To lend and not to count the cost - the history of philanthropy

Before the end of this week there will be announcements of further vast losses from US banks including Citigroup, J.P.Morgan and Merrill Lynch.  We don’t know how big they will be and we don’t know what will happen to the world’s economic machinery as a result.  It’s clear from the last few weeks that almost anything is possible.  Philanthropy will not be spared, of course.  Many of the banks and bankers that made decisions to lend without much hope of repayment are amongst the biggest donors.  It’s not that the dangers were unknown, it was a simple desire to make more and more money, and charities have benefitted, and now the people they serve will suffer.

This summary of the story so far sounded about right when I read it a couple of weeks ago: “It was of course all the more drastic in the USA because in fact a lagging expansion of demand has been beefed up by means of an enormous expansion of consumer credit.  (Readers who remember the late 1980s may find themselves on familiar territory).  Banks, already hurt by the speculative real-estate boom which, with the usual help of self-deluding optimists and mushrooming financial crookery, loaded with bad debts, refused new housing loans or to refinance existing ones.  A thousand properties a day were being foreclosed.” 

 In fact this isn’t a paragraph from a recent Financial Times but part of Eric Hobsbawm’s description of the Crash of 1929 (The Age of Extremes, Abacus, p100, 1992).  Hobsbawm comments “it provides a vivid illustration of society’s need for historians, who are the professional remembrancers of what their fellow-citizens forget.”  As someone too old to have been taught any twentieth century history at school, I can recommend this book as a “brilliant synthesis of familiar and forgotten facts and ideas” (Ben Pimlott) and a wonderful read for those like me ignorant of the history and economics of that time.

Another example of our need for historians is the tragedy of Iraq.  Even if the invasion were justified, and I don’t think it was, (although I admit I wasn’t so sure when I marched in London with a million others,) only the war was planned, not the peace.  I wish that I could say that philanthropy could have shown the way but there were no voices loud enough to be heard above the thunder of the helicopters.  However, I knew that I had read something about the similar and far worse situation when Germany surrendered in 1945.  Winston Churchill the British Prime Minister wrote, “the surrender of the German people should be completed by the agencies which have authority over them.  We will never be able to rule Germany apart from the Germans.” (Prime Minister’s Personal Minute, M.474/5, 14 May 1954, Churchill papers, 20/209.)

Has anyone written a history of international philanthropy, as readable and insightful as Hobsbawn and as immediate as Churchill?  I know that it’s a tall order, but in these difficult times, philanthropists and fundraisers need perspective and encouragement too. Remembrancers, please step forward