Faith & Charity

In 1948, Paul Gray Hoffman explained why he was willing to give up his $90,000-a-year presidency of the Studebaker Corp. to run the Economic Cooperation Administration at a salary of $20,000. "It may be the opportunity," he said, "to put up a fight for peace." This week, after spending 30 months and $10 billion presiding over the Marshall Plan, Hoffman resigned to carry his fight to another field. He was expected to become president of the Ford Foundation, the world's largest private charitable institution.

If he took the job, Hoffman would not lack for funds. Old Henry Ford and his son Edsel had bequeathed the Ford Foundation 81% of Ford's non-voting stock (estimated worth: $250 million), primarily as a device to stave off inheritance taxes which would have shaken the family's hold on the company. Dollars kept clinking into the foundation's vaults as fast as Ford cars rolled off the assembly lines. So far only $27 million of the conveyor-belt income had been passed out, and the trustees had called in a special committee of scholars to tell them how to spend the rest to best advantage.

The answer, which this week became published policy, was broad and sweeping. Unlike the big Rockefeller Foundation ($123 million) and Carnegie Corp. of New York ($173 million), the Fords would skip specific scientific, medical and public-health projects. Instead, they would try to find new designs for human relationships which would match the assembly-line achievements of the machine age. One suggested field of endeavor, described in a prime sample of sociological gobbledygook: "The mitigation of tensions which now threaten world peace."

It was a high-soaring charter laid in a frame of thought and expressed in a UNESCO-like lingo that probably would have outraged well-ballasted old Henry Ford, who always mistrusted charity anyway. But with Paul Hoffman's clear-eyed business head, and the trustees' broad-gauge faith, it had a good chance of coming down to earth. --

To replace convalescent Paul Hoffman (recently returned from a two-month leave of absence for a gall bladder operation), Harry Truman appointed Hoffman's deputy, William C. Foster, onetime machinery manufacturer who had been Under Secretary of Commerce under Averell Harriman. Hoffman had been disheartened by Congress' insistence that ECA's European currency funds should go for rearmament (although he heartily favored a separate military aid program). Nonetheless, he wrote the President, Bill Foster might well preside over "ECA's period of greatest usefulness."

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