The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions PDF
Preview The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions
TrrS Francis X. Sutton The Ford Foundation THE MEN AND THE MILLIONS I THE FORD FOUNDATION THE FORD FOUNDATION The Men and the Millions Dwight Macdonald With a new introduction by Francis X. Sutton t? Transaction Publishers New Brunswick (U.S.A.) andOxford (U.K.) New material this edition copyright (c) 1989 by Transaction Publishers,New Brunswick,NewJersey 08903. Originallypublishedin 1955 byReynal & Company, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American CopyrightConventions. Nopart ofthis bookmay be reproduced or transmittedin anyform orby any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers--The State University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. LibraryofCongress CatalogNumber: 88-15400 ISBN: 0-88738-748-9 Printedin theUnitedStatesofAmerica LibraryofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macdonald,Dwight. The Ford Foundation: the men and the millions / Dwight Macdonald; withanew introductionbyFrancis X. Sutton. p. cm. Reprint. Originallypublished: New York: Reynal,cl956. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN0-88738-748-9 1.FordFoundation-History. I. Title. HV97.F62M25 1988 361.7'632'0973»dcl9 88-15400 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION vii HOW MUCH AND WHO 1. 3 2. THEINQUISITORS 19 3. THENATURAL HISTORY OF FOUNDATIONS 36 WHAT HATH FORD WROUGHT! 4. 50 5. THE PHILANTHROPOIDS 95 6. ANCIENT HISTORY 130 THENEW ORDER 7. 155 APPENDIX: A PRACTICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY 175 INDEX 179 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION DwightMacdonald's The FordFoundation: The Men and the Millions remains after more than thirty years the only book-length account of the Ford Foundation that has been published.1 Richard Magat's The Ford Foundation at Work (1979) describes how the Foundation has gone about its work, illustrating with case studies and summarizing the major programs to that date.2 But Magat denied any aspiration to be Macdonald's continuator or supplanter. He and McGeorge Bundy, then retiring from the Foundation's presidency, called to scholars for a serious, full-length account of the Foundation. Special studies have since appeared, but their call for a big book carrying Macdonald's story on from 1956 remains yetunanswered. One wonders why the Ford Foundation should be an uninviting or perhaps daunting subject. Institutional history is certainly not one of the more ingratiating literary genres, but even the big banks now seem to find willing chroniclers. Other foundations have found their historians or memoirs-writers, and there have been several lengthy accounts oftheFord family andthe motor company, with Robert Lacey's Ford: The Men and the Machine and David Halberstam's The Reckoning current and lively.3 Perhaps the FordFoundation has never again arousedas much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald recounts. The announcement in 1950 that it was ready to launch a new program with the riches that 90 percent ofthe Ford Motor Company's stock wouldbring caught the attention ofthe mediaall across the country. The sheer size of this new foundation was astounding. MacDonald wrote that in 1954 it spent four times as much as the Rockefeller THEFORDFOUNDATION viii Foundation and ten times as much as CarnegieCorporation^ and its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of institutions that might look to it for help. Thus when Ford was committing $51 million in 1951, Father Ted Hesburgh became president of the University of Notre Dame with a budget of $9.7 million; or looking internationally at about the same time, the national University of the Philippines (which became a major Ford grantee) had an annual budgetof about$3 million. The corebudget of the United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in those years was about $7.2 million.5 With its riches still tied to the profitability of the Ford Motor Company it was not easy to say what the worth of the Foundation was, but it was clearly huge and growing. The year that Macdonald's book waspublished, theFoundation made its first sale of Ford Motor Company stock, realizing $641 million, and promptly gave away $548 million in an unprecedented largesse to American universities, liberal arts colleges, and hospitals. By 1960, the Foundation's capital of over $3 billion amounted to more than half the total endowment ofall U.S. institutions of higher learning ($5.44 billion) and its annual budget was greater than the combined corebudgets oftheU.N. and its specializedagencies.6 Thereactions ofthe American public to theappearance ofthis huge foundation were excitedly expectant. In the great anxieties overpeace that this country felt (along with much of the rest of the world) at the time, there was particular attention to the promise that it might do something for preservation of the peace. Dwight Macdonald had no awe of foundations and had more modest expectations. He thought the Fifties were a silver age for foundations when they were reduced from old glories to "merely lubricating the gears of the status quo."7 But Ford was so big thatit might be a throwback and play the kind of role Rockefeller and Carnegie hadplayedin the time oftheirgreatness. The Ford Foundation aroused lively interest in its early years not simply because it was so big. It was controversial in those years, in a way hardly ever repeated, even in the late Sixties when some of McGeorge Bundy's actions contributed to the political wrath that culminated in a 1969 tax act hostile to foundations. Ford's beginnings were in the time of McCarthyism. The journalists,Westbrook Pegler and Fulton Lewis, Jr., were tirelessly
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