May 31, 2006
Eleemosynary Immortality Posted by John Steele Gordon at 02:15 PM EST Since the days of George Peabody and Peter Cooper 150 years ago, American businessmen have been the world’s greatest philanthropists. The size and number of their donations to schools, colleges, hospitals, research institutes, libraries, symphony orchestras, opera companies, museums, and who knows how many other worthy causes have been staggering.
Partly, I’m sure, this generosity has been a way of giving thanks to the nation and society that allowed them to flourish so abundantly. And partly, I’m equally sure, it has been a way of assuring that their names would live after them, blazoned across the entrances to such places as Carnegie Hall, Vanderbilt University, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the Field Museum, the Morgan Library, and the Ford Foundation.
Now, I have nothing against tooting one’s own horn, especially when the tooting does such great good as these places have. If my next book outsells The Da Vinci Code, I will be more than happy to join in the tooting.
But the natural tendency to seek eleemosynary immortality is not universal. Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932), who was instrumental in turning Sears, Roebuck from a tiny mail-order business and total corporate mess into the Wal-Mart of its day, made a colossal personal fortune in the process. He gave much of it away—over $70 million, when such a sum would have put you in the top ten of the Forbes 400 List, had it existed back then—paying for the construction of more than 5,300 schools for rural blacks in the American South, among numerous other worthy causes.
Yet today his name is hardly remembered at all outside of business-school courses, for he deliberately arranged things so that the foundation he established would spend all its money on good works and then go out of business, which it did in 1948. He thought his boundless generosity was a moral obligation, one he was more than happy to fulfill, not an opportunity to advance his own interests while also doing good.
But he shouldn’t be forgotten, for that reason alone, as well as the fact that he led a great American life and was one of the foremost businessmen of his time. Happily there is a new biography out on Julius Rosenwald, the first full-length one in more than sixty years: Julius Rosenwald: The Man Who Built Sears, Roebuck and Advanced the Cause of Black Education in the American South, by Peter M. Ascoli (who is Rosenwald’s grandson).
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