Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / To take at face value the current enthusiasm at the idea of marshaling science to end human social ills such as global poverty, one could easily overlook the fact that one hundred fifty years prior people were making strikingly similar claims as part of a broad movement often referred to as “scientific charity” or “scientific philanthropy”. The goal of this dissertation is to contribute to our knowledge of the scientific charity movement, through a retrieval of the morally weighted language used by reformers and social scientists to justify the changes they proposed for both public and private provision of poor relief, as found in the Proceedings of the Annual Assembly of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (NCCC). In essence I am claiming that our understanding of the scientific charity movement is incomplete, and can be improved by an approach that looks at scientific charity as a species of moral language that provided ways to energize the many disparate and seemingly disconnected or even contradictory movements found during the period under study. The changes enacted to late 19th century philanthropic and charitable structures did not occur due to advances in a morally neutral and thus superior science, but were born along by a broad scale use of the language of scientific charity: an equally moral yet competing and eventually more compelling vision of a philanthropic future which held the keys to unlock the mysteries of poverty and solve it once and for all. When viewing scientific charity as something broader than any particular instantiation of it, when pursing it as a set of languages used to promote social science’s role in solving human problems by discrediting prior nonscientific attempts, one can begin to see that the reformist energies of late 19th century social thinkers did not dissipate, but crystalized into the set of background assumptions still present today.

<p>A historical study on the inflince of private foundations in American political history.</p>

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation employs a historical approach to the philanthropic activities of Madam C.J. Walker, an African American female entrepreneur who built an international beauty culture company that employed thousands of people, primarily black women, and generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual revenues during the Jim Crow era. The field of philanthropic studies has recognized Walker as a philanthropist, but has not effectively accounted for how her story challenges conventional understandings of philanthropy. I use historical methods and archival research to determine what motivated and constituted Walker’s philanthropic giving to arrive at three main conclusions. First, Walker’s philanthropy can be best understood as emerging out of a moral imagination forged by her experiences as a poor, black, female migrant in St. Louis, Missouri during the late 1800s dependent upon a robust philanthropic infrastructure of black civil society institutions and individuals who cared for and mentored her through the most difficult period of her life. Second, she created and operated her company to pursue commercial and philanthropic goals concurrently by improving black women’s personal hygiene and appearance; increasing their access to vocational education, beauty culture careers, and financial independence; and promoting social bonding and activism through associationalism, and, later, fraternal ritual. Third, during her lifetime and through her estate, Walker deployed a diverse array of philanthropic resources to fund African American social service and educational needs in networks with other black women. Her giving positions her philanthropy as simultaneously distinct from the dominant paradigm of wealthy whites and as shared with that of other African Americans. Her approach thus ran counter to the racialized and gendered models of giving by the rich white male and female philanthropists of her era, while being representative of black women’s norms of giving.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / In 1854 the United States Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska bill which left the question of slavery in the territory up to a vote of popular sovereignty. Upon the passage of the bill, New England’s most elite class of citizens, led by Eli Thayer, mobilized their networks of philanthropy in New England to ensure the Kansas-Nebraska territory did not embrace slavery. The effort by the New England elite to make the territories free was intertwined in a larger web of philanthropic motivations aimed to steer the future of America on a path that would replicate New England society throughout the country. The process and goal of their philanthropy in the Kansas-Nebraska Territory was not dissimilar from their philanthropy in New England. Moral classification of those in material poverty mixed with a dose of paternalism and free labor capitalism was the antidote to the disease of moral degradation and poverty. When Missourians resisted the encroachment of New Englanders on the frontier, the New England elites shifted their philanthropy from moral reform to the funding and facilitation of violence under the guise of philanthropy and disaster relief. For six years, until the outbreak of the American Civil War, New England philanthropists facilitated and helped fund the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas.