Annual letter from Elizabeth Wheeler, Board of Directors
December 2023
Dear Family and Friends of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation,
Whenever I despair of public life, I turn to Alexis DeTocqueville to remember what I had forgotten. As you recall he visited America in the 1830s and wrote about it in Democracy in America. In particular, he admired the profusion of private, voluntary associations.
Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds, constantly unite together. Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; they establish hospitals, prisons, schools by the same method. Finally, if they wish to highlight a truth or develop an opinion by the encouragement of a greater example, they form an association. There is scarcely an undertaking so small that Americans do not unite for it.
This enables them to be part of something larger than the circumstances of their own existence. Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another. If they do not acquire the practice of associating with each other in ordinary life, civilization itself would be in peril.
DeTocqueville came to mind the other day when I was standing in a light rain with 150 other people at the Huntington House. Our hearts were troubled. Long ago men and women had been enslaved in this place but their stories had never been told. That bothered us. We had, therefore, gathered here to remember them and unite our stories as one. We "associated".
Ancestral Bridges is a local community group that partners with other community groups to create educational and economic opportunities for Black and indigenous people of color (BIPOC.); and
Stopping Stones is a project that installs plaques commemorating the lives of the enslaved peoples who worked at a specific site; and
Mass Humanities, Reading Frederick Douglass Together sponsors community readings of Douglass' powerful address to his "Fellow Citizens": What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?; and
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation believes we have a collective responsibility to engage the past in order to create a fulsome future for all, which for PPH, has meant embracing the persons enslaved by our ancestors.
When the program was over I felt better, revived. We all did. The silence breathed Amen. Our national politics might be dysfunctional. Our individual interests might be selfish. But our local associations had broadened our perspective and expanded our understanding of community. In this moment, we had been drawn out of our private preoccupations to stand in public for something larger. We were citizens.
Indifferent to the rain and thrilled by the words of our common purpose, our hearts expanded. Our small organizations, weak by themselves, gained power in this moment of association. As DeTocqueville implied, our local associations are the foundations of our civilization. Join us.
Thank you.
Elizabeth Wheeler
Board of Directors