Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions

by Dwight Macdonald

Thirty years since it was first published, Macdonald's masterful book on the Ford Foundation remains the only book-length account of this institution that has been published. Despite the calls for a book carrying on the story from 1956 on the part of Richard Magat and McGeorge Bundy, that book has yet to be written. In his stimulating introduction to this new edition, Francis Sutton suggests why this is so. The Foundation, he observes, has never again aroused as much public interest as it did in the years Macdonald's describes. The announcement that a new program would be launched with the riches that 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company's stock would bring captured the attention of the media all across the country. Its sheer size was astounding; in 1954 the Ford Foundation spent four times as much as the Rockefeller Foundation and ten times as much as the Carnegie Corporation. Its expenditures were very large in relation to the budgets of the institutions that looked to it for help. Consequently, the American public waited expectantly to see what this huge foundation would do. But the Ford Foundation was not only big; it was controversial in those years, and inspired activism in the media, Congressional investigations, and political wrath. Macdonald nicely captures the American ambivalence toward large bureacratic organizations, which the Ford Foundation epitomizes, with its own language and, one might argue, its own values. Sutton points out that Macdonald's writing also sets a model for foundation history and indeed philanthropic history, with a poised, ironic detachment that has remained rare. His introduction points out the main themes of Macdonald's book and examines the extent to which they continue to illumine the foundation in the years since this book was first published. It looks at how well the Foundation has addressed the objectives it set for itself, and nicely captures the giant changes that this giant foundation has experienced through the 1960s and 1970s, to the present day.

Genres: History

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, philosopher, and political radical. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine Partisan Review for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including Time, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and politics, a journal which he founded in 1944.

Reviews

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dwight MacDonald’s The Ford Foundation (1955) stands as one of the most incisive early critiques of American philanthropic power, offering a penetrating analysis of how ostensibly benevolent institutions accumulate political influence, cultural authority, and ideological reach. Written at a time when large-scale private foundations were expanding rapidly in scope, MacDonald’s essay-length study is both an artifact of mid-century American intellectual life and a prescient examination of the structural tensions inherent to philanthropic governance.


At the core of MacDonald’s argument is a skepticism toward the concentration of unaccountable wealth in “nonprofit” form. He portrays the Ford Foundation as an enormous reservoir of capital—larger than many universities or government departments of the period—operating with minimal democratic oversight. MacDonald’s critique centers less on specific abuses than on the very possibility of them: when vast social resources are controlled by a small board of trustees with no public mandate, a political problem exists regardless of the benevolence of those trustees. This line of reasoning anticipates later scholarship on “philanthrocapitalism” and the political economy of nonprofit institutions.


Stylistically, the work represents MacDonald’s characteristic blend of intellectual seriousness and polemical wit. He approaches the Ford Foundation with a journalist’s eye and an essayist’s skepticism, interrogating both its organizational opacity and the managerial ideology embedded in its programs. His analysis is grounded in documentary research—annual reports, public statements, financial disclosures—yet his interpretive framework is fundamentally sociological: he situates the Foundation within a broader constellation of elite institutions that shape public life without public authorization.


One of the most significant contributions of MacDonald’s critique is its emphasis on the cultural and ideological effects of philanthropic giving. He argues that the Ford Foundation’s patronage fosters a technocratic model of social reform—“liberalism with the politics left out”—wherein social problems are framed as technical challenges to be managed by experts rather than contested in democratic arenas. This managerial ethos, he suggests, dulls the critical edge of the arts and social sciences by aligning them with funders’ preferences for moderation, stability, and incrementalism. Such insights resonate strongly with contemporary research on the “depoliticizing” tendencies of large-scale philanthropy.


Yet MacDonald’s work is not without limitations. His tone occasionally drifts toward polemic, and his sweeping generalizations about the cultural effects of philanthropic patronage can feel speculative. Moreover, writing in the mid-1950s, he lacked access to internal documents and archives that later historians would draw upon to construct a more intricate picture of the Foundation’s internal debates and shifting priorities. Nonetheless, these constraints reflect the pioneering nature of his critique rather than diminish its value.


In retrospect, The Ford Foundation can be read as an early intervention in a field that would later attract sustained academic attention—from critiques of the “nonprofit industrial complex” to analyses of foundations’ roles in international development, social science research, and liberal political reform. MacDonald’s central insight—that philanthropic institutions, however well-intentioned, are political actors whose influence demands scrutiny—remains strikingly relevant.


Overall, MacDonald’s study endures as a foundational text in the critical literature on American philanthropy. Its combination of sharp analysis, moral urgency, and institutional skepticism offers an important historical perspective for scholars examining the evolution of private foundations and their role in shaping modern governance.

GPT