Independent Streak Marks Philanthropy of Heir to Blue-Jeans Fortune

Of the many descendants of Levi Strauss, his great grandniece Madeleine Haas Russell has followed perhaps the most independent path in her philanthropy.

Among the earliest grants of the Columbia Foundation, a private foundation that she founded in 1940 with her late brother William Haas, were awards to the Japa nese American Student Relocation Council. That group made it possible for students who had been removed from campuses and sent to internment camps during the anti-Japanese fervor that swept California during World War II to continue their studies at colleges and universities in the Eastern United States.

Following the war, Mrs. Russell gave a small grant in 1947 to the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to help them try to discourage the further use of nuclear weapons and energy. For her support, she received a gracious thank-you letter from the group’s founding chairman, Albert Einstein.

And the fund continues to support unpopular causes today, including groups opposed to the death penalty and human-rights groups that defend the rights of homosexuals.

Looking back on the many grants that have gone to unpopular causes over the years, Mrs. Russell refuses to be portrayed as a heroine. Instead, she suggests, her wealth and the anonymity she chose in pursuing her philanthropy shielded her from any negative consequences of her actions.

“I often have wondered what I would do if it really had a personal effect on me,” she says in her Bauhaus mansion here, with its panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking through the mist and the trees. “I don’t know if I would be so courageous.”

At first, Mrs. Russell tried to remain anonymous — not out of some great moral virtue, she says, so much as from the simple wish not to be alienated from her friends. “It was very embarrassing in the Depression for somebody my age to have so much wealth,” she says.

Indeed, from her earliest days, Mrs. Russell experienced great wealth and tremendous personal isolation. She was heir to two fortunes, with holdings in Levi Strauss & Company bequeathed to her by her grandfather Jacob Stern, a nephew of Levi Strauss, as well as holdings in Haas Brothers, a San Francisco business that had been run by her father, Charles Haas. In 1927, the same year that Mr. Stern died, Mr. Haas — already a widower — passed away at age 43, leaving Mrs. Russell an orphan at age 12.

In retrospect, Mrs. Russell wonders whether anonymity was the right path to pursue.

“I missed so much of what I could have benefited from in my work in the foundation by not being willing to step forward,” she says. “I always stayed behind.”

Mrs. Russell has been a maverick not only in her philanthropy but in her politics as well. A lifelong supporter of Democratic candidates for local and national public office in a family full of Republicans, she was often chided by her late cousin Walter Haas for “biting the hand that was feeding” her. “He would say it half jokingly, but half seriously,” she notes. “I didn’t care,” she adds.

Her political contributions brought criticism from outside the family as well. As a member of the Democratic National Committee, Mrs. Russell earned a spot on President Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.”

Even her Presidio Heights home is a symbol of her maverick style. Mrs. Russell scandalized her tony neighbors in 1950 when she tore down her grandfather’s grand brick mansion, replacing it with a modern home designed by Erich Mendelsohn. Today, the simple rectangular structure stands in stark contrast to the Tudor and neo-baroque fantasies that dominate her neighborhood.

Mrs. Russell laughs gently when she recalls the tempest she set off a half-century ago. “Some people called it Fort Russell,” she says.

In the early years of the Columbia Foundation, Mrs. Russell says, she relied on older and more experienced relatives to help guide her philanthropy. Her uncle Samuel Lilienthal was a member of the Board of Directors when the foundation was founded, and her cousins Walter Haas and Daniel Koshland later both served on the board for 20 years.

Since 1977, when her three children joined the foundation’s Board of Directors, Mrs. Russell has increasingly worked with them to set priorities for her foundation. But she candidly admits that she has had to make compromises in sharing authority with her children.

In January, the foundation — which had about $70-million in assets and spent about $3.5-million on grants last year — announced a new set of program guidelines, fashioned after a year of deliberations within the family. And now that the grant categories have been chosen, the family is still discussing how much will be spent on each topic.

The new strategy will focus on arts and culture, preservation of wilderness ecosystems and biological diversity, urban planning (with an eye toward protecting the environment), and human rights, including opposition to the death penalty and support for the rights of homosexuals.

In general, the new guidelines represent no major departure from past foundation activities. And there were no fractious battles in choosing them, says Mrs. Russell. “We all agree on everything, but it is just a question of what do we want to emphasize,” she says.

“In a certain way, to be truthful, it is much easier to make up my own mind and do what I want to do,” Mrs. Russell says. “But I felt that I wanted the foundation to continue after my death,” she says, adding that bringing her children into the foundation was the best way to do that. “I want it to be a family affair.”