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Johanna Neuman
From the Puritans to Paul Newman, a history of American volunteerism
In
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. "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
Rae Wilson's story is as quintessentially American as it is familiar.
According to a report released by the
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 inhabitants," wrote
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
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
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,
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 "
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
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
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
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
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 (
And in 1942, when President Roosevelt announced a shortage of rubber, the
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
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
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
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
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 (
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
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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The Distinctly American Tradition of Charity