Ford Foundation

Dwight Macdonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351519571
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.

CHAPTER 1
HOW MUCH AND WHO

THE FORD FOUNDATION, which in 1953 moved its headquarters to New York City from an estate in Pasadena that was known to the staff as Itching Palms, is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some. The Foundation is in the business of giving away cash, its function as defined in its charter being “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and for no other purposes.” It is by far the biggest wholesaler in this peculiarly American field of private enterprise. Last year, its capital consisted of ninety per cent of the stock of the Ford Motor Company. On the Foundation’s books, this was given the value, for tax purposes, of $417,000,000, but its real value, as measured by the earnings of Ford Motors, was at least $2,500,000,000. This is considerably more than half as much money as all the other foundations in the country have among them. The Ford Foundation’s liquid capital, which corresponds in a general way to an individual’s checking account, fluctuates between $60,000,000 and $100,000,000, depending on the time of year. (Only six other foundations are known to have total capital of over $100,000,000.) The Foundation began to spend big money in 1950, when it gave away $24,000,000, and has continued on a rising scale ever since. Its 1954 spending came to just short of $68,000,000, which is four times what the second largest foundation, Rockefeller, normally spends in a year and ten times the annual spending of the third largest, the Carnegie Corporation. It is also as much as all American foundations together spent in any one year up to and including 1948, and it is about a quarter of the total spent by all American foundations last year.

All of the foregoing statistics, massive as they are, have proved to be but the prologue to the swelling theme of the magnitudinous immensity of the Ford Foundation. In the first place, the Foundation early in 1956 put on the market the first block of its Ford holdings, thus finally letting the public into what for decades had been by far the largest privately-owned business in the country. The sale, which was the biggest single offering of common stock in Wall Street’s history, consisted of about one-fifth of the Foundation’s Ford stock and brought in some $643,000,000. In the second place, last December the Foundation made an even more sensational announcement: it stated that in the next eighteen months it would give away $500,000,000, or most of what it would realize from selling its stock. This was not only by far the largest single benefaction in the history of American philanthropy, which operates in a large and dashing way but never on anything like this scale, but it also was $150,000,000 more than the Foundation itself had been able to give away in the whole twenty years of its existence up to then. The sum, which was a special, onetime appropriation outside the Foundation’s regular program, is to be divided as follows: $210,000,000 to help raise faculty salaries in the country’s private liberal-arts-and-sciences colleges and universities, all 615 of them; $200,000,000 to “improve and extend services” in the country’s private, non-profit hospitals, all 3,500 of them; and $90,000,000 to “strengthen instruction” in the country’s privately-supported medical schools, all 42 of them.

Since bigness does not bore the American public, the Ford Foundation has been chronically in the headlines. It is becoming the kind of folklore symbol the Ford car once was—the first thing that pops into many people’s minds when philanthropy is mentioned. There was the time that a California swindler, arrested for passing bad checks, told the cops that he had spent the money to buy uniforms for a boys’ football team and expected to be reimbursed shortly by a grant from the Ford Foundation; there was the South American couple who drove from Paraguay to Detroit in a 1927 Ford, which they hoped to sell to the Foundation; and last summer the belligerent Patrick McGinnis, who was then still president of the New Haven railroad, told an audience of commuters, apropos of a new charge for parking in station lots, “If it costs me money, it’s going to cost you money, because I’m a businessman, not the Ford Foundation.”

Despite the growing tendency to regard the Foundation as a symbol, there is an almost incredible amount of confusion as to what the Foundation is and does. Westbrook Pegler is of the opinion that the Ford Foundation is a “front for dangerous Communists,” while Pravda rather inclines to the view that “the real business of the Ford Foundation is the sending of spies, murderers, saboteurs, and wreckers to Eastern Europe.” The Honorable B. Carroll Reece (Rep.), of Tennessee, has warned Congress that there is “important and extensive evidence concerning subversive and un-American propaganda activities of the Ford Foundation,” while the Czechoslovakian Home Service Radio has broadcast, “So that future United States espionage agents will lack for nothing, the Ford Foundation has donated sums running into the millions.”

The speculations of many Americans are less lurid but not much better informed. Indeed, although the Foundation’s name is constantly coming up in the press and in talk, it would appear that a substantial number of them aren’t sufficiently informed to speculate at all; at any rate, a recent Gallup Poll found that more than half of those interviewed had never even heard of the Ford Foundation, which would seem to indicate a rather cursory reading of the front pages. Gallup asked the forty per cent who said they had heard of it, “Just in your own words, what is the purpose of the Ford Foundation, what does it do?” About a third of the answers were wrong by the most liberal marking system: “Gives people work; it’s a good factory,” “All about better cars,” “To help crippled children,” “It is a peace pact that has gone to the Red side,” “They want labor to do a day’s work,” “To study diseases and such,” and so on. And most of those who had some slight inkling of the Foundation’s actual nature—less than a third of the whole population—were on the vague side, giving answers such as “Helps education” and “Supports worthwhile research projects.” It might, therefore, be interesting to see what, in fact, the Ford Foundation has been doing with All That Money.

The precise sum that the Ford Foundation gave away in 1954 was $67,777,741. The operation was performed by some two hundred and forty people—the trustees, a group of fourteen eminent citizens that includes Chairman Henry Ford II, who is also president of the Ford Motor Company; about forty staff members, headed by President H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., who have something to say about how the money is spent; thirty workers in field offices in Karachi, Beirut, Rangoon, Djakarta, and New Delhi; and around a hundred and sixty clerks, stenographers, and other employees who work at the Foundation’s headquarters, which occupy eight floors of a gleaming new office building at Madison Avenue and Fifty-first Street. The money was handed out in a hundred and eighty-two grants, the largest of which was for $25,000,000, given to the Fund for the Advancement of Education, and the smallest for $900, given to Princeton so that Professor Kazuo Midutani, of Kobe University, could spend two more months in this country to complete a study of international trade. The biggest slice of the money—$34,000,000—went for education; $18,000,000 was spent on international programs; and the remainder was allotted to economics, public affairs, and the social, or, as the Foundation calls them, the behavioral sciences. The purposes for which the money was spent were extremely—in fact, excessively—varied, and included contributing to the development at New York University of a stove operated by sunlight ($45,000); building and financing for five years a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in Palo Alto, California ($3, 411,590); enabling the Committee on Disaster Studies of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences to make a study of how people behave in floods, hurricanes, fires, explosions, and other depressing contingencies ($194,400); acquiring current Soviet publications for the Library of Congress ($16,925); training Haverford College students to work on the Gold Coast of Africa ($44,500); furnishing a research room in the New York Public Library in memory of the late Frederick Lewis Allen, of Harper’s, who was a trustee of the Foundation when he died ($25,000); establishing training centers for village crafts in India ($407,575); building lecture halls and a library at the Free University of Berlin ($125,000); looking into the effects on readers of the recent merger of the Washington Post and Times-Herald ($12,991); making it possible for Yale scholars to examine the economic behavior of households ($60,000) and Stanford scholars to consider “the rejection of leadership opportunities in British politics” ($15,000); developing a program of international legal studies at the law schools of Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, California, and Michigan ($4,950,000); financing the publication in the Atlantic Monthly of supplements of translated Greek, Brazilian, Arab, and Indonesian writings ($150,000); helping the Detroit Board of Education perfect a new method of using audio-visual materials in teaching French ($7,038); aiding Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s literary and philosophical studies ($10,000); and giving general support to the Brookings Institution ($1,000,000), the Council on Foreign Relations ($1,500,000), the Fund for Adult Education ($7,500,000), the Harvard Business School ($2,000,000), and a number of other weighty institutions, among them the Institute of Business Administration of the University of Istanbul ($385,000).

Rowan Gaither succeeded Paul Hoffman—Truman’s Marshall Plan administrator, Eisenhower’s adviser, and now chairman of the Studebaker-Packard Corporation —as president of the Foundation in 1953. He is of medium height, average build, and indeterminate coloring; his clothes are subdued, his neckties low-keyed, and he would be a hard man to pick out in a crowd; he has a roundish face and smallish features of the sort that don’t look the same in any two photographs. His voice is low, with traces of both Southern drawl and Western twang; his manner is informal but reserved, friendly but discreet, institutional but not pompous; he is a shy glad-hander, a public-relations man with a highly developed sense of privacy. Unlike his predecessor, a man of expansive plans and pronouncements, which proved his undoing with the trustees, Gaither is almost wholly unknown to the public, having for years specialized in running research and philanthropic organizations in a reassuringly unobtrusive way. He has been called “a genius at putting together a functioning team,” “a great little cooperator,” “the perfect chairman,” “a man with a mind like an I.B.M. machine,” “the compleat administrator,” “Henry’s yes man,” “the trustees’ chosen instrument,” and other things, but never “a personality.” Asked which of the many activities of his Foundation appeal to him the most, he replies, with a pale smile, “I don’t think it would be diplomatic to answer that. A judicial attitude is desirable in this department.”

Keeping a cold, impartial watch over the intricate workings of the Foundation, Gaither mediates, without passion or prejudice, among the special interests of grantees, trustees, and the public. Half his working time is spent conferring with his staff, reading reports, and writing letters and memoranda. The other half goes into consulting with the trustees and with important and/or knowledgeable people who may or may not want a grant (at the moment, that is; practically everybody will, sooner or later). “It’s part of my job to keep informed,” he says. “So I try to be alert to opportunities of seeing people who don’t want money.” But even from veteran prospectors, with a dozen applications for grants up their sleeves, Gaither often manages to extract useful information. For he is an expert and patient listener, and three-fourths of being a foundation executive is listening without committing oneself.

The Gaithers are an old Maryland family, descended from Lord Baltimore’s secretary; the town of Gaithersburg, in that state, is named after them. One branch drifted South, settling in Natchez, where, to give him the full name he never uses, Horace Rowan Gaither, Jr., was born in 1909. A year later, his maternal grandfather became governor of Oregon, and the family moved to Portland. Horace senior got a job in a bank there, and later became a bank examiner in San Francisco. In 1923, he and some friends, who put up the capital, founded the Pacific National Bank of San Francisco, of which he was the president until his death three years ago. Horace junior went to grammar school and high school in Piedmont, across the Bay from San Francisco, and then to the University of California. “We lived in modest circumstances,” Gaither recalls. “Dad didn’t make much as a bank examiner, and even after he had his own bank, it was a small one.” All through school and college, Gaither had odd jobs—driving bakery trucks; doing farm work in the summers, at two dollars a day; pumping gas on weekends. At the University, where he was manager of the baseball team and president of his fraternity, he majored in history. He graduated in 1929. The following year, he entered the University of California Law School and married Charlotte Castle, who had been his girl since their sophomore year at Piedmont High and who is, so far as anyone knows, the only woman in his life.

Gaither graduated with honors from law school in 1933. It was the bottom of the depression, and he was glad to be offered, as an outstanding law graduate of that year, a $2oo-a-month job with the Farm Credit Administration, in Washington. He returned to California in 1936 to work in the San Francisco law firm of Cooley, Crowley & Supple, and became a partner the next year. In 1942, he took a job that proved to be the turning point of his career—that of assistant director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Radiation Laboratory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a wartime organization that developed scientific devices, notably radar, for the armed forces. His job was to coordinate the work of the scientific staff and to act as liaison officer between the Laboratory and the armed services. Thus, at thirty-three, Gaither began to play the roles he has specialized in ever since—an organizer of research and a middleman between brains and capital. In Cambridge, he also came into close contact with scholarly and scientific groups for the first time and, in particular, made an important friend—the late Karl Compton, who was then president of M.I.T. After the war, Gaither went back to his law practice in San Francisco. In 1948, he was called in to help convert RAND (military code name for Research and Development) into the Rand Corporation, a private firm that now does research for the Air Force on everything from new kinds of explosives to the nature of the Soviet Politburo. The conversion, of course, necessitated making Rand financially independent of the Air Force, and to this end Compton, who was a trustee of the Ford Foundation, introduced Gaither to Henry Ford II. He made such an impression on Ford that the Foundation not only gave Rand $1,000,000 for working capital but asked Gaither to organize and head a committee to prepare a report on how the Foundation, which up to then had been mostly a local Detroit affair, could best spend the huge income from the money it had just inherited from Edsel and Henry Ford.

The Study Report that Gaither and his committee came up with in 1949, after a year of research, became the Magna Carta of the new and greater Ford Foundation that began to flourish in 1951 under Hoffman. Gaither was made one of four associate directors of the Foundation, and devoted one or two days a week to Foundation business and the rest to his law practice and to Rand, of which he had been chairman since the 1948 change-over. When, early in 1953, he succeeded Hoffman as president, he resigned from his law firm, but he remained, and still is, chairman of Rand. He is also a director of Chromatic TV Laboratories, a California company that is developing a new television color tube invented by a friend of his—Ernest O. Lawrence, the Nobel Prize physicist. This enterprise got under way several years ago when Lawrence showed some rough sketches of his tube to Gaither, who organized the company and sold a half interest in it to Paramount Pictures for $1,000,000, which is now being used to get the tube into commercial production. Gaither expects it to become the standard tube for color television once it goes on the market, and he is a little embarrassed by the possible profits. He is helping Lawrence with the tube because he will go to a lot of trouble for a friend and because he feels that scientists are underpaid. “But how can I expect anyone to believe that, when I’m probably going to make a lot of money?”

The Gaithers have two sons—H. Rowan III, a senior at the University of California, and James, a freshman at Princeton. Rand and television tubes notwithstanding, Gaither’s family is the one strong interest he has outside the Foundation (he used to collect Confederate currency and memorabilia, but he has given that up), and his ruling passion, if it is permissible to speak thus of one so temperate, is family life. At the age when most men switch from tennis to golf, Gaither switched the other way, because his boys had become old enough to play tennis. “Our family philosophy is to do things together,” he says. “So I gave up golf.” Mrs. Gaither, a pleasant, gray-haired matron who manages her home as efficiently as her husband administers his Foundation—if need be providing dinner for eight on a few hours’ notice—usually accompanies him on his frequent trips on Foundation business; when he made a six-week tour of the Foundation’s projects in the Near and Far East, not only Mrs. Gaither but the two boys went along. As might be expected of such busy homebodies, the Gaithers are do-it-yourself experts. When they lived on the West Coast, they did all the wiring and plumbing in a summer cottage they had outside San Francisco, and even made most of the furniture for it after a year of night classes in furniture-making at the Oakland High School. They now live in a rented house on East Sixty-fourth Street, and have a weekend farm in Bucks County.

Next to Gaither, the most important staff members of the Ford Foundation are his six vice-presidents. Four of them, all in their forties, are former co-workers of his on the 1949 Study Report and have been with the Foundation several years. They are Dyke Brown, California ’36 and a Rhodes Scholar, who was once assistant dean of the Yale Law School and later a partner in Gaither’s law firm; Thomas H. Carroll, California ’34, who taught at the Harvard Business School and then became, successively, Dean of the Business Schools of Syracuse University and the University of North Carolina; William McPeak, George Washington University Evening School ’33, who has been a reporter, an analyst in the Department of Agriculture, and executive head of the Ford Motor Company Fund, a philanthropic arm of the company that is sometimes confused with the Ford Foundation; and Don K. Price, Jr., Vanderbilt ’31 and a Rhodes Scholar, who began as a reporter, moved to the Social Science Research Council, and then worked for fourteen years in the Public Administration Clearing House, which studies problems of local government. The other two vice-presidents were appointed in the fall of 1955. They are F. F. Hill, University of Saskatchewan ’23, who is a governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and has been governor of the Farm Credit Administration and, successively, Professor of Land Economics and Provost at Cornell; and Quigg Newton, Jr., Yale ’33, who was mayor of Denver from 1947 to 1955. Each vice-president deals with one or more special “Areas.” Price and Hill are Area I, international; Brown and Newton are II, public affairs; Carroll is III, economics; McPeak is IV, education, and V, behavioral sciences. In addition to being conversant with his own Area, or Areas, each vice-president is expected to know something about all the other Areas. “We want generalists, not specialists,” says Gaither. The vice-presidents (plus Joseph McDaniel, Secretary of the Foundation) meet three times a week to discuss, plan, and take action, and at these sessions everybody votes on all matters in all Areas. President Gaither then either accepts or rejects their recommendations, passing along those he accepts to the trustees, who make the final decisions.

Henry Ford II, son of Edsel, grandson of the first Henry, and president of Ford Motors, is chairman of the board. He was in the class of 1940 at Yale (“Ford will go into manufacturing,” predicted the editors of the class-book, accurately enough), where he got his “Y” managing the crew, was on the business board of the Record, belonged to Zeta Psi, Book and Snake, the Amalfis, and the Haunt Club, was nicknamed “T,” and failed to graduate. “They thought I was too stupid, I guess,” he says, with a determined smile. (His brother Benson, who is also on the Foundation’s board, went to Princeton, and didn’t graduate, either.) Sober, solid, stoutish, a plain, downright sort of person, Henry II is not brilliant, but he has the modesty of common sense. When, in 1945, he became president of the Ford Motor Company, he did not himself try to reorganize and modernize the company, which was then losing some $10,000,000 a month, but instead called in three former executives of General Motors—Ernest R. Breech, L. D. Crusoe, and D. S. Harder. The team, headed by Mr. Breech, who recently became the company’s first board chairman, has done a good job. In 1954, for the first time since 1935, Ford sold more cars than Chevrolet; last year Chevrolet recaptured the lead, but only by a slim margin.

Henry II, like the Rockefeller grandsons, is an heir to a great business fortune who seems to have developed that sense of responsibility and public obligation that also distinguishes some of the sons of the Br...