October 21, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Philanthropic Foundations: New Scholarship, New Possibilities
Edited by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
This book’s contributors intend to throw light on the operations of private foundations and spur discussion of foundations’ place in American society.
The history of foundations has been poorly sketched, writes Ms. Lagemann, a professor at New York University. The deficit in scholarship is due to foundations’ reluctance to open their files to outsiders, and to “boring house histories” that succeed mainly in keeping independent investigators away in droves, according to Ms. Lagemann.
She writes that the authors assembled in this collection were drawn to the subject because of an increase in the number of foundations over the past few decades and a realization by philanthropists that outside scrutiny might benefit their images.
Part One of the book explores how American foundations have been shaped by outside forces. One theory, advanced by the Harvard professor Peter Frumkin, posits that an unintended result of the Tax Reform Act of 1969 — which imposed payout and disclosure requirements as well as excise taxes on foundations — was to turn foundations into havens for white-collar professionals, whose services were needed to keep foundations in the good graces of government.
Part Two examines the imprint foundations have had on American culture. For example, Julia Grant, a professor at Michigan State University, argues that the grant making of the early Rockefeller funds helped to define child development as a scientific field. Part Three looks at the ways in which foundations have shaped social movements, including three essays on the Ford Foundation’s work in the 1960s. Part Four reverses the lens and offers five essays on how historians can improve their research on foundations.
Publisher: Indiana University Press, 601 North Morton Street, Bloomington, Ind. 47404-3797; (812) 855-4203 or (800) 842-6796; fax (812) 855-8507; iuporder@indiana.edu; http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress; 420 pages; $35; I.S.B.N. 0-253-33500-0.
