America since its founding has struggled to reconcile two often contradictory goals: the urge to do good and the urge to do well.

In recent years, the corporate social responsibility movement has tried to square the circle by prodding business leaders toward altruism. But U.S. history offers little support for the notion that capitalists can--or should--be weaned from their single-minded pursuit of profit.

Case in point: The battling Brown brothers of Providence, R.I., John (1736 -1803) and Moses (1738 - 1836) were merchant princes who dispatched their ships around the world to exploit whatever trade opportunities were available. Occasionally, they participated in the slave trade--until 1773, when Moses had an epiphany. He embraced Quakerism, turned his energies to social reform and refused to traffic in human beings. He urged John to follow his example.

But John refused, on the grounds that U.S. merchants should not have to give up a profitable business that remained open to their foreign rivals. So Moses gave up on moral suasion, and instead campaigned for legal restrictions on the slave trade. When John flouted these restrictions, Moses urged his brother's prosecution. John was acquitted by a sympathetic jury, but Moses won in the end: Congress finally outlawed the trade in 1808.

Moses Brown was a precursor of today's CSR activists, who urge corporations to focus more on society's needs than on those of their shareholders. Moses failed to win over his brother John, but he did not give up on his moralistic approach to business. Putting his money where his mouth was, he decided to build a textile mill in Pawtucket to provide work for destitute Quakers. This would be a business with a social purpose: helping the needy support themselves. But things did not turn out quite as Moses intended.

The man he hired to build his mill was an English immigrant named Samuel Slater, who succeeded beyond Moses' wildest dreams. Slater's water-powered factory, built in 1793, marked the dawn of America's industrial revolution. Within just a few decades, similar factories were providing employment to millions of Americans. But many of these workers were ruthlessly exploited by their bosses. The saintly Moses Brown, in trying to make a better world, had helped to create those "dark, satanic mills" which so horrified 19th century reformers.

Inevitably, a new generation of social-responsibility advocates arose to meet the challenges posed by industrial capitalism. Prominent among these do-gooders was Lewis Tappan (1788 - 1873), who used his business profits to support abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.

Tappan, like Moses Brown before him, tried to integrate his business activities and his reform activities. In 1841, he drew on his nationwide abolitionist connections for help when he founded America's first credit-rating firm, which eventually evolved into Dun and Bradstreet. (That same year, Tappan led the successful effort to free the Amistad slaves, in the famous episode that eventually would supply the plot for the Steven Spielberg film of the same name.)

But Tappan's business success came back to haunt him. His innovative credit-rating firm contributed enormously to the development of American capitalism, which rejected Tappan's reformist vision and embraced laissez-faire instead.

In 1869, near the end of his life, Tappan published a pamphlet titled "Is It Right to Be Rich?" In it, he condemned "the feverish and almost insane spirit of speculation," which leads to "the neglect of families, to neglect of their own souls and the souls of others, and often to the ruin of body and soul." Tappan might have been addressing his words to Andrew Carnegie, who was 33 years old in 1869 and already rich--and very worried about his soul.

"To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares, and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery," Carnegie wrote in a memo to himself. Then he filed it away and went back to making money.

Carnegie (1835 - 1919) was yet another reform-minded businessman who wanted to save the world in his spare time. He started his career as a 12-year-old bobbin boy in a textile factory that was a lineal descendant of the mill Moses Brown had built in Pawtucket five decades earlier. Carnegie fancied himself a radical, but as he ascended into the plutocracy, he found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his professed ideals with his business practices.

In 1886, Carnegie wrote magazine articles supporting his workers' right to organize. But in 1892, he had his ruthless lieutenant Henry Clay Frick break the union at his Homestead steel works, precipitating a violent conflict with his workers. Like Brown and Tappan before him, Carnegie found his reform ambitions contradicted by his business instincts. He finally resolved the problem by dividing his career into two phases. First, get money; second, give it away. In 1901, Carnegie sold his steel business and embarked upon a philanthropic career of epic proportions.

By that point, the Gilded Age was giving way to the Progressive Era, which favored government action to solve society's problems. When the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York's Greenwich Village caught fire in 1911, and scores of desperate workers jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor, nobody waited for reform-minded businessmen to step up to the plate. Instead, labor activists took the lead, abetted by sympathetic politicians like Al Smith, a future governor of New York.

Smith passed the reform torch to Franklin Roosevelt, whose years in the White House from 1933 to 1945 would mark the apotheosis of regulatory zeal. But in time, Roosevelt's New Deal would lose its momentum, as the crisis which sparked it--the Great Depression--faded from memory. Eventually, Ronald Reagan's ascension would mark a partial return to the laissez-faire approach favored by John Brown, the 18th century Providence merchant who wanted government (and his nagging brother Moses) to leave him alone to run his business as he saw fit.

Here in the 21st century, the debate continues between latter-day John Browns and Moses Browns. But that debate is most effectively conducted in the court of public opinion, not in the boardroom. Reformers have more impact when they use the political process to set the ground rules for business, rather than trying to cure capitalism of its basic instinct.

Many businesses these days make a show of embracing corporate social responsibility principles, but they still focus primarily on profits. If history is any guide, they will continue to do so.

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