{"id":365408,"date":"2025-02-08T17:10:47","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T16:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=365408"},"modified":"2025-02-08T17:10:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T16:10:48","slug":"foundations-gone-rogue-ford-foundation-and-beyond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=365408","title":{"rendered":"Foundations Gone Rogue: Ford Foundation and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From Master Resource<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Jane Shaw Stroup<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Editor note<\/strong>: The wealth of free-market capitalism creates a robust civil society, where nonprofits and foundations can support the causes of their choosing, many of which might not be viable otherwise. The problem is where philanthropy goes political against the free society and human betterment. Jane Shaw Stroup takes a look at good money going in negative directions, even violating original intent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve probably heard that Henry Ford II resigned from the board of the Ford Foundation because it had veered far away from its donor\u2019s intent.  In his 1976 resignation letter, Ford (grandson of Henry Ford Sr.) wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In effect, the foundation is a creature of capitalism\u2014a statement that, I\u2019m 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\u2019s grant programs.\u201d[1]<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What had the Ford Foundation been doing? Essentially it had gone rogue.<\/p>\n\n\n

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A 1919 photograph of the senior Henry Ford. From the Library of Congress\u2019s Prints and Photographs Division. It is in the public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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 had only routine chores for them. He started the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014even though former staff members such as Frank Mankiewicz and Peter Edelman were lawyers earning up to $500,000 a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Henry Ford II asked McGeorge Bundy (Ford\u2019s president) to support the Henry Ford Hospital. Bundy refused. Only when Henry Ford II\u2019s 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\u2019s last gift to the hospital. In 2024, the hospital started on a funding campaign<\/a> and the Ford Foundation is nowhere in sight.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Henry Ford II. From a photograph by Hugo van Gelderen in the public domain under Creative Commons license CC0 1.0.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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]<\/strong> The report set energy conservation as \u201ca matter of highest national priority.\u201d[3]<\/strong> 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 automobile miles-per-gallon standards, and promoted pollution taxes. (Our sluggish dishwashers are an example of what this report led to.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Freeman report also mused that \u201ca 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.\u201c[4]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, you won\u2019t read about Henry Ford II\u2019s disaffection in the history page on the Ford Foundation\u2019s website.[5]<\/strong> However, the New YorkTimes<\/em>  published portions of his resignation letter, including the quotes above.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Foundations Went Rogue, Too<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final edition (published in 2017) is called How Great Philanthropists Failed and You Can Succeed in Protecting Your Legacy. <\/em>[6] As the title indicates, Wooster not only identified the ways in which the founders of these organizations lost control but advised wealthy readers who might be contemplating a foundation how to avoid their predecessors\u2019 mistakes. And he showed all potential donors, small or large, the pitfalls that almost inevitably occur over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s look at a few other examples of foundations that went astray:<\/p>\n\n\n\n