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Book Review
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American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700–1865.
By Kathleen D. McCarthy. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003. xii, 319 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-226-56198-4.)
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| Despite Kathleen D. McCarthy's important publications on the role of American philanthropy, nonprofit organizations, and patronage and the arts, she has produced a troubling new book. From the eighteenth century to the 1830s, she argues that a "geography of generosity" (passim) emerged. It centered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia but was much less developed in the South. Within this "geography," women and African Americans participated actively in voluntary societies that promoted benevolent reformist causes. No few Catholics and Jews participated as well. Operating largely outside the first and second party systems, these reformers advantaged themselves with emerging options for social and economic action inherent in the northern capitalist marketplace. With increasing effectiveness, they circulated their ideas for social amelioration. According to McCarthy, some of the basic ideas they propagated and even illustrated through their benevolent society activism became the credal American belief system—egalitarianism, religious liberty, civic responsibility, freedom of speech and the press, and the freedom to assemble. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he was deeply taken by this voluntary society nexus for reform. |
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McCarthy's very positive characterization of the early years of voluntaristic philanthropy mirrors historical appraisals from the early Cold War decades such as Charles Foster, An Errand of Mercy: The Evangelical United Front, 1790–1837 (1960), and Robert Bremner, American Philanthropy (1960). It flies in the face of subsequent historical scholarship, however. During the 1970s, for example, scholars such as Paul Johnson and Paul Boyer emphasized that benevolent society reformers had sought, under the cover of kind intentions, to discipline the lower classes in the interests of commercial and industrial efficiency—to control them socially. In more recent decades, such scholars as Robert Abzug and Bertram Wyatt-Brown advanced the still-current perspective that social control and benevolence were simply different and not always competing layers of intent within the same reformers. If McCarthy has mastered the twists and turns of the historiography, she has not elected to engage it very seriously. |
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Her portrayal of the triumph, through marketplace mechanisms, of women, blacks, and others who were not white male elites is also troubling. Historians know too well that between the American Revolution and the Civil War racial and religious minorities and women were increasingly marginalized in what the Connecticut Jacksonian Democrat and American Colonization Society activist Andrew Judson called the white man's country. Advantaged by hindsight, McCarthy argues that early and mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist and woman suffragist organizations were very important for some of the marginalized, providing venues in the marketplace within which they eventually learned to deploy power effectively. That perspective, however, was obviously less than clear to young benevolent reformers of the period such as the Grimké sisters, Lucretia Mott, and Theodore Dwight Weld. More consistent with nineteenth-century sources are the works of such historians as Lori Ginzberg (Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, 1990), which demonstrate that the struggle against marginalization and degradation took several generations for even modest triumph. Indeed, the victories were often broken by periods of severe regression, which sometimes provoked transformations of both benevolent reformist means and ends. |
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