Abstract
The voluntary association was the central instrument of America’s bourgeois revolution. In the decades following the Civil War, associations in a variety of forms—ranging from government-chartered joint stock and nonstock corporations to informal entities—became the dominant mode of collective action throughout the country in every significant domain of activity. Arts and culture, commerce, education, finance, health care, manufacturing, politics, recreation, and social welfare were overwhelmingly organized as voluntary associations.
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Notes
Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1835) I: 63, declares that New England town meetings “are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within people’s reach, they teach men how to use and enjoy it.” It is no less accurate to say that New Englanders’ voluntary associations served a similar function.
Joseph S. Davis, Essays in the Earlier History of American Corporations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917) 1:349.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies (Cambridge: Sever and Francis, 1866) I: iv–v.
Charles W. Eliot, “The New Education,” Atlantic Monthly 23 (1869) 203.
Hamilton Andrews Hill, Memoir of Abbott Lawrence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1884) 13. State Street was Boston’s financial center—its equivalent of New York’s Wall Street.
The authoritative compendium on Yale alumni’s Civil War service, Ellsworth Eliot Jr.’s Yale in the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press and London, Oxford University Press, 1932) did not appear until nearly 80 years after the end of the war.
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909) 439.
Charles W. Eliot, “Inaugural Address as President of Harvard College, October 19, 1869
Eliot, Educational Reform: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1898) 12–13.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1636–1936 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936) 420.
On this, see Leonard Bacon, The Christian Doctrine of Stewardship in Respect of Property (New Haven: Nathan Whiting, Printer, 1832). Bacon, a member of Yale’s faculty and pastor of New Haven’s venerable Center Church, was a pioneer theorist of voluntary associations. In this influential sermon, he called on Christians to regard their occupations as ministries and associations as vehicles for the “the business of doing good.”.
Leonard Bacon, “Responsibility in the Management of Societies,” The New Englander 5, 1 (1847) 28–41. This was the first serious study of board governance ever written.
For an account of the laicization of governance at Harvard and Yale, see Peter Dobkin Hall, “‘Noah Porter writ large’: Reflections on the Modernization of American Education and Its Critics, 1866–1916,” in The American College in the Nineteenth Century ed. Roger L. Geiger (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000) 196–220.
William Walter Phelps, “Speech of W.W. Phelps,” The College Courant (July23, 1870) 71–72.
Noah Porter, American Colleges and the American Public (New Haven: Charles C. Chatfield, 1870) 289.
Lyman Hotchkiss Bagg, Four Years at Yale (New Haven: Charles C. Chatfield, 1871) 702.
Loomis Havemeyer, “Go to your room”: A Story of Undergraduate Societies and Fraternities at Yale (New Haven: privately published, 1960).
H. S. Durand and Carl Wilhelm. “Bright College Years” (1881). http://www.yale.edu/yaleband/ypmb/music/yale.html.
On the geography of American philanthropy, see William G. Bowen et al., The Charitable Nonprofits: An Analysis of Institutional Dynamics and Characteristics (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994).
Peter Dobkin Hall, “A Historical Overview of Philanthropy, Voluntary Associations, and Nonprofit Organizations in the United States, 1600–2000,” in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook 2nd edition, ed. Richard Steinberg and Walter W. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
Rikki Abzug and Jeffrey S. Simonoff, Nonprofit Trusteeship in Different Contexts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) 92.
According to George W. Pierson, in 1940 Yale and Harvard alumni comprised 1.62 percent of the college educated population over 25. By 1975, they comprised only 0.92 percent. See Pierson, A Yale Book of Numbers: Historical Statistics of the College and University, 1701–1976 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 54.
Theda Skocpol, “How Americans Became Civic,” in Civic Engagement in American Democracy ed. Theda Skocpol and Morris Fiorina (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1999) 54.
Henry Seidel Canby, Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1936) 32.
On the evolution of campuses, see Paul Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (New York: Architectural History Foundation and Cambridge, MIT Press, 1984).
On Harvard’s campus, see Bainbridge Bunting, Harvard: An Architectural History (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985)
Douglass Shand-Tucci, Harvard University: The Campus Guide (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001).
On Yale, see Vincent Scully et al., Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)
Patrick L. Pennell, Yale University: The Campus Guide (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)
Aaron Betsky, James Gamble Rogers and the Architecture| of Pragmatism ed. David G. De Long (New York: Architectural History Foundation and Cambridge, MIT Press, 1994).
Bliss Perry, Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1921) 329.
John Daniels, Reginald Foster, and Ralph Sanger, eds., The Harvard Year Book (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1904) 92–98.
See also William Garrott Brown, ed., Official Guide to Harvard University (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1903).
For a valuable account of the motives driving the organization of alumni clubs, see Ormande de Kay, From the Age That Is Past: Harvard Club of New York City, a History (New York: The Club, 1994).
Association of Harvard Clubs, Handbook for Harvard Clubs (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1924).
George W. Pierson, The Education of American Leaders: Comparative Contributions of U.S. Colleges and Universities (New York: Praeger, 1969) 21, 89, 157.
Max Weber argued persuasively that the triumph of the modern economic order was a byproduct of religious belief and practice, and showed how specialization, professionalism, and bureaucracy became fundamental organizing characteristics of all modern institutions. Building on Weber, Talcott Parsons argued that these universalistic institutions coexisted with—and were dependent on—particularistic ties of kinship, friendship, and loyalty. More recently, Robert Putnam and Theda Skocpol have explored the interrelationships of social networks and formal organizations: Putnam argues that the efficacy of formal institutions of government and commerce depend on trust, reciprocity, and interpersonal networks;Skocpol shows how membership organizations gave Americans the values, skills, and connections that facilitated modern politics and government. See Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)
Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).
Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977).
Melissa Middleton, “Nonprofit Boards of Directors: Beyond the Governance Function,” in The Nonprofit Sector: A Research Handbook ed. W. W. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987) 143.
J. Allen Whitt and Mark S. Mizruchi, “The Local Inner Circle,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology (1986) 14 (Spring), 115–25.
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© 2010 Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum
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Hall, P.D. (2010). Rediscovering the Bourgeoisie: Higher Education and Governing-Class Formation in the United States, 1870–1914. In: The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115569_11
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