Johann N. Neem: The Jeffersonian tradition and American philanthropy
[Johann N. Neem is assistant professor of history at Western Washington University.]
"The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson's claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating primogeniture and entails or what we today call trusts and foundations. Otherwise a few individuals or institutions would over time amass sufficient wealth to lord it over ordinary citizens.
Warren Buffett's recent decision to donate the bulk of his fortune, a whopping $30.7 billion, to the Gates Foundation (already the largest foundation in the world) asks us once again to consider Jefferson's claims. The press has lauded both Gates's and Buffett's philanthropy. But Jefferson is spokesman for a rival American tradition that is wary of foundations' potential to unduly influence democratic public life.
Given the combined wealth of Gates and Buffett, one can be confident that the Gates Foundation, governed by a small board of trustees, will have significant public influence. For those of us who support Gates's current goal of alleviating global poverty and improving American education, this is good. Yet its private control should give us pause. What if the Gates Foundation's trustees supported either ends or practices that we as a people find unethical or impolitic? Should such a powerful institution trump the public will?
Americans confronted these questions soon after the Revolution during the Dartmouth College controversy of 1816. While in monarchical England, incorporation had long been accepted as a legal privilege granted by the monarch to those who served the realm, following independence many Americans worried that corporations would enable the few to exercise monopolistic privileges not available to the many. In time, many Americans feared, corporations and trusts would become immortal private fiefdoms, the basis for a new aristocracy. Corporations, they concluded, must be made subordinate to the public will....
Read entire article at Common-Place.org
"The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; . . . [and] the dead have neither powers nor rights over it," proclaimed Thomas Jefferson in 1789. Jefferson's claim is a radical one: the wealth and power of past generations should not determine present and future ones. To maintain democratic equality across generations, Jefferson argued, private fortunes must be broken up by eliminating primogeniture and entails or what we today call trusts and foundations. Otherwise a few individuals or institutions would over time amass sufficient wealth to lord it over ordinary citizens.
Warren Buffett's recent decision to donate the bulk of his fortune, a whopping $30.7 billion, to the Gates Foundation (already the largest foundation in the world) asks us once again to consider Jefferson's claims. The press has lauded both Gates's and Buffett's philanthropy. But Jefferson is spokesman for a rival American tradition that is wary of foundations' potential to unduly influence democratic public life.
Given the combined wealth of Gates and Buffett, one can be confident that the Gates Foundation, governed by a small board of trustees, will have significant public influence. For those of us who support Gates's current goal of alleviating global poverty and improving American education, this is good. Yet its private control should give us pause. What if the Gates Foundation's trustees supported either ends or practices that we as a people find unethical or impolitic? Should such a powerful institution trump the public will?
Americans confronted these questions soon after the Revolution during the Dartmouth College controversy of 1816. While in monarchical England, incorporation had long been accepted as a legal privilege granted by the monarch to those who served the realm, following independence many Americans worried that corporations would enable the few to exercise monopolistic privileges not available to the many. In time, many Americans feared, corporations and trusts would become immortal private fiefdoms, the basis for a new aristocracy. Corporations, they concluded, must be made subordinate to the public will....