The historian, author, and curator talks to Michael E. Hartmann about the Smithsonian’s philanthropy collection and how the Revolution and independence changed philanthropy in America.
Amanda Moniz is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. She leads the museum’s efforts to collect objects from and research about, and to interpret, the history of American giving and civic engagement. With more than 250 objects that tell stories of Americans giving of their time, money, and goods to support others, its philanthropy collection is one of its newest.
Before joining the Smithsonian in 2016, Moniz worked with the American Historical Association and its National History Center.A historian by training, her book From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism, published by Oxford University Press in 2016, won the inaugural Peter Dobkin Hall History of Philanthropy Book Prize. She returned to some of the book’s themes last month in a great article for The Conversation, “How America’s independence from England revolutionized US philanthropy.”
In the article, Moniz argues that the American Revolution fundamentally reshaped philanthropy in the United States by breaking older, imperial patterns of charitable giving and encouraging more democratic, locally organized forms of civic action. The post-Revolutionary period helped establish enduring features of American philanthropy, she writes, including voluntary associations, grassroots fundraising, and reform campaigns.
Moniz was kind enough to join me for a recorded conversation two weeks ago. The just less than 16-minute video below is the first part of our discussion; the second is here. During the first part, we talk about the Smithsonian’s philanthropy collection and how the Revolution and independence changed philanthropy in America.
Before the National Museum of American History’s philanthropy collection was formally established in 2015, according to Moniz, philanthropic artifacts were scattered across other collections and treated secondarily.
“Objects related to philanthropy, charity, and what not had been collected as part of other collections, often secondarily,” she tells me. “Many objects, all objects, speak multiple voices” and “tell multiple stories. By establishing the philanthropy collection, the Smithsonian was recognizing that this is a topic that deserved attention in its own right, with objects collected first and foremost with the philanthropy story in mind.”
The collection is deliberately broad and materially grounded, Moniz says—including not just papers and archival documents, but everyday objects connected to philanthropic activity. There’s one of the first buckets to be used as part of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, for example, as well as promotional tote bags and umbrellas from fundraising campaigns, posters from charitable initiatives, ceremonial tools used at orphanage-cornerstone layings, and fundraising boxes from organizations like the Jewish National Fund.
The museum’s long-term Giving in America exhibition in particular is designed to make the history of philanthropy visible to a broad public audience, she underscores. The larger philanthropy collection’s materials are increasingly available online too, accompanied by essays, videos, and interpretive content.
Alteration, expansion, and democratization
Moniz says colonial Americans inherited multiple traditions of giving from Britain, continental Europe, Africa, and Indigenous societies. Organized philanthropy expanded dramatically in the 18th Century Atlantic world alongside the growth of a market economy and more disposable income. Colonial Americans actually participated in a lot of transatlantic philanthropic networks before independence. “British-Americans, and German-Americans, and what not contributed to help their brethren overseas,” she tells me.
The Revolution then altered those relationships. Before independence, according to Moniz, much of philanthropy reinforced imperial bonds and Protestant civilizational ideals within the British Empire. After independence, Americans and Britons continued collaborating philanthropically across the Atlantic, but now on more-universal or humanitarian grounds, rather than as fellow imperial subjects.
“Americans are continuing to collaborate across the Atlantic, but they’re also collaborating after the Revolution with fellow citizens in other states and there they are emphasizing those national ties,” she says. “So one does see a huge boom in charitable organizing philanthropic activity after the Revolution, as Americans are trying to create new bonds of citizenship and pursue their ideals of life, liberty, and happiness through their” philanthropy.
As part of this, by Moniz’s telling, the post-Revolutionary period in the new republic saw a major expansion of civic associations, charitable groups, and reform movements aimed at pursuing ideals connected to liberty and happiness, including prison reform, abolitionism, and general public benevolence. She stresses that this expansion was driven partly by political transformation and partly by broader economic and social developments associated with the rise of capitalism and voluntary associational life between roughly 1750 and 1850—an “age of benevolence,” she calls it.
Although philanthropic leadership before the Revolution was dominated by prominent white men, Moniz argues that organized giving was usually collective, rather than dominated by singular wealthy patrons. Groups pooled funds through subscriptions, benefit events, and civic associations. After the Revolution, women and African Americans also became increasingly active participants in organized philanthropy.
Compared to Britain’s more-aristocratic and -hierarchical philanthropic culture, “[t]here was a more-democratic tenor” about it in America, she says. “I’m not saying that it wasn’t hierarchical here in the United States, but there was just … a more-democratic sensibility in the way they talked about, the people they were helping, for instance.”
In the conversation’s second part, Moniz expands on the democratic character, moral tensions, and organizational evolution of early American philanthropy—and reflects on how later developments, especially during the Progressive Era, changed it.
