Finding Philanthropy’s Forgotten Founder

For a poor, Black son of the South like me, beginning life in Jim Crow’s grip, the haughty, heady world of professional philanthropy might as well have been a different planet. When I first landed at the Rockefeller Foundation, I immersed myself in the history of the institution and the field. I read about the captains of industry, famously dubbed “robber barons” by muckrakers at The Atlantic: Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon and John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford, whose namesake foundation I’ve been privileged to serve as president for the past 11 years.

The standard line is that modern philanthropy traces its beginnings to 1889, when Carnegie wrote what we know as “The Gospel of Wealth.” In the face of rampant inequality, Carnegie proposed a bold idea: The wealthy, he argued, should freely give from their gains to aid “the masses”—though not the “unworthy” poor, whom he deemed too lazy and irresponsible to merit support. In fact, Carnegie accepted that inequality was a natural, even inevitable, by-product of capitalism, and so not a condition that philanthropy (itself a “creature of capitalism,” as Henry Ford II later said) bore any responsibility to address.

[From the May 1929 issue: The principles of public giving]

But here and there, I heard mentions of another name—Rosenwald—that was not included in the traditional pantheon of philanthropy’s founders, which piqued my curiosity.

I began to explore. I asked