October 3, 2002 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Of Robert H. Bremner, the distinguished historian of philanthropy who died last month at age 85, Daniel Boorstin, a former librarian of Congress, wrote, “[He] is neither a sentimentalist, a cynic, nor a muckraker. He is a…sympathetic historian.”
Mr. Boorstin had commissioned Mr. Bremner to write what has become a classic of the nonprofit world, American Philanthropy, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1960 as part of its American Civilization series and reissued in 1982.
It was a modest 186-page work, free of footnotes, framed in easily digestible prose — “a pleasant narrative,” a critic wrote in The American Historical Review in faint condescension. In contrast, a leading historian of the field, Barry Karl of the University of Chicago, extolled the book for “[extending] the meaning of philanthropy in its American context back into the origins of American history.”
In a typical passage on the early decades of American charity, Mr. Bremner wrote, “To some guardians of conscience neither the ends nor the means of conventional giving warranted the name of philanthropy. Emerson…warned the ‘foolish philanthropist’ not to come to his door begging for ‘your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots, and the thousandfold Relief Societies.’ Thoreau scorned ‘a charity which dispenses the crumbs that fall from its overload tables, which are left after its feasts!’ He wondered at the boasts of men who gave one-tenth of their income to charity while keeping nine-tenths for themselves.”
That Mr. Bremner never rose to academic superstar may have had something to do with the fact that he seldom wandered from his native Ohio, where he was raised and educated. Ohio State University, where he obtained his doctorate and spent his entire teaching career, was sniffed at as a backwater by the priests of academic temples.
His modesty is legendary.
Another leading scholar of philanthropy, Stanley N. Katz, director of Princeton University’s Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, observed, “He is such a quiet and self-effacing fellow that I sometimes think the academic profession has not recognized the tremendous contributions he has made.”
“Absolutely no interest in status,” said another, “just the opposite of the academic scrambler and pusher.”
Mr. Bremner’s pathbreaking book appeared just a few years after scholars who met at Princeton bemoaned the gaps in research on philanthropy and set an agenda for nudging the subject into the academic mainstream.
Presiding over the birth of another important scholarly subdiscipline — the history of families and children — Mr. Bremner was general editor of Children and Youth in America, a three-volume, 2,600 page work published by Harvard University Press. The series corrected the omission of the treatment of minority groups in earlier documentary histories. The noted education critic Joseph Featherstone termed it “a comprehensive and often somber presentation of the place of childhood in our national life — far and away the best chronicle of public policy toward children we now have.”
The work of which Mr. Bremner was most proud was From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United States, which prefigured Michael Harrington’s classic book on the poor, The Other America. Unlike the spare American Philanthropy, From the Depths is heavy with scholarly furniture — twice as long as the earlier work, fully footnoted, with a 37-page bibliography and a portfolio of photographs, etchings, and cartoons on poverty.
Later, at the behest of the Social Science Research Council and the Civil War Centennial Commission, Mr. Bremner wrote The Public Good, an exploration of philanthropy and social welfare in the Civil War era.
Despite his lifetime engagement in the philanthropy field, no stars clouded his eyes or blurred his vision.
“Something about philanthropy seems to go against the American grain,” he once noted. “We may be willing to help others, but we are not humble enough to appreciate the efforts of those who would bend down to help us.”
Mr. Bremner traced the roots of skepticism from “the lower-middle class cynical attitude of H.L. Mencken…to the populist view…of Congressman Wright Patman, to the leftists or radicals who are suspicious even of the public uses of wealth.” At the opposite pole, he said, was a tendency to overpraise philanthropy.
Mr. Bremner’s work on philanthropy arose from his research on the Progressive Era at the turn of the 19th century. His dissertation, which dealt with figures in Ohio’s “civic revival,” presaged a lifelong liberal belief, including support of advocacy by the nonprofit world. It was reprinted in 1994, a half-century after it was written, by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.
Unlike that of many a noted scholar, Mr. Bremner’s career was marked by an extraordinary concern for the advancement of his students.
In 1989, several of them joined in publishing For the General Welfare: Essays in Honor of Robert H. Bremner. The editors wrote, “His humane capacity for arousing historical curiosity…and his ongoing interest in the lives of his students reveal a rare and precious quality in this modest, brilliant teacher and scholar…who enriches the lives of all those he touches.”
Mr. Bremner’s absorption with the connections between literature and history blossomed in the 1994 work Giving: Charity and Philanthropy in History, a rich journey through the eyes and minds of more than 250 writers and characters in their works — stories, poems and ballads, scripture and sermon, novels, biographies, essays, and plays.
Almost until his last breath, Robert Bremner added to his legacy — with book reviews, work with Learning to Give, an organization that promotes the teaching of philanthropic values, and an essay titled “Dealing With Misgivings About Giving.”
“It is important for those who seek to encourage the study of giving to deal frankly with these misgivings,” he wrote. “Doing so makes the topic much more interesting than it would otherwise be and clarifies the relationship between organized giving and generosity, a national trait of which Americans are justifiably, if immodestly, proud.”
Richard Magat, senior fellow at Community Resources Exchange, is the former president of the Edward W. Hazen Foundation and author of
Unlikely Partners: Philanthropic Foundations and the Labor Movement (Cornell University Press, 1999).
