Frank Cowperwood and the World of "Philanthropy"

In the course of Theodore Dreiser's The Titan the protagonist Frank Cowperwood, fighting to establish his streetcar monopoly in Chicago in the face of determined opposition from vengeful business and personal enemies, finds himself having a tough time getting the credit he needs to continue in his campaign--just when he is approached by an astronomer attached to a certain local university on the grow (implicitly, the then-newly founded University of Chicago) looking for donations for the construction of what he intends to be the world's most powerful observatory.

Dreiser's Cowperwood is sufficiently intellectual to have some respect for such a project and the intelligence and earnestness of the man endeavoring to realize it. However, that is not what is foremost in his mind. Rather it is that if the astronomer merely hopes for only a small part of the total cost from Cowperwood, Cowperwood, who realizes that he could easily afford to pay for the whole project, also realizes that "[o]n such a repute" as would accrue to him from paying for such an observatory end his problems raising credit at a stroke by impressing the financial world with his means. Indeed, he inwardly says "'At last! At last!'" at that very moment, makes the "donation," and gets exactly the result he expected. His "gift" making bankers take "sharp note of the donor" of such extraordinary means, Cowperwood now found his requests for "bond and mortgage loans" on his infrastructure projects "courteously received" even by houses that we had just seen give him the brush-off, and his bonds quickly taken up for sale, so that he had all the money he needed to proceed--while "those who had been scheming to bring about Cowperwood's downfall gnashed impotent teeth."

As it was then, so it remains now, the donations of the rich frequently serving other ends besides altruism--though such realities are apt to be slighted by the elite's courtiers in the mainstream press and the gullible portion of the public which respects its singing of "philanthropists," quite sure that when sex scandal-ridden ex-presidents and tech billionaires say they only hung out with Jeffrey Epstein for the benefit of their charitable foundations they consider it expression of a disbelief of them the mark of a low and shabby mind insufficiently respectful of the elite before whom their sort expect all "right-thinking people" to bow and scrape."