ABSTRACT
The ford foundation is a philanthropic institution, of which there are estimated to be roughly 499,999 others in this country today. These include all churches, most universities and hospitals, and a great variety of miscellaneous agencies through which private wealth is voluntarily turned over to public service. F. Emerson Andrews, of the Russell Sage Foundation, who is probably the leading authority on philanthropic giving, puts their total wealth at $40,000,000,000, and estimates that in 1954 they received about $5,401,000,000 as gifts, for disbursement in one way or another. These are big figures—much bigger than anything known in the same field abroad—but the conclusion that Americans are therefore a uniquely generous people must be tempered by the fact that $5,000,000,000 is about what they spend each year on smokes and is $3,000,000 less than what they spend on liquor. Perhaps the only safe generalization is that this is a very big and a very rich country.
