Common Ground (70 page)

To Joan, the old Hyams Trust was symbolized by a set of panels which decorated the foundation’s boardroom. Purchased by Godfrey Hyams on a trip to London, the panels were said to be copies of ones which had hung in the House of Lords. Depicting common people bowing and scraping before the King and nobility, they struck her as incredibly patronizing, the flip side of Yankee
noblesse oblige
. There was something wildly anachronistic too, she thought, about those aristocratic tableaus hanging above the trustees’ heads as they deliberated on racial unrest, juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancies, and heroin overdoses. The times had changed, the social needs of the city were different than they had been in Godfrey Hyams’ day. They could no longer be addressed from the lofty reaches of traditional Boston philanthropy.

From the beginning, charity had been among the most prized of Yankee virtues. “We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities,” John Winthrop admonished his shipmates aboard the
Arbella
. And seventy years later, Cotton Mather could report with satisfaction, “For charity—I may indeed speak it without flattery—this town has not many equals on the face of the earth.”

Yet, from the start, the Puritans were tortured by their own beneficence. For if, as they believed, worldly prosperity was a reward for virtue, how could they indulge the improvident? Even Cotton Mather warned Bostonians “not
[to] abuse your charity by misapplying it. The poor that
can’t
work are objects for your liberality. But the poor that
can
work and
won’t
, the best liberality is to make them. Find them work; set them to work; keep them to work.” It was a distinction which seemed even more essential as Boston grew from a small village to a bustling seaport. It was one thing for a few hundred native-born vagrants to wander the town’s dusty lanes, quite another for many thousand “destitute and desperate Papists” to swarm the tenement districts. To the Protestant gentlemen who administered the city’s charitable organizations, the host of impoverished Catholics was more than a drain on their resources; it was a threat to their stable, homogeneous world. To stem these tides of disintegration, the charity reformers of the 1870s urged the city’s philanthropists to alleviate “pauperism” (a pitiable state brought on by youth, age, physical or mental disability) but keep hands off mere “poverty” (a necessary condition of mankind).

This distinction was grounded in the persistent moralism of Protestant Massachusetts. For if poverty derived from a defect in character, a failure of the poor man to follow in Christ’s way, then the remedy wasn’t reform of social inequalities, but religious transformation. To the Reverend William Ellery Channing, the true Christian’s duty was to “rescue the poor from the degrading influence of poverty, to give them generous sentiments and hopes, to exalt them from animals to men, into Christians, into children of God.” When Boston’s Congregational churches founded a charitable body, they called it the Boston Society for the Moral and Religious Instruction of the Poor.

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.”