Philanthropoid No. 1
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Those who knew Henry Townley Heald when he was head of New York University say that he was never known to get excited or waste a word. Chancellor Heald was running true to form when he called in his top staffmen one day last June to hear a special announcement. "Gentlemen," said he matter-of-factly, "they've offered me the presidency of the Ford Foundation, and I don't see how anyone in education could turn it down." "That was all there was to it," recalls one of those present. "Here was a man getting the most important educational job in the U.S., and he summed it up in one sentence--period. He went on to talk about other things, and the subject never came up again."
Though not everyone would agree on just what is the most important educational job in the U.S., the presidency of the Ford Foundation clearly comes close. Were the foundation nothing more than what a New Yorker wag called it--"a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some"--it would wield power enough. But it has used its money to tackle problems--and try solutions--on a scale grander than private philanthropy has ever known. It has more than a third ($2.7 billion) of all the foundation money in the U.S. It spends at the rate of $100 million a year, has brewed up such a wide assortment of projects that it is practically impossible to say where it will turn up next.
The Wild One. Its money and that of its subsidiary funds is at work everywhere from Little Rock to New Delhi. Its province is the world, its goal the welfare of all mankind. Its trustees' reports bristle with such phrases as "the dignity of man . . . the inherent worth of the individual . . . the ideals and aims of democracy." Its ideals were so loftily stated and its youthful mistakes so widely publicized that it inevitably won the reputation of being the Wild One of philanthropy. In launching his investigation of tax-exempt foundations, Tennessee's tub-thumping B. Carroll Reece solemnly warned of Ford's "subversive and un-American propaganda activities." Westbrook Pegler called it a "front for dangerous Communists," and Pravda accused it of "the sending of spies, murderers, saboteurs and wreckers to Eastern Europe."
The independent Fund for the Advancement of Education has at times stirred the ire of professional educators, and the Fund for the Republic, which the foundation founded and set adrift, has stirred the ire of practically everyone else. Fulton Lewis Jr. devoted a whole series of broadcasts to denouncing the Fund for the Republic, and the national commander of the American Legion charged in 1955 that it was "threatening and may succeed in crippling the national security." Some citizens have boycotted Ford cars; others deluged Henry Ford II with outraged letters. "Your grandfather would spin in his grave," wrote an Albany physician, "if he could see the antics of the people who are spending good American dollars earned in the good American way by your once-fine company." Wrote someone from Los Angeles: "Dear Henry: Drop dead."
No. 1 Lord Bountiful. However chaotic their beginnings, neither the foundation nor any of its funds has ever deserved such burning criticism. As a matter of fact, the foundation has come to maturity so rapidly that some academics have begun to wonder whether it might not be in danger of becoming all too conservative. In any case, the fact that it has Henry Heald as president is a significant indication of its development, for few men have won wider respect in business, government and education. An engineer by training and a conservative by temperament, Heald has made an enviable reputation for performing administrative wonders with a minimum of fuss.
He is the father of the modern Illinois Institute of Technology, was the best head New York University ever had. Now, as U.S. education's No. 1 Lord Bountiful and as the nation's chief philanthropoid, he has the delicate task of keeping the world's biggest foundation both bold and cautious, risky but responsible, of being himself the Pioneer in the Grey Flannel Suit. It is the duty of a foundation, he once said, to "pioneer ahead of popular opinion." Then he added characteristically: "To be ahead --but not too far ahead."
Made in U.S.A. Though foundations are as old as the Pharaohs, the one that Heald runs is as much an American product as the model T. Plato may have endowed his academy, and Benjamin Franklin may have left funds for the needy married apprentices of Boston and Philadelphia, but it was not until the formation of the Peabody Education Fund in 1867 that the modern foundation really emerged. By that time philanthropy was taking up a whole new role: not charity alone, but the advancement of knowledge.
The Peabody Education Fund (established by Massachusetts-born Millionaire Merchant George Peabody) helped set up state departments of education in the South, opened schools to train teachers, was partly responsible for the Southern Education Board, which sparked a national crusade to improve and finance Southern schools. The Rockefeller Foundation, partly following the Peabody lead, plunged into medical research, virtually eliminated hookworm from the South, wrestled with diseases all over the world. Andrew Carnegie's money sprinkled public libraries across the nation, set up pensions for college teachers and, by supporting the famed Flexner report on U.S. and Canadian medical schools, revolutionized medical education in America. Meanwhile, the smaller ($1,000,000 a year) but prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has made it possible for thousands of artists and scholars to strike out on their own.
How to Die Disgraced. In a sense, it is an irony that the largest foundation of all should bear the name it does. Henry Ford was hardly the sort of man to agree with Carnegie that "the man who dies . . . rich dies disgraced." "Give the average man something," said Henry, "and you make an enemy of him." True enough, he and his son Edsel did have a small foundation which spent about $1,000,000 a year, but the money went mostly into such pet projects as restoring the Wayside Inn and the birthplace of Noah Webster. After his death and the death of Edsel, however, it was this small foundation that kept the Ford Motor Co. safely in the hands of the Ford family.
Had the Ford heirs (Mrs. Henry Ford, Mrs. Edsel Ford, Henry II, Benson, William and Mrs. Josephine Ford Ford) inherited all that Henry and Edsel left, they would have had to sell so much Ford Motor Co. stock to pay the taxes that they might have lost control of the company. Instead, 90% of the stock--all nonvoting--went to the foundation, and the remaining 10% (including the voting stock) stayed in the family. But taxes aside, the Ford heirs wanted the very best for the foundation. In 1948 Henry II consulted the late Karl Compton of M.I.T., and Compton in turn suggested that he hire able young San Francisco Lawyer H. Rowan Gaither Jr., wartime assistant director of M.I.T.'s radiation lab, to make a thorough study of just how the foundation should spend the estimated $15 million to $20 million a year it would have.
Gaither gathered a small staff, talked to more than 1,000 people in business, education, labor and the professions. The staff then holed up in a Manhattan hotel, eventually produced a 22-volume pre-scription for the ills of the world. The foundation, said the report, should concentrate not in the sciences, where other foundations already had heavy commitments, but in five broad areas: 1) world peace and understanding, 2) democratic institutions, 3) education, 4) economic wellbeing, and 5) research in man's behavior. Gaither also submitted a list of possible trustees and officers. Among the names on the list: Paul Hoffman.
Dreamer's Dream. Onetime president of the Studebaker Corp. and then head of Economic Cooperation Administration, Hoffman seemed to have all the executive and international experience to make him ideal to head such a foundation. His only apparent drawback was that he wanted to settle down in his home in Pasadena and therefore insisted that the foundation establish its headquarters there. In spite of reservations about the efficiency of such an arrangement, Henry Ford II and his trustees decided to give Hoffman his chance.
For anyone with a taste for world-saving, Pasadena was certainly a dreamer's dream come true. The brilliant and flamboyant Robert Maynard Hutchins, onetime (1929-51) trail-blazing head of the University of Chicago, came out as an associate director with all sorts of reforms in mind for U.S. education. Chester Davis, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, joined to set up the foundation's private Point Four program. These, recalls Hutchins nostalgically, "were the best days of the foundation, when there were just three of us in one room of a cottage at the Huntington Hotel. The three of us would drink as many deep-dish martinis as we thought were in the public interest." Later, wiry, erudite Harvard Law Professor Milton Katz joined up as associate director in charge of international understanding, and Lawyer Gaither agreed to come along on a part-time basis to get things rolling and oversee the behavioral sciences.
Itching Palms. As the staff grew, the foundation (now dubbed Itching Palms) moved into a nearby mansion complete with swimming pool. Hoffman set up shop in the master bedroom, turned the paneled bar into a conference room and the manorial living room into a waiting room. About the only cloud on the Pasadena horizon was that the Internal Revenue people were beginning to show signs of concern at the rapid way the foundation's money was piling up.
To get rid of some money fast, the foundation began setting up its independent satellite funds. The two most important: the Fund for the Advancement of Education under Hutchins' old friend Clarence Faust, former dean of the college at the University of Chicago, and the Fund for Adult Education under C. Scott Fletcher, former president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Films. By that time the waiting room had begun to fill, and the foundation began learning the woes and worries of giving.
Peace & God. The applicants and applications were of every shape and size. "My mother tells me," wrote one young correspondent, "that you give money for peace. Please send a rug to my mother for our dining room and paint the living room yellow so that my father can have peace." One man popped up in a purple velvet suit; another came with a luxurious-looking toilet seat and the theory that if people were more comfortable in their bathrooms, they might think up some first-rate ideas on how to solve the world's problems. One ambitious fellow wanted to irrigate the Sahara Desert; another man showed up brandishing a $100,000 check signed by God. He could find no one, he complained, who was willing to cash it.
By 1952 the foundation's work was gradually taking shape, but there was still something wrong with its management. "How firm a foundation," sang Robert Hutchins airily, "we've three times the dough and ten times the brains that any other can show." But the foundation was far from firm, and the kind of brains running it was not precisely what the trustees had bargained for.
Mutiny Over the Bounty. Though brilliant and daring, Hoffman was not around enough. If he was not off campaigning for Eisenhower, he was off crusading for something or other somewhere else. "He could come back from India," says one foundation official, "with the Taj Mahal under one arm and Nehru under the other, smoke curling from his nostrils. Hell, he could make a great speech and even get Buddha elected." "He was like Dulles," says cigar-chomping Trustee Frank Abrams, former board chairman of Standard Oil (N.J.). "He'd be in Denmark one day and in Portland, Ore. the next. He was a catalyst, not an administrator."
As the months passed it became obvious that the Pasadena idea was not working out. The staff had to plane back and forth across the continent so much that they began calling the foundation the "Fund for the Advancement of Aviation." To make matters worse, Hoffman infuriated Henry Ford II by inadvertently leaking to the press that the Ford Motor Co. might put some of its Ford stock on the market. Finally, at President Eisenhower's first inauguration, Ford told Hoffman: "This is the end, Paul." A month later the trustees also rose against Hoffman, elected Rowan Gaither president and ordered him to move Itching Palms to Madison Avenue. Hoffman became board chairman of his brain child, the Fund for the Republic. As for Hutchins, no one knew quite what to do. "I am an associate director," said he as he cooled his heels in Pasadena, "who doesn't direct anything or associate with anybody."
In spite of this unhappy start, the foundation and its funds managed to turn out a prodigious amount of work. The surprising thing about it is not that it made so many mistakes but that it made so few. To a far greater extent than any other foundation, it is a problem-solving agency on a grand scale, thinking up its own solutions and paying going institutions and campuses to try them out.
How to Raise Standards. Under mild-mannered, capable Clarence Faust, the Fund for the Advancement of Education has made its most important contributions in two fields: the training and recruitment of teachers, and improving the intellectual lot of the gifted student. In 1951 it launched its famous statewide Arkansas Plan to attract more public-school teachers by giving liberal-arts graduates one year of training and internship instead of the tedious mishmash of courses usually doled out by schools of education. Though Arkansas is perhaps too poor a state to carry on such an experiment successfully, the fifth-year idea has spread to more than 25 other communities and universities.
The fund has experimented with putting master teachers on TV for the benefit of a whole school system. It has persuaded some colleges to take in bright high-school students before graduation and to give others advance standing after high-school graduation. It has also been a major catalyst in beefing up the standards of the public-school curriculum.
From its headquarters in White Plains, N.Y., the Fund for Adult Education (director: C. Scott Fletcher) runs a major campaign to give adults a chance at liberal education. Among other things, it has spent $10 million on educational TV, started thousands of Americans on the Great Books trail, financed part-time liberal-arts courses for businessmen, now hopes to get 12 to 15 universities to set up adult liberal-arts programs.
"Feel Free!" Though both these satellites are entirely independent corporations with their own trustees, Ford Foundation officials are apt to go out of their way to emphasize the complete autonomy of the Fund for the Republic. It is literally, says Robert Hutchins, its present head, "a completely disowned subsidiary of the foundation," and when it has spent its $15 million, it can expect to get no more. Its motto, according to Hutchins, is "Feel Free." Its province: the turbulent area of civil liberties.
In 1954 the fund commissioned Commonweal Executive Editor John Cogley to write a report on blacklisting in the entertainment industry. Unfortunately, the whole study appeared to be so opinionated, even to objective critics, that it lost much of the impact it might have had with the general public. On the other hand, the fund-supported Bibliography of the Communist Problem in the United States, compiled by Cornell Historian Clinton Rossiter, Georgetown Law Professor Joseph Snee, S.J. and Harvard Law Professor Arthur Sutherland, was a valiant if incomplete attempt to do a much-needed job. The investigation of security procedures and firings, made under the auspices of the New York City bar association, cast a frightening Orwellian light on the abuses committed in the name of security.
But the fund's unhappy reputation, however undeserved, has been firmly established. It found itself in deep trouble with Congress. Representative Francis Walter wondered out loud whether "it was a friend or foe of America in the struggle against the Communist conspiracy."
Do What You Can. While its satellites go their way, the foundation goes about its own business of dispensing millions from its hushed, grey-carpeted headquarters in a sleek new office building on Madison Avenue. There a staff of 20 educators, 17 former government workers, twelve former businessmen, eight journalists and two lawyers pore over projects with an earnest and refreshingly optimistic determination to do what they can for the world. These projects can emerge in various ways--from a casual conversation at a cocktail party, from a request by some scholar or university, or from some great scheme cooked up by the staffmen themselves. All projects of over $500,000 must be passed by the full board of trustees,* which meets four times a year in a conference room with one wall lined with photographs of their predecessors and themselves. Between meetings the trustees study reams of reports and documents sent them by the foundation, more than earn their $5,000 a year. "We've got a tremendous trust," says Trustee Donald K. David, former dean of the Harvard business school. "You really learn what being a trustee means."
The foundation has poured millions into Eastern Europe, the Near East and Asia. In India alone it has spent $19 million on a vast network of community projects, conferences, training centers and publications--ranging from a model community center in Delhi in memory of Gandhi to helping spread the vidyapeeths (rural universities) in Mysore and other states. In Burma the foundation's work is so highly regarded that when Rowan Gaither visited the country, Statesman U Nu took the unusual step of declaring him a guest of the state. Commented one Indonesian official: "The foundation does not interfere in our domestic politics. It's helping us strictly on humanitarian grounds."
$6 To $560 Million. On the home front the foundation likes to give a boost to such going concerns as the Institute for International Education and the American Council of Learned Societies. It has spent $8,000,000 on educational TV, $1,725,000 on 30 university presses. Among its most significant grants:
P: $20 million to set up the National Merit Scholarship Corp. with a $500,000 assist from the Carnegie Corp. Today the N.M.S., with 57 supporting corporations, foundations and individuals, is sending 1,386 of the cream of the high-school students to college, is the largest private dispenser of scholarships in the world.
P: $5,000,000 to get its independent satellite, the Council on Library Resources, going in Washington, D.C. With former Chief Assistant Librarian of Congress Verner Clapp at its head, the council is seeking ways to improve library procedures and interlibrary cooperation.
P: $5,350,000 in 1953 for a Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Calif. Taking its cue from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the center assembles 50 scholars and scientists a year to work alone or in groups on any problem that interests them in human and animal behavior.
P: $4,172,000 to establish Resources for the Future, Inc. in Washington, D.C., headed by bearish Biochemist Reuben G. Gustavson, former chancellor of the University of Nebraska. Resources is trying to change the old "Don't use" philosophy of conservation to a "Use wisely" policy.
P: $560 million--the largest foundation gift in the history of philanthropy--to 1) up teacher salaries at 630 private four-year colleges and universities, 2) reward those campuses that have made outstanding efforts to raise their own salaries, 3) help more than 3,200 hospitals and the nation's 44 privately supported medical schools to the tune of $290 million, 4) give a $10 million shot in the arm to the National Fund for Medical Education, 5) in general, call dramatic attention to the pronounced plight of higher education.
P: $6 to Jonathan ("Rocketship") Shapiro, 10, president of a spaceship club in New York City, who wrote: "Dear Mr. Ford: I am interested in electricity and electronics, and I would like you to equip a shop for our club to keep us off the streets."
Time for a Change. While plowing into new fields and pouring out its millions at a rate never, before known, the foundation under President Rowan Gaither was also convalescing from the big upheaval of 1953. But Lawyer Gaither felt all along that the administration still needed strengthening, and so, when Henry Ford II, who has conscientiously tried to keep the foundation free of family influence, decided to resign as chairman, the board of trustees concluded that it was time for a change again. They decided to up Gaither to the chairmanship, started the search for a president with more experience in education. Among the men they looked over, one name kept cropping up in a most surprising fashion. Though Henry Townley Heald, 52, has had plenty of time to make enemies, no one had anything but good words to say about him.
He was born in Lincoln, Neb., has for years kept a picture of Abraham Lincoln in his office, is invariably described by others as "Lincolnesque" ("Oh, that's a lot of nonsense," says he). But he did not grow up in any log cabin. His Leipzig-educated father, a distinguished botanist, moved through a succession of academic posts, finally became head of the plant pathology department at the State College of Washington in Pullman. Partly because of these many moves and partly because she thought primary school a doubtful blessing, Mrs. Heald taught Henry and his older sister at home. Not until he was ready for the ninth grade did he finally enter a regular school.
In the Pullman high school and later at Washington State and the University of Illinois, where he took a master's in civil engineering, Henry Heald was always the detached, single-minded student who seemed to know exactly where he was heading. Except for an abortive attempt to make the high-school track team, he took little interest in athletics or extracurricular activities and, in spite of his popularity and high grades, did not even join a fraternity. Nor did he want to squander his meager summer-job savings on dates.
But one day when he was home for a visit, his younger sister told him about a member of her sorority at Washington State--an attractive girl from Yakima named Muriel Starcher. To his family's amazement, Henry called Muriel up, took her to lunch in Moscow, Idaho, nine miles away. "I'll never forget what I had," recalls Muriel. "It was fruit salad, and I like it to this day." After only one week, the boy who knew what he wanted proposed.
Invisible Machinery. By that time, after a couple of engineering jobs around Chicago, Heald was teaching at Armour Institute, which was struggling to stay alive with 800 students and a handful of buildings. He rose swiftly from dean of students to dean, acting president. As president, at 34, he was the talk of Chicago. Without seeming to make an effort ("With Heald," says one friend, "the machinery never shows"), he persuaded 60 top industrialists to join his board of trustees, arranged a merger with Lewis Institute, hired Architect Mies van der Rohe to build a whole new campus for what is now the Illinois Institute of Technology. As 16 gleaming new buildings rose from the midst of Chicago's worst slums, enrollment climbed to 7,000.
In his spare time Heald also headed a committee that finally rid Chicago of autocratic School Superintendent William Johnson, who had made such a mess of the school system that the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools threatened to blacklist it.
When Heald became chancellor of New York University in 1951, all Chicago felt the loss. Five corporations had made him a director; the Republicans had wanted him to run for mayor; even ex-Superintendent Johnson claimed him as a friend. "A very fine gentleman," said Johnson. "I've been a guest of his many times at I.I.T."
A Little Sense of Destiny. At N.Y.U. Heald faced a different sort of problem-- a huge (35,000 students) university with six scattered campuses and only a faint sense of entity. Heald rallied the alumni for the first time, boosted their annual giving from $140,000 to $400,000 a year. He eliminated departmental duplication, persuaded students to consolidate their activities (e.g., the university had four student newspapers), raised $44.5 million, which was more than had come in in all the previous 25 years. But his real achievement was something more intangible: restoring to students, facultymen and alumni faith in the future of their university. "I tried," says Heald, "to give them a little sense of destiny."
Today Henry Heald is in a position to influence the destiny of hundreds of institutions. But if his face is lined and 6 -ft.-2-in. frame slightly stooped, it is not because of worry: he thrives on problems, Each morning, accompanied by his wife, he walks to his office from his Sutton Place apartment, usually carries a bulging briefcase full of last night's homework. He rarely goes out at night, seldom entertains, indulges in no hobbies, has never been known to take a real vacation. His desk is clean, his decisions swift, his temper always even.
In the few months he has been president, the Ford Foundation has already felt his touch. To consolidate the educational work of the foundation and the Fund for the Advancement of Education, he drew up plans to merge the two, appointed the fund's respected Clarence Faust a foundation vice president. He also made clear that he thought the Program Committee, which reviewed all projects and managed to satisfy no one, should be eliminated. "When?" someone asked him. "Now," said Heald.
Occupational Hazards. As Heald has already learned, running a foundation is full of pitfalls. No one could possibly quarrel with the foundation's recent grant of $25 million to the National Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program to draw more talent into college teaching by helping promising graduate students. On the other hand, the $500,000 grant to set up an exchange program for U.S. and Polish artists and intellectuals could well have stirred up a flurry of protests. But politics and public opinion aside, philanthropy faces nettlesome occupational hazards of its own.
With so much money to give, a foundation can easily tempt a scholar to distort his work in order to be pleasing ("Of course," says one Midwest political scientist, "professors distort and tailor their project requests. They aren't dumb. If they know the magic words to say to the foundation boys, they're going to say them"). The foundation must also be wary of overselling a university on a project that it really has no business taking on. It must support group-research projects--for teamwork is the trend--but it must be careful not to slight the lone wolf. It has a responsibility to follow up its grants, but it must not dictate what its grantees do. Finally, it must master one of the most difficult tasks of all in foundationmanship--knowing when to terminate a grant. It must be able to get out of a project that is leading nowhere, but it must not end a project before it really bears fruit.
The whole function of a foundation, says Heald, is "to discriminate, to pioneer, to show by example, to be prudent but not afraid, to be risky but not foolhardy, to explain fully." It is a tricky path to follow, but it is especially so for Heald, whose foundation will inevitably influence the whole course of foundation giving. "It is not enough," Heald once told a colleague, "for this foundation to be good. It has the moral responsibility to be great." Under President Heald, the Ford Foundation has every chance of being just that.
*Present trustees: H. Rowan Gaither Jr.; Frank W. Abrams; Robert B. Anderson, picked last week as the new Secretary of the Treasury; James B. Black, chairman of the board, Pacific Gas & Electric Co.; James F. Brownlee, partner, J. H. Whitney & Co.; John Cowles, president, Minneapolis Star and Tribune Co.; Donald K. David-Mark F. Ethridge, publisher, the Courier-Journal, Louisville; Benson Ford, vice president, Ford Motor Co.: Henry Ford Laurence M. Gould, president, Carleton College-Henry T. Heald; John J. McCloy, chairman of the board, Chase Manhattan Bank; Julius A. Stratton, chancellor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Charles E. Wyzanski Jr., judge, U.S. District Court, Boston.
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