A Brief, Slightly Unhinged History of the fundraising Gala

From Gilded Age charity balls to the modern paddle raise, how "a party where you ask for money" became an industry.

The 1600s: rich people panic-donate after a fire

Perhaps one could argue that humanity as a whole took care of the community at large better. The concept of tithing (giving 10% of your gross receipts to your church) is older than the bible. It was just a part of life to donate and help the less fortunate. In earlier times, it was much more apparent that if someone close by was suffering, it could affect everyone. Imagine if the local cobbler died and his family could no longer survive, then you don’t have shoes anymore. Better idea to make sure they live and the apprentice cobblers can keep working.

On a large scale to mobilize charity to help, the whole concept seems to start with a disaster and grass roots efforts. After the Great Fire of London in 1666 wiped out most of the city, organizers ran what were called "charitable briefs," a nationwide ask that went church to church. It worked. They raised over £16,000, which in 1666 money is a small fortune. No open bar, no auction paddles, just a very motivated ask and a very good reason.

The 1700s: celebrities get involved, on purpose

By the mid-1700s, London's Foundling Hospital had already figured out that attaching famous people to a cause moves money. The painter William Hogarth donated murals. The composer Handel didn't just write a check, he threw a benefit concert in 1750 that raised £728 for the hospital. That's a Handel show, for a children's charity, on purpose, as a fundraiser.

This is also roughly when the word "gala" starts meaning what we mean by it. It comes from French, "en gala," tangled up with an older French word for merrymaking, and possibly with Italian "vestito di gala," meaning robe of state, which some etymologists trace even further back to an Arabic word for a ceremonial garment given as a gift. The specific sense of "a festive event where people show up in their finest" gets documented in 1777.

The 1800s: merch, guilt, and a genius product idea

The Victorians didn't have paddle raises, they had donor swag. Charity leaders like Thomas Barnardo and William Booth became famous enough that people bought postcards, plates, and teapots with their faces on them just to support the cause.

The best move of the century belongs to the Salvation Army, who in 1891 started selling "Lights in Darkest England" safety matches, a fundraiser and a labor reform statement wrapped into one object people would actually buy and use. Even back then, people were already annoyed about being asked for money too many times. The Times complained in 1880 that once your name landed on a subscriber list, you never stopped hearing from them.

1883: the year a costume ball became a class war

This is the one most people already half know from the TV show The Gilded Age. Alva Vanderbilt threw a housewarming costume ball on March 26, 1883, at her new mansion on Fifth Avenue. It cost roughly $250,000, about $6 million today, with $65,000 spent on champagne alone and $11,000 on flowers. Nearly 1,200 guests. It ran until sunrise.

It wasn't a charity event, it was a status maneuver. The Vanderbilts had money but not acceptance, Mrs. Astor and her gatekeeper Ward McAllister controlled who counted as society. Alva threw a party so massive it forced the old guard to let the new money in. The New York Sun ripped her for it, pointing out the obscenity of that kind of spending while the same city was full of people suffering. That tension, spectacle next to suffering, has been baked into the gala ever since. Alva seems to mostly be remembered for her social climbing and parties, but she was also a militant suffragete and a founder of the National Woman’s Party.

1938: a comedian names the industry

President Franklin Roosevelt had polio. Starting in the 1930s, his birthday became an annual excuse for fundraising balls to fight the disease. On January 3, 1938, that effort formally became the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Then the comedian Eddie Cantor got on the radio and gave it the name that stuck: the March of Dimes, a pun on the newsreel series The March of Time.

Cantor's pitch was pure strategy. He wasn't asking rich people for big checks, he was asking everyone for a dime, on the logic that a million dimes adds up fast. By the end of that January, the White House had received 2,680,000 dimes, over a quarter million dollars, entirely in loose change mailed by regular people. That money helped fund the research that led to Jonas Salk's polio vaccine.

This is the moment the gala stops being only a rich person's game and becomes a real fundraising mechanism with a mass audience, a celebrity spokesperson, and a name catchy enough to survive ninety years later.

Now: the paddle raise takes over, and nobody agrees on who invented it

Somewhere in the back half of the 20th century, the format that runs today shows up: dinner, silent auction, live auction, and the fund-a-need appeal, better known as the paddle raise, where the auctioneer works the room number by number.

I could find no credible, sourced origin story for the paddle raise or fund-a-need appeal turned up anywhere. Every guide out there treats it as an established technique that professional benefit auctioneers refined, nobody credits an inventor, a founding event, or even a solid decade. It is a format that is just thought of as the only way to do things nowadays. It works for the most part, but one my question is: why you have to get people drunk in front of their neighbors and friends in order to get them to give large sums of money to a noble or worthy cause? A question for another day perhaps.

Sources

Etymonline, "Gala" (etymology and 1777 date for the festive-event sense): https://www.etymonline.com/word/gala

University of Kent Special Collections & Archives, "History of Fundraising" (Great Fire of London charitable briefs, Foundling Hospital, Handel benefit concert, Barnardo and Salvation Army, 1880 Times complaint): https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/specialcollections/2024/07/22/history-of-fundraising/

Museum of the City of New York, "Vanderbilt Ball" (1883 ball, cost figures, Mrs. Astor and the Four Hundred, New York Sun backlash): https://www.mcny.org/story/vanderbilt-ball

TIME, "Polio History: How the March of Dimes Got Its Name" (FDR's birthday balls, Eddie Cantor, 1938 dime count): https://time.com/5062520/march-of-dimes-history/