped launch the American Museum of Natural History in 1869, and was a founding patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a $1,000 donation in 1871. Attention span going on this for now so...heres full piece. Any thoughts? philanthropyroundtable.org/topic/excellence_in_philanthropy/seven_myths_about_the_great_philanthropists
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 20:58:23 +0000