The Greater Good: How Philanthropy Drives the American
Economy and Can Save Capitalism

By Claire Gaudiani

Preface

I feel highly motivated to tell the story of America’s unique and powerful brand of generosity because of what I have seen and learned during 13 years as president of Connecticut College and four years as volunteer president of the New London Development Corporation.  In both cases, my job was to call on people to be generous, to think beyond their own narrow personal interests and reach out for the common/greater good.  So over the years, I have seen the generosity of donors, wealthy and not.  Some families had been donating to causes for generations.  Others had never made a monetary gift. 

In both of these non-profit settings, college and urban economic development, I saw how personal generosity worked, and sometimes did not work.  In my service learning course called Literature, Service, and Social Reflection, I saw how the younger generation gives and how they react to the generous work they see the older generation doing. They expect us to address the nation’s equity problems.   For more than a decade now, I have seen how present and menacing selfishness, demagoguery, and discrimination are. How fragile democracy is and how easy it would be for it to ebb away.   I am always struck, even since September 11, by how much Americans take our tradition of generosity for granted. We focus so rarely on this amazing quality though it has been so powerful and has remained so widely shared.  Mostly, I am worried that we could lose this quality if more of us don’t nurture it.  Without our citizen generosity, our country would not be the same.  Neither its democracy nor its economy would be the same. 

So as I completed both these jobs, I decided to think more about the role of generosity, why it is so important in the US, where the tradition came from, and why giving matters going forward.

I did not always feel this curiosity about my country.   For all the years I taught my field of French Literature in college, I also pretty much ignored the qualities like generosity in American culture.  I always did volunteer work, but despite the fact that my sisters and brothers and in fact, my husband and I, were all scholarship students, I did not question how those donations were made to Harvard, Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Princeton and Connecticut College.  All the while I was living in the States and raising our children here, I never thought about the fact that if we had all been born in France, our fate may have been quite different.  Maybe we would not have been able to attend some of the finest institutions in the country as we did.    Certainly my two grandfathers’ fates would have been different.  The French system would not have likely awarded a place in a premier medical school to a poor young immigrant who had arrived from Italy in 1889.  This gentleman, my mother’s father, ended up graduating first in his class at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1907.  The French system might not have let a brilliant young surgeon trained in Italy and Germany practice and pursue research in surgery from 1911 on as happened to my father’s father in New York. I had always heard stories about their generation’s generosity to others in New York.  How my mother’s father had gone back to the poorest neighborhood in New York to practice medicine among those who needed him most — other immigrants like himself.  

Somehow none of it registered for me.  I was proud of both of them as well as my grandmothers but I was not proud of my country and all the opportunities that it had offered them.  And, even if they had an uphill battle against “Italians need not apply” signs, they got into the best universities.   My grandfather sent his only son to MIT in 1923.  My father attended West Point, Class of ’43.   They all made progress, like millions of others did.  They served in the world wars and contributed lifetimes to their adopted country — they were a good return on the investments made in them.  But I did not begin to really see America until I became a college president and eventually a community leader in New London, Connecticut.

From those perches, I saw generosity — of alumni, of donors, of townspeople.  I learned that the people of New London had collected $135,000 a penny at a time around 1910 to attract the Founders to put Connecticut College in New London. That industrialist, Morton Plant gave $1 million at the same time to establish the college.   Town and gown, dime donors and millionaires, educated and very simple proud people — giving for a common cause — to change some little piece of the world.  That is how America gives. 

Of course, I saw selfishness too.  Sometimes among some faculty who did not want to be involved with the city of New London or its people, refused to re-think the college's place in the town as a major asset to its economic development.  Sometimes among donors too, but most often among faculty, donors and students, I saw generosity.   I watched alumna Carolyn Holleran and her husband Jerry give $1 million to open a Center for Community Action and Public Policy right down town.  They had hoped to see a time when students from the college would live downtown in New London for an urban semester or year. 

Meetings I conducted in offices and homes and city council chambers, whether in New York, New London or San Francisco, demonstrated whether people were able to put the needs of others and the common good ahead of their own personal interests and act, or not.  I began to understand very slowly that the spirit of the country made certain things seem like a good idea.   The texts and experiences of others, from Aristotle and Adam Smith to a jobless New Londoner and a Connecticut College freshman taught me a lot about democracy, generosity and capitalism.  

Americans keep working toward the aspirations of the Founding Fathers.   We invest in each other.  We know the job is not finished yet.  We know we have benefited from others and know we usually cannot give back to those who gave to us, so we give to others who need some help and express thanks that way.  I was struck with how little many Americans, just like me, really know about our practice of citizen generosity and how deeply it is connected to our success. 

The story of generosity in America and how it has mediated between capitalism and democracy is almost too good to tell without sounding jingoist or naïve — potentially fatal flaws for an academic like me.  If our government and economy persist over the next 50 years, the same story is going to be told about the America of today — how much sharing there was.  Only now we need to get much more generous.  We will have the funds and the human resources.  The need is critical.  So there must be a way to pause and tell this great story now.  Maybe there is a way…