Theirs was a Protestant God, so Catholic immigrants were denied the society’s ministrations, unless they would convert. Others who did minister to the Irish often felt guilty about it. “Are we not building up Catholic faith on Protestant charity?” asked Abby Alcott, Louisa’s mother. She preferred to assist Boston’s Negroes. “This much neglected class of native Americans should be more regarded by our philanthropists,” she wrote. “To me they are far more interesting than the God-invoking Irish who choke you with benedictions and crush you with curses.”
Such philanthropists did not trouble themselves much about the efficacy of their methods. When the ladies of the Hollis Chapel founded a Flower Mission in 1869, they never doubted that blossoms would lighten the slum dwellers’ burden. One matron reported: “As soon as the first flower was handed out, the news spread like wildfire, and the children would come in crowds from the garret and cellar for the prizes, while men, rough laborers, would stop and beg—more humbly than children—for ‘just one flower, Miss.’ ”
By the late nineteenth century, though, another movement was underway which sought to make charity more effective. “Scientific philanthropy” was as intent as the earlier movement on distinguishing “honest need” from “mere pathos,” but it did so by applying empirical techniques borrowed from the physical sciences. “Data” would be gathered and analyzed, “hypotheses” tested and revised, until a body of “sound, scientific principles” evolved. A new social science came into existence, at first called “philanthropology,” later—more modestly—“social work.”
Boston’s principal outpost of the new science was Robert Woods’s South End House, which occupied a brick town house on one of the district’s parks. There Woods presided over a dozen university graduates, most of whom were middle-class Yankees raised with a sense of social obligation. Woods regarded South End House as “a sort of shaft sunk into the thickest part of society with a view of studying the various strata.” The young workers would advance by “patient experimental action, leaving aside the sentiments of pity and mercy which have been outworn by the spread of democratic ideas.” And they would no longer seek the cause of poverty in a poor man’s character, but in his environment. “The real trouble,” wrote Woods, “is that people here are from birth at the mercy of great social forces which move almost like the march of destiny.”
By late in the century, the flood of Catholics arriving in Boston was matched by the tide of Congregationalists and Unitarians ebbing toward Dover and Ipswich. Henceforth, the displaced Yankees no longer felt much responsibility for the “scourings of Europe’s streets,” seeking instead to preserve those institutions they still regarded as their own: Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Symphony Orchestra.
As Boston’s early mercantile energies gave way to a cautious preoccupation with preserving established fortunes, charitable trusts became the philanthropists’ favorite instruments. This preference grew more pronounced after a Massachusetts judge decreed that trustees need only behave as “men of prudence,” allowing Boston trustees greater latitude in investments than their counterparts elsewhere. But the provisions of such trusts—like one which provided money for a boat to deliver Sunday papers to the Boston Lightship—remained frozen forever or, as Fortune put it, “beyond the reach of any power but the Communist International.”
By the twentieth century, so much of Boston’s philanthropic wealth had fallen under the “dead hand” of irrevocable trusts, it had become difficult to meet current charitable needs. Into that vacuum, in 1915, stepped the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company with the notion of pooling trusts into a “community foundation”—the Permanent Charity Fund—to guarantee benefactors sound management of their money while permitting flexible adaptation to changing conditions. Boston Safe wasn’t being entirely altruistic. Already the city’s preeminent trust company, it would gain from the new device an even larger share of that business.
Forty-five years later—in 1959—the Permanent Charity Fund’s principal was abruptly doubled. Albert Stone, Jr., an eighty-two-year-old bachelor, had lived alone in a Back Bay town house, investing in “sound common stocks.” Now his bequest of $19.4 million made the Fund the country’s second-largest community foundation. It could hardly have come at a more appropriate moment, for, barely a year later, John F. Kennedy was elected President, bringing with him a new determination to solve America’s human problems. Armed with vastly increased resources, and challenged by the national mood, the Fund went in search of a new director, settling on Harvard’s dean of admissions, Wilbur J. Bender.
It was a shrewd choice, for Bill Bender was in perfect tune with those strenuous times, having done more than anyone to transform Harvard from “a finishing school for the St. Grottlesex crowd” to a more representative institution. At the Permanent Charity Fund from 1960 to 1969, Bender displayed the same commitment to a more open society. With astonishing speed, he made the Fund a major force for social change in Boston. His critical decision was to phase out operating subsidies—once 90 percent of its grants—in favor of vastly increased support for pilot programs, demonstration projects, and other innovations. Often, the Fund supplemented, reinforced, or even prefigured Washington’s social experiments. In the early sixties, for example, it presented $344,000 to Action for Boston Community Development, which became the city’s anti-poverty agency, and another $250,000 for its first centers in Charlestown and Roxbury.
Philanthropists, Bender believed, should do “more than react to what comes to us.” They should be “catalysts,” with a “questing, questioning, non-doctrinaire openness to [their] community.” In his final report—issued only months before he died in March 1969—he captured the sense of urgency which was a hallmark of that era: “The young are impatient, the poor are impatient, the mood of violence exists, and we are in a race between the ability of a lumbering, perplexed, imperfect society to move fast enough—and catastrophe.”
Behind Bender’s Permanent Charity Fund stood larger forces with an interest in accommodating themselves to the sixties’ multiple insurgencies: liberal Harvard; the Boston Globe, at last awakening from its years of lethargy; the progressive wing of the Catholic Archdiocese; Irish Democrats enlisted under John Kennedy’s banner; the most enlightened elements of the city’s financial community, represented by the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company; and their allies in the Yankee law firms, like Hutchins & Wheeler, which served as counsel to Boston Safe. Those worlds converged in the person of Ralph Lowell, chairman and president of Boston Safe, who had recruited Bender for the job. Sometimes known as “Mr. Boston,” Lowell was a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, an officer or director of forty-four other corporations and institutions, including the Globe, as well as the dominant figure in the Vault. Of his own philosophy, he once said, “Most of us are given a great deal, in one way or another, and I believe it is our duty and privilege to return that bounty to our fellow man in whatever way our talents direct us.” Not himself a Kennedy liberal—he was more of a Bull Moose Republican—Lowell felt the gales of change rushing across the harbor and, like the yachtsman he was, knew enough to put the wind at his back.
If the Permanent Charity Fund was the principal channel for such endeavors (by 1969 its endowment had reached $68 million and its annual grants totaled $2.4 million), then the Hyams Trust and its associated trusts, with assets of $38.6 million and annual grants of $1.6 million, were a respectable second. The foundations were closely linked—Boston Safe served as a trustee for both and Hutchins & Wheeler was counsel to both, with partners sitting on each board. The only foundations in town with professional staffs, by 1970 they were situated only three floors apart in Boston Safe’s new bronze tower, and the traffic between their offices was heavy, for though they differed on certain issues, they shared an underlying philosophy—a curious amalgam of Puritan conscience and Yankee noblesse oblige; nineteenth-century scientific philanthropy and twentieth-century social work; a focus on
the inner city and a cautious commitment to social change.
Not everyone in Boston’s philanthropic world shared this sense of urgency about the city’s social needs. Greater Boston had some 900 foundations, most of them tiny trusts, administered by banks and law firms, or relatively small corporate operations, and few of these greatly realigned their priorities during the sixties. By far the largest philanthropy in the city was the Massachusetts Bay United Fund, whose annual campaign in the late sixties was raising more than $14 million. Launched in the depths of the Depression, it was Boston’s equivalent of the Community Chests and United Appeals which had consolidated public giving in communities across the country, and for years, service to the United Fund was considered de rigueur for public-spirited Bostonians. But, relying ever more on corporate contributions and payroll deductions, the United Fund had become increasingly dominated by business executives whose notions of charity scarcely extended beyond Boys’ Clubs, Girl Scouts, and the USO. Each September, the Fund raised a four-story gas beacon called the “Torch of Hope,” which burned on Boston Common until the campaign ended in mid-November. But many Bostonians placed little hope in the United Fund.
Blacks were especially disillusioned. Of the $14 million the United Fund raised in 1968, some $10 million went to the suburbs. That left $4 million for the city, of which $1.3 million was spent in the black community. But more than two-thirds of that amount was channeled through white-controlled agencies, leaving only $500,000—or 4 percent of the total—to black organizations. So skewed were the allocations, blacks argued, that the YMCA in the affluent suburb of Newton received more than the Roxbury Y in the heart of black Boston.
Black dissatisfaction came to a head in 1969, mobilized by the New Urban League. In most cities, the Urban League was a tame outfit, dedicated to improving black access to jobs and housing, but in the mid-sixties, young blacks led by the South End’s Mel King seized control of Boston’s League. King’s imposing stature (six feet five inches), shaved skull, and dashikis made him look much fiercer than he was, and many whites found him an unnerving figure. As the League’s new executive director, he sought substantially more money from the United Fund. Instead, the League’s allocation was reduced: from $66,500 in 1968 to $61,500 a year later.
In October 1969, the League challenged the Fund’s allocations process. Traditionally, 45 percent of the monies raised by the Fund were handed directly to the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the USO, and several large Boston hospitals, which had insisted on that arrangement in exchange for abandoning their own fund drives. The remainder went to the Fund’s allocating wing—United Community Services—which distributed it to 225 Greater Boston agencies. The New Urban League labeled that process “paternalistic colonialism,” because it required blacks to “shuffle” for their dollars. Henceforth, it demanded, 20 percent of the United Fund’s total must go directly off the top to a black-controlled agency, which would distribute it to black institutions. The United Fund flatly refused to consider this form of “community control.”
On December 18, 1969, the United Fund held its annual Awards Luncheon at the Statler-Hilton Hotel. Nearly seven hundred guests were just finishing their coconut custard pie and coffee, and Charles Francis Adams, a lineal descendant of the Adams Presidents, board chairman of Raytheon, and leader of that year’s campaign, was preparing to make the awards, when thirty black members of the New Urban League filed into the vast ballroom. Taking up positions around the walls, they stood with arms folded, staring coldly at the diners. James Bishop, the League’s president, strode to the platform, where, flanked by two aides in black leather jackets, he denounced the United Fund as a “racist organization that collects funds from black people and friends of black people, but can’t allocate them in a way that will help black people.” As he spoke, his colleagues moved through the stunned audience gathering half-eaten French rolls and pieces of coconut pie, which they tossed into a large laundry bag marked “Our Unfair Share—Black Crumbs.” Then Mel King—his shaved head glistening in the ballroom spotlights—held the bag high over his head and dumped the leftovers in front of an astonished Charles Francis Adams. “We’ve been getting crumbs,” King said. “We’re no longer going to accept crumbs.”
When Adams had brushed the pie off his lap, he rose to say, “There’s a great deal of truth in what our black friends say. But it’s not as simple as that. Our friends tend to oversimplify. I hope negotiations with the Urban League will continue, but the real solution is to increase the total we raise, rather than taking from one deserving group to give to another.”
But that was precisely what the New Urban League was demanding: a shift of money from whites who needed it to blacks who needed it even more. Over the next several years, contributions to the “inner city”—a euphemism for the black community—did rise to $2.1 million, and the Fund did establish a Committee on the Inner City to consider ways of giving blacks a greater voice in their own allocations. But when negotiations reached an impasse, the Black United Front established its own United Black Appeal, seeking an annual $4 million for black institutions and agencies. The drive was launched in the middle of the United Fund’s fall campaign, a point which chairman Ben Scott emphasized when he said, “We have a message to the black and the white individual who cares about urban problems and the emergency needs of the black community: Give to the Black Appeal, because the United Fund is inadequate to the growing needs of our community.”
This bold attempt by Boston blacks to augment—and control—the flow of private money into their own community was the talk of Boston’s philanthropic world when Joan Diver arrived at the Hyams Trust, and she felt a certain sympathy with the challenge; surely, if one considered the pressing needs of Boston’s black community, it had been short-changed over the years by the major Boston philanthropies, the United Fund in particular. Joan hoped that Hyams and other private foundations could fill that gap, but as she came to know the foundation world better, she recognized that Hyams couldn’t simply hand money over to the black community. The sad saga of FUND had demonstrated the dangers inherent in doing that. In the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination, FUND’s white liberals had set out to raise $100 million and give it, no strings attached, to the Black United Front; in fact, it had raised barely $1 million, most of which was quickly dissipated in bad loans to small black businesses. And, within weeks of its inauguration, the United Black Appeal indicated its own unreliability when it took a $20,000 grant from Polaroid, intended for Boston’s blacks, and presented it to the civil rights activists in Cairo, Illinois, and South African “freedom fighters.” No, if Hyams wanted to step up its assistance to the city’s black community—as Joan surely did—it would have to identify specific black agencies doing valuable work there and then fund them.
But that wouldn’t be easy, Joan realized; excepting East Boston, where much of its early work had been concentrated, Hyams had little personal contact with any Boston neighborhood, much less the black community. For decades, it had remained aloof from the city it was pledged to assist. Reflecting Godfrey Hyams’ own reclusiveness, the foundation published no annual reports, prohibited newspaper publicity for its grants, and discouraged visits to its offices. Many potential applicants were utterly unaware of Hyams’ existence, and those who did apply had little contact with the trust. Their proposals were turned over to John Moore, whose recommendations to the board were based largely on his own experience at the United Fund. Most board members had little independent knowledge either of the communities they assisted or the agencies they funded. And there was little follow-up to determine how well the money had been used.
This time-honored procedure had worked reasonably well so long as the city’s social agencies remained limited in number and applicants to the trust were old friends. But, energized by the War on Poverty and the movement for community control, new agencies were popping up every month. Determined to make the foundation more responsive and accessible,
Joan published an elaborate annual report, opened channels to the press, and began meeting regularly with agency representatives, seeking more information about their operations than could be gained from written proposals. These conferences frequently took place in the foundation boardroom beneath the House of Lords panels, and one afternoon during a meeting with two young black men she noticed that they couldn’t stop staring at the panels, which clearly disconcerted them. After checking with Bill Swift, she replaced the panels with stark black-and-white photographs of communities the trust was assisting: two black kids in the South End, a construction worker with a cold cigar in his mouth, an Italian woman in a North End market, black teenagers buying rhythm-and-blues records, an Irishman with a beer belly fishing in the harbor.
Gradually the new decor was matched by a shift in the trust’s priorities. It has always devoted the bulk of its assistance to the city’s poor and disadvantaged. Now, without abandoning the white ethnic neighborhoods, it allocated more of its resources to blacks and minorities. Meanwhile, it slowly phased out its support for some of the most conventional institutions whose needs were being amply met by other Boston philanthropies. In 1971, for example, the board had voted a $10,000 grant to the 90th Anniversary Fund of the Boston Symphony Orchestra—perhaps the most popular of all Boston charities. Two years later, instead of supporting the adult orchestra, it gave $2,000 to the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra “to support inner-city youth participation,” as well as $10,000 to the Museum of Afro-American History for restoration of the African Meeting House on Beacon Hill, and $2,500 to Radcliffe College to help publish the proceedings of a conference on “The Black Woman: Myth and Realities.” By the mid-seventies, about a quarter of Hyams’ grants were going to agencies serving black or minority populations, while another quarter served mixed populations.
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