On May 10, 1900, the Navy steamship Quito sailed from Brooklyn, New York, to deliver 5,000 tons of corn and seeds to the “starving multitudes” of India. This “great work of rescue” was the brainchild of Louis Klopsch, proprietor of the Christian Herald—the most influential religious newspaper in the United States. Since his purchase of the publication in 1890, the enterprising Klopsch and his editorial partner, the charismatic Brooklyn preacher Thomas De Witt Talmage, had combined scriptural injunctions about charity with emerging technologies of modern journalism—gripping headlines, heartrending reporting, and graphic photographs of suffering people—to convince readers that aiding the afflicted was the obligation of every American.
Although we’ve forgotten his name, Klopsch and the Christian Herald fostered a popular movement of faith-based philanthropy that rivaled the achievements of competing humanitarian agencies like the American Red Cross and provided a sharp contrast to another trend in American giving at the time: the rise of scientific philanthropy, championed by Andrew Carnegie. During its heyday, the Christian Herald engaged ordinary citizens from across the U.S. in efforts to assuage all kinds of adversity: from homelessness among New York City’s unemployed to poverty among formerly enslaved people in the American South; from disease and destitution among survivors of massacres in Armenia to hardships following natural disasters in India, China, Scandinavia, Macedonia, Japan, Italy, and Mexico. By the time Klopsch died in 1910, Christian Herald subscribers had donated over $3.3 million (equivalent to approximately $89 million in 2019) to domestic and international causes. No other relief organization in this period came close to matching its fund-raising record or ability to arouse popular concern for suffering.
Key to Klopsch’s success in making the Christian Herald “a medium of American bounty to the needy throughout the world” was his insistence that philanthropy was not the province of the privileged elite but a popular practice in which all citizens ought to participate. In a humanitarian crisis, each dollar made a difference—even a nickel could buy a loaf of bread. Every person who could spare a penny should share with sufferers in distress.
By democratizing philanthropy, the Christian Herald’s campaigns made charity a distinguishing mark of American character, Klopsch contended, and helped unify an increasingly diverse population. The common enterprise of serving others, he argued, let people overcome political disagreements, social prejudices, economic antagonisms, regional animosities, cultural conflicts, and religious discord—all of which were on the rise in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as Americans argued over immigration, race, income inequality and labor unrest, imperialism, women’s rights, evolution, and the Bible. Whatever their differences in these arenas, Klopsch insisted, surely American citizens could unite around the commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”