Book Reviews

Helping Others, Helping Ourselves: Power, Giving and Community Identity in Cleveland, Ohio, 1880-1930. By Laura Tuennerman-Kaplan. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001. 222 pp. Paper, $29.00, ISBN 0-87338-711-2.)

Until the New Deal era, much social support in the U.S. came through private philanthropy. In considering the means and ends of such private philanthropy, historians have explored "top-down" philanthropy whereby wealthy Americans gave funds and endowed non-profit organizations to shape society in particular ways. When Andrew Carnegie, for example, chose to finance public libraries he was not merely expressing a benign belief in the power of reading. He gave his money to support his idea that the less fortunate should not be provided direct aid, but rather given the indirect means by which they could choose to help themselves. For Carnegie and other wealthy philanthropists, thus, giving was a way to control other groups in the U.S.

In Helping Others, Helping Ourselves, Laura Tuennerman-Kaplan has written a social analysis of philanthropy that moves beyond this top-down approach by shifting from philanthropy of the wealthy to that of more "ordinary" people in Cleveland and asking how and why they chose to give to others within their community. She admits that such philanthropy too was an exercise in power, but insists that the "giving" of more ordinary people was rooted in their sense of belonging to Cleveland and that patterns of giving reveal "a social relation, one that both reflected and shaped society" (150). In her Introduction and Chapter 1, Tuennerman-Kaplan explains that her "bottom-up" investigation of Cleveland's giving patterns will illustrate philanthropy as "an embedded social relation" that exposes "networks of givers and receivers" who were "working in interrelated ways to provide the goods and services necessary in life" within the city (23). Her next three chapters trace out these ideas by presenting a broad overview of giving in Cleveland from early charitable endeavors to the more systematic, progressive-era models of philanthropy. Chapter 2 examines the pre- to immediate post-Civil War efforts that were primarily voluntaristic, generally motivated by religion, and practiced heavily by women. Private welfare institutions such as the Protestant Orphan Asylum and St. Mary's and St. Vincent's Orphan Asylums, for example, were permanent representations of such efforts. Chapter 3 explores the historical shift from voluntarism to the more centralized activities that characterized the Progressive Era when elite families such as the Rockefellers endowed charitable foundations; and organizations such as the City Federation of Women's Clubs (1902) were founded to "coordinate the educational, civic, and welfare activities of women's clubs throughout the city" (47). Both kinds of activities, she argues, were distinct from earlier giving efforts, and both represented attempts of an expanding socio-economic elite to control and order the city to suit their values as new immigrants poured into it (51). Chapter 4, on the other hand, shows how ethnicity, gender, and religious orientation caused other Clevelanders simultaneously to found an array of church societies, fraternal orders, and self-improvement clubs. The money and time members gave to these organizations were, in the author's analysis, a means to build community networks, "to create and maintain social relationships" that would in turn reinforce "specific community identities based on class, gender, race, ethnicity, and religion" (81).

Page 1 of 3, Next >>