Abstract
From the end of the Civil War through the beginning of World War I, the third group of philanthropists, industrial philanthropists, emerged. More visible than missionary societies, this group was comprised of wealthy individuals, such as Andrew Carnegie (steel), J. P. Morgan (banking, later steel), Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt (railroad), John D. Rockefeller Sr. (oil), and large philanthropic foundations. The most important of the secular foundations during this time were the Peabody Education Fund, John Slater Fund, Daniel Hand Education Fund for Colored People, Julius Rosenwald Fund, Phelps-Stokes Fund, Carnegie Foundation, and General Education Board.
American colleges and universities have always been basically dependent upon philanthropy, whether private or public. In the post—Civil War years, the university could not have developed without the Cornells, Hopkinses, and Rocke fellers.
—Laurence R. Veysey1
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Notes
Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 3.
James D. Anderson, “Philanthropic Control over Private Black Higher Education,” in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1980), 154–155, 163;
James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 241.
Anderson, “Philanthropic Control over Private Black Colleges,” 173, 163; Atlanta University: Purpose of Atlanta University, box 96, folder 6, Hope Records, AUC; Wallace Buttrick to John D. Rockefeller Jr., February 14, 1914, box 203, folder 1937, Oswald Villard, 1903–1954, GEB, RAC; General Education Board: An Account of Its Activities, 1902–1914 (New York: General Education Board, 1915), 208; and Raymond B. Fosdick, Henry F. Pringle, and Katherine Douglas Pringle, Adventures in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 88–89.
Herbert Spencer, quoted in Stewart H. Holbrooke, The Age of the Moguls (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1952), 88.
Ronald C. White Jr., Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, with a foreword by James M. McPherson (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), xx, xxi.
Edwin Embree, “Rockefeller Foundation,” 1930, box 1, folder 3, Edwin Embree Papers, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. (Hereafter, designated as Embree Papers and RAC); Alice Fleming, Ida Tarbell: First of the Muckrakers (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971), 112, 126–127. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt condemned reckless and irresponsible journalists who only reported the “bad side of things” and took advantage of the public’s response to Tarbell’s expose by writing in the interest of sensationalism. He compared these individuals with the character in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and called them “muckrakers.” Though Roosevelt also praised those writers who were attacking “legitimate social ills,” he did not distinguish the term between the two; thus, “muckraker” eventually became a term applied to those journalists, like Tarbell, “who were working on behalf of reform.” Fleming indicated, “The insult was transformed into a term of approval, and Ida, who had at first resented being called a muck-raker, came to accept the title as a badge of distinction.”
John D. Rockefeller Sr., Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913), 58;
Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), xxi; and Holbrook, Age of the Moguls, 67.
John Ensor Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Conscience: An American Family in Public and in Private (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, Marmillian, 1991), xiv.
Veysey, American University, 126. Veysey explained that most American universities did not initially implement the German model; instead, most implemented utilitarian curricula, causing contrasting methods in the teaching field for those who trained in the United States and those trained abroad. There was a difference, however, between American universities and German universities, as Veysey explained, “German rhetoric about academic purpose appears to have centered upon three quite different conceptions: first, on the value of non-utilitarian learning, freely pursued without regard to the immediate needs of the surrounding society (hence “pure” learning, protected by Lehrfreheit); second, on the value of Wissenschaft, or investigation and writing in a general sense, as opposed to teaching (Wissenschaft did not necessarily connote empirical research; it could just as easily comprehend Hagelian philosophy); finally, on their epistemological side, German statements of academic aim continues to run toward some form of all-encompassing idealism.” Since learning in the late nineteenth century in the United States was of utilitarian orientation, there were only two universities dominated by the ideal of scientific research and established as centers for graduate study when they opened: Johns Hopkins University (1876) and Clark University (1889); institutions such as Harvard and Columbia were in the process of transforming into universities. Lawrence A. Cremin, “The Education of the Educating Profession,” The History of Higher Education, 2nd ed., ASHE Reader Series, ed. Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Boston, Massachusetts: Pearson Custom, 1997), 403.
Merle Curti and Roderick Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 213.
Wickliffe Rose, “Summary of Operations of the Peabody Education Fund,” June 20, 1916, folder 5, box 1, Wickliffe Rose Papers, RAC. In 1910, Rose was elected president of the George Peabody College for Teachers. In 1913, he became a trustee for the GEB and later, in 1925, became president of the GEB. Rose noted that during the 47 years of the fund’s operation, “the Trustees contributed from the income of the Fund toward the encouragement of public education in the Southern states about three and three-quarter million dollars.” See Horace Mann Bond, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, 130–144; Curti and Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education, 173; Fosdick, Pringle, and Pringle, Adventures in Giving, 3; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 378–384;
and Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, vol. 2, with a new introduction by Sissela Bok (New York: Harper & Row, 1944, 1962; reprint, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996), 890.
Dwight Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Evolution of the Negro College (New York: Arno and The New York Times, 1969), 164–165.
John E. Fisher, The John F. Slater Fund: A Nineteenth Century Affirmative Action for Negro Education (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986), 3.
Bond, Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, 130– 144; Curti and Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education, 173; Roy E. Finkenbine, “Law, Reconstruction, and African American Education,” in Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History, ed. Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 167; Fosdick, Pringle, and Pringle, Adventures in Giving, 3; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 378–384; and Myrdal, American Dilemma, 890.
Bernard Alderson, Andrew Carnegie: The Man and His Work (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1908), 155.
Louis M. Hacker, The World of Andrew Carnegie, 1865–1901 (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1968), 364–367; “History of Carnegie Mellon,” http://www.cmu.edu/home/about/about_history.html; and Ellen Condliffe Lagerman, “Surveying the Professions,” in Goodchild and Wechsler, History of Higher Education, 394–402.
W. Bruce Leslie, “The Age of the College,” in Goodchild and Wechsler, History of Higher Education, 337. Also see the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Missions of the College Curriculum, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1977).
John D. Rockefeller Jr. to John D. Rockefeller Sr., February 11, 1919, in “Dear Father” I “Dear Son:” Correspondence of John D. Rockefeller and John D. Rockefeller, Jr, ed. Joseph W. Ernst (New York: Fordham University Press in cooperation with Rockefeller Archive Center, 1994), 90.
Chernow, Titan, 481–483; Curti and Nash, Philanthropy in the Shaping of American Higher Education, 215; Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 117; Allan Nevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), 482–484;
and Clarence A. Bacote, The Story of Atlanta University: A Century of Service, 1865–1965 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1969), 248.
Anderson, Education of Blacks in the South, 251–252; Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 538–539; and Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930, foreword by Louis R. Harlan (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 205–206.
Both Morehouse and Spelman Colleges received money from the GEB by 1914. Benjamin Brawley, The History of Morehouse College (Atlanta, Georgia: Morehouse College, 1917), 107; John D. Rockefeller Jr. to the General Education Board, March 23, 1906, box 39, folder 360, Ga 10 Spelman College, 1902–1965, GEB, RAC; Abraham Flexner to John D. Rockefeller Jr., September 21, 1914, box 40, folder 362, ibid.; and Booker T. Washington to Andrew Carnegie, November 13, 1909, The Booker T. Washington Papers, 196.
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© 2013 Vida L. Avery
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Avery, V.L. (2013). Mythical Phoenix and the Ashes It Spreads. In: Philanthropy in Black Higher Education. Philanthropy and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281012_3
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