Volunteer Nation

Soon after COVID-19 hit the United States, the homemade face mask emerged as a powerful symbol of Americans’ common purpose in beating the pandemic. Its makeshift manufacture in homes across the country illustrated the voluntarist upsurge meeting the crisis.

Yet the DIY face mask’s status as a symbol of nationwide mobilization ultimately became an emblem of national disunity. After all, the very need for wide-scale private production and distribution of such an obvious public good highlighted the state’s failure to adequately prepare for the pandemic. Were homemade masks a rebuke to underfunded public budgets and the Trump administration? Or did they express a more fundamental lack of faith in the state’s competence to take the lead in addressing large-scale public crises? These questions tapped into larger ones regarding crisis-fueled voluntarism: Was the rise in mutual aid in response to the pandemic necessarily allied with demands for a more robust safety net, or did it carry an inherent strain of anti-statism?

As University of Chicago sociology professor Elisabeth S. Clemens chronicles in her timely new book, Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State, that ambiguous relationship between voluntarism and the nation-state has a long history.

Clemens’ narrative proceeds along two tracks: a history of nation building and state making, and a history of American voluntarism, or, more precisely, a history of elite and mass-based charitable giving. Although the book features some dense sociological analysis, the bulk of Clemens’ account maps the crisscrossing of those tracks, with major national crises—wars, economic depressions, and ecological and natural disasters—serving as the major points of intersection. The chronicle she knits around them is richly textured, nuanced, and engrossing.

The book opposes the long-dominant understanding of the relationship between voluntarism and the state, a dualism enshrined in the celebrated observations of Alexis de Tocqueville. Visiting the United States in the 1830s, the French nobleman singled out the nation’s proliferating voluntary associations as one of its defining features and argued that they would serve as bulwarks against a despotic central government. In the nearly two centuries since, both the right and the left—those opposing expanded governmental power and those encouraging it—have advanced similar understandings of voluntary associations and voluntary action as rivals to state building. Clemens, however, joins a corps of contemporary scholars who have shown how voluntarism has often served as an instrument of governance and as a means of extending centralized state power, without necessarily expanding the formal institutional boundaries of the state.

Civic Gifts offers an even broader challenge to the Tocquevillian mythos that has shaped much conventional thinking on voluntarism. Tocqueville’s writings helped train Americans to think of themselves as a nation of virtuosic joiners and exceptional givers. Yet, Clemens, building on work by historians such as Johann Neem and Kevin Butterfield, recaptures the contested legitimacy of associations in the early United States, which were suspected as potential threats to both individual liberty and the common good. Similarly, she shows that while collective charitable activity has served as a means of creating “political solidarity among citizens despite pervasive social and economic inequalities,” Americans have always harbored fears that gifts can foster relations of dependence and expectations of gratitude, which threaten the “democratic dignity” of citizens. Clemens demonstrates how organized benevolence has been used as a tool for nation building and state making, even as she is attuned to how it can undermine the idealized notions of liberal citizenship that have been central to those projects. This book, in other words, is fully comfortable with the “constitutive contradictions,” as Clemens terms them, embedded in US history. That incongruity doesn’t always make it an easy read, but it does make the book an important one.

Clemens provides a history of the early stirrings of nationwide voluntarist mobilization along with the suspicions that attended such efforts. She pays particular attention to the “Great Commissions” of the Civil War, and especially the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC), a private organization designed to discipline the spontaneous outpouring of local generosity and to promote an impersonal approach to giving, directed not to the hometown enlistee but to the “national soldier.”

The USSC established a template of giving as a generalized translocal system of reciprocity, in which military service was met with nationwide generosity. This, Clemens argues, helped minimize any risk of gifts encouraging dependency or subservience. It was not until World War I that the promise of coupling organized voluntarism and national political authority was first fully realized, if only temporarily. President Woodrow Wilson, reluctant to erect a permanent federal bureaucracy, relied heavily on a decentralized but coordinated system of governance and on voluntary means of mobilizing resources. In Wilson’s “expansible state,” Clemens notes, “federal projects drew upon and amplified local capacities, solidarities, and prejudices,” tapping the same networks that local elites had built up in the previous decades to raise funds for community purposes, for the support of national ones.

The American Red Cross was central to this approach—as it is to Clemens’ book more generally. Granted a federal charter in 1900, the organization emerged as something new in the American system of governance: “a civic association directly subordinated to the holders of executive office in the federal government.” As Clemens makes clear, Red Cross supporters understood its mission not merely in terms of supporting the troops but also in cultivating a spirit of self-sacrifice and national solidarity among donor-citizens, which would link civic voluntarism to the federal government.

With demobilization, some of this infrastructure was repurposed to address peacetime needs; local elites again asserted control over community-based charity. A decade later, President Herbert Hoover tapped these networks to address the economic devastation of the Great Depression. He resisted calls for federal relief, which, he feared, would undermine local charitable responses. The Red Cross once again stood at the center of these debates. When Democrats proposed a $25 million congressional appropriation to the organization, Hoover and his allies in the organization rejected the offer. “If we break down this sense of responsibility of individual generosity to individual and mutual self-help in the country in times of national difficulty,” he explained, “we have not only impaired something infinitely valuable in the life of the American people but have struck at the roots of self-government.”

There was, in fact, an impressive surge of giving in response to the crisis, but it soon became clear that private charity was entirely inadequate to the scale of public desperation. When Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March 1933, he did so with an explicit repudiation of Hoover’s reliance on voluntarism. FDR attempted to establish clear lines of demarcation between federal relief and private charity, with an insistence in the primacy of the former. In doing so, Clemens argues, he helped forge a discourse legitimizing public relief as “a democratic entitlement,” one defined against traditional understandings of charity as “a threat to democratic dignity.”

"Civic Gifts" raises important questions about the relationship among charitable giving, civic identity, participatory democracy, and the state.

The transition from Hoover to FDR has become a well-worn progressive morality tale, recently invoked in the face of Republican intransigence about committing sufficient federal funds to address the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19. Clemens does not call into doubt the folly of Hoover’s voluntarist hubris, but she does complicate what she considers a dominant assumption in much of the historiography of the welfare state—that the movement from “charity to rights” was linear and inevitable. The New Deal, she contends, did not “expunge private charity from American governance.” FDR relied on professional charity workers to implement many of his relief policies, and they brought to their public mission the approaches that informed their previous work, including a penchant for investigation and a reliance on discriminatory categories of classification. FDR also came to appreciate the importance of “citizen philanthropy,” in which local voluntarism could support national politics.

This commitment to “citizen philanthropy” intensified with the mobilization for World War II, when, like Wilson, FDR tapped voluntary action to promote national aims. This time, the president supported a $50 million congressional appropriation to the Red Cross; in one Gallup poll from 1943, cited by Clemens, 84 percent of respondents reported donating to the organization. In FDR’s version of the “expansible state,” the capacities of the federal government were much larger than in the past, dwarfing those of the voluntary realm. And yet champions of the Red Cross and other voluntary organizations frequently urged Americans to donate to them as a “prophylactic against expanded taxation.” At the same time, private charities largely conceded large-scale relief and public works to the government and began to frame their own contributions as supplemental to that work. According to Clemens, this partnership between the federal government and private charity heightened tensions between them while also “generat[ing] a novel synthesis that would come to be embodied in the postwar ‘nonprofit sector.’”

Civic Gifts directs our attention to “potent moments in which democratic citizens insisted that government depended not only on popular consent but popular contribution.” It raises important questions about the nature of those contributions, and about the relationships among charitable giving, civic identity, participatory democracy, and the state. The institutions at the book’s heart that were designed to promote a civic culture of giving and national solidarity often minimized donor control and agency. The act of giving, of contributing, was all that was demanded.

The trend in the last several decades, however, has been in the other direction. Many recent developments within the charitable sector—from the United Way’s acceptance of donor choice to the spread of donor-advised funds to the disintermediation allowed by the internet—have enhanced individuals’ power to direct funds in ways that correspond to their own preferences but erode the communal dimensions of giving.

For good or ill, the COVID-19 crisis is the first of national scope that has developed without the emergence of a unifying, centralizing institution serving as a centripetal force of voluntarism. If we want to recover the possibility of “the expansive mobilization of voluntary efforts” harnessed to national identity and purpose, Clemens’ book will need to function more as goad than guide. It will require “not restoration, but innovative combination and recombination,” as she writes. And it will also require coming to terms with the “constitutive contradictions” in American civic life that she has skillfully chronicled.