The Distinctly American Tradition of Charity
Johanna Neuman

From the Puritans to Paul Newman, a history of American volunteerism

In December 1941, 26-year-old Rae Wilson wrote the editor of the North Platte, Neb., Daily Bulletin after having watched townspeople hand out food and notes of encouragement to soldiers on their way to combat in World War II. Wilson suggested that the community open a free canteen to serve the soldiers whose troop trains paused in North Platte while the steam engines took on water. Her letter launched one of the most inspiring home-front efforts of the war. When the trains made their brief stops en route to military bases in the West, North Platte put on a show. Young women attended each arrival with baskets and smiles, offering fruit, matches, and candy bars to the soldiers, while directing them to the canteen. Inside, a pianist provided music and local girls wearing their Sunday finest danced with the servicemen for a few moments. "For the next five years, volunteers welcomed every single troop train that came through North Platte with something good to eat and words of encouragement," Bob Greene wrote movingly in his book, Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen (2003). "More than 55,000 volunteers from 125 communities in Nebraska, Kansas and Colorado came to help." By 1946, North Platte had nurtured 6 million soldiers on their way to war -- and on their way home, too. One later wrote a thank-you published in the North Platte Telegraph. "To think that you people, to whom we all were strangers, would do all you did for us," he wrote. You "showed us that this was the real America, this is what we had fought and worked for and wanted to come back to."

Rae Wilson's story is as quintessentially American as it is familiar. According to a 2010 report released by the Corporation for National and Community Service, 63.4 million Americans volunteered to help their communities in 2009, an increase of 1.6 million from the year before. Together, they contributed 8.1 billion hours of service, for an estimated dollar value of nearly $169 billion.

This instinct to rally around a cause, to serve a greater good, has been with us since Colonial America. As John Winthrop led a group of English Puritans to Massachusetts Bay in 1630, he imparted the "model of Christian charity" that would define their colony. "We must bear one another's burdens," he told his fellow settlers. "We must not look only on our own things but also on the things of our brethren." In settlements like Jamestown and Plymouth, neighbors depended on one another to survive harsh winters and privation. The settlers raised barns, hosted quilting bees, and built common areas. "Every community established in the Bay Colony was obligated to take care of its own legal inhabitants," wrote University of Connecticut historian Robert Gross.

In the mid- to late 18th century, public service became less of a Christian mission and more of a civic duty. Benjamin Franklin, who would go on to establish a towering position in American history as a newspaper publisher, signer of the Declaration of Independence, diplomat, and inventor, led the way. When the streets of Philadelphia needed sweeping or lighting or paving, he gathered men and resources to the task. When fires threatened to destroy the city, he organized the nation's first volunteer fire company, an idea so compelling that cities up and down the Atlantic seaboard adopted it. "Franklin could be called the Founding Father of American voluntarism," says historian and biographer H.W. Brands. He also began an insurance company, a voluntary militia, and a philosophical society -- all, notes Brands, "based on the principle of individuals working together, uncoerced, for the common good."

Mindful of the gap in knowledge that separated the classes, Franklin borrowed an idea from Britain and founded America's first subscription library, where those of moderate means could gain access to the books once the exclusive purview of the elite. Soon similar libraries would open from Charleston to Boston. Franklin also founded the Junto Club, made up of shopkeepers and businessmen, to discuss other ways they might benefit their community.

New advocates.

As the middle class grew in America, people found more opportunities to serve. By the 1830s, two groups who felt their lack of power -- women, who had no right to vote, and the clergy, their political authority weakened by the constitutional separation of church and state -- formed benevolent societies to focus on issues they felt hurt society. They advocated for ending illiteracy and abuse of prisoners, among other causes. What Gross called their "crusading spirit of reform" led to the great antebellum movements against slavery, cruelty, and "drink" that helped define the country for generations.

"All the institutions that we take for granted were started somewhere, somehow, by people who were in opposition to the status quo," observes Susan Ellis, president of Energize Inc., which trains volunteers worldwide, and coauthor of By the People (2005), which chronicles those reforms. "The stereotype is that volunteers are 'helpers,' but history suggests that they are change makers."

In 1840, Dorothea Dix learned that mentally ill patients in Massachusetts were often chained naked to bedposts or housed in cages and "lashed into obedience." Soon, the teacher from Boston was traveling the country, campaigning for reform, and working with legislatures to create a system of state mental hospitals. Under Dix's prodding, Congress passed a bill to set aside millions of acres in land grants to support asylums, but it was vetoed.

Perhaps one of the most extraordinary examples of service came from a woman who could only act after overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped the Maryland plantation where she had been born into slavery almost 30 years before. Once she reached freedom herself, she returned south to rescue her family using the "Underground Railroad," a secret network of routes and safe houses first started by abolitionists and clergymen in Boston in the 18th century. Not content with saving only those closest to her, she would make the dangerous journey south 13 or more times to guide more than 300 slaves to northern states or Canada -- this despite rewards offered for her capture. In all, Tubman and others would help an estimated 100,000 slaves escape to freedom.

The Civil War would rally many to service, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. In the North, women's aid societies -- sometimes led by men -- canvassed homes for needed supplies. In the South, counterparts provided clothing for Confederate soldiers and took up collections to buy gunboats. As the war dragged on, shortages in drugs, surgical instruments, and hospital supplies affected both sides. One woman was determined to help.

Clara Barton was the daughter of a Mason who taught her to "seek and comfort the afflicted." She began working for local charities when war broke out, trying to boost the spirits of soldiers from her home in Boston. Inspired to do more, she advertised for medical supplies in the Massachusetts newspapers. The response was so robust she had to use her apartment to house all the bandages, medicines, food, and lanterns that came in. By the summer of 1862, she and several associates drove the goods on mules to Union field hospitals in Virginia. By August, she had persuaded Army officials to let her tend the wounded in field hospitals. "At a time when we were entirely out of dressings of every kind, she supplied us with everything, and while the shells were bursting in every direction," she stayed "dealing out shirts" and "preparing soup," Army surgeon James Dunn wrote in a letter home, calling her "a homely angel."

Far-reaching relief.

Clara Barton's impact on the war or its medical care is difficult to calculate, but it is hard to overestimate her impact on volunteerism. Tapping the same sources of support she mined during the war, Barton and a group of friends founded an American chapter of the International Red Cross in 1881. Uniquely, she broadened the definition of relief to include any disaster (as when the group provided food, shelter, and medical care to the 25,000 victims of the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pa.), whether in the United States or beyond its borders. She vigorously lobbied Congress to recognize the organization and to ratify the Geneva Convention that defined protections for those injured in war. As a result, Congress designated the American Red Cross an official counterpart to international Red Cross agencies, with the authority to help at home and abroad. These days, with 35,000 employees and more than a half million volunteers in 700 chapters, the Red Cross has trained 15 million Americans in disaster relief.

Toward the end of the century, as the country industrialized and Americans moved to the cities, opportunities for volunteerism grew too. Jane Addams, born to a prosperous Illinois family, was restless with the life of a well-to-do young woman. Visiting Toynbee Hall, Britain's first settlement house, she hit on the idea of importing this radical notion -- social workers living among the poor in industrialized neighborhoods -- to America. She and college friend Ellen Gates Starr rented a mansion in Chicago's industrial district, moving in so they could become "good neighbors" to the population they hoped to serve, and asked their circle for help. Wealthy families donated money to the experiment. Their children got an education in giving as volunteers. Within the first year, Hull House attracted 50,000 visitors.

Eventually the concept grew to a complex of 13 buildings and a web of diverse services that welled out of need. Addams offered the Chicago Public Library the ground floor rent-free to open a branch. Art classes were offered in a studio and gallery, and the University of Chicago offered extension courses. There even was one of the city's first public baths -- crucial to immigrants often housed in tenements without indoor plumbing. Addams persuaded the landlord of a nearby decrepit building to tear it down, and she built the city's first public playground. Through it all she preached egalitarianism across class lines. "The good we seek for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secure for all of us," she said.

Her impact on the social welfare profession, and on charitable organizations, was profound. Until then, many groups took a somewhat judgmental and paternalistic view of those in need. The charities "saw the poor largely as moral failures," says Mark Mattaini, an associate professor at the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois-Chicago. "Addams and other settlement house workers treated those in the neighborhood in much more respectful and human ways -- as citizens, not as clients." Ever since, he said, aid groups have focused less on the pathology of those in need and more on how to build the health of the neighborhood around them. Gradually, he said, because of Addams, they became advocates.

The Depression changed the landscape of volunteerism and giving yet again. At its worst in 1933, 12 million Americans were out of work. Soup kitchens and bread lines, often run by churches or charities, formed all over the country, providing free if simple food to anyone in need. With one fourth of the labor force unemployed and men roaming the streets, having left their families in shame at not being able to provide for them, volunteerism became the work of innovation. Missions offered shelter. Doctors gave free care. Business clubs paid for one meal a day for the needy at neighborhood restaurants.

Soon the government began taking up the work of social welfare. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal ushered in a variety of alphabet agencies, from the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) to the FWP (Federal Writers' Project), designed to build infrastructure and provide income to the unemployed. In some cases, the programs supplanted work done by charities. But when the country entered World War II, volunteering again soared. Families collected newspapers and tin cans and donated blood. Veterans served on local draft boards and students joined the Victory Corps, getting academic credit for scrap drives and bond sales. Some families searched their attics for photographs taken in Europe and Asia that might provide hints about recent construction or road changes.

And in 1942, when President Roosevelt announced a shortage of rubber, the Boy Scouts took up the campaign, asking motorists at gas stations to donate their floor mats. The slogan of the day was: "Give till it hurts." By 1942, more than 5 million Americans were providing wartime services of all kinds -- running local civil defense programs, manning volunteer fire brigades, tracking the skies for enemy aircraft by plane (the Civil Air Patrol) or from the ground. And as the war dragged on, volunteers took on the sadder task of sending more than 27 million Red Cross bundles to American prisoners of war in Europe and the Far East.

Defeating polio.

Amid the zeal of wartime patriotism, volunteers also found time to work for other causes. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis -- founded in 1938 by a wheelchair-bound FDR and now called the March of Dimes -- kept marching in the cause of polio research and care. During the Depression, volunteers would arrive at homes with cardboard sheets punched with cutouts for dimes, asking families to deposit what they could for collection in a few weeks. From 1938 to 1955, they raised 4 billion dimes. As the epidemic spread, efforts to find a cure went community-wide, with politicians, newspapers, and clergy rallying to the cause. One night in 1950, 2,300 volunteers in Phoenix knocked on doors for donations. In some poor neighborhoods, Hispanic and African-American women, long ignored in civic projects, stood in front of their homes, eager to help. Within an hour, using paper bags and Mason jars, the all-volunteer army deposited $44,890 into the foundation's depleted coffers. Even when the Salk polio vaccine was ready for testing, volunteers drove the effort. Plans originally called for employing 10,000 clerks. But the foundation argued that its volunteers would do a more conscientious job, including logging millions of pages of test results, which they did.

As a rule, "Americans think if they have a problem, they ought to get a group of citizens together to address it," says Carl Milofsky, a sociologist at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. "It's a distinctive American style, a tradition of grass-roots action." Perhaps at no time is this seen so dramatically as during a natural or manmade disaster. In the spring of 1997, 27,700 volunteers from 14 states tried to keep the Red River from flooding its banks in North Dakota and Minnesota. On April 15, sandbag work went 24/7, and before long, volunteers had filled 1.3 million bags. But five days later, the river rose to 54 feet in Grand Forks, N.D., 6 feet beyond the previous high. Thousands of homes were inundated, and a fire charred much of the city core, forcing 50,000 residents to flee. Still, the outpouring of volunteers both before and after the flood left a strong impression. "I've never been so impressed by such a rallying spirit in the midst of a game of chicken with nature," wrote Kasey-Dee Gardner, who covered the disaster for KVLY/KXJB television. As the community struggled to recover, volunteers once more poured in to help clean up damaged homes or to haul away the flood-damaged possessions rotted by sewage and mold.

Over the years, Americans have also shown themselves eager to respond when catastrophes struck overseas, as in the Asian tsunami of 2004 or the floods this summer in Pakistan. When an earthquake hit Haiti this year, so many U.S. doctors wanted to give of their time that the Northwest Haiti Christian Mission had to start a waiting list.

In recent years, the boundary between public and private good works has softened. Politicians have long embraced volunteers, both as a great force for change and for moral inspiration, while continuing to respect their autonomy. Herbert Hoover was convinced volunteer efforts could ward off the worst pain of the Depression. More recent presidents have continued this support of private initiatives. George H.W. Bush launched the "Thousand Points of Light" foundation to encourage giving and volunteering. Bill Clinton unleashed AmeriCorps, which offers government grants to organizations that recruit and train volunteers for critical needs in education, health, or public safety. George W. Bush offered government assistance to faith-based groups providing needed community services. And Barack Obama has endorsed several nonprofit organizations, including Teach for America, which trains volunteer students to teach in inner cities; the Nurse-Family Partnership, which sends nurses on home visits in poor neighborhoods to assure good prenatal care; and the Harlem Children's Zone, a charter school that provides comprehensive services (following the Jane Addams model) from classes for new parents to medical care and an organic garden for school lunches.

Another trend in American philanthropy the last few decades is to combine the muscle of the private sector with the social conscience of the nonprofit world. In 1982, actor Paul Newman and writer A.E. Hotchner founded Newman's Own, a company that makes all-natural salad dressings, sauces, and other products, donating the profits ($300 million so far) to charities from Feeding America, which supplies food banks all over the country, to Fisher House, a foundation that builds housing for the relatives of combat veterans hospitalized with war injuries. The company motto: "Shameless exploitation in pursuit of the common good."

The enterprise has become a family affair. Newman's widow, actress Joanne Woodward, serves on the board, daughter Clea Newman Soderlund is vice president of the Newman's Own Foundation, and daughter Nell launched a line of organic products in 1993. But Newman, who helped found the Safe Water Network to aid villages abroad in maintaining clean water supplies (Page 22), also created camps for kids with serious medical conditions. Named "Hole in the Wall" for the gang in his most famous movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the camps offer an escape for children with chronic diseases such as cancer, offering them treehouses, adaptive equestrian programs and other sports, campfires and crafts, and mostly "a chance to do things they never imagined possible due to the complexity of their medical needs," camp organizers say.

Volunteers of all ages and professions make up at least half of the staff, arriving singly or in groups, like the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity. Today, there are 14 camps, with more in development, serving children from 45 countries on five continents. Since the first camp opened in Connecticut in the late 1980s, more than 200,000 kids and families have participated, at no charge. Before his death in 2008, Newman was asked why he started the program. He mused about the luck in his own life, and the hardship visited on "the lives of others, especially children, who might not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it."

The work of Newman and so many other Americans directly reflects Ben Franklin's belief that citizens must share a commitment to the greater good. More than 200 years after Franklin's death, volunteering still forms the core of the American character. Says Claire Gaudiani, author of a new book about American giving called Generosity Unbound, Franklin believed one served "not to save your soul but to build a strong society." Or, as the folks in North Platte, Neb., who fed 6 million soldiers on their way to war, might say: "It's just what we do."

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