Consolidating for Public Good: Philanthropic Foundations and Social Welfare

By the early twentieth century, debates about corporate capitalism's ability to organize the chaos of the American economy centered on the vices and virtues of trusts and combinations. While John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil stands out for shaping federal policy in relation to antitrust law at this moment, his controversial creation of the Rockefeller Foundation (1913) demonstrates how these debates about the corporate form and its relationship to progress and economic growth shaped conversations about social reform. Rockefeller’s personal counsel advised him that the Rockefeller Foundation could be a “great holding company” capable of guiding social reform across sectors; however, others worried that the Rockefeller Foundation represented a troubling “commercialization” of charity.

In this paper, I will consider how the proliferation of philanthropic foundations ignited national debates about the role of market-principles in social welfare policy across the early twentieth century. I will use the first foundations' mission statements, corporate charters and programming to analyze their vision of managing social relations through new financial technologies and market relationships. I will also track how the emerging field of social work, the government, and business interests critically responded to the growth of these foundations.

Debates about these foundations—the Peabody Education Fund, the Slater Fund, the Jeanes Foundation, the General Education Board, the Carnegie Institute of Washington, the Sage Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation—changed over time. While the first foundations worked closely with state and federal governments and they saw their work as a first pass at creating public schools and public health programs, I’ll argue that by the early twentieth century, institutions, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, started to push the boundaries of this model. As foundations started to operate as holding companies, ambitiously guiding welfare work across sectors, they changed the terms of debates about foundations in American life.