ABSTRACT
The ford foundation, which in 1953 moved its headquarters to New York City from an estate in Pasadena that was known to the staff as Itching Palms, is a large body of money completely surrounded by people who want some. The Foundation is in the business of giving away cash, its function as defined in its charter being “to receive and administer funds for scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and for no other purposes.” It is by far the biggest wholesaler in this peculiarly American field of private enterprise. Last year, its capital consisted of ninety per cent of the stock of the Ford Motor Company. On the Foundation’s books, this was given the value, for tax purposes, of $417,000,000, but its real value, as measured by the earnings of Ford Motors, was at least $2,500,000,000. This is considerably more than half as much money as all the other foundations in the country have among them. The Ford Foundation’s liquid capital, which corresponds in a general way to an individual’s checking account, fluctuates between $60,000,000 and $100,000,000, depending on the time of year. (Only six other foundations are known to have total capital of over $100,000,000.) The Foundation began to spend big money in 1950, 4when it gave away $24,000,000, and has continued on a rising scale ever since. Its 1954 spending came to just short of $68,000,000, which is four times what the second largest foundation, Rockefeller, normally spends in a year and ten times the annual spending of the third largest, the Carnegie Corporation. It is also as much as all American foundations together spent in any one year up to and including 1948, and it is about a quarter of the total spent by all American foundations last year.
