Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Private Money and the Public Good: Nonprofit Organizations in Two Eras of Boston's Urban Development, 1960-1990

January 1, 2013

Throughout the history of the United States, private associations and charity have supplemented -- and at times surpassed -- the government in caring for the most economically vulnerable citizens, improving the social and physical infrastructure of neighborhoods, and supporting cultural institutions. The American welfare state exists today, as it has for centuries, as a project of both public and private aid. Such interaction (indeed, cooperation) between the public and private sectors is not a new phenomenon, but the specific configuration of the interaction that has evolved and shifted over time. Factors such as economic growth, governance structures, and political ideology have defined and altered the relationship between both the public and private sectors and between the sectors and the citizens. For example, private settlement houses emerged as the dominant form of charitable urban-aid at the end of the nineteenth century, but in the 1930s the New Deal model of public aid and benefits replaced the settlement house model. In the 1960s the welfare state entered yet another phase when the government began granting public monies to private nonprofit organizations. The entry of direct public subsidy for private nonprofit activities, I argue, marks a significant turning point in the history of charity in the United States and of the American welfare state that had profound consequences for American cities.

Rockefeller Family Support for W1XAL/WRUL, "Boston's Vest-pocket BBC"

January 1, 2009

I spent July and August of 2004 as a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Archive Center, doing research on the support of Rockefeller philanthropy for the study and practice of educational radio. Within a few days of my arrival, I was saddened to learn of the death of Laurance Spelman Rockefeller (born 1910), who was one of the two surviving sons (along with David Rockefeller) of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. I was also informed that -- as is the case with the death of any Rockefeller family member whose papers are held by the Rockefeller Archive Center -- the papers of Laurance Rockefeller would now be open to researchers. As I have always found Laurance Rockefeller to be an intriguing figure -- well known for his activities as a venture capitalist, an aviation pioneer, a conservationist, not to mention his later forays into UFO research -- I began to examine his papers with a view to understanding the extent to which he may have been involved in educational radio. It became almost immediately evident that not only was Laurance Rockefeller a long-time supporter of educational radio, but his activities in this area over the years provided a window into the evolving relationship between private family interests, philanthropic practices, and the rise and fall of an innovative yet highly controversial 2 venture in radio broadcasting, namely the experimental educational radio broadcaster W1XAL. (In 1939 the experimental status was abandoned, and the station was assigned the call letters WRUL, which stood for "World Radio University Listeners"). Accordingly, I used Laurance S. Rockefeller's papers as a point of departure for examining other collections that contained material on the emergence and development of W1XAL/WRUL.

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