Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America's Political Past and Present

Abstract

With the diminishment of public social programs in the United States over the past thirty years, nonprofit and voluntary organizations have taken on new visibility and significance in debates about the maintenance of the social safety net. These political and policy shifts have invited scholarly analysis of the contemporary and historical role of such organizations. The eleven historians, sociologists, and anthropologists assembled by Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie in Politics and Partnerships remind us that voluntary associations—rather than acting as a “third sector” that is distinct from both government and the market—have been deeply imbedded in politics and markets for decades if not centuries. The collection has a distinctively twentieth-century cast to it, with the exception of Johann N. Neem's examination of the complex interplay between the state and civil society in the early republic that initially fostered—then ultimately fragmented—Americans’ sense of nationalism prior to the Civil War. This modernist focus is appropriate given the authors’ goal of using the essays to “inform contemporary efforts to understand and transform contemporary systems of governance” (p. 2). The systems of intellectual and social provision by nonprofits that the contributors to the volume analyze have their closest analogues in the urban industrial economy and polity of the twentieth century. Mark Hendrickson's and Alice O'Connor's chapters demonstrate how nonprofit organizations incubated policy ideas outside of the political mainstream during the 1920s and 1970s, respectively. In Hendrickson's most striking example, the National Urban League rescued a group of African American researchers who were financially abandoned with the elimination of the U.S. Department of Labor's Division of Negro Economics and allowed them to continue to undermine stereotypical views of “the Negro labor question” in northern industries. O'Connor reveals how, half a century later and on the other side of the political spectrum, conservative philanthropists, incensed by the seemingly liberal activism of the Ford Foundation in particular, funded a series of emphatically conservative foundations aimed at liberating businesses from the regulatory apparatus of the New Deal.