This book is, hands down, the most Whiggish history I have ever read. A given reader's opinion will depend on whether he sides with Hemingway or Fitzgerald on the rich: Are they like us but with more money, or are they nearly a different species, a homo sapiens munificentia? This book falls squarely on the side of the latter. You or I might puzzle over the complexity of human society. Not the American rich. Owners of fabulous wealth, concerned to keep it away from the government after they go to the generation of their fathers, the wealthy have been fully endowed with the wisdom to identify the common good, and then to go out and buy some for the poor. Yes, not only are they different from us, they are better.

The prehistory of American philanthropy, up to the later nineteenth century, consisted of small, localized projects that relieved the burden of poverty—simple almsgiving really. But dreaming no small dreams, soon the goal became not to make the difficult life of the poor somewhat less difficult, but to eradicate poverty itself. “Americans believed they could eliminate welfare almost completely by identifying and addressing the root causes of social evils” (p. 17). Beyond optimism, this was hubris of the highest order, although Olivier Zunz presents it in a naive, consensus history. Philanthropy funded not just the newly emerging fields of social science (led by “progressive fighter[s] for just causes,” p. 99) but also the “larger social agenda that benefitted millions” (p. 21) which these savants-for-hire concocted. That social agenda enjoyed approval among all the Americans who mattered: “Most reformers were nonsectarian Protestants who embraced universal values to reach across fragmented American communities” (p. 18). The rich and the Unitarians join forces to tell everyone else what to do (pp. 183–87). Who could object?

Zunz describes in some detail one and one-half success stories that were enabled by philanthropic interests, and whitewashes one truly despicable project. The unadulterated success story was that of the Rosenwald schools. Julius Rosenwald, a wealthy Sears Roebuck executive, devoted his considerable fortune to providing schools for African American children in the rural South. His efforts led to five thousand schools that enrolled 40 percent of all black school children in 1932. The quantitative achievements of these schools are just now beginning to be appreciated (D. Aaronson and B. Mazumdar, “The Impact of Rosenwald Schools on Black Achievement.” Journal of Political Economy 119, no. 5 (2011): 821–88).

The half story is that of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Philanthropic money, through the stratagem of providing “voter education” to get around legal restrictions against political activity, did help the movement. On the other hand, what made the Civil Rights Movement a widespread phenomenon was the courage of many otherwise ordinary people to boycott segregated businesses, sit where they pleased in buses and restaurants, and risk physical harm at the hands of violent bigots. That is, it was a movement of labor, and not so much of capital. Plus, where capital did intervene, such as in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools fiasco (p. 224), its contributions were less than salutary. Indeed, some foundations continued to fund “militant black power groups” (p. 220), a domestic version of destroying the city in order to save it.

The despicable project, which any history of the wealth progressive nexus must confront, was eugenics. Early philanthropists believed that a deep problem of modernity was the large number of poor people, who vastly outnumbered those who put the “eu” in eugenics. Zunz, to his credit, notes Margaret Sanger's enthusiasm for limiting the ability of the “unfit” to have children (p. 93). He suggests without evidence that Sanger would have found the Buck v. Bell (“three generations of imbeciles are enough”) decision ironic, but Sanger had previously endorsed forced sterilization of “the moron and the imbecile” (A. Franks, Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005, p. 47). Limiting numbers of the poor appealed to the wealthy well into the twentieth century. Much to Zunz's approval, Henry Ford II supported the Ford Foundation's funding of birth control projects, even after having converted to Catholicism before the first of his three marriages (p. 297). Fortunately, Zunz writes, nominally Christian donors had the good sense not to let religion interfere with really important matters.

Zunz frequently invokes Tocqueville's timeless observation on the tendency of Americans to form associations to solve large problems. As in the rest of the book, Zunz misses the forest for the trees. This history of philanthropy shows it often enough to consist of simple politics. The right-thinking rich pool their unimaginably ample resources to direct local and national politics toward ends favorable to their class. What this represents is not ordinary Americans forming an association, but what Tocqueville described as the English way of doing things. Ordinary Americans take care of things themselves; at the head of a new undertaking in England will be found a noble lord (II.2.5). And the lord will make sure things are done his way.