You’ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor’s intent. In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Ford Sr.) wrote:
“In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism—a statement that, I’m sure, would be shocking to many professional staff people in the field of philanthropy. It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the. foundation does.
“It is even more difficult to find an understanding of this in many of the institutions, particularly the universities, that are the beneficiaries of the foundation’s grant programs.”[1]
What had the foundation been doing? Essentially it had gone rogue.
True, the elder Ford had been eccentric and viciously antisemitic, but he changed the world with his autos, he paid workers well, and he hired disabled veterans, the elderly, and the handicapped. He revived a Detroit suburb, Inkster, during the Great Depression by hiring many of its largely black population, paying them $6 a day even if he only had routine chores for them. He started the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
By 1976, the foundation had become the largest charitable foundation in the world, and was leaning toward Democratic Party politics. One of its projects supported the Democratic Party by funding a voter registration drive in Cleveland to elect a Democratic mayor, Carl Stokes. Another gave money to the staff of Robert Kennedy after his assassination—even though former staff members such as Frank Mankiewicz and Peter Edelman were lawyers earning up to $500,000 a year.
Henry Ford II asked McGeorge Bundy (Ford’s president) to support the Henry Ford Hospital. Bundy refused. Only when Henry Ford II’s wife, Cristina, interceded with Robert McNamara, a prominent trustee, did McBundy agree to a one-time $100 million donation in 1973. That appears to be the foundation’s last gift to the hospital. In 2024 the hospital started on a funding campaign and the Ford Foundation is nowhere in sight.
Finally, in 1974, the foundation authorized a 530-page report on energy by S. David Freeman (later the head of the government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority).[2] The report set energy conservation as “a matter of highest national priority.”[3] It elevated government planning and control over the oil and auto industries. It proposed appliance energy efficiency standards, mortgage subsidies for people who bought homes that met the standards, pushed for car miles-per-gallon standards, and promoted pollution taxes. (Our sluggish dishwashers are an example of what this report led to.)
The Freeman report also mused that “a political decision must be made: to restrain windfall profits by price controls; to tax some of them away and spend the proceeds in ways that will benefit the poor; or to do nothing.“[4]
By the way, you won’t read about Henry Ford II’s disaffection in the history page on the Ford Foundation’s website.[5] However, the New YorkTimes published portions of his resignation letter., including the quotes above.
Other Foundations Went Rogue, Too
The Ford Foundation was not alone. Others that turned against their creators include the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pew Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, the Buck Foundation, and the Barnes Foundation.
We have this full picture because one person brought the examples together. He was the late Martin Morse Wooster, who studied philanthropic organizations for years for the Capital Research Center. Wooster died in 2022 in a hit-and-run accident, but he left rich histories of American foundations in a book that went through four editions.
The final edition (published in 2017) is called How Great Philanthropists Failed and You Can Succeed in Protecting Your Legacy. [6] As the title indicates, Wooster not only identified the ways the founders of these organizations lost control but advised wealthy readers who might be contemplating a foundation how to avoid their predecessors’ mistakes. And he showed all potential donors, small or large, the pitfalls that almost inevitably occur over time.
Let’s look at a few other examples of foundations that went astray:
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- The MacArthur Foundation is famed for its mostly left-wing “genius awards” (ten on the left for every one on the right, wrote Wooster). Who would have thought that it was built on the money of a capitalist who turned around a bankrupt insurance company in the Depression, making it a great success, partly by hiring handicapped workers and discounting rates? John MacArthur then grew his fortune by developing land in New York and Florida. He was a giant proponent of private enterprise and, as Wooster says, “pugnacious.” MacArthur opposed the planners who wanted to block his land developments in Florida (“they think alligators are more important than people’”) and he refused to give money to politicians.[7]
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- Who would have thought that the Pew Charitable Trust, created by the money from Howard Pew, an entrepreneur in the oil industry (founder of Sun Oil or Sunoco), would abandon its origins? The Pew Trust has supported a plethora of social causes, among them “environmentalists who favored restrictions on oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness,” Wooster observed. [8] Surely, Howard Pew would have been stunned.
These are just a couple of examples. But Wooster’s book is not only about foundations that ended up disparaging the capitalistic sources of their money. It’s about donor intent.
The Sad Barnes Tale
One of the most disturbing illustrations of foiling the intent of the donor is the Barnes Foundation. Albert C. Barnes was a leftist liberal who supported the New Republic and the earlier Masses magazine. An entrepreneurial genius in the medical field, over the years he built one of the world’s most outstanding collections of modern art. But he wanted students of art, not the public, to see it—and especially not members of the art establishment. When he exhibited his early collection in 1923, art critics called the works “trash” and the “creations of a disintegrating mind” (not Barnes’ mind; rather, the works of artists like Chaim Soutine). Today the Barnes collection is worth about $25 billion.
To make a long story short, the Philadelphia art establishment had its revenge after Barnes died in 1951. Using court cases and public pressure, the establishment eventually forced the foundation to leave its home location, a small suburb of Philadelphia, and house the artwork in a public Philadelphia museum. The story is complicated, but you can get an idea of the course of things by the name of a documentary about Barnes’ experience, “The Art of the Steal.” The movie, on Youtube, is unforgettable.
Not every foundation has turned on its creator, and Wooster praises those that didn’t. He goes on to argue that there are two ways a wealthy philanthropist can prevent such takeovers:
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- Spend your money as effectively as possible while you are alive.
- Set a sunset date for your foundation.
There’s much more to this book, of course, and much more to the entire issue of donor intent. But this is my start.
The image above is the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in New York City. It is licensed by Creative Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Today the headquarters is called the Ford Foundation for Social Justice.
Notes (Comments follow the notes)
[1] “Excerpts from Henry Ford Letter, “ New York Times, January 12, 1977, https://www.nytimes.com/1977/01/12/archives/excerpts-from-henry-ford-letter.html.
[2] Energy Policy Project of the Ford Foundation, A Time to Choose: America’s Energy Future (Cambridge, MA :Ballinger Publishing. 1976). S. David Freeman was the lead author.
[3] Energy Policy Project, 329.
[4] Energy Policy Project, 8.
[5] Ford Foundation, “Our Origins, https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/about-ford/our-origins/.
[6] Martin Morse Wooster, How Great Philanthropists Failed and You Can Succeed in Protecting Your Legacy (Washington, D.C.: Capital Research Center, 2017).
[7] Wooster, 63.
[8] Wooster, 103.
The LA Times wrote an interesting article on July 2, 2012 (I’ll post the link in a moment). Although Kimberly Camp succeeded the infamously damaging Richard Glanton as CEO, and presided during the court fight, she now maintains the Barnes was not in financial trouble and the Trustees voted for the move for other reasons.
What were those reasons? Power, politics, the Philadelphia art community bluebloods, and then-Mayor Ed Rendell. They pressured the Trustees to place it in a more accessible location on the Philadelphia Parkway, demolishing a youth study center in the process. All about revenue.
I was saddened that the Orphans Court Judge Stanley Ott allowed the powerful to break a clearly written Will of Alfred Barnes, but Power won.
The LA Times link is here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-xpm-2012-jul-02-la-et-cm-barnes-foundation-ceo-denies-bankruptcy-claims-20120702-story.html
Thank you, Vic, for expanding the story. Unfortunately, it makes the story even more grim.
As I recall, part of the Barnes Foundation trustees’ and the art establishment’s frustration with the constraints on the Barnes collection was that they were required to hang the paintings as Mr. Barnes left them — filling every wall space, including stairwells. There is an aesthetic objection to that approach: if there is no focal point of interest, every object is a distraction. Similarly, the Winterthur Museum founded by Henry Francis du Pont in the 100s of rooms of his six-story house in Delaware, features rooms stuffed full of furniture, ceramics, paintings, and building facades carted off from European villages, all displayed based on the principle that there should be no focus in any room, but which ever direction one looks is of equal interest (even in the scores of bathrooms converted into gallery space). The effect on this visitor was like wandering through a furniture warehouse on a grand scale, like a Nebraska Furniture Mart or the warehouse in Citizen Kane. However, that is what Mr. Du Pont wanted, and what makes the aesthetic experience unique. So far, at least (unless there has been a wholesale change since I toured it), in Winterthur, the the Du Pont family has kept faith with the donor’s intent.
Over many years observing non-profits from both the outside and inside I have a simple generalization to explain the drift from pro to anti capitalism.
Non-profit decision makers (501-c-3) hire people like themselves.
What are the decision makers like? From various motives, they are committed to the idea that greed and profits are part of a single sin. Thus, society would be better off if the foundation’s grants favored people deemed victims of capitalism even if the cause of their suffering is something else.
The results can be fairly rapid bankruptcy or transformation into a foundation whose grants reflect the perspective of the officers and board of directors.
There is the maxim alternately called “O’Sullivan’s Rule” (after John O’Sullivan, former editor of National Review) or “Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics.”
“Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”
‘Splains a lot. If there is any hope for a foundation to retain its original purpose, that has to be explicitly spelled out in the charter.
When I was at Cornell, the Ford Foundation was funding a “community organizing” program that, among other things, published a Trotsky-ite newspaper and organized a local chapter of a “welfare-rights” organization involved in disruption and violence. Cornell gave academic credit for students participating in such things.
This history points out the wisdom of the English lawyers who promulgated the Rule Against Perpetuities, in part to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Unfortunately, the rule has never been applied to “charitable” bequests.