Patrician Philanthropy in America: The Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

For a variety of reasons, patricians, men and women of wealth and genealogical distinction, were active in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American philanthropy. The roles played by three patrician philanthropists--Josephine Shaw Lowell, Robert Treat Paine, and Joseph Lee-- are in many respects typical of the activities of others of the period. In general, they distrusted poor people and felt that poverty was mainly, although not entirely, a consequence of personal failings. Nevertheless, patricians felt a responsibility, dictated in part by class origins, to alleviate poverty and serve the poor. Although they opposed movements which allegedly threatened institutional independence, certain trends, such as the emergence of large-scale organizations and the professionalization of social work, were inevitable. Social work professionalism, although unopposed by the patricians and even supported by them, reduced the patrician role in philanthropy.