An Open Letter to Mr. Basil O'Connor

Chairman, Central Committee, American Red Cross, Washington, D.C.

by ROBERT CUTLER

DEAR MR. O’CONNOR: —
In your address at the spring meeting of the National Social Welfare Assembly in New York City you charged that the raising of funds for the privately supported health, welfare, and social agencies in a community through the medium of a community chest or fund was “the communication of fund-raising” and that such federated fund-raising “spells the ruination of all private health and welfare activity.”
The text of your address has now been published. So astonishing is its content and so responsible is the high position which you occupy in the American Red Cross that many Americans, like myself, have felt impelled to reappraise their basic beliefs about charitable undertakings in America in the light of these startling pronouncements.
It is not possible lightly to brush aside the views which you expressed. They were not casual or fortuitous. They were the main thesis of a serious, considered address made by you before a national meeting attended by representatives of the principal charitable associations in America. And the inevitable conclusion, in the absence of correction, is that you spoke as Chairman of the American Red Cross’s Central Committee and as President of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. In fact, the context of your address indicates that you intended in it to set forth the philosophy of these two dramatic philanthropies.
That philosophy may be thus expressed: neither the Red Cross nor the “March of Dimes” will participate with any other charity or association of charities in a joint appeal for funds. Each of these two national agencies insists, as a matter of policy, on its own separate appeal in each local community. The Red Cross and the “March of Dimes” typify what you call the “school of independent financing.” The supporters of the many thousand local agencies that unite in community chests and funds throughout the United States and Canada comprise, in your terms, the “school of federated financing.” Between these two schools you say there is irreconcilable conflict, which is soon “going to break out [into] open warfare.”
The views which you have expressed are alien to me and, upon serious reconsideration, appear to me unsound and misleading. Their unfortunate misapprehension ought not to lie before our fellow countrymen without reply.
My sense of personal obligation to make such reply derives from the rich experiences which I have had as a volunteer in community fund work at local and national levels, and from my active interest as Treasurer of one of Boston’s large, voluntarily supported hospitals, a Red Feather Agency.
But my principal qualification for this task is my deep conviction that the wholesome development throughout America during the last three decades of community chests and funds — “federated financing”— is a social phenomenon without parallel; one which has benefited our country in many practical and spiritual ways that are readily demonstrable, and one which is in essence a quite natural development of the democratic process in our free American society.

The community chest idea was born in Cleveland in 1913. In the thirty-four intervening years chests and councils have grown, year by year, until there arc now about one thousand communities in the United States and Canada in which the private social agencies have banded together in some form of federated fund-raising and social work planning In the year 1945, these chests and funds raised for their local agencies and for the wartime agency appeals (other than Red Cross and Infantile Paralysis, of course) over $220,000,000. Truly an astonishing and uniquely American accomplishment.
How did all this come about? Was it ordained from some Olympian height? Or did it sprout up from the grass roots?
If you will read the history of the growth of the chest movement in America, you will see that the development was wholly spontaneous. As a forest fire jumps from tree to tree, the flame passed from the people of one community to the people of another community. There was no fiat imposed from above upon any city or town or village. The inherent horse sense of the thing was its own passport. It appealed to the business acumen of the average American. The genius of our people is to appreciat e and select reasonable, economical, and efficient methods of conducting their private enterprises. The growth of chests and funds in the forty-eight states has been a fine manifestation of this genius.
The unification of local appeals in a single voluntary campaign, with its ever widening participation in numbers of givers and workers, has made it possible more readily, more effectively, and with a finer spirit to raise the money necessary to carry on the local health, hospital, welfare, and social agencies which are vital to each community. During the depression years, the federated funds were able to maintain a higher level of contributions than were individual agencies. Thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people all over America learned to take an interest which they had never known before in the agencies that helped to stabilize the economic life of their home towns. As the clear judgment of men like Newton D. Baker and Gerard Swope prevailed, corporations likewise came to realize the benefit to them in the orderly support of the social agencies in the communities in which their employees worked and lived. And thus when the sudden horror of World War II broke upon America, there was in every community of consequential size a mechanism in instant readiness to grapple with and surmount the added and multifarious social burdens that are war’s by-product at home.
If this kind of growth is not “the American way of life,” — and you maintain it is not, — then my understanding of America is widely at variance with yours. To me, liberty is the right to serve in a good cause as a volunteer and not to be driven. Liberty is not to be confused with license, which is a horse of a very different color. Liberty is obedience to law, working with your neighbor as a team, communion rather than solitary or patrician worship. Liberty never says. I will do it my way and everyone else in the neighborhood must take it and like it. No, in America we decide things in a town meeting. Democracy flowers at her best and is most productive when the people, informed of the facts and after consideration, make up their own minds and the will of the majority prevails.
My hospital is my most intimate concern in the field of charity, but the vitality and welfare of the privately supported agencies in Boston as an effectively functioning group are yet more important.
And so to me the American way of life has been magnificently exemplified in what has happened in so many great cities and little villages throughout our nation during these last thirty-four years. Each has decided for itself what it wants in regard to the support of its voluntary charitable agencies. Many citizens have had to subordinate their individual likes, prejudices, intellectual judgments to what has seemed to most citizens the better way. In Boston we came but lately (1936) to a central Fund. At the outset some very able and devoted leaders in our local life were skeptical and opposed. Joseph Lee and President Lowell then felt that Boston would lose more than it gained in adopting a fund organizat ion. But the event has conclusively proved the wisdom of Charles Francis Adams and Cardinal O’Connell and Bishop Lawrence and the others who supported centralized fund-raising.
Above all, let me emphasize again that the validity of any community chest rests wholly upon the will of the people in that community. The free adoption by such a community of the chest and council method of raising and expending its charitable monies is not “communization,” but the working of the American process.

It is beyond informed question that without the centralized system of fund-raising, countless local health, hospital, welfare, and social agencies in our cities and towns could not have been supported through the lean years but would have gone to the wall, with the result that their necessary functions would have been added to public expenditures and the light of voluntary charity to that extent would have dimmed in America. In the case of my own hospital, the continuing drain upon our unrestricted endowment funds to meet operating deficits in the care of the indigent sick would, without the Fund’s support, have exhausted our resources and closed our doors. This instance could be multiplied, not hundreds but thousands of times, throughout the communities of America. Federation of fundraising, far from spelling “the ruination of all private health and welfare activity,” has to the contrary been its salvation at the community level.
An even greater asset of joint fund-raising in the local community for the local services is the contribution made to the spirit of the people who work and give to the campaigns. Charity is no longer an exclusive preserve for the rich. Neither is it a handout. Today people more and more want to know what they are getting for their dollar. The comfortable, nice feeling of giving to the poor is not enough. The heart must underlie all real charity, true enough. But the head is an important part ner of the hand. The support of our community agencies in full and vital operation is, to borrow Joseph Chamberlain’s great description of social legislation, “the ransom which society pays for its security.”
Twenty-five years ago the support of our social agencies in Boston was a patrician luxury, with some five hundred individuals making half of the total annual contribution. Today, almost forty thousand volunteers take part in the long preparation and the carrying forward of our Greater Boston campaigns, to which the leaders give literally months of their time. Some 400,000 individuals contributed to make up the $6,450,000 Greater Boston raised in 1947 for its 300 Red Feather Agencies. Can there be a more stirring impulse in America? Thousands of our citizens are taking new and increased interest in charitable works and learning rich lessons in neighborliness. I venture to say that nothing in our three centuries and a quarter has done so much to bring the two million people of Greater Boston together, in friendship and in better understanding, as have its eleven Community Fund Campaigns.
Please do not mistake me. I do not attribute infallibility to the chest idea or its functioning. Of course, there are flaws, errors, and mistakes. Every enterprise undertaken by free men has them. That is, however, the underlying virtue of a democracy as opposed to a tyranny. In a democracy, there is always room for improvement. In a despotism, the despot is perfect and beyond critical reproach. In America we reject the Bourbon motto “ne plus ultra.” For we know that there is always something better which can be done, if we will only try.
The only true rule to serve as our guide is that the people in each American community, as free men in a free society, shall have the right to decide how the money which they give to charity shall be raised and shared. It’s their money and they work to raise it. Naturally, they think their voice should determine the amount of their goal and whether one campaign or many campaigns shall prevail.
An attempt by any particular group in a community to dictate with reference to the charitable undertakings of all the people in that community should be rejected, whether it be an industry, a labor organization, a religious denomination, a racial division, or whatever. The very heart of this matter is that any dictation is repugnant to the American ideal. Dictation in such a matter by government would be equally offensive. Dictation by a national agency, backed by government, would likewise be intolerable and should be struck down just as quickly.
Why should there be, as you insist, an inevitable battle between the “school of federated fundraising” and the “school of individual fundraising”? It isn’t a seemly thing to fight about. More souls are saved through coöperation than conflict. My solution of any such issue remains that which as National Chest President I offered in 1941. Leave it to the “little people" back home in each community to settle. Can anything be more sound, more fair, or more American? Let’s not have the decision come again from Olympus. I think we can safely abide by the good sense of the folks in their own home towns. After all, they are America.
You have made yourself nationally known by your labors in behalf of the Red Cross and Infantile Paralysis. These two fine endeavors are worthy of the great interest which the American people have shown in them, and you have been very successful in attracting that interest. But these two causes, with their enormous heart appeal (your address admits to the “over-dramatization” of one) and their good work, are only a little burden compared with the enormous load resting upon the “little people” in the local communities to continue the voluntary support of the hospitals, health, welfare, and other social agencies which are essential to decent and orderly living in their home towns.
There is all too little “drama” in many of these necessary works of love and devotion. Yet it would be intolerable if, because of lack of glamour, they should be elbowed into the shadows of inadequate financial support, while the coffers of a more dramatic appeal were filled and overflowing. WTe can’t all be Marys. Some of us have to be Marthas in the kitchen. And Martha was a saint quite as much as Mary. Martha’s backbreaking burden can be supported in these modern times only through (he warmhearted and united efforts of the people back home doing the job in the manner which they decide is best for them.
Very truly yours,
ROBERT CUTLER