Philanthropy provides the fabric of America.

• Author: Zinmeister, Karl
• Position: American Thought

PRIVATE PHILANTHROPY is crucial in making the U.S. the unusual country that it is. Let us start with some numbers: our nonprofit sector now comprises eleven percent of the total workforce. It will contribute around six percent of gross domestic product this year. To put this in perspective, the charitable sector passed the national defense sector in size in 1993, and it continues to grow. Moreover, these numbers do not take volunteering into account: charitable volunteers make up the equivalent--depending on how you count--of between 4,000,000 and 10,000,000 fulltime employees. So, philanthropy clearly is a huge force in our society.

To begin to understand this crucial part of the U.S., it is useful--and also inspiring--to consider some of the nation's great philanthropists.

Ned McIlhenny, born and raised in a Louisiana bayou, had a day job in addition to being a philanthropist: manufacturing and selling the hot pepper condiment invented by his family, McIlhenny Tabasco. There is big money in helping people bum their tongues, and McIlhenny used his resulting fortune for an array of good works. Here is just one example: when he was young, hats with egret plumes were all the rage for ladies (like Coach handbags today) with the effect that the snowy egret, a magnificent creature native to Louisiana's bayous, had become nearly extinct. In response, McIlhenny beat the bushes to find eight baby egrets on a private island his family owned. By 1911, he built up a population of 100,000 egrets on the island. At the same time, he convinced John D. Rockefeller and other philanthropists to help him purchase some swampy land to use as a winter refuge for egrets and other birds.

Another American philanthropist was Alfred Loomis. Passionate about science from early boyhood, he entered law school when his father died in order to be able to support the family. Hating the study of law and wishing to return to science, he went to work on Wall Street and, by the early 1930s, he had become one of the country's richest men. Retiring from finance, he set up one of the world's great experimental labs in a mansion across the street from his home north of New York.

In 1938, Loomis visited Berlin, Germany, and was struck by two things: Chancellor Adolf Hitler's popularity and the brilliance of German scientists. He returned home convinced that war was brewing and that science would have a lot to do with who won. He poured himself and his fortune into a promising new field that had defense applications--a way to use radio waves to detect moving objects--and his lab very quickly became the national leader in what we now call radar. Thousands of radar sets created under Loomis' supervision did much to turn the tide of World War II.

Even more than his money, Loomis' methods account for his remarkable success. Appalled by the bureaucracy and sluggishness of government research programs, he took a radically different approach in his lab. When it became apparent how successful his approach had been in producing radar, the Department of Defense copied it directly for the Manhattan Project, even hiring many of the scientists from Loomis' radar lab. Pres. Franklin Roosevelt later said that there was no civilian who did more to win World War II than Loomis.

Another philanthropist was Kodak founder George Eastman, who popularized photography in the early 1900s. When he began his business, photography was all art and guess-work--and very little science. He hired chemists from an obscure school called Boston Tech and, out of gratitude for what they did for his company, he later provided most of the money that transformed Boston Tech into the powerhouse Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he did so anonymously--for years and years, the donor behind MIT was referred to as "Mr. Smith." Eastman also had a passion for music, so he methodically created and built to world prominence...