ON FREE AND OPEN ENCOUNTERS
by Barry D. Karl

reprinted from the Council on Foundations magazine, Foundation News and Commentary

On an early spring weekend just a few weeks back, approximately half of the membership of the House of Representatives went off to a retreat. It was a bipartisan group, including spouses and children, which was appropriate, considering the fact that the chief purpose announced for the retreat was to encourage a return to civility in politics. That included not pulling one another's neckties in the midst of a debate, and not shouting "shut up" at fellow committee members. Those were surely nursery school lessons all of them had sadly forgotten, but which the children among them would be bound to support. Funding, the newspaper account told us, came from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Another news item, a few years back: the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded a series of town meetings around the nation to gather folks together to talk about health care reform; the foundation also paid for air time so that NBC could devote two hours to a special about health care in America. First Lady Hillary Clinton happened to be looking into the same topic at the time, attended two of the five town meetings and appeared, along with then-Sen. Bob Dole and others representing a range of views, on the NBC television special.

Are both of these involvements of philanthropic groups in public policy examples of advocacy?

Seminars on tie-pulling would certainly not include discussions of policy, even at lunch and dinner. Never. Smoke-filled rooms are out of fashion anyway. As for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where else would one go for advice on health care delivery than to the nation's most knowledgeable group of men and women? Anyone looking for advice on health care would be bound to trip over something funded by Robert Wood Johnson sooner or later. Some of us observers even thought that was where the president's task force should have started, rather than waiting until the water got up to its knees.

The answer is, both events influenced public policy. Both advocated behavior in the public interest. Both processes are and were intended to affect the legislative process for the better. And both have long and distinguished roots in American history.

A Familiar Ring
Today's debates over the practices of privately funded groups that advocate particular public interests have a familiar ring to them, at least to historians like myself who have followed the complex relation between public and private in American political life. Like many of the political debates over the uses of tax-exempt funds for public purposes, the private money/public interest issue has been present in American history since early in the 19th century. Regulating charity has deep roots in our English past, our choice as a new nation of committing ourselves to separation of church and state, and our ambivalence toward public need as an acceptable responsibility of a democratic state. The chronic absence of historical memory of our unresolved struggles with such problems is itself a significant historical fact, as though some form of repressed memory were at work.

	FACTS & FIGURES Nearly all charitable donations by African Americans, Southerners, and born-again Christians were given in the pew. Evangelicals are among the most likely to throw a $20 in the collection basket - on average, they contributed $2,346 last year to their churches. More Facts & Figures

Privately funded programs for improving the lives of American citizens have been part of our national history, most particularly in the 20th century when organized philanthropy took on the responsibilities once largely confined to local church groups and ad hoc citizen organizations. The programs often stepped on the toes of industry, as when family of Nathan Straus (owner of Macy's) funded agencies to conduct testing of milk in New York City and 35 other cities. This led to an overwhelming public acceptance of monitoring milk - because doing so had a significant effect on easing infant mortality - that forced communities to turn it into public policy.

The same was true of programs for child guidance in the schools, once school attendance became law and left both children and their families searching for reasons why their young should not be entering the job market and contributing to family resources. Counseling and parent-teacher organizations were the result, and again, the public joined the private community in support of it.

The labor movement in the United States, particularly where the protection of roles of women and children were concerned, has an old dependence on private philanthropy. Legislation and court decisions we now accept as national policy were the products of the joint involvement of philanthropists seeking to change public policy and legislators and judges grateful for their help.

The list of such examples is long and the organizations are all part of what has become the tax-exempt system of philanthropic support of public policy. "Making it legal"-that is, turning ideas into government-supported programs - has been the central way of making good ideas work with limited private funding, and assuring that such funds could be turned to other equally urgent needs. Yet such private systems and assemblages of interested citizens were only modernized by philanthropy and the tax benefits; they were not created by them. Citizens were assembling to engage in public actions to protect the needs of those who could not protect themselves long before the systems we now criticize were created. So why the criticism?

While we agree that as individuals we have a right to assemble to demand redress of our grievances, we really don't agree on the methods such demands on government should take. Each generation of angered political leaders approaches each instance of offending interference as though it were a fresh insult. We don't tend to recall associations with, say, the long history of abolitionist organizations and the war they helped provoke or the slavery that war ended, either because the memory is too threatening or the teaching of history too irrelevant to the urgency of today's collections of dissatisfied citizens.

Behind it all is a history that stretches back to the origins of our first consciousness of our need to speak our minds, to decide for ourselves, if you will, which fruits we will eat from which trees. It's not an easy history to untangle when one puts it in that form. It becomes too fundamental and too close to the pain of moral principle. The questions may not be ones of law or the constitutional supports of free speech, but the richer history that created those laws and supports that we now live under.

John Milton's defense of free speech in his Aeropagitica in 1644 used to be central to the vocabulary of American education: "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the Earth, so Truth be in the field, we do ingloriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple: Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?"

That statement has been useful to Americans ever since because it supported the tradition of public debate historians traced back to the revolutionary era, not simply the inflaming writing of Thomas Paine, but the pamphlets that circulated among Americans defining for themselves a course of action that would ultimately create their constitutional liberties. The Committees of Correspondence, the assemblies of the dissatisfied, and the sequence of organizations that ultimately built an American nation were all part of an ad hoc process of exchanging ideas for public purposes. Thus, we need to understand that the Constitution of 1787 was not the beginning of those liberties but their confirmation. It fixed for the future the fruits of the long years of new world experience with our English roots.

The newspaper essays that posed Federalists against Anti-federalists extended that tradition and stood before the world as models of opposition to the European suppression of dispute in the supposed interests of political stability. American stability, by contrast, rested on debate, not always comfortably but always with the assurance that open discussion would be preserved. It was a rocky road but one with a secure direction, and so it has remained.

Thomas Paine vs. Harry and Louise
How close to today's concerns with advocacy does that bring us? In some respects, not as close as one would like, but for reasons that distinguish the eighteenth century from the end of the twentieth. Our forms of communication have become much more complex than Milton's printed page and much more subject to manipulation. Thus, Milton's "truth" and "falsehood" are less distinguishable from one another. Images that rustle the unconscious have been added to words that stimulate rational thought. We are meant to see Harry and Louise in the commercials advocating opposition to the Clinton health care proposals as ourselves, not as refined creations of an industry bent on reflecting us in shiny plastic professionals from central casting. The costs of inventing such artificial figures have escalated to the point where the management of ideas has become a profession no more controlled by stands of truth than the contents of a magician's sleeve. The producers of truth and falsehood are masters of the same technique.

One could argue that has always been true. Milton was a brilliant poet as well as a man with political interests to promote. He was also opposing the edicts of a Puritan government to whose revolution he had committed himself, not the monarchy they had so brutally overthrown. Promoting ideas of good and evil are among the most ancient of human tasks and the most threatening.

The punishments are now more refined. One can distinguish the cup of hemlock from the removal of a tax exemption, but by the severity of the punishment, not by its purpose, the stifling of dissident voices. There are no guarantees that funding will produce truths that will be acceptable to all and there never have been. Suppressing efforts at truth remains the most threatening of the alternatives.

Generating openness and multiplicity was what Milton and his descendants saw as the only protection of truth. The opposition to that process has always been based on a fear of the results of misunderstanding or misrepresentation, and it was that fear that Milton sought to allay. By assuring the ultimate victory of truth, he was hoping to dispel the fear. The question is, does our concern with today's technological skill diminish the confidence he felt in truth, or even change the nature of truth itself? The historian's answer is that if it does, we are closer to losing the Paradise he so eloquently described than we want to be.

Part of our problem is our penchant for stockpiling words without real meanings and adding to them when we feel enough of a hunger for meaning to look for it, but not enough to inhibit our penchant for argument. "Advocacy" is an empty vessel that has to be filled with real ideas before it gets enough meaning to excite intelligent debate. By that time, of course, it has attracted enough friends and enemies to stop us in our tracks.

The authors of the Federalist Papers were aware of that problem when they tried to distinguish "parties" and "corruption" and "patronage" from "interests." What they were looking for was a distinction between a blind adherence to individuals with power and a thoughtful-even-if-biased commitment to ideas. Aware that ideas became commands when they were expressed in laws that strictly limit our power to disagree with them, they divided the control of those commands among the three branches of government and gave to each of them a check upon the other two.

While it is important to look to the Constitution for the powers that support advocacy, it is equally important to look to the power that the Constitution was created to protect, namely, the rights of the people themselves, their freedom to assemble, to petition the government, and to make their case for their differences with that government. That freedom was recognized prior to the Constitution and remains the bedrock on which it stands. It precedes the nation of lawyers and legalisms that now dominate our national debates. If it is now a more costly process than it was 200 years ago, we can only welcome it to the list of costly processes that are the price of our modernity.

One does not need to revise or defend the Constitution that freedom created, only to remember its origins. Advocacy is an exercise of that freedom, not an usurpation of it.

Advocacy and Tax Exemption
The history of the effort to prevent the use of tax-exempt funds for political purposes is a course filled with efforts to control a process of public expression that really has only one base behind it. That's the distinction between the political support of individuals the authors of the Federalist papers would have called the support of a political patron, from the support of intellectual perspectives they called "interests." Interests, to the authors, meant groups of citizens whose occupations and professions committed them to perfectly rational perspectives others might not share. For example, doctors saw things differently than lawyers simply by virtue of their training and roles in the community.

While our use of "interest" today has taken on a much more partisan ring than they intended, "advocacy" is as close to their meaning as we have been able to come. Advocacy refers to the ideas that reflect the beliefs of identifiable communities of men and women seeking to influence government policy, just as the Federalists' term "interests" did. Still, it enables us to continue the struggle to separate the validity of the debate from the personalities of the debaters, a task that in today's world of political media and performance politics is as difficult as it has ever been.

The history of the tax exemption and its relation to charity and public service has gone through equally complex redefinitions. Originally an extension by the states of the exemption from property taxes of churches and church-sponsored schools and hospitals, tax exemption was extended even by the early state constitutions to include institutions providing other public services, including secular education and scientific research. The rationale behind the extension was clear. States and communities that could not afford such services out of their own limited resources were grateful to those who organized their own funds to provide them. Exempting their property from taxation was not a gift but an act of thanks. It was another borrowed English practice that had aroused almost as much debate there as it has continued to arouse here. In both countries the practice has created periodic uneasiness now for two centuries, but continues, albeit in very different forms.

One could ask, "why the uneasiness," and stutter through an answer that no one would find very satisfying beyond the muttered assertion that "tax exemption works." But the uneasiness also has to do with uncertainties about the appropriate role of financial support of issues in political debate. Campaign finance is an equally old and equally troubling problem that cries for a rationality unwanted even by many of its supporters, but without the added value of a tax exemption. Where the distinction between campaign finance and advocacy is concerned, one returns ultimately to the difference between the support of an individual and the support of an idea. Funding gives individuals political power. Funding gives disembodied ideas a particular reality they can achieve in no other way.

Whether it also gives ideas political power is the fear that generates this opposition. The fact that such power can come only through the working out of the constitutional processes by the individuals we elect to manage our politics is the protection we have against the power of advocacy. If we are still afraid of that power, it is the state which must be made to protect us through the powers of rational decision-making we expect of it, not a restriction of our right to press our demands on the state by increasing the cost of doing it as a punishment for doing it at all. Even the threat of such a punishment violates our tradition by the use of political power against it. That was the "licensing" and "prohibiting" Milton found so profoundly disturbing.

The funding of publicly useful ideas is not a matter of ideology, even of clearly definable right or wrong. It is not a matter of lobbying except in a pejoratively designed sense of metaphor, for there is no profit but the public good. It is a matter of maintaining an open debate for all, a multiplicity of alternatives from which those we elect to office can choose, knowing that they have heard all interested voices.

Barry D. Karl, professor emeritus of American history at the University of Chicago, is author of a forthcoming book, The Secularization of American Charity. He is also currently working on a study of American foundations and public policy.