The Foundation's Early Years

On hearing of plans to construct a Foundation headquarters building in New York, Douglas Ensminger, the Foundation’s pioneering overseas representative in India and a considerable force in the allocation of Foundation resources, wrote to Henry Heald, the Foundation’s president, expressing dismay and opposition to the idea. He argued that organizations build monuments to themselves only at the end of their most productive years. He did not believe the Foundation had completed its work and didn’t like the assumption that it had.

(Ensminger, it should be added, later received funds to build a considerably less palatial headquarters, with swimming pool, for the Foundation’s office in New Delhi.) 

Ensminger’s complaint, according to Verne Atwater, the Foundation’s vice president for administration at the time (the first so named), did not register, despite echoes among staff. The trustees soon gave a go-ahead for the building. Not least in their consideration was the strong support of trustee Henry Ford II. A man of few words, Ford’s support was understandably decisive on most matters in which he took an interest.

The story of the Ensminger letter appears in a chapter on the Ford Foundation headquarters in Atwater’s memoir on the early years of the Foundation, written with Evelyn C. Walsh, with whom he represented the Foundation in Latin America in the 1950s and ’60s. The sections on Ford programs in Argentina, Chile, and Peru occupy a prominent section of the The Ford Foundation: The Early Years.

Subtitled “An Insider View of Wealth and Good Intentions,” the memoir covers the years from 1936, when Edsel Ford established the Foundation with a grant of $25,000, until 1968, when John McCloy, Foundation chairman, persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to release McGeorge Bundy from his national security post to become the Foundation’s fifth president.

Chapters are devoted to F.F. Hill and the Green Revolution, university development, the Humanities and Arts Program under McNeil Lowry, overseas development, urban development under Paul Ylvisaker and Mitchell Sviridoff, the population program under Oscar Harkavy, grants to individuals, and the roles of the presidents. Scattered through the text are photos of the early pioneers. In a concluding chapter titled a “A Fifty Year Perspective of the Ford Foundation”, Atwater and Walsh write that the initial program goals of the Foundation have evolved over the years to place less emphasis on global economic development, increased food production, and revitalization of the arts to stress a broader measure of the “advancement of human welfare.” Under new leadership, the Foundation focused more on humanistic objectives, namely greater equity and the advancement of women, minorities, and society’s outsiders. This shift in emphasis, Atwater writes, was initiated by McGeorge Bundy and “was sustained and enhanced into the 21st century by Franklin Thomas and later Susan Berresford.”

Turning to specifics of the Foundation’s work in the years after World War II, the authors write:

•Henry Ford II was the key factor that enabled the Foundation to operate independently of the Ford Motor Company;

•The Study Committee Report of 1949, the (Gaither Report), which defined the Foundation’s mission, had a positive long-term effect and was a vital factor in the remarkable success of a variety of sometimes disparate programs. 

•Presidential leadership, from Henry Ford, Paul Hoffman, Rowan Gaither, Henry Heald, McGeorge Bundy (and later Franklin Thomas and Susan Berresford) had a positive, “perhaps disproportionate,” influence on the goals and programs of the Foundation.

•Throughout the years of the Marshall Plan, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy Administration anti-poverty and Alliance for Progress programs, there was close collaboration by the Foundation with United States and foreign governments.

The book, published by Vanguard, is available from barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.