Education: Fosdick’s First

The estate estimated at $200,000,000 to $300,000,000 which Andrew William Mellon left last week in his educational and charitable trust (see p. 12) may become the world’s greatest philanthropic enterprise, but until it gets under way the greatest will continue to be the Rockefeller Foundation. According to the latest balance sheet, made public last week in the Foundation’s annual report for 1936, it had assets of $185,000,000 of which $151,459,000 has still been unappropriated.

In 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation was established “to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world.” In 1936, the Foundation gave away $11,300,000. It cooperated financially with 130 agencies, in amounts varying from a few thousand to several hundred thousand dollars. To scholars doing advanced scientific work it provided 222 grants. It provided 700 fellowships for post-graduate training. It conducted research through a field staff of 70 public health experts on yellow fever, malaria, hookworm disease, tuberculosis, yaws, diphtheria, schistosomiasis. influenza. Its money flowed into 53 foreign countries from Scandinavia to Java. The agencies which it helped included 41 local and national governments, 44 educational institutions, 20 research institutes, two libraries, 23 councils, associations, societies and commissions, mostly national or international.

These facts & figures were set forth last April in a president’s review by the Foundation’s able new President Raymond Elaine Fosdick. Last week this review was included in a full annual report, detailing all the ultimate capillary destinations of the flow of gold which last year poured from the heart of the Rockefeller philanthropic empire in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center—much but by no means all of it under the eye of John Davison Rockefeller Jr., chairman of the Foundation’s board of trustees. The following is a sample— very far short of a comprehensive list— of what Rockefeller money bought:

¶The University of Wisconsin got $27,500 for a Svedberg ultracentrifuge, a device which analyzes molecular weights by whirling materials around at a centrifugal force 350,000 times the force of gravity.

¶Massachusetts Institute of Technology got $85,000 for a big differential analyzer (‘”brass brain”) which makes possible rapid solution of engineering computations which would otherwise be impossible or impractically laborious.

¶Harvard’s Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory got $4,000 forresearch with small sounding balloons equipped with automatic radio.

¶The China Medical Board Inc. got $10,000 for further digging in the now famed caves at Chou-Kou-Tien whence came the fossil remains of “Pekin Man,” generally considered by anthropologists to be the oldest human type ever discovered. C. Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, got $61,200 to start and maintain for five years Canada’s first university training school for prospective civil servants.

¶The Brookings Institution (“systematic study of the basic problems of democratic government”) got $225,000 for three years.

¶The University of California got $10,750 for teaching the Russian language.

¶The University of Chicago got $25,000 for teaching the Chinese language.

¶The Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan got $120,000 for a library of important motion pictures produced since 1889.

¶The World Wide Broadcasting Foundation (“radio programs of cultural and educational value”) operating through Boston’s short wave station WINAL, got $40,000 for two years. C. Last autumn there was published in London, with Foundation help, a list of 1,639 scholars (”Scholars in Exile”) who had been ousted from academic posts in Germany by the Nazis. Most of them were Jews, partly Jewish, or married to Jewesses; some were pure “Aryans” who could not stomach the Nazi ideology. By the end of 1936 the Rockefeller Foundation had given a total of $532,000 to universities and research institutions on behalf of 151 of these scholars, most of whom have found permanent posts outside Germany.

¶China, great stamping ground of missionaries, has long been dear to the Baptist hearts of the Rockefellers, and the current destruction wreaked by the Japanese on many human and institutional beneficiaries of the Foundation must inevitably bring dismay to its trustees. Nankai University, whose Rockefeller-aided science building was destroyed by Japanese shells a month ago, was given $45,000 (Mex.) last year. Besides aid to a handful of universities. Rockefeller projects in North China included mass education, public health, rural reconstruction.

In 1936, the Foundation declined 920 applications for aid. (“The Foundation does not make gifts or loans to individuals, or finance patents or altruistic movements involving private profit, or contribute to the building and maintenance of churches, hospitals, or other local institutions, or support campaigns to influence public opinion on any social or political questions. . . .”)

Raymond Elaine Fosdick was elected president of the Rockefeller Foundation and the allied Rockefeller-endowed General Education Board two winters ago (TIME, Dec. 23, 1935), took active charge in July of last year, replacing two retiring presidents, Trevor Arnett and Max Mason. For a quarter-century before that Fosdick had been active in Rockefeller philanthropy. War worker, peace advocate,internationalist, social science promoter, he was first if not foremost a lawyer—the sort of genial, persuasive, energetic man who takes naturally to public life without becoming a politician, the sort of man who might have become an inner councilor of the New Deal if his tastes and convictions had lain in that direction. Brother of the Riverside Church’s Rector Harry Emerson Fosdick, he was born 54 years ago in Buffalo, graduated in 1905 from Princeton (to which university the Rockefellers have now given $700,000), emerged from New York Law School in 1908. Under Mayor McClellan he got into municipal government as assistant corporation counsel, later became Commissioner of Accounts. He first joined the Rockefellers as an investigator of European police systems. In 1916 Newton Diehl Baker sent him to the Mexican border, recalled him after U. S. entry into the World War to take charge of training camp activities. After the Armistice President Wilson appointed him Undersecretary of the League of Nations, a post from which he resigned after the Senate refused to ratify the League Covenant.

Five years ago Mr. Fosdick’s first wife shot herself and their two children to death. Last year he remarried. In the summer he lives on a Connecticut farm, leases his fields to farmer neighbors for haying. He travels frequently, last week arrived in France to visit the Foundation’s Paris office, make a quick stop in London before returning to the U. S. His first year as the Foundation’s president saw no sensational shifts of Rockefeller procedure but a continuation and broadening of traditional policy. His administration was proving quite satisfactory to his trustees and there was a note of crispness and dispatch in the Rockefeller Center offices which would have gladdened the Baptist heart of old John D. Sr., who died during Mr. Fosdick’s first year.