David Rubenstein, head of the private equity firm Carlyle Group and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, will distribute replicas of the Declaration of Independence to be displayed in every baseball and basketball stadium in the United States, he told Bloomberg on Saturday.

Rubenstein, one of the preeminent funders of efforts to conserve artifacts of American history, has purchased roughly a dozen 1823 replicas of the Declaration of Independence, out of the 50 that remain of the 200 that were printed under then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams. 

“I’m making replicas of the replicas and I’m giving one to every Major League Baseball owner, every NBA owner,” Rubenstein said in an interview on his so-called “patriotic philanthropy.” 

“And so all the NBA owners and all the Major League Baseball owners will have in their stadiums a life-sized replica of the Declaration of Independence to put on display this year,” he said. 

Rubenstein said that his efforts to collect and preserve American history — documents, monuments, museums — began, in fact, with a British artifact: the Magna Carta.

“It was, like many things in life, fortuitous,” Rubenstein said.

“I happened to go to a viewing of the Magna Carta,” he told Bloomberg. “It happened to be actually a night before it was going to be auctioned. The person auctioning it off said that basically it was going to leave the country if I didn’t, or somebody didn’t, buy it, and so I got seduced into thinking I should save it and keep it the one copy of the Magna Carta that was available to be in this country, in this country,” he said. “So I did buy it. And then subsequently, I started buying other historic documents. And then subsequently I began fixing historic buildings: the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial and so forth.”

In the interview, Rubenstein acknowledged that “patriotic philanthropy” is somewhat redundant — ”All philanthropy is probably patriotic in some way,” he noted — but said that he believes that his efforts to preserve American history are critical for American democracy. 

“The reason we preserve documents and buildings, in my view, is that the human brain still gets more out of seeing an original than it does of a document that’s on a computer. And what we’re trying to do ultimately is get people to learn more about our country’s history, be educated about our country’s history,” he said. “What [Thomas] Jefferson said is that a democracy is dependent on informed citizenry. And if we have an uninformed citizenry, democracy isn’t going to work that well.”

Rubenstein, a signatory of The Giving Pledge with an estimated net worth of $4 billion, stressed that you don’t have to be an ultra-wealthy individual in order to be a philanthropist. 

“Anybody can give away money, and people who give away money — if they’re a billionaire or not a billionaire — they’re still making a contribution,” he said. “But I also like to remind people that philanthropy is derived from the ancient Greek word that ‘means loving humanity.’ It doesn’t mean rich people writing checks. And you can love humanity by giving your time. The most valuable thing any of us have is our time. You can make more money, you can’t make more time. And so I try to encourage people to give their time as well as their money, and they’d be a very good philanthropist if they do that.”