The Difficult Art of Giving

Francesca Sawaya’s The Difficult Art of Giving and Mary Kathleen Eyring’s Captains of Charity, two recent additions to the ongoing analysis of American attitudes toward charitable giving, offer compelling readings of both prominent and lesser-known authors. While each addresses different periods of American history, they share some key insights regarding the intersection of philanthropy, literature, and a rapidly changing economic landscape, even as they differ rather dramatically in their interpretations. More importantly, they are a welcome reminder that recent critiques of the nonprofit sector, including of corporate and family foundations, are not new; writers have been exploring, exposing, and taking advantage of the fraught intersection between the marketplace and charitable organizations since the days when they began gaining prominence in the United States.Sawaya focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and extends more familiar notions of philanthropy to include not only the emerging corporate foundations that now dominate the nonprofit landscape, but also patronage. She argues that the former emerged, in part, from the latter. Complex networks of friendships and influence, including personal relationships between authors and corporate benefactors, were fostered by elite private clubs and literary associations like the Authors Club, which welcomed Andrew Carnegie as a member. One of the book’s particular strengths is the way that Sawaya traces Carnegie’s influence on both the rhetoric and the practice of philanthropy. His famous essay, “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889), promoted a “business” model that sought to corporatize philanthropy even as it refused to criticize the economic system that contributed to the very problems wealthy donors ostensibly sought to address.The authors in Sawaya’s study, which include Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Theodore Dreiser, benefited from the friendship and patronage of wealthy benefactors, or their institutions, even as they employed their fiction to interrogate how such relationships could compromise artistic independence. Such connections could be personal, as in the case of Twain’s friendship with Standard Oil executive Henry H. Rogers, or at a further remove, as in the case of Chesnutt’s education, which was supported by a wealthy Northern banker. Sawaya provides intriguing readings of key texts by these authors: one example that feels quite timely given the rise of donor-funded journalism is Sawaya’s discussion of Howells’s novel A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). She argues that Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller served as models for the millionaire Jacob Dryfoos, who sponsors a literary magazine and then hopes to influence its contents: “In Howells’s fictional exploration of the dilemma of print media,” Sawaya writes, “ . . . the market challenges artistic and intellectual creativity and integrity, but a newer challenge is the capitalist sponsor, the philanthropist, who mediates the relation of the intellectual to the market and who seems to allow her/him to bypass the market” (77). Philanthropy may appear to offer the artist an escape from economic entanglements, but for writers like those Sawaya discusses, such evasions were illusory.Eyring also sees philanthropy as intricately linked to capitalism. While Sawaya examines how corporate philanthropy at the end of the nineteenth century tended to spring from and perpetuate elite networks of white male privilege, however, Eyring argues that the integration of charity and industry in the postrevolutionary period meant that working in the emergent field offered members of marginalized groups, including free African Americans and women, a degree of economic and social agency. She analyzes both the writings and careers of authors including Sarah Pogson Smith, Nancy Prince, and Sarah Josepha Hale, arguing that their decisions to connect their written work with charitable causes provided them with tangible rewards. Eyring sees Hale’s founding of the Seaman’s Aid Society, for example, as helping to pave the way to her editorship of the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. The social and religious approval that came from working to help others, Eyring argues—and the audience one reached in writing to support such efforts—were nonmonetary benefits charity offered to those who practiced it.Hale’s work on behalf of sailors and their families is particularly significant to Eyring’s analysis, as she contends the Atlantic maritime industry provided the foundation for the rise of the nonprofit sector. The harsh conditions accompanying maritime trade meant there were always people in need, and the profits from the very same enterprises that contributed to people’s hardship simultaneously provided funds sought by charitable workers like Hale or Smith. Eyring’s discussion of Smith, who donated the proceeds from the sale of her book Daughters of Eve (1826) to the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (founded in 1818), illustrates the kind of intersection Eyring sees as a fundamental part of the nascent nonprofit sector. Smith’s personal interests (Eyring reads Smith’s donation in part as a marketing tactic), industry needs (the institute featured a curriculum that prepared its students to pursue trades valued in maritime commerce), and the needs of the students and their families were all served by Smith’s philanthropic enterprise.Both Sawaya and Eyring ably demonstrate the social and economic forces that shaped philanthropy at distinct moments in US history and the ways that writers contributed to, reflected, and interrogated these forces. What remains less clear, perhaps inevitably so, is the role that personal conviction may have played in the benevolent actions of many of the subjects of these texts. Sawaya notes, “I hope to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis that plague analyses of philanthropy: on the one hand, the naturalization of it as an expression of the benevolent progressivism of corporate capitalism, or more simply of the good intentions of individual capitalists; on the other hand, its reduction to an easy and unchallenged capitalist hegemony” (3). This is a laudable aim, and difficult to achieve. In arguing persuasively for the benefits her subjects accrued through their philanthropic actions—benefits rendering them “captains of charity”—Eyring at times glances over these more personal commitments. If, as Eyring argues, Prince’s missionary work in Haiti was likely driven by economic necessity, for instance, it certainly remains the case that she may have been equally moved by religious or altruistic sentiments, just as Hale may have been moved by the plight of sailors and their families. True to her aim, Sawaya goes further in examining the entanglement of self-interest and altruism, attending to the role that emotions like loyalty and gratitude played in the friendship between Twain and Rogers, for example. It is difficult not to read her text and be reminded of a question she asks early on, “Could or did philanthropy ever exist?” (8), and answer in the negative: capitalist hegemony often lurks on the edge of the discussion. Still, given the myriad intentions that motivate charitable action, and the social and economic forces behind it, both of these authors have done remarkable work in tracing the development of philanthropy in American literature and culture during two key periods in the nation’s history

Aesthetics · Art · Political science · Nonprofit Sector and Volunteering · Religion, Society, and Development