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Apr 20, 2024 · The need for a standardized and efficient system. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the American education system was fragmented and lacked standardization. Rockefeller recognized the need for a more cohesive and efficient approach to education. He supported initiatives that aimed to establish uniform curricula, teacher training ...
May 17, 2024 · By creating the school system, John D. Rockefeller aimed to bridge this gap and provide accessible education and training specifically tailored to the needs of the industrial workforce. This initiative not only helped meet the demand for skilled workers but also played a crucial role in shaping the trajectory of American industrialization.
- Precursors to A New Philanthropy, 1892-1913
- Finding A Footing, 1913-1928
- The Advancement of Knowledge, 1928-1963
- An Ecological Web of Giving, 1963-1988
- Catalyst, Collaborator, Convener, 1988-2013
A Fortune Too Large to Give Away?
At the dawn of the twentieth century, John D. Rockefeller was the richest man in the world. In a span of only forty years, from his first job as a sixteen-year-old assistant bookkeeper in 1855 to his unofficial retirement as the head of Standard Oil in 1895, Rockefeller not only amassed a personal fortune but transformed American business practices forever. Even after his retirement, thanks to the oil shares he still owned and the demand for gasoline for newly invented automobiles, Rockefelle...
Tackling Root Causes: Making Benevolence a Business
Two men stepped in to help Rockefeller re-envision his ad hoc charitable giving. Together, Frederick T. Gates and Rockefeller’s only son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.(JDR, Jr.), worked with Rockefeller to promote the evolution of large-scale philanthropy. They remade personal charity into an organized, institutional enterprise modeled on corporate business practices. This new style of philanthropy did not seek to provide direct relief to the those suffering from disease or poverty, but instead lo...
Progressive Era Values
The new “wholesale” philanthropy was steeped in the ethos of the Progressive era. Ironically, this ethos had evolved in response to the cataclysmic social changes brought about by the large-scale industrial capitalism that Rockefeller himself had helped to invent. Although Progressivism was infused with Protestant religious values, it embraced secular methods, particularly the “rationality” of science and the quantitative analysis of the social sciences. Its essential tools were organization,...
After a long and unsuccessful quest to obtain a federal charter that played out over half a dozen years, the Rockefellers, Gates, and Murphy agreed to charter their new entity in New York State instead, and the Rockefeller Foundation was incorporatedwith very little trouble on May 14, 1913. On May 22, the trustees held their first meeting. Througho...
After the major reorganization in 1928, the Rockefeller Foundation entered an era that would in some ways become its defining period. Its operations were now more consolidated than ever and its infrastructure functioned like a well-oiled machine. John D. Rockefeller and Frederick Gates’s vision of a philanthropy that would run like a corporate busi...
Reorganizing for Changing Times
The reorganization at the fiftieth anniversary was led by President J. George Harrar, who had risen to the presidency from beginnings as a local director in the Mexican Agriculture Program. The most significant shift in program organization since 1928, the 1963 reorganization transformed the Rockefeller Foundation’s structure from academic divisions similar to university departments into “goal oriented programs in which each component was related to every other in an ecological pattern.”The R...
The Gospel of Ecology
That Harrar described the new programs as an ecological pattern is typical of this era. By the early 1960s, the rhetoric of ecology had extended beyond the environmental movement. Its concepts became commonplace in academic disciplines and even in popular culture. The ecological viewpoint, broadly put, cast social problems as complex, web-like systems in which everything was connected to everything else. In the earlier part of the century, taking care of the environment had meant effective st...
Foundations Under Fire
Harrar was in many ways the ideal candidate to shepherd this transition. A deeply respected leader steeped in the Rockefeller Foundation ethos, he remains the only RF President who has ever risen to the office through the organization’s ranks. He assumed the presidency of the Foundation against a backdrop that included the cultural and social upheavals of America in the 1960s and the controversial Tax Reform Act of 1969. The Tax Reform Actrequired increased public accountability from tax-exem...
A changing global economy in the 1980s challenged the Rockefeller Foundation and other private sector organizations and changed their relationship to the public sector. Longtime RF trustee Richard Lyman assumed the Foundation’s Presidency in 1980 and steered the Foundation through a decade that included the emerging global crisis of HIV/AIDSand, in...
Nov 8, 2018 · Strengthen regulation of medical licenses. Free medical professors from most patient care to permit time for research and instruction. Increase the years of instruction required before graduation. With significant financial backing from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, Flexner's vision was realized. Licensing was strengthened.
- Ross Pomeroy
The Rockefeller. Foundation was seen by Embree et al ., as " a board for the advancement of knowledge," with four divisions in the humanities, physical sciences, and social sciences, plus " professional groups " in law, agriculture, and. medicine.130 The General Education Board they saw as devoted to ele-.
The University of Chicago has long accorded John D. Rockefeller the official designation of "Founder," and that accolade may offer some historical compensation to Rockefeller's more conventional and hostile sobriquet of "robber baron." Simply put, Rockefeller's enormous contributions, totaling almost $35 million between 1892 and 1910, made ...
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Sep 11, 2020 · See also Elizabeth Romney, “The Rockefeller Foundation’s Equal Opportunity Program: A Short History” (The Rockefeller Foundation: 1985), Richard W. Lyman papers, Rockefeller Archive Center. Spelman College, an HBCU that received funding over many decades from Rockefeller philanthropies, including the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
