History can and should be an instrument of change, not simply a repository of things that have come before. In that vein, I'd like to offer up a piece I did for presentation at the 2005 Delegate Assembly of the Colorado Education Association, an organization of which I remain a proud member. It's the sort of call to arms I don't generally trumpet - after all, it's not often that teachers call upon other teachers to reject $1000 gifts - but TocqueDeville’s excellent diary got me to thinking that it might be nice to take another look at the legacies the wealthy, the powerful, and the obtuse try to buy themselves when all other attempts at being perceived as humane fail.
So join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight your resident historiorantologist will talk of what can only be described as a Gilded Age - replete with self-indulgent corporate overlords, vicious, labor-hating goons, and some truly cynical bastards. A century ago, such people defined how and why the wealthy should donate to the public good - I'll ask the Walton Foundation if the same spirit holds true today...
Historiorant: This article, which was Moonbatified for posting at the progressivehistorians.com inauguration ceremony (9/5/06) and for the front page at Never In Our Names(12/23/06), was originally written as part of a "Tool Kit" developed by CEA to counter overt moves by the Walton Family Foundation to afflict public education in Colorado with an unwanted - (defeated in general elections twice) – voucher scheme. To the best of my knowledge, the Foundation has not given up on its dream of destroying public education, and is still attempting to co-opt teachers with its "Teacher of the Year" program.
Cynical Philanthropy
Philanthropy, the bequeathing of money for the betterment of society, has been a powerful cultural force since the first king gave the first coin to the first charitable cause. Over the centuries, the wealthy and the elite have given untold sums of wealth to make the world a better, more enlightened place - and in so doing, have helped to define the concept of civic-mindedness in modern civilization. The largess of oligarchs has built parks, music halls, and institutions of learning that have benefited all humankind, and for that, great benefactors like Alfred Nobel and Andrew Carnegie are revered by history. Their names, carved in the marble facades of grand buildings, are their legacy, as far as the public at-large is concerned; to the historian falls the sad duty of reminding us that there is always a context for giving, that altruism attested to in granite can serve as an historical smokescreen designed to obscure a lifetime of corporate malfeasance and personal excess.
It has probably always been so. Certainly by the time trade and commerce begat aristocracies so entrenched in their power that the elite were afforded the luxury of concern for their legacy, a cynical kind of philanthropy had taken hold amongst the sharing of the truly good-hearted. This kind of public giving was designed to buy in death the good reputation that a person may or may not have earned in life, as with Alexander the Great establishing a great library in a mighty city that bore his own name. Like all who would bend history to reflect themselves in a positive light, Alexander knew that associating himself with an unprecedented gathering of knowledge would speak more favorably to the ages far than if he were remembered solely for the glory and carnage of his conquests.
The use of philanthropy as a cynical form of historical propaganda reached its zenith with the robber barons of the late 19th century, though the people behind some of contemporary society’s most powerful corporate entities are beginning to give the Nobels and the Carnegies a run for their money. We live in an age in which television moguls make billion-dollar donations to the United Nations, media magnates affect national policy by the way they order it described, and snack-chip companies affix their names to venerated sporting events (and if you think that link’s bad, check out what happened to the former Peach Bowl). The scale of what an individual or corporation must donate in order to whitewash a history of misdeeds may have increased over time, but the screen of doing the public good remains a potent means to that end.
How Nobel of You
Matching the blatancy of the legacy-buying of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, will not be easy for the modern cynical philanthropist, however. Nobel’'s historical epiphany came in 1888, when his brother Ludwig passed away and a newspaper mistakenly published Alfred’'s obituary. It was entitled "The Merchant of Death is Dead," and described the Swedish chemist as a man who had gotten rich from helping men find better ways of killing one another. Profoundly disturbed by the revelation that his name was synonymous with military use of high explosives, Nobel, upon his death in 1896, left several million dollars (the figure sounds more impressive when rendered in kroners) to fund awards for work that benefited humankind. These awards, of course, eventually became the Nobel Prizes - and a scant century later, they have become the man's legacy, while his invention of TNT has become the historical footnote.
Men of Steely Visage
Guilt can be a powerful motivator for philanthropy, as with Andrew Carnegie, builder of hundreds of libraries in addition to the most famous music hall in the nation. The Scottish immigrant had lived a life out of a Horatio Alger story, rising from obscure beginnings to dominate steel production in the United States. A Social Darwinist, Carnegie believed that his achievements were scientific proof that he was more fit to survive in the cutthroat capitalist world of the industrial age than those who toiled in his factories and foundries; his philosophy virtually compelled Carnegie to regard these people as inferiors, and to treat them as such. Though his public rhetoric often supported the rights of workers to organize, when push came to shove, the weaver’s son put his own interests at the fore of his considerations.
This was the case when Carnegie threw his support behind plant manager Henry Frick during the Homestead Strike in 1892. Frick subsequently hired scabs and an army of 300 goons from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to escort them through the striker’s picket lines. In the ensuing violence, 11 union men and bystanders and 10 guards were killed. History records that the violence of the strike haunted Andrew Carnegie even as it besmirched his public reputation - but then again, the writing of history is generally the province of either the victor or the guy who paid the most.
If anything should have been haunting Carnegie, it was his partial culpability in a much greater tragedy that had occurred only a few years before the Homestead Strike. In 1879, he and about 50 aristocrats (among whom numbered Andrew Mellon, Henry Frick, and Philander Knox) chipped in to buy an old dam and reservoir near the town of South Fork, Pennsylvania. Throughout the 1880’s, the wealthy and privileged enjoyed the beauty and solace of the exclusive preserve, all the while dangerously modifying the dam to suit their patrician needs: they had it lowered by a few feet in order to allow for a two carriage-lane road, and installed in the spillway debris-catching screens, to prevent the escape of the expensive game fish with which they had stocked the reservoir. By the time of the inevitable disaster, water in the spillway was only four feet below the top of the dam.
In 1889, the ill-maintained earthworks burst, inundating the valley below with water from the South Fork Hunting & Fishing Club's private lake. The resultant flood destroyed several towns; the largest, Johnstown, now gives its name to the disaster. Property damage was estimated at $17 million, with over 2,200 souls perishing in the thoroughly-preventable deluge.
And how did men of wealth and privilege respond?
In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, the club contributed 1,000 blankets to the relief effort. A few of the club members, most notably Robert Pitcairn, served on relief committees. About half of the club members also contributed to the disaster relief effort, including Andrew Carnegie, whose company contributed $10,000. Later, he would rebuild Johnstown's library - that library building today houses the Johnstown Flood Museum (...snip...). However, no club member ever expressed a sense of personal responsibility for the disaster.
Johnstown Flood Museum (hyperlink in text removed – U.M.)
On Selling One's Soul to Posterity
Carnegie and Nobel, like many of their fellow captains of industry around the turn of the century, were able to buy redemption through public works, which has led history to forgive them many of their worst misdeeds. This established a precedent that has been noted by the nouveau riche of our time: be as big a bastard as you’d like in the boardroom, so long as you leave enough to charity to ensure that your name gets connected with something the public will long perceive as beneficial. Contemporary oligarchs like Bill Gates are thus willing to fund experimental school models regardless of their effectiveness, while Donald Trump (being unfamiliar with the word "gauche") affixes his name to anything he associates with "class."
The Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, has chosen the beneficiaries of its largess with more care than most philanthropies that claim to operate on behalf of others, and has done so with naught but public relations in mind. One has merely to look at the coded text of their stated objectives to see that theirs are not gifts for the public good, but - to their minds, anyway - for the good of the public:
To enhance the public charter school movement by targeting states and communities where market share of quality schools may be established. Specific investment areas include:
Planning, development and growth of quality charter schools
Supporting the growth of state charter school associations, resource centers and other charter related support organizations
Monitoring, promoting and disseminating information concerning quality and accountability issues
Organizations which may leverage investments in creating access to facilities financing alternatives for charter schools
And
The goal of the Foundation's school choice initiative is to support the design, implementation, and study of public policies that provide low-income K-12 students with the financial means to choose and attend high-quality public and private schools of choice.
In targeted states and cities, the Foundation supports:
Policy Advocacy: initiatives and organizations working to build support for public policies that provide low-income families with the financial means to choose and attend public and private schools of choice;
Program Implementation: organizations managing and strengthening publicly-funded scholarship programs;
Parent Information: initiatives to provide clear and useful information to families about available choice programs, participating schools, and the academic quality of those schools;
Research and Evaluation: longitudinal evaluations of the performance and effects of significant-scale school choice programs.
To which I respond: Screw "vouchers" and the theocratic horse they're riding in on, and charter schools - being anti-organized labor from inception - are a very bad idea.
The Walton's boosters love to trot out very impressive-sounding numbers – or at least, impressive until one puts them into perspective. The Walton Family Foundation has given over $1 billion to charities (of its $94 billion fortune), but much of that money that was spread over such a wide base that it will likely have little lasting impact. An excellent example of this is Wal-Mart Teacher of the Year (TOY?) Award, which provides cash prizes for teachers nominated by members of the community.
Wal-Mart touts the program as one which inspires teachers to excellence, but it is, at its heart, a form of cynical philanthropy designed to co-opt potential opposition to the Walton Foundation's extremist education policies. A $1000 prize like the one presented to teachers represents less than a single second's profit for Wal-Mart, a corporation with more wealth than most nations. But that kind of cash is received gratefully by underpaid, under-recognized educators – for whom a thousand bucks could represent upwards of a 5% one-time boost in income. The Walton Family both knows this and preys upon it.
To someone who didn't know a scam was afoot, it would probably appear that the Walton Foundation, with an absolutely minimal investment, allows community members to take an active role in recognizing outstanding teachers, shows the teaching community as a whole that Wal-Mart "cares" about education, and persuades individual teachers to be more favorably disposed toward Wal-Mart and the Walton Foundation's agenda. From Wal-Mart's perspective, this has the potential added benefit of undermining teacher support for their unions and professional associations, as the latter engage the Walton family in debate over the course of public education in America. If anyone objects to the cynical undertones of Walton Foundation philanthropy, the family can always crank up the noise machine and get Paul Harvey to make the don't-look-a-gift-horse-in-the-mouth argument to a public with scant attention for the politics of giving.
The Jockey Club
In looking closely at the Walton Foundation’s teacher recognition program, one is reminded less of the noble helping hand that an endowment can be - as when Sears, Roebuck & Co. President Julius Rosenwald built more than 5000 schools throughout the rural South (subsequently employing more than 14,000 teachers) in the 1920’s - and more of the coins casually tossed from the balconies of the Mexico City Jockey Club during the reign of Porfirio Diaz, thirty years earlier. There, the poor would gather for the chance to fight and claw in the dust as money and trinkets were tossed down by haughty industrialists, corrupt government officials, and the sycophants who attended them. The resulting peasant-on-peasant violence a source of amusement for the aristocrats, who laughed and teased the surging crowds by dangling and pretend-tossing the coins, the way one toys with a dog and a fetching-stick.
Philanthropy can and should be a great shaper of civilization, a means for those who have realized society’s dreams of success to leave a legacy of culture and gratitude to the unknown multitudes that helped, however indirectly, to lift them to the pinnacles of fortune. It is the undeniable prerogative of the endower to determine how that which they choose to bequeath should be directed, but with that prerogative comes a certain moral obligation concerning purity of motive. To be revered by history, a gift ought to be free of the taint of pandering. Barring that, a bequeathing to right past misdeeds should reflect a true spirit of penitence on the part of the giver, not a latter-day indulgence ponied up to avoid purgatory. To behave otherwise is to mock and muddle the veracity of history.
How many Peace Prizes absolve the father of high explosives for the military application of his invention? How many concert halls whitewash a lifetime spent fighting worker attempts to unionize? How many $1000 checks to get teachers to look past the fact that their prizes were drawn from the profits of sweatshop labor? The lines may vary with knowledge and perception of intent, but society should be under no obligation to receive with unquestioning gratitude a benevolence born of false pretense, nor history to preserve any less or more than a philanthropist’s true, fully-disclosed legacy.
The public should be as proud to receive a gift as a benefactor is to give it. For this reason alone, teachers should reject cynical philanthropic attempts by the Walton Foundation to obscure its profound negative impact on educational discourse in the modern political arena. The rights of workers to organize in their workplace and the plight of sweatshop laborers are worth more than thirty pieces of silver, and John Walton enjoys no more privilege to prescribe the moral tone of his own legacy than did the robber barons of the past.
Notes From the Cave: Work is going to be keeping this teacher pretty busy for the next couple of weeks, as is a major-league collaboration I’m working on with Swordsmith. Afghanistan, Part 3, is still on the way, as is a long-promised series on Libya, but I wanted to let y’all know that I may be asking a fellow historioranter (like guyermo or pico) to mind the Cave in the next week or three – and for those of you who keep track of such things, I have been in contact with the much-harried aphra behn, and boy, did she have a great idea for a future series...