Social Research Can Make a Difference

The philanthropic tradition of supporting research for “social betterment” is marking its 100-year anniversary this year, and looking back today, this approach to charitable giving seems more relevant than ever.

Credit for ushering in what marked a new era in philanthropy goes to the Russell Sage Foundation, which was established in 1907. At a time still divided by Gilded Age concentrations of wealth and poverty, the foundation pioneered a tradition in which social-scientific research and policy-reform ideas were explicitly and unapologetically linked — and in which both would be used to search for a reorienting set of ideologies and social values that would undo the legacy of laissez-faire individualism.

Although Russell Sage earned one of the most notorious fortunes of the Gilded Age, his widow, Margaret Olivia Sage, used the millions of dollars she inherited to institutionalize a new philanthropic approach, devoted more to changing underlying conditions of social inequity than to providing direct charity for poor people.

The Russell Sage Foundation backed research that was rigorously empirical. But its research was also crafted to advance progressive ideas for change, in large part by cultivating a view of social problems as collective and interconnected rather than as individual and isolated, and by fleshing out programs of public action in response to the findings of scholars.

Much has changed over the course of a century to create a sense of distance from this early spirit. Philanthropy and social research have become more professionalized and scientific, detached from the arena of public policy and reform.

Liberal foundations in particular have been circumspect about articulating any but the most generalized sets of values, and in the wake of legislative proscriptions have shied away from making grants that might be construed as direct political engagement. The larger philanthropic landscape has of late been transformed, not only by the rise of spectacular new fortunes but also by the increasing number and influence of conservative foundations and the rightward shift in political culture that the emergence of these foundations represents.

And yet the problems of inequality and social neglect are deepening, leading commentators to label ours “a new Gilded Age.”

That is why it is worth looking back at the lessons offered by the foundations established at a time when the concentration of wealth was coupled with the rampant political corruption satirized by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in the novel that gave the original era its name.

The Gilded Age was anchored in ideas and ideological doctrines that were used to justify and sustain its vastly unequal social order. Laissez faire economics and Social Darwinism were prominent among them, but so were the moral prerogatives associated with upper-class charity and Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. The Russell Sage Foundation did not abandon the charitable tradition, but it did challenge the Gilded Age belief system through the research it financed and in its conception of how research could foster changes in policy.

In the years after its founding, the Sage foundation became a virtual incubator of progressive research and policy ideas. In programs that combined grants, direct research, publication, and community-based social surveys and exhibits, it established itself as a recognized center of expertise on the leading social issues of the day, including low-wage industrial work, housing and homelessness, urban planning, juvenile justice, social-work practice, and consumer credit.

In some instances, the foundation’s research would be closely linked to specific policy changes, as was the case with its longstanding campaign against predatory lending.

More generally, however, the foundation sought to provoke change by raising questions about the consequences of unregulated industrial capitalism and social neglect. Most distinctive about the Russell Sage Foundation’s progressive philanthropy — and what gives it contemporary relevance — was its underlying vision of socially purposive research.

The purpose of research, the foundation believed, was not only empirical and scientific but deeply ethical as well. It was to inform a broad and broadly inclusive conversation about the rights and obligations of individuals, governments, corporations, and civil society during a time of rapid social and economic change. It was to introduce progressive values into that conversation, by pointing out the contradictions between economic practices and democratic ideal.

The purpose of research was meant to create a platform for a much more accessible, public, and democratic form of civic engagement and deliberation than existing political venues allowed. For this, the foundation would use all the tools of inquiry and dissemination available, including an expansive repertoire of documentary photography, maps, and inventive visual displays.

Nowhere were these aspirations more fully captured than in the foundation’s first major undertaking, a massive investigation of social, economic, and environmental conditions in industrial Pittsburgh conducted in 1907-8.

Pittsburgh, of course, had tremendous symbolic significance as a launchpad for change-oriented philanthropy, as home to Andrew Carnegie’s vast steelworks but also of his crushing defeat of labor in the Homestead strike of 1892.

The Pittsburgh Survey, in turn, became the leading edge of progressive reform investigation, drawing on scores of community-based and nationally recruited contributors, and on an extraordinary range of visual and documentary evidence, including the pioneering social photography of Lewis Hine.

Photography, Mr. Hine realized, could be used as a tool for social investigation and analysis by visually framing problems like child labor and poverty as the consequences of unregulated capitalism and social neglect.

Eventually published by the foundation in six volumes, the results of the Pittsburgh Survey were initially serialized in the leading journal of social work, Charities and the Commons, and widely displayed in the civic exhibits that had by then become progressivism’s stock in trade. Its extensive findings would be cited for decades, especially in struggles over protective labor legislation.

But what mattered most about the survey was that its richly documented findings about society were anchored in a framework of values and ideas: about the value of working-class “life and labor”; about employers’ responsibility to pay living wages and respect fair labor standards; about the shared nature of industrial risk and economic insecurity; about wealth concentration as a threat to representative democracy; about social responsibility for child health and welfare; about government and civil society as institutions for representing a broader public interest.

Such ideas did not suggest any one agenda for change or a preordained set of findings. They left plenty of room for internal disagreement and were conspicuously silent on the glaring inequalities of race.

Their influence would be felt, though, in the profound shift in political culture toward a “new” liberalism that combined political freedom with economic regulation and expanded social protections, and that eventually formed part of the intellectual infrastructure of the New Deal welfare state.

Ironically, the notion that “ideas matter” is these days a lesson liberal foundations are urged to learn from the right. That is due in part to the extraordinary success of the conservative “counterrevolution” in politics, and the role of ideologically conservative foundations in resurrecting “free” markets, “traditional” morals, and laissez-faire governance as political ideals.

Though themselves deeply engaged in the political “war of ideas,” and in producing the knowledge to fight it, leaders of conservative philanthropy have called on foundations to confine themselves to charitable uplift, and to uphold the virtues of capitalism in their programs.

Especially important, they have devoted themselves to changing the social and policy conversation, by focusing on government — and liberalism, with its emphasis on collective need and responsibility — as the source of the problem and on individual morality as the response.

Faced with this challenge to their missions and values, liberal foundations will find more meaningful lessons by looking to their own progressive pasts. In the tradition of philanthropy started a century ago, they won’t find ready-made answers to the problems of inequality, “life and labor,” and unmet needs that are back on the agenda today.

What they will find is a tradition of social research that made a difference in how those problems were debated and understood: to be sure, by subjecting them to rigorous standards of investigation, but also by framing them as questions of social ethics, and in ways that were accessible to a diverse citizenry.

They will also find a tradition of research that helped to introduce progressive values of economic fairness, equity, and social responsibility into the social-policy conversation, and with them, an expanded vision of what politics, social policy, and philanthropy could achieve.

Alice O’Connor, an associate professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Social Science for What? Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up, published in April by Russell Sage Foundation Books as part of the foundation’s centennial book series.