A Legacy Beyond Their Gifts

The Washington Post, Outlook, by James Allen Smith, January 4, 2004

Modern American philanthropy emerged a century ago when the great industrialists of the late 19th century -- John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie the wealthiest among them -- endowed huge philanthropic trusts. The fortunes they amassed, and the amounts they gave away, were on a scale that had never been seen before, measured in the tens and ultimately the hundreds of millions of dollars.

They created enduring institutions -- the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller University, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, among others. And they invented modern grant-making foundations that have served as models for subsequent generations of wealthy donors. Unlike older endowments, these new foundations were flexible in purpose, chartered for such broadly stated goals as advancing and diffusing knowledge or pursuing the well-being of mankind. The mandates were general because donors knew that human needs would change from one generation to another.

The philanthropists of a century ago were convinced that research and education would lead to a better understanding of the root causes of social ills. They attacked hookworm, tuberculosis and yellow fever; they reformed medical education and other professional fields; and they created new institutions for investigating social and economic problems.

The spirit in which they worked gives us a sign of what is likely to last from the staggering wealth created in late 20th-century America. Much has been written about how philanthropy is changing, how the billionaires of today want to maintain more control over how their wealth is used. But what's truly striking is something perhaps more surprising: the similarity between the philanthropists of a century ago and the philanthropists of our age.

Education endures as a focus. George Soros created the Central European University in Budapest in 1991, an institution likely to survive long after his Open Society Institute spends down its last dollars. Thomas Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, has pledged more than $200 million to establish a new Catholic university and town in Florida.

Hoping to improve higher education in the state where Wal-Mart had its start, the Walton family gave several hundred million dollars to the University of Arkansas, the largest gift ever to a public university. Ruth Lilly, heiress to a pharmaceutical fortune, left hundreds of millions to a handful of arts groups, including Poetry magazine and Americans for the Arts.

Almost certainly, today's wealth will lead to scientific advances in the battle against the health scourges of our time. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by far the largest new foundation, is addressing the problems of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, and is spending millions to expand vaccination programs targeting childhood diseases in the world's poorest countries. James and Virginia Stowers have donated more than a billion dollars -- part of the considerable fortune that James Stowers made as the owner of an investment company -- to their Institute for Medical Research. Many other large-scale donors also understand that successes in medical research and public health are huge multipliers of social and economic well-being.

Sometimes philanthropy can alter public perceptions of a problem and yield new public policies. Concerned about the loss of biodiversity around the globe, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has committed more than $250 million to Conservation International's work. Others, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Kaiser Family Foundation, have toiled in the field of health policy.

But the most enduring legacy of philanthropy across the decades may reside simply in the act of giving, in making the exemplary donation, whether it is to create a foundation, sustain a charitable organization or alleviate a human need. What has most often endured, as Aristotle understood and as Andrew Carnegie echoed, is the knowledge that the act of giving can bind a society together -- across gulfs of wealth inequality, across accidents of good or bad fortune, across divides of optimism and despair, across generations.

James Allen Smith, an adviser to the president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, is a historian. For the current academic year, he is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, serving as the Waldemar A. Nielsen Chair in Philanthropy.