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Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas
The Duke Endowment, 1924â"1994
By Robert F. Durden Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9712-0
CHAPTER 1
THE ORIGINS OF THE DUKE ENDOWMENT
WHILE JAMES BUCHANAN DUKE'S father, Washington Duke, and his older brother, Benjamin Newton Duke, were certainly not slouches in the business world, they were also not possessed of the business genius and drive that characterized the youngest member of the family. Known only to his family and a few intimate friends as "Buck" during his life time, J. B. Duke played a key role in persuading his father and other business partners to gamble on machine-made cigarettes in the 1880s. After that gamble paid off handsomely and W. Duke Sons and Company became the leading cigarette manufacturer in the nation, J. B. Duke took the lead in persuading the nation's four other largest cigarette manufacturers to join with the Duke company in forming the American Tobacco Company in 1890. Young J. B. Duke, at age thirty-three, was then named president of the company, and he proceeded to build one of the first giant holding companies in the nation.
Long before the Supreme Court of the United States ordered the dissolution of the vast "tobacco trust" in 1911, however, J. B. Duke helped to organize in 1902 the world-girdling British-American Tobacco Company, headquartered in London. While he totally separated himself from the domestic American tobacco industry after 1911, he continued to play a major role in the British-American Tobacco Company until his death in 1925 and served as its chairman for more than a decade.
Textile manufacturing in Durham and elsewhere in the two Carolinas also attracted Ben and J. B. Duke from the early 1890s onward, and they became major players in that booming economic sector. Moreover, as an outgrowth of their involvement in textile manufacturing and their interest in water-power sites for their mills, early in the twentieth century they became involved in a burgeoning new industry: the production of hydroelectric power. The last major economic activity of J. B. Duke became, therefore, the building of a vast network of electric-power plants in the Piedmont region of the two Carolinas. In the mid-1920s it would become the Duke Power Company. While this company, which soon became state-regulated but investor-owned, never brought the Dukes as much personal profit as had the tobacco industry, it grew to have a special place in J. B. Duke's mind and heart. Not only did he particularly enjoy the kind of construction and problem-solving that was involved in the electric-power business, but he also held a passionate belief, which turned out to be absolutely correct, that the power company was destined to play a key role in the industrial development of the Piedmont region of the two Carolinas.
In light of J. B. Duke's business career, even a casual observer could discern that he both liked and had the ability and persistence to plan and build on a large scale. When he turned to the idea of permanent philanthropy, therefore, it was altogether in character for him to think big. While Washington Duke had carefully raised his children to share his interest in charitable giving, especially to Methodist causes, as will be discussed, J. B. Duke was the only member of the family to institutionalize philanthropy on a princely scale.
Precisely when J. B. Duke first conceived of using the electric-power system as a basis for philanthropy for the Carolinas is not known. When a Virginia-born lawyer named William R. Perkins became Duke's chief legal counselor in 1914, however, he placed in one of his desk drawers an early, rough draft, prepared for Duke, of what eventually became a decade later the indenture creating the Duke Endowment.
J. B. Duke's movement toward his own, large-scale philanthropy was thoroughly entangled with the family's long-standing involvement with Trinity College. Because it was the Methodist church's college for men in North Carolina, Washington Duke and his family began to take an active interest in the small, struggling institution in the late 1880s. At a time when the college was almost bankrupt, Ben Duke gave it $1,000 in 1887 and soon became a trustee. The leaders of Trinity decided in 1890 that it needed to move from its isolated, rural location in the North Carolina Piedmont —five miles from the nearest railroad, telegraph, or telephone — to a growing city. Several North Carolina cities made bids accordingly, but Washington Duke, after conferring with his son Ben and other members of the family, contributed the money that brought the college to Durham, where it commenced operations in the fall of 1892.
Since the full story of Trinity College's gradual development into one of the South's leading liberal arts institutions by the time of World War I has been well told elsewhere, it need not be repeated here. Washington Duke and his family, by providing the regular financial support that Trinity had long sought but never before found, played a major part in that development, with Washington Duke giving the bulk of what endowment the college had prior to his death in 1905 and with Ben Duke contributing largely to the annual budget and serving as the chief link between the family and the college. At Ben Duke's urging, J. B. Duke, who had moved from Durham to New York in the mid-1880s, also made important gifts to the college. In short, Trinity College and its needs, as transmitted to J. B. Duke by his older brother, Ben, and the presidents of the college, first John C. Kilgo and then William P. Few, were what might be called the "starter dough" which, when some other ingredients were added, rose finally into the great loaf that became the Duke Endowment.
Methodist higher education was not, however, the only charitable concern of Washington Duke and his family. The Orphan Asylum at Oxford, North Carolina, some twenty-five miles north of Durham, was owned and operated by the Grand Lodge of North Carolina Masons, to which Washington Duke belonged. From the 1890s onward, he and Ben Duke took a close, personal interest in the institution, often taking the train up to spend the day, or a part of it, seeing what the most urgent needs and problems were, and then doing what they could to help.
The Oxford Orphan Asylum was then maintained for white children only, and the walls of the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, the South's second "peculiar institution" (antebellum slavery having been the first), were rapidly rising higher around the turn of the century. Washington Duke and his family, however, rather than helping to segregate the races, befriended African Americans and their institutions, both in and beyond Durham. The African American school north of Raleigh that became Kitrell College was one early example, and there were numerous others.
Having acquired money and therefore power and social status by the 1890s, the Dukes therefore displayed the paternalistic and benevolent attitudes toward African Americans on which many upper-class white southerners traditionally, and often hypocritically, prided themselves. In the case of the Dukes, however, there was an unusual aspect of the relationship that transcended paternalism, and it was rooted in politics. The overwhelming majority of African American adult males became Republicans in the stormy years after the Civil War, and so did Washington Duke first and then later his sons. If the blacks knew all too painfully what it meant to be an oppressed minority, so too, in an admittedly different way, did those southern whites, like Washington Duke, who became Republicans. They were despised and ridiculed as "scalawags" by the Democratic majority. For Washington Duke, therefore, African Americans became political allies as well as, in many cases, friends, and the relationship influenced not only his sons and the family's philanthropy but also had a certain liberating influence on Trinity College after 1890.
The Dukes' business partner, George W. Watts, gave a general hospital, one of the early ones in the state, to the white people of Durham in 1895. While the Dukes also contributed to Watts Hospital, they were sensitive to the fact that Durham's African Americans sorely lacked such a facility. Accordingly, in response to an appeal from a prominent leader in the black community, Ben and J. B. Duke gave the money to establish Lincoln Hospital for Durham's African Americans in 1901 and continued to help support it in later years.
Lincoln Hospital was, in fact, the first and only major venture of the Dukes in the field of medical care, for Trinity College and other Methodist causes headed the list of Duke philanthropies. In addition to significant support to Methodist colleges for women in Louisburg, North Carolina, and in Greensboro, North Carolina, the Dukes also generously befriended Quaker-sponsored Guilford College, near Greensboro, which had grown out of New Garden School. Since the younger Dukes had briefly attended New Garden back in the early 1870s, it had a special claim on them. Moreover, Trinity College itself had evolved from a one-room school jointly sponsored by Methodist and Quaker farmers back in 1838, so in helping Guilford, the Dukes were also honoring an old collaborative effort.
Having been converted to Methodism as a young adolescent in the early 1830s, Washington Duke honored the tradition of the dedicated itinerant ministers, the circuit riders, who built the church into a major Protestant denomination. He had known first hand the hard work and poverty that filled the lives of both ministers and church members, and he always responded to appeals for help that came from both preachers and congregations, especially in such rural, agricultural communities as his had been.
Countless examples of this could be cited, but perhaps a letter that Ben Duke in Durham wrote to his brother J. B. Duke in New York right after Christmas in 1893 is the best, briefest way to suggest the pattern of family philanthropy that was clearly emerging in the 1890s. "Dear Buck," Ben Duke wrote:
I am much disappointed at not seeing you here fin Durham] this Xmas, but I suppose your business would not allow you to leave N.Y. I want to talk to you about money matters. During the past year I have paid out money as follows
Trinity College
(on account of our offer to the conference last year) $7,500
All other church & charity $4,016
$11,516.00
I believe it was understood that Mary, you and myself were to share in this Trinity College expenditure. The other item of $4,016.00 was expended about as follows: contributions to the poor fund of the town during the severe weather last winter, amounts given to the pastor of our church for the poor during the year which he used in doctoring the sick, burying the dead &c, &c (all of which he rendered itemized statement of), Oxford Orphans Asylum, current expenses of our church of every kind. Colored School at Kittrell N.C. $500. Worn out Preachers of the N.C. Conference $500. To poor churches over the state &c &c. What I mention is in addition to what Pa gave or rather it is two-thirds (2/3rds) of the total of such payments, the total being $6,024.00.1 expect you have given away money individually during the year — if so & you are disposed to assist me as usual with these expenses you should have credit for such amounts as you have expended. The total amount I've paid ($11,516.00) looks large but $7,500 of it went in one place & I do not see how I could have made the other items less, as the pressure from the poor &c has been urgent, & as for myself I feel better for having given it than if I had not done so. Of course this does not include money I've given to favor kin people.
J. B. Duke promptly paid his share, of course, as his older brother had requested. While J. B. Duke did make charitable contributions on his own, especially to certain Methodist churches in New York City and in New Jersey, among other causes, he generally had no time to spare for the correspondence involved in philanthropic work, much less for the tedious hours of conferring with educators, Methodist preachers, and various other petitioners. That was left to Ben Duke, who took the trouble to answer, even if negatively sometimes, the hundreds of requests that poured in to him and his father, requests that became especially voluminous after the announcement of each of the family's larger gifts to Trinity. Gifts from the Dukes along the lines suggested in Ben Duke's letter of 1893 grew larger as the years passed, with Trinity College always the prime beneficiary. The pattern was also recapitulated in Washington Duke's will in 1905.
One may well ask why the Dukes began to engage in systematic, annual philanthropic giving from the late 1880s onward, that is from the time that they began to enjoy true wealth. Their motives were no doubt mixed, as in the case in most human affairs. One quick explanation, however, that many in a later era would certainly rush to offer, must be ruled out: since there were no income taxes in the United States in the late nineteenth century, and would not be until after the Sixteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1913, the Dukes obviously were not seeking tax deductions.
Most people most of the time enjoy the approval of those among whom they live, and the Dukes were no exception. Although they generally acted quietly when possible and never hungered for publicity, they sought, certainly in some measure, the approval of their fellow North Carolinians. After the storm of angry opposition to the "tobacco trust" arose in the 1890s, some critics charged that the Dukes were simply attempting to "buy off" public opinion. The simplest rebuttal to that suggestion, however, lay in the large amount of time, thought, and worry, even more than money alone, that Washington Duke and especially Ben Duke gave to charitable causes, and they began doing so even before the American Tobacco Company became the target for widespread attack.
Pride in Durham and a desire to help enhance its respectability and progressive modernity played a part in some of the family's early giving, as in the case of the Dukes' wanting Durham to become the home of Trinity College. They were not alone, of course, in possessing a strong sense of community, of southern love of place, but in their case, money began early to give tangible expression to the sentiment.
When all cautionary qualifications are made, however, the simplest answer seems to be the principal one: the Dukes gave because the Methodist church emphasized the desirability, even the necessity for salvation, of giving on the part of those who were able. Washington Duke came to philanthropy via the Methodist church and raised his children accordingly. In a time when the southern churches still kept the new social gospel at arm's length and focused on the actions and responsibilities of individuals, the old biblical doctrine of the stewardship of wealth remained very much alive: those who possessed wealth had the dual responsibility, according to the church's teaching, of both using and giving it wisely.
While J. B. Duke had traditionally deferred first to his father and then to his brother Ben in the matter of the family's philanthropy, beginning around 1915 things began somewhat to change. For one thing, Ben Duke began to experience serious health problems around that time, and while there would be periods of improvement, he gradually slipped into semi-invalidism. This forced a certain modification of the old division of responsibility between the two brothers, who were unusually devoted to each other as they had been to their father. At any rate, J. B. Duke began, tentatively and warily at first, to establish his own lines of communication with Trinity College. Most members of its faculty had probably never actually met J. B. Duke, but in 1914 President Few went to New York to confer with him and his brother and then wrote one of his first letters directed solely to J. B. Duke. "We want you to understand what we are doing [at Trinity] and to approve of it," Few explained. "But I do want you to feel that we will live within our means; that we will incur no added financial responsibilities without the approval beforehand of your Brother and yourself; and that any further contributions are to be free will offerings made because you feel like making them and not because they are expected of you." In closing, Few struck a note that reappeared many times in his letters and public addresses: "And speaking for myself I am particularly anxious that you shall get enduring personal satisfaction and happiness out of what you have done for Trinity College, because you are able to feel that through it you have done some permanent good upon the earth."
Just precisely how J. B. Duke felt about doing "permanent good upon the earth" is not known, for, prior to 1924, he rarely went on record about his private beliefs and aspirations. In addition to Ben Duke and President Few, however, there was another person who carefully lobbied J. B. Duke on behalf of Trinity College, and that was its former president, John C. Kilgo. Although he became a Methodist bishop upon giving up the presidency in 1910, he remained close to the college, serving as both a trustee and member of the executive committee. Kilgo had rekindled Washington Duke's interest in Trinity back in the 1890s and was greatly admired by Ben and J. B. Duke.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lasting Legacy to the Carolinas by Robert F. Durden. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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