Great Catalyst

The first John D. Rockefeller had to admit that he was worrying himself "almost to a nervous breakdown." So many charities were appealing to him for help that he hardly knew which way to turn. He finally got the answer to his dilemma after he met Frederick T. Gates, who, as executive secretary of the American Baptist Education Society, had helped persuade him to finance the founding of the University of Chicago.

"Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche!" thundered Gates one day. "You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows!" And the very best way to distribute it, advised Gates, was to turn it over to a philanthropic corporation run by a wise and able group of trustees.

In 1901, with Gates's guidance, John D. did just that. He organized the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and later set up the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission. Finally, in 1910, he launched the Rockefeller Foundation--the richest organization of its kind the world had ever seen. Eventually the foundation took charge of almost all his giving, and spent nearly half a billion dollars "to promote the well-being of mankind throughout the world." In its first official history (The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation; Harper; $4.50), published this week, former President Raymond B. Fosdick tells what all the money has done.

Search & Cure. John D. was certain of at least one thing about the "difficult art of giving." Said he: "The best philanthropy is a search for cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source." The first major evil that his trustees sought to cure: hookworm in the South.

In those days, hookworm was afflicting millions of people. The Rockefeller trustees began their fight with a gigantic survey, pinpointing the towns and counties where the disease was at its worst. Then, in addition to distributing medicine, they set off a program of prevention. They held thousands of public meetings, distributed millions of pamphlets, organized teachers to give special instruction. Gradually, people learned general hygiene, and in ten years the hookworm was at last being brought under control.

The foundation later took on other diseases. It set up typhus teams in both Manhattan's East Side and in Algeria, taught Egypt how it might free itself from schistosomiasis--a disease caused by the blood fluke, carried by snails. It built the $8.000,000 Peking Union Medical College ("We must create the Johns Hopkins of China!" cried one trustee), studied scarlet fever in Rumania, malaria in Nicaragua, undulant fever in France, oroya fever in Peru, dengue fever on Guam. It set up a yellow fever commission under General W. C. Gorgas, and one of its doctors--Wilbur A. Sawyer--eventually found an effective vaccine.

The foundation also set out to revolutionize medical education, for Frederick Gates had been impressed by the famed report of Abraham Flexner on U.S. medical schools. In the entire nation, Flexner had found in 1910, there were only half a dozen good schools. Few of the medical colleges had clinics, fewer still had good laboratories, and many required no more than a high-school education for admission. Under Flexner's direction, the foundation and the General Education Board began pouring millions into top universities, helping them make their medical schools models for the rest of the U.S. Stirred to action, other schools eventually began trying to compete. They set up clinics, built laboratories, hired first-rate full-time faculties, raised entrance requirements. "The revolution thus accomplished," wrote Flexner later, "brought American medicine from the bottom of the pile to the very top."

Gamble on Talent. But medicine was only a part of the foundation's interests. It helped finance the Shakespeare Memorial Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon,,gave nearly $2,000,000 for a new site for the University of London. It contributed to Columbia's Institute for Russian Studies, sent money to Physicist Niels Bohr for his Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen.

It has poured money into everything from Basic English to the Berkshire Music Festival, from "studies of the aurora borealis in Alaska to measurements of the velocity of light in California" and the 200-inch telescope on Palomar Mountain. Its fellowship programs have been a gigantic "gamble on talent" that have included such excellent bets as Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, Ralph Bunche, Historian Arnold Toynbee (for a future book on international relations), Lord Beveridge, scores of young writers, hundreds of refugee scholars--even Dr. Kinsey.

In the 20th century, says Author Fosdick, there are some bitter disappointments connected with running a foundation. "One thinks ... of the promising research projects that were disrupted [by war] ... of the assembly of the finest mathematical faculty in the world at Goettingen which was scattered by Hitler's terrorism, of the health institute in Tokyo which became a military headquarters, of a physics institute in Madrid standing isolated and unused . . ." But over the years, the foundation has had much to compensate for such setbacks. It has been such a vast catalyst to achievement that even old John D. was awed. "We have built," said he to Frederick Gates in 1924, "better than we knew." In 1952, with the income from $131,480,000 to spend, the foundation is still abuilding.

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