ted him to undertake new ventures for building bridges between the Jewish
and Christian worlds and, in particular, for enhancing the respectability of
Jews and Judaism in the larger society. Finally, handsome giving provided
him with a tool for attacking anti-Jewish discrimination within the non-
Jewish agencies he supported.
Like most respectable Americans of his day, Schiff preferred to limit his
gifts to the “deserving poor,” industrious men and women who, through
no fault of their own, were unable to earn an honest living. Indiscriminate
giving, on the other hand, was not only demoralizing but, by rewarding
those whose moral deficiencies accounted for their poverty, only fostered
pauperism. To weed out the deserving from the non-deserving the banker
insisted on careful investigation of all applications for relief. His attitude
on encouraging independence among the poor was well summed up in
his idea for bicycle clubs on the Lower East Side. When Lillian Wald
preached about the ghetto dwellers’ need of fresh air, Schiff encouraged a
favorite pastime of his own, bicycling. He was prepared to purchase equip-
ment—some one hundred bicycles—for clubs in the tenement district.
The users, however, were to be charged a small fee for maintainance costs.
As Schiff reasoned, they “must not feel that they get the enjoyment and
benefit through anyone’s philanthropy, which is too apt to be construed as
charity, but they should rather feel that the small dues... give them a sense
of proprietary interest in the proposed affair.”^55
Striving to inject a businesslike approach into philanthropic undertak-
ings, Schiff emphasized balanced budgets and efficient operations. Re-
quests from agencies on the matter of new equipment, for example, re-
quired considered judgment. (For a frugal man who, it was said, used the
backs of envelopes in order to save paper and who made his family list
every phone call they made, nonessential expenses in budgets were unjus-
tified.) The banker once lectured the president of the Baron de Hirsch
Fund on how to authorize payments. If the proper business form was not
observed, Schiff, a vice president and trustee, disclaimed responsibility.^56
Since he endorsed emerging trends to rationalize charitable operations,
the banker supported the study of philanthropy as a scientific discipline.
For the training of experts on social welfare he endowed a chair of “social
economy” at Columbia University. At the same time, however, he refused
to sacrifice the individuality of the recipient or for that matter the donor on
the altar of scientific giving. Aware that the deserving poor were often hu-
miliated by charitable handouts, he sternly reminded the director of the
United Hebrew Charities to serve all applicants in a “kindly fashion.” The
needy deserved respect and compassion; those who were treated as beg-
gars were likely to sink to that level. For his part, if moved by the plight of
Leadership and Philanthropy 61