The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation

Raymond B. Fosdick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351473286
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Since its original publication in 1952, Fosdick's book has been the single most reliable treatment of one of the most important philanthropies in the United States and indeed the world. Fosdick served as president of the foundation for twelve years, from 1936 to 1948, when it was the largest grant-making endow-ment in the world. As Steven Wheatley notes in his valuable new introduction, in part The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation was intended as an instrument of institutional self-defense. When it was written, the foundation community was under mounting political attack from the right, and the book was meant to help balance the Scales by cataloging the foundation's good works. As a deliberate self-portrait, the book conceals as much as it reveals, while in the process it reveals a good deal about the author. Fosdick sees politics, like bureaucracy, as perhaps an avoidable problem and not an inevitable consequence of foundation activity. He sees foundations as engaging in the application of scientific, tech-nical, and organizational solutions to public problems through a ""venture cap-ital"" approach to discovering how to resolve them. Fosdick's ""higher ground"" approach became established philanthropic practice far beyond the Rockefeller Foundation. Consequently, this volume is significant as an institutional history as well as a charter for American foundations.

CHAPTER I

THE BACKGROUND OF THE IDEA

FREDERICK T. GATES WAS A MAN OF remarkable qualities. A former Baptist minister, he became the principal adviser in business and philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller. He combined bold imagination and large horizons with shrewd business capacity and driving energy. In a candid bit of portraiture, he described himself in 1891 as “eager, impetuous, insistent, and withal exacting and irritable.”¹* In addition it may be said that he was fearless, often fiery in his words, powerful in exhortation, with a mind that was too precipitous to be always tolerant, and with a voice that thundered from Sinai. At his last meeting as a trustee of The Rockefeller Foundation in 1923, he made a farewell speech. Shaking his fist at a somewhat startled but respectfully attentive Board, he vociferated: “When you die and come to approach the judgment of Almighty God, what do you think He will demand of you? Do you for an instant presume to believe that He will inquire into your petty failures or your trivial virtues? No! He will ask just one question: ‘What did you do as a Trustee of The Rockefeller Foundation?’”²

In spite of his evangelical fervor—indeed, perhaps because of it— he was one of the chief architects of that extraordinary group of foundations which Mr. Rockefeller established in the first two decades of the century.

One would have to search over wide areas to find two men who were so completely different in temperament. Mr. Gates was a vivid, outspoken, self-revealing personality who brought an immense gusto to his work; Mr. Rockefeller was quiet, cool, taciturn about his thoughts and purposes, almost stoic in his repression. Mr. Gates had an eloquence which could be passionate when he was aroused; Mr. Rockefeller, when he spoke at all, spoke in a slow measured fashion, lucidly and penetratingly, but without raising his voice and without gestures. Mr. Gates was overwhelming and sometimes overbearing in argument; Mr. Rockefeller was a man of infinite patience who never showed irritation or spoke chidingly about anybody. Mr. Gates summed up his impression of Mr. Rockefeller in this sentence: “If he was very nice and precise in his choice of words, he was also nice and accurate in his choice of silences.”³

And yet these two men who worked together so intimately and understandingly for forty years shared certain strong resemblances. Both were self-made men who had come out of humble circumstances in their youth; both were inspired by deep religious conviction; both were endowed with a capacity for bold planning and large designs; each was a pioneer in his own way, adventurous in spirit, eager for new methods and new ideas, ready to drive at a gallop when the way opened ahead. Their long relationship was one of mutual respect and confidence. In his book, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, Mr. Rockefeller referred to Mr. Gates as “possessing a combination of rare business ability, very highly developed and very honorably exercised, overshadowed by a passion to accomplish some great and far-reaching benefits to mankind, the influence of which will last.”⁴ On his side, in his autobiography, as yet unpublished, and in his private papers, Mr. Gates wrote constantly of Mr. Rockefeller's sincerity and earnestness, the superior quality of his mind, and his statesmanlike grasp of detail. Years later, he said of Mr. Rockefeller: “He was a very reserved man, admitting few confidences, and these only in times of very high nervous tension and altogether exceptional stress. His usual attitude toward all men was one of deep reserve, concealed beneath commonplace and humorous anecdotes. He had the art with friends and guests of chatting freely, of calling out others, but of revealing little or nothing of his own innermost thoughts.”⁵

There was another member of this informal partnership who was destined to play a notable part in the creation and development of vast philanthropic enterprises—Mr. Rockefeller's only son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Graduating from Brown University in 1897 in his twenty-third year, he entered his father's office at once. “I felt … that if I was going to learn to help Father in the care of his affairs,” he afterward wrote, “the sooner my apprenticeship under his guidance began, the better.”⁶ Few father-and-son relationships have been characterized by more genuine trust or by deeper affection. For forty years they worked closely and intimately together. The younger Rockefeller had many of the qualities which his father most admired: conscientiousness, tireless industry, practical judgment, and a capacity to sift the relevant from the irrelevant. These qualities were tempered by a modesty which was characteristic of both men, for as Allan Nevins says in his biography of Mr. Rockefeller: “[He] always dealt with his wealth in humility, not in arrogance.”⁷

It was this three-cornered partnership that was responsible for a group of foundations to which Mr. Rockefeller ultimately contributed nearly half a billion dollars. It was a partnership singularly equipped for its task. Mr. Gates and Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., shared in the exploration of new ideas, while the elder Rockefeller retained final decision in all large matters and worked closely with his two assistants. It was a healthy relationship of complete frankness in which both lieutenants told Mr. Rockefeller exactly what they believed. Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., had this great advantage: like all sons, he belonged to a younger generation than his father, and the relationship between the two was so intimate that he could help to explain and interpret ideas and points of view which age finds unfamiliar. Mr. Gates, who could never be anything but candid and forthright, used to thunder at the elder Rockefeller: “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows! If you do not, it will crush you and your children and your children's children!”⁸ In his autobiography, Mr. Gates records: “I felt that he was entitled to my ultimate thought frankly expressed…. I did not consciously allow his anticipated views to control or to modify my own views in the least degree. On the contrary, when I knew there would be a conflict of view I took special pains to fortify my position instead of yielding it or concealing it…. I was there to present my own views, with courtesy indeed but with absolute and undeviating frankness and truth. This, therefore, I always did.”

But this was precisely what Mr. Rockefeller wanted. In all his business life, his invariable practice had been to surround himself with strong characters of independent judgment; and like his son after him he wanted no “yes-men” among his advisers. A man who could work with powerful and dominating figures like John D. Archbold and H. H. Rogers and Henry M. Flagler would appreciate the value of Mr. Gates. Years later, he said of Mr. Gates: “He combines business skill and philanthropic aptitude to a higher degree than any other man I have even known.”⁹ Speaking of the younger Rockefeller, he remarked to the writer one day in the middle of a golf game— apropos of nothing that had previously been said: “My greatest fortune in life has been my son.”

II

Critics have frequently charged that Mr. Rockefeller's benefactions were set up as a shield against public censure, in an attempt to reestablish himself and ward off the abuse to which over many years he was subjected. But this contention is not borne out by the facts.* The famous “Ledger A” which he kept in his teens when he secured his first job as a clerk in Cleveland, a job which paid him six dollars a month, shows that he gave away 6 per cent of his total wage to the Sunday school and various missions related to his church interests. The obligation to give was an inseparable part of his religious conviction; it was a philosophy with which he had been indoctrinated by his mother from his earliest youth. “From the beginning,” he declared, “I was trained to work, to save, and to give.”¹⁰ Five years later, in 1860, his gifts were rising proportionately with his income, which was still, however, small. Moreover, his plan of giving had broadened. Although his interests were centered primarily in the activities of the Baptist church, by this time he was making contributions to a Methodist church, a German Sunday school, a Negro church, and “Catholic orphans.”

In 1865, when he was twenty-six years old, his annual gifts mounted to $1,012.35. Four years later, they reached nearly six thousand dollars. As Mr. Nevins says in his biography: “[Mr. Rockefeller] had not waited to grow rich before he began giving. It is to be noted that save for one year his gifts constantly grew larger, and that by the later sixties he was giving considerable lump sums—$558.42 to Denison University, for example. In his early giving, as later in life, he freely crossed lines of creed, nationality and color.”¹¹

But there were other forces aside from his own ingrained habit of giving that were pressing on Mr. Rockefeller. By the turn of the century, the industrial revolution had swept the nation. Rapid expansion of industry due to the advancement of science, wide application of machinery, centralized financing, and large-scale operations had created a booming prosperity. It was the culmination of an age of economic laissez faire, of uninhibited business practices which rolled up colossal fortunes and rewarded aggressiveness and acquisitiveness with wealth and power. Mr. Rockefeller, then and later, found himself in company with men like Carnegie, Morgan, Stanford, Armour, Sage, Guggenheim, McCormick, Havemeyer, Bamberger, Huntington, Rosenwald, Duke, and a dozen others who faced the same problem of the responsibilities and duties imposed by the unexpected weight of their fortunes. Beginning around 1900, and continuing for a quarter of a century, this group made a contribution to American life whose impact and consequences it is impossible even yet to measure. Acquiring their fortunes under conditions unique in the history of the country, and not infrequently by methods which, if permissible at the time, no longer accord with social conscience or the requirements of law, they enriched the intellectual and cultural life of America with a stream of universities, foundations, institutes, libraries, and endowments without parallel in any other age.

Their motives were doubtless many and varied—genuine social vision; religious principle; sometimes, in part, a desire for social recognition or the perpetuation of a name. Mr. Rockefeller, writing in 1909, said: “As I study wealthy men, I can see but one way in which they can secure a real equivalent for money spent, and that is to cultivate a taste for giving when the money will produce an effect which will be a lasting gratification.”¹² Mr. Rockefeller's position was undoubtedly influenced by Mr. Carnegie, whose essay on “The Gospel of Wealth” appeared in the North American Review in 1889. Its thesis was the pithy aphorism: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced”; or, as Mr. Carnegie elaborated it: “The day is not far distant when the man who dies leaving behind him millions of available wealth, which was free for him to administer during life, will pass away unwept, unhonored and unsung.” One of the most cordial letters of congratulation which Mr. Carnegie received came from Mr. Rockefeller: “I would that more men of wealth were doing as you are doing with your money,” he wrote, “but, be assured, your example will bear fruits, and the time will come when men of wealth will more generally be willing to use it for the good of others.”¹³

Mr. Rockefeller's point of view was frankly expressed in the principle which he repeatedly enunciated: “A man should make all he can and give all he can.”¹⁴ But with his wealth accumulating so rapidly, how could he give effectively and efficiently? For this was the invariable test by which Mr. Rockefeller always judged his contributions. Indiscriminate giving he abhorred. During the eighties, before Mr. Gates joined him, he had arrived at certain general principles which he endeavored to follow in his contributions. His money should be given to work already organized and of proven worth; it should be work of a continuing character which would not disappear when his gifts were withdrawn; the contributions, where possible, should be made on conditional terms so as to stimulate contributions by others; and finally—and to Mr. Rockefeller, most important—his money should make for strength rather than weakness and should develop in the beneficiary a spirit of independence and self-reliance.

But he was not content. He was giving to a multiplicity of small causes mostly related to his church interests—schools, hospitals, and missions. The scope obviously was not big enough for his rapidly accumulating fortune, nor was it broad enough to satisfy his growing awareness of social needs. Mr. Gates, who knew him better than most men did and who was a shrewd judge of character, described him in these words: “[He had] a taste for excellence and even for perfection in whatever he did, a taste so marked, so dominant, as to amount to a passion, and it was indeed the ruling passion of his life. If genius is the art of taking pains, then Mr. Rockefeller was a genius.”¹⁵ “I had a great talk with Mr. Rockefeller,” Gates wrote to Dr. Harper in 1891, when the latter was selecting his faculty for the University of Chicago, “and he wished me to say to you positively that the best men must be had.”¹⁶ It was this passion for excellence which Mr. Rockefeller brought so conspicuously to the founding of his philanthropic trusts.

III

Mr. Gates joined forces with Mr. Rockefeller in 1892. “About the year 1890,” said Mr. Rockefeller, “I was still following the haphazard fashion of giving here and there as appeals presented themselves. I investigated as I could, and worked myself almost to a nervous breakdown in groping my way, without sufficient guide or chart, through this ever-widening field of philanthropic endeavor.”¹⁷ Mr. Gates so completely changed this system that twenty-five years later Mr. Rockefeller referred to him as “the guiding genius in all our giving.” Says Mr. Gates: “I gradually developed and introduced into all his charities the principles of scientific giving, and he found himself in no long time laying aside retail giving almost wholly, and entering safely and pleasurably into the field of wholesale philanthropy.” To illustrate the point, Mr. Gates described what Mr. Rockefeller had been doing for the Baptist missionaries abroad:

He had conducted a small foreign mission society, if I may so call it, of his own.… He was in daily receipt of appeals from individual Baptist missionaries in every region of Baptist missionary endeavor…. His office, his house, his table was beset with returned missionaries, each comparatively ignorant of all fields but his own…. We cut off every one of these private missionary appeals. We referred every applicant straight back to the missionary executives in Boston…. Mr. Rockefeller then gave not thousands as formerly, but hundreds of thousands, every dollar of which was expended by the experienced board.¹⁸

Mr. Gates had come to Mr. Rockefeller's office from the American Baptist Education Society, of which he had been the administrative head. Already the two of them had worked in close co-operation in Mr. Rockefeller's first great adventure in giving—the creation of the University of Chicago. Indeed, it was in the initiation of this project that Mr. Gates first came to Mr. Rockefeller's attention. Starting as an idea for a Baptist institution of higher learning, under Baptist auspices and control, it developed, during the twenty-one years of Mr. Rockefeller's active interest, into one of the great universities of the country. When in 1910 he made his final gift to the institution, and withdrew from all association with it, his total contribution had amounted to $35,000,000. In a Minute adopted at this time by the trustees of the University occurred this significant paragraph:

We know of no parallel in the history of educational benefaction to gifts so munifice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Background Of The Idea
• Chapter 2. The Birth Of The Rockefeller Foundation
• Chapter 3. The Control Of Hookworm
• Chapter 4. The Broadening Program In Public Health
• Chapter 5. The Challenge Of Yellow Fever
• Chapter 6. Invasion From Africa
• Chapter 7. “The Johns Hopkins Of China”
• Chapter 8. Medical Education In The United States
• Chapter 9. Medical Education Around The World
• Chapter 10. Medical Research And Psychiatry
• Chapter 11. The Foundation Enters New Fields
• Chapter 12. The Natural Sciences
• Chapter 13. Experimental Biology
• Chapter 14. Tools Of Research
• Chapter 15. Agriculture
• Chapter 16. The Problem Of The Social Sciences
• Chapter 17. The Social Sciences In A Time Of Crisis
• Chapter 18. The Growth Of The Social Sciences
• Chapter 19. The Humanistic Studies
• Chapter 20. Humanism As An Interpreter
• Chapter 21. Investment In Leadership
• Chapter 22. “Throughout The World”
• Chapter 23. The Evolution Of Principles And Practices
• Chapter 24. Perspective
• Appendices
• Notes
• Index