Giving to Get Power: Wrong-Headed Philanthropy

When the Colorado billionaire Philip Anschutz bought into the Los Angeles Kings hockey franchise, his co-owner, Edward Roski, took him around Los Angeles to meet some of the people he would have to please in the months and years that lay ahead. Between handshakes, Mr. Roski advised his new partner where best to direct his charitable giving. “Ed has done a very good job of directing us toward the right activities and causes,” exulted Kings President Tim Leiweke after the tour.

How nice for the chosen charities, whichever they turn out to be, to have the 18th-richest man in America pointed in their direction. All non-profit groups should have such luck.

But the inference in Mr. Leiweke’s remark is not entirely charitable. There is more at stake here than the endowments of the city’s great universities, the status of its museums, or the research capabilities of its private hospitals. The Kings would like a new downtown arena — the one they play in now, far from the city’s center, is regarded by most fans as an inconvenient dump — and making the right charitable contacts can help insure that they get their wish.

What Mr. Roski and Mr. Anschutz both know about contemporary America, and more particularly about Los Angeles, is that charity can generate power. In fact, few things generate power faster in some cities than strategic philanthropy. The trick is to know exactly where to put money to make the right people happy.

It can be a very expensive process, and the wrong gift to the wrong institution can backfire on the donor, ruining his or her true intentions. There are consultants who charge big fees to counsel would-be philanthropists. Mr. Anschutz got the advice free.

Using charity to buy influence isn’t new, of course. It has been an integral part of urban power-grubbing for centuries. But it appears to be occurring with increasing frequency and transparency. To those who believe that philanthropy belongs to civil society and not to business, however, the rise in the number of such quid-pro-quo philanthropic arrangements diminishes a field that has aspired to such lofty goals as enhancing literacy, curing diseases, and ameliorating poverty.

Had Mr. Anschutz purchased a sports franchise in a city like Boston or New York, where philanthropy is more closely linked to social status than business expedience, he might have received different advice. New York’s Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, would probably be much less impressed with a grant to Columbia University than he would be with the number of labor leaders on Mr. Anschutz’s Rolodex, or the campaign contributions of his business partner. Donald Trump, who has had his way with Manhattan for most of his working life, has never been considered a serious philanthropist, in or out of the city.

That is not to suggest that money can’t buy power in New York, Boston, or any other city. It’s just less likely to be philanthropic money, which might gain you a listing in the social register but probably not a downtown site for your sports arena. The number of jobs you’re creating — especially union jobs — is much more likely to impress Mayor Giuliani than a receipt from the local art museum.

What seems to be common to strategic philanthropy in every city — and in every era, for that matter — is narcissism. Try to find 50 private foundations in America (and there are 43,000) that aren’t named after their benefactor. And how often are large grants made to a museum or hospital without a brass plaque appearing on some wall with the donor’s name deeply inscribed? Grants have been withdrawn and pledges canceled, in fact, because inscriptions weren’t quite big enough.

We honor our benefactors, as we should. They have built much of our civilization. But for some reason, we seem to prefer high-profile donors and at some level suspect the motives of — and even distrust — the anonymous donor. When a modest Irish-American business leader, whose desire for anonymity I shall respect by not repeating his name, was caught in the act of secretly channeling hundreds of millions of dollars through offshore banks into American charities, he was “outed” like some kind of crackpot. Why give all that money away without any credit or gratitude, asked suspicious pundits? What are his motives? How could his business have prospered so without recognition of his charity?

Our adoration of the high-profile donor, of course, plays directly into the hands of strategic philanthropists searching for a legal way to lubricate the wheels of power. It’s impossible to quantify the linkage between philanthropy and business in Los Angeles or any other city, but what seems clear is that they feed off each other in ways that are generally good for business — and a lot better for some charities than for others. Always favored, of course, are the arts, which now find themselves deeply enmeshed in the development schemes of urban renewal across the nation.

Chambers of Commerce in at least a dozen major American cities have discovered that the arts, if performed and exhibited in safe and splendid surroundings, can be a magnet for tourism and, thereby, a binding force of downtown revival. Thus, “funding the arts” takes on new meaning not only for corporate patrons seeking redemption and parvenus seeking acceptance but also for local foundations whose trustees regard their opera, ballet, or symphony not only as civic enterprises but also as market commodities. Support for creative processes becomes scarce as “art grants” are made to market-research firms for “audience enhancement.”

Of course, the artistic amusements of the elite have long been its favored beneficiaries. The Medicis discovered that they could expand their political influence throughout Tuscany and make it last for centuries by patronizing the arts in Florence, just as my father learned 400 years later that he could build his little brewery in Cleveland by helping George Szell build the best symphony orchestra in America.

But as power philanthropy grows and pays off in new ways for its donors, we stand to lose the benefits of more traditional grant making. If the incentives that drive Mr. Anschutz to donate money in Los Angeles displace the motives that drove Andrew Carnegie to create a nationwide public-library system, or the imagination that prompted John D. Rockefeller to eliminate hookworm in the rural South, or the utter perversity of Margaret Olivia Sage — who named her foundation after her parsimonious husband, Russell, and put the money to work on projects he would have despised — we will have lost something special and indigenously American about our philanthropy.

As charity becomes a factor in the downtown renewal of cities and as big-ticket philanthropy emerges as a competitive parlor game of the celebrity rich, I suppose we need to accept the possibility that compassion may not be the prime motivating force behind largesse. But after lamenting the quid pro quos of big-city fund raising, perhaps we should be thankful that the charitable contribution is replacing outright palm greasing as a means to obtain permits, power, and sports arenas in our civilization.

Giving to get power will surely remain troublesome to those who believe that true philanthropy — the kind that literally means “love of humanity” — supports access for the handicapped, environmental activism, and storefront neighborhood services for the poor as well as great operas, liver-transplant units, and shining hilltop museums.

Mark Dowie, a former publisher and editor of Mother Jones magazine, lives in Point Reyes Station, Cal., and is currently working on a book about foundations. A version of this piece appeared in The Los Angeles Times.