THE FOUNDATIONS AS PIONEERS
"It is nearly always easier to make $1,000,000 honestly than to dispose of it wisely," said Julius Rosenwald, who developed this sentiment while giving away most of his $700 million mail-order fortune (Sears, Roebuck & Co.). Andrew Carnegie was uneasily convinced that "the man who dies rich dies disgraced," and to avoid that humiliation, he began investing a personal estate of $400 million in the public weal. In 1911, after twelve years of uninterrupted and unprecedented generosity, he still had $150 million left. Carnegie solved the problem by establishing the Carnegie Corporation of New York and endowing it with $125 million, thereby setting a pattern that other rich Americans have since copied with exponential zeal. Despite its title, which suggests a kinship with General Motors or IBM, the Carnegie Corporation pursues no profits and pays no taxes. It was one of the first of the philanthropic foundations that have multiplied throughout this century in a conscientious --and sometimes conscience-stricken--effort by great wealth to live up to its noncommercial responsibilities.
Since Carnegie's time, the census of U.S. charitable foundations has described a near-perpendicular climb: up from two dozen in 1900 to more than 19,000 today, with new foundations spawning at the rate of 1,500 a year. Together, they control assets valued at anywhere from $20 billion to $100 billion, depending on who is making the estimate; last year they gave $1.25 billion to a myriad of causes.
The Risk Capital
Although the original assets of the Carnegie Corporation, the eleemosynary mammoth of its day, have nearly trebled since 1911, it now ranks only seventh in size, behind the Ford Foundation (incontestably first with $3.59 billion in assets), the Rockefeller Foundation ($804 million) and the Duke Endowment ($612 million), to name the top-ranking three. With a few other large exceptions, foundations scale sharply down from there. Only about 1,500, or about one in 13, are worth as much as $1,000,000, and there are plenty of mini-foundations, such as Chicago's Robbins Charitable Fund, with assets of $8.22.
By joining forces, small foundations can assume considerable girth. Such combines are known as community foundations. The New York Community Trust, one of the larger examples, represents 209 separate foundations with a total value of $65 million. Another rapidly expanding variety is the corporate foundation, set up by individual private industries and supported out of their profits largely for the purpose of giving the company a good name where good causes are concerned.
The principal mission of the private foundation is to take its resources where neither Government, which must consider the taxpayer, nor private business, which must account to the stockholder, dare go. Foundations should provide the risk capital of philanthropy, acting as the pioneers pushing forward into the future.
A vast body of evidence in a dozen fields testifies to their performance in this role. As early as 1930, the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation was sponsoring the rocket research of Dr. Robert Goddard--a bit of foresight so far ahead of its time that it took the Government one World War to catch up. Without steady support from Ford funds, which have totaled some $140 million, educational television might have died of anemia. Both Harvard's Russian Research Center (Carnegie) and the Russian Institute at Columbia University (Rockefeller) owe their existence to foundation grants. Ford's Gray Areas programs in five cities have been described as a forerunner of the Government's poverty program. As for science, Geneticist George W. Beadle has said that "the remarkable 20th century flowering of experimental biology would not have been possible without the support of private foundations in key areas and at critical times."
Where the foundation money goes, Government money often follows--as it should. The U.S. Government's overwhelming presence in such fields as public education, social welfare, medicine and scientific research was largely prompted by foundation initiative. Most of the new scientific disciplines, in fact, were fed through their infancy on private philanthropic funds. "I sometimes wonder," said Dean Rusk before leaving the presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation to become U.S. Secretary of. State, "whether foundations might not have a special parish in what might be called the future."
While some of the foundations' bigger outlays do not seem venturesome in retrospect, many were at the time the only source of crucially needed money. Thus Andrew Carnegie, whose formal education ended in his twelfth year, channeled $60 million into the construction of 2,811 public libraries. The Ford Foundation gave $260 million to 630 colleges and universities to increase faculty salaries.
Not all grants are so grand--and some even suggest a sense of humor. Ford has bestowed $6 for shop equipment on ten-year-old Jonathan Shapiro's spaceship club in Manhattan. Last year the Permanent Charity Fund of Massachusetts distributed $2,300,000 to such disparate beneficiaries as the National Braille Press, the New England Aquarium, the crew of the offshore Boston light (for Sunday-paper delivery) and Mrs. Augusta Bailey, who received $5,000 with which to plant flowers in Roxbury, a predominantly Negro neighborhood in Boston that Mrs. Bailey has been beautifying on her own for 20 years.
Since the tastes of endowers often affect the posthumous course of their riches, foundations sometimes sponsor causes so far out as to strain the meaning of philanthropy. Take the Gravity Research Foundation of New Hampshire, with assets of $500,000, all of it earmarked for acceptable essays on the subject of gravity. And then there is Oregon's St. Genevieve Foundation, set up by an elderly millionaire for the comfort of two sisters of his acquaintance. His benevolence was as innocent in intent as it was nondeductible. Challenged by skeptical tax authorities, this widower explained that he merely craved the endearing elegance of female companionship and was sufficiently liquid to buy it.
From Small Seed
There are countless examples of small sums priming big results. In 1908, for just $14,000 from Andrew Carnegie, an educator named Abraham Flexner produced a broadside indictment of medical training in the U.S. and Canada that revolutionized and reformed the entire field. Present-day foundation executives still cite it as a textbook example of how much good even a little money, when imaginatively applied, can do.
On its 50th anniversary, the Rockefeller Foundation noted with understandable pride that 34% of all Nobel prizewinners in medicine, physiology, chemistry and physics had been helped along the road to their achievement by Rockefeller grants. After the death of Russell Sage, a tightfisted multimillionaire who was wary of charity, his widow pledged part of his estate to a foundation that supported the science of social welfare during its youth. To come up to date, a 1967 Ford grant of $175,000 for a voter-registration drive sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality in Cleveland was instrumental in electing Carl Stokes, the city's first Negro mayor.
A full year before Sputnik 1 rose to jolt the West into a new sense of urgency about technological training, Carnegie Corporation money planted $277,000 in a developmental study of the new math curriculums. The first shoulder stripes on Connecticut roads were painted by the Dorr Foundation, with modest assets of $900,000, which then cheerfully yielded its brush to the state highway department. Project Head Start, now moving along on Government backing, took inspiration from a pilot project in Harlem that began with just $80,000 from the Taconic Foundation in 1960.
The diversity of foundation giving can sometimes conceal the emergence of new patterns and trends. Thousands of small foundations continue to support religious causes. Conservative philanthropy pours money, somewhat unimaginatively, into direct charity and welfare. Education grants still dominate; last year, for example, 33% of all grants of $10,000 or more, or $191 million, went to that field, whereas the $39 million invested in the humanities accounted for only 7% of the total.
Today, the major foundations are placing great emphasis and resources on the two thorniest unsolved domestic problems: urban renewal and race relations. Within recent weeks, Ford funds have begun to underwrite interdisciplinary studies of urban affairs at Harvard, the University of Chicago, M.I.T. and Columbia University.
Humanities has long been a neglected area, and the big foundations are only now beginning to redress the indifference of the past. Before 1957, Ford spent almost nothing on the arts; it has since spent $217 million. Its generosity in this sector rivals that of the Federal Government. Rockefeller, too, has expanded its budget, which totaled some $4,000,000 in 1967, including a $65,000 grant to Cafe La Mama, an experimental off-Broadway theater in Manhattan's East Village. Chicago's Woods Charitable Fund has committed $1,000,000 to a new fine-arts center at the University of Chicago.
From Plato to Patman
In the main, the foundation is today an American phenomenon. But the fact is that it was an import to these shores, where the spirit of American generosity, warmed by a benign tax climate, permitted it to flourish as never before. Its history goes back to the time of the pyramid-building Pharaohs. Plato's Academy, which survived its founder's death by nine centuries, can be considered a precursor. In proportionate wealth, today's U.S. foundations cannot compare to the ecclesiastical endowments of medieval England, which at times controlled one-third to one-half of the country's wealth.
Early American capital established foundations in the 18th and 19th centuries, notably two $5,000 gifts from Ben Franklin to Boston and Philadelphia, to be lent at interest to young married artificers of good character. One of these funds, swollen by 177 years of compound interest and investment, is worth over $2,000,000 today. These early efforts were few; the great surge of U.S. foundation building coincides with the first federal income tax of 1913, a provision of which exempted religious, educational or charitable organizations. As the tax bite grew, so did the foundation birth rate. Some three out of four present U.S. foundations did not exist in 1940.
While pride (90% of all foundations perpetuate the donor's name) is also a strong motivation, taxes no doubt provide the prime impetus. This aspect is also the area in which foundations receive the most criticism. Four congressional investigations, the first in 1916, have combed various foundations for faults. The most persistent current watchdog is a House subcommittee, which under Congressman Wright Patman of Texas has been examining their operation since 1962. Patman has reported hundreds of examples of foundations, generally small, which were founded almost entirely as tax-dodging devices. When exposed, the dodgers generally forfeit their exemptions. As one result of the Patman investigations, seven foundations have been presented with back tax bills totaling $28 million.
Many foundations could improve the candor with which they conduct their affairs. Of 23 foundations with assets of $10 million or more, only 17 issued public reports in 1966. Sometimes the cost of giving seems exorbitantly high. In its first two years, the Fund for the Republic, a watchdog of civil liberties that was started with Ford money, spent $410,000 giving away $843,000. And sometimes the giving seems low. The^Patman subcommittee cited the example of 575 foundations that, over a period of four years, realized $4.6 billion on their investments but paid out only $2.2 billion.
Representative Patman has proposed a federal regulatory agency for foundations, and it seems clear enough that they could use more policing than they now get. Internal Revenue Service supervision is, at best, relaxed. Under pressure, it has raised to 10,000, from 2,000, the number of tax-exempt returns it annually examines--but that still leaves a great majority unchecked. Former IRS Chief Mortimer Caplin said: "There is no revenue in it."
The sheer size of foundations--their collective wealth and power as investors in the stock markets and their influence on U.S. society--has begun to stir criticism and concern in some quarters. When looked at in the widest context, this point of view seems unwarranted. Foundation wealth represents the tiniest fraction of all private wealth in this country, which is estimated at $2.15 trillion. Foundation grants account for only 8% of total U.S. philanthropy, 80% of which comes from the individual giver, in a gamut of generosity that embraces large and small offerings to hospitals, churches, the Community Chest and even the coins dropped into Salvation Army tambourines.
Too Complacent?
The best foundations are acutely conscious of their public image and obligations, and sensitive to the need for periodic introspection if they are to preserve their function as the implement of vital change. Philanthropic institutions can degenerate into bureaucracies, stiff with habit and overloaded with deadwood; it is difficult, for instance, to fire a philanthropist for backing a poor horse. Soon after taking over the presidency of the Ford Foundation in 1966, McGeorge Bundy declared his conviction that periodic personnel turnover at the disbursement level was probably a good foundation practice.
"We are prone to be too complacent, too willing to conform, too ready to settle for the tried and proven," says John D. Rockefeller III, who maintains an active interest as board chairman of the foundation erected on his grandfather's wealth. "We tend to hang back, responding slowly to change, often with too little, and sometimes too late. Rather than venture, we dwell on the problems of yesterday, neglectful of the new needs of today and the impatient future."
Homer Wadsworth, president of a Kansas City, Mo., group of foundations, compares foundation operation to exploring for oil. "If we don't get any dry holes," he says, "it means we aren't exploring enough." A foundation executive recently heaped praise on John Gardner for his resourceful and enterprising conduct of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, but then he went on to express the wish that Gardner had shown the same boldness in his previous job--head of the Carnegie Corporation.
To maintain their vital role in the evolvement and improvement of life in the U.S. and abroad, foundations must be constantly alert to the complexities of the world and of their own responsibilities to all society. Their very charters, as the New World Foundation's Vernon Eagle has observed, mandate them as "agents for social change." Policies cannot become ruts; the habit of geese flocking, or doing what the other foundation does and supporting popular institutions and causes, must be sturdily resisted. "Foundations should stay out in the forefront of humanity," says Rockefeller President J. George Harrar. "Our major contribution is to make ourselves no longer necessary."
In this pathfinding spirit, foundation giving belongs to the best democratic tradition: ruggedly individualistic, proud of its great wealth--and guilty enough about possessing it to consider investing it in unselfish ways. In no other country does private philanthropy possess either the wealth or the social conscience that informs its conduct in the U.S. To give money away wisely is a challenge that perhaps only a rich democracy can feel. And it is one that American philanthropy is earnestly striving to elevate into an art.
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