ABSTRACT
The ford foundation began life in a small way in Detroit in 1936. Its original endowment was a $25,000 check from Edsel Ford and its articles of incorporation ran to just three typed pages. Both its cash and its verbosity have increased considerably since then. Its history divides naturally into two parts—a provincial period, which lasted up to 1950, and its present modern, or global, era. In the fourteen years of its provincial phase, the Foundation gave away a total of $19,000,000, or less than a third of what it spent in 1954 and less than a thirtieth of the $600,000,000 plus that, in 1955, it committed itself to giving away in the near future. The $19,000,000 was doled out, at the rate of a mere $1,000,000 or so a year, to a number of local worthy causes, such as the Detroit Symphony, in which the Edsel Fords were interested; the Henry Ford Hospital; and two remarkable monuments to that antiquarian passion that so oddly complemented industrial genius in the first Ford’s personality—almost as though he were unconsciously trying to preserve with one hand what he had destroyed with the other. One of these is the fascinating Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, where fourteen acres of old locomotives, trolley cars, churns, buggies, dresses, lamps, airplanes, 131automobiles, sleighs, plows, steam engines, printing presses, lathes, toys, harnesses, pressed glass, Colonial furniture, and other American artifacts are housed behind a front made up of replicas of the façades of three famous Philadelphia buildings (Congress Hall, the Old City Hall, and Independence Hall). The other monument is the adjacent Greenfield Village, among whose hundred or so historic, or at least venerable, structures are Edison’s laboratory from Menlo Park, New Jersey, the shed in which the first Ford was built, and the birthplaces of Noah Webster, Luther Burbank, the Wright Brothers, and William H. McGuffey, the author of McGuffey’s Readers.
