A Short History of Urban Nonprofits

Alexis de Tocqueville, the nation’s patron saint of the voluntary association, was not necessarily a fan of the American city. “I look upon the size of certain American cities and above all the nature of their inhabitants as a genuine danger threatening the future of the democratic republics of the New World,” the French nobleman wrote in “Democracy in America,” after his U.S. tour in the early 1830s. The danger lay in the fact that in these cities, Tocqueville wrote, “men cannot be prevented from concerting together and awakening a mutual excitement that prompts sudden and passionate resolutions.” In cities, then, the associational impulse that Tocqueville celebrated threatened to boil over into something darker.

Yet paradoxically, precisely that sense of cities as places of peril — a product of their scale, their heterogeneity, their unfamiliarity — is one of the main reasons that urban centers came to harbor and incubate so many associations. The problems posed by the city are one of the main reasons why they came to serve as the setting, in the two centuries since Tocqueville wrote those words, for the formalization, growth and development of associations into modern nonprofits. The city became the place where the power of such associations has long been amplified, registered and contested. As scholars Christof Brandtner and Claire Dunning have noted, the nonprofit sector, both as a legal category and a discursive one, is very much an “urban phenomenon.”

The growth of urban nonprofits

From the nation’s earliest days, the progenitors of what we now recognize as nonprofit organizations proliferated in cities to address urban challenges and to make the most of urban opportunities. In doing so, they often functioned as nodes of private governance within the broader municipal setting. They were — and still are — discrete, legally sanctioned concentrations of power which in turn were compelled to contend with others’ power, whether wielded by public bodies or private.

One of the first major bursts of associational growth within American cities came about in response to a perceived “urban crisis” in the early 19th century, brought on by immigration, industrialization and poverty. Many of these associations were created by evangelical reformers for whom, as the historian Paul Boyer wrote, “the city was a mission-field — an arena where the nation’s moral destiny would be decided.” Before the spread of universal white male suffrage in the early 19th century, these reformers could claim uncontested civic authority based on their elite status. But with a new cohort of voters, these elites often found themselves on the civic margins. And they had little faith in the city governments brought to power by this new electorate, which, as they saw it, were so badly in need of moral guidance and correction.

The hundreds of voluntary associations they formed in cities were meant to provide a hedge against democracy. In an 1812 sermon delivered in New Haven, Lyman Beecher, a noted Congregational minister, called for the establishment of associations “of the wise and the good” to serve as “disciplined moral militia” that could bring collective moral pressure to bear on city life. They would represent a force “distinct from that of the government, independent of popular suffrage, superior in potency to individual effort, and competent to enlist and preserve the public opinion.”

Yet if many of these reform societies represented efforts to recreate village norms within the city, their leaders soon appreciated that they could make use of the advanced technological resources that urban settings afforded in order to do so — so tract and bible societies harnessed industrial power to mass produce their wares and tapped into the distribution networks in which cities served as major hubs to distribute those products across the nation. The cities might be places of peril, but they also boasted steam-powered presses. They were Rube Goldberg machines of reform and associational activity, where industrialization produced both dire social ills and the mechanisms to ameliorate them.

Mutual aid societies

Indeed, the urban subjects of this empire’s “benevolence” also turned to voluntary associations — sometimes incorporated, sometimes not — to address their own needs. Associations could function as refuges from the depredations or neglect of both private and public authorities, enabling marginalized communities to defend their rights, privileges and property. Cities were, more than anything, places of plurality, and the associational landscape came to reflect this reality, featuring pockets of familiarity, parochialism, pride and protection. So the immigrants who arrived in the United States in the first half of the 19th century quickly established their own charitable networks, featuring mutual banks, burial societies, soup kitchens and schools — roots of the nonprofit urban networks that would grow in the next century.

“Between 1848 and 1860, when Jews made up somewhere between two and five percent of (New York’s) total population,” the historian Hasia Diner has written, “they supported more than ninety-three philanthropic associations. The rest of the city maintained only ninety-six similar institutions.” Catholics established their own networks of charitable institutions, including some based on ethnic identity or country of origin. Likewise, in cities up and down the Eastern Seaboard, African Americans formed mutual aid societies, self-help associations, churches, schools and antislavery groups, the basis of a flourishing Black urban civil society. By 1835, Philadelphia boasted 80 Black mutual aid societies, and by 1848, nearly half of the adult African American population in the city was affiliated with one. On the West Coast, Chinese and Japanese immigrants established mutual aid societies in the cities in which they settled.

In the decades after the Civil War, as urban populations exploded, another generation of associations emerged in cities to address the challenges associated with that growth. A few of the most prominent, like the Charity Organization Societies that became the basis for a sprawling network of social welfare charities in the 20th century, defined their efforts in opposition to the public relief administered by city governments, which they believed encouraged dependency. Instead, they presented their organizations as centers of good government reform, seeing wasteful municipal public relief as the lubricant that greased the wheels of urban political machines.

Here, again, was that familiar strand of urban antidemocratic associationalism. And yet, in this case, the leaders of many of those organizations came to embrace an understanding of urban poverty as being rooted in social factors, as opposed to individual moral ones, and to appreciate the need to advocate for changes in regulations at the city and state level to improve sanitary, housing and labor conditions.

Nonprofit policy advocacy

Policy advocacy in an urban context would become a core nonprofit function in the next century. In fact, as political scientist Jeffrey Berry has recently reminded us, although these days national nonprofits advocating in Washington, D.C., attract most of the public’s attention — and censure — “nonprofits at the community and neighborhood level represent the greatest density of c3s involved in the governmental process,” with city politics offering “a distinctively low barrier to entry for nonprofits wishing to become involved in policymaking.”

In some cases, early 20th century Progressive Era urban nonprofits did not just advocate for policies; they worked closely with government officials to implement them. In other words, the relationship between nonprofits and city government was not defined simply by competition or antagonism; there was room for partnership and collaboration as well. In fact, in the decades that followed, leaders of urban nonprofits often moved back and forth between private and public offices, blurring the boundaries between the two.

Most notably, during the Great Depression, in order to circumvent the Roosevelt administration’s stipulation that federal relief could only be administered through public agencies, in some cities private charity officials simply assumed new identities as public agents. In the Depression’s first years, many of those private officials were also some of the first to appreciate the “limits of voluntarism” and call for government aid to address widespread unemployment. Some also lent their technical expertise to municipal efforts. The Russell Sage Foundation, for instance, loaned a good part of its department of statistics to New York City’s Department of Relief, to lead its statistical work. Ultimately, then, nonprofits could help boost municipal capacity even as they represented alternative, and sometimes rival, power bases to that authority. You don’t have to look too hard to find similar dynamics at play today. Witness the funding that Bloomberg Philanthropies has directed to support city governments around the world.

Wealthy benefactors

The above example highlights yet another major development at the turn of the last century that redefined the relationship between nonprofits and the city: the emergence of large-scale philanthropy, fed by the industrial fortunes of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. American cities have always had their wealthy patrons, but the philanthropists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries could give on an unprecedented scale — and thereby reshape the urban landscape.

Many cities became closely associated with their largest benefactors, their civic quiddity indebted to those donors’ idiosyncratic personalities and tastes — think Pittsburgh and Andrew Carnegie, or more recently, Los Angeles and Eli Broad. That influence persisted long after death, with the establishment of legacy foundations, massive concentrations of wealth and power around which entire ecosystems developed. In every city in the country, local (and sometimes national) philanthropy seeded cultural and educational institutions, hospitals and charities, with massive endowments, exerting an irresistible gravitational force on the city’s political, cultural and economic life, and with profound if ill-defined (and often unmet) responsibilities to the communities in which they were situated. New York residents — and visitors — experience this every time they visit a museum, do a spin on the Rockefeller Center ice rink or receive care at the named wing of a hospital.

Some now regard the philanthropic institutions bestowing these gifts, and especially their living donors, as “genuine dangers threatening the future” of democracy, to quote Tocqueville, asserting their unaccountable power on the landscape of the city — and the nation — reflecting the preferences and prerogatives of an elite class. At the very least, questions of immense civic consequence shadow their development, relating to their status both as instruments of democracy, opportunity and pluralism and as potential threats to those ideals.

As this potted history of urban associations makes clear, the questions that are currently being asked about the role that nonprofits play in the life of American cities are not new. Well before the explosion of nonprofits that came about in the 1960s, when the federal government turned to them to implement Great Society anti-poverty programs, and when the familiar outlines of the nonprofit sector were established, most of the dynamics that define the relationship between nonprofits and the city in our current day were very much in play. Individuals turned to voluntary associations and nonprofits to meet the challenges and opportunities presented by cities, and those associations in turn presented their own challenges and opportunities for cities to confront. The history of that mutual exchange continues to be written, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, grant by grant, contract by contract.