Philanthropy Winter 2015 by Philanthropy Magazine

GEORGE WILL WARNS DONORS • PRISON BOOK CLUB • AID THAT HELPS VS. HARMS A PUBLICATION OF THE

W I N T E R

2 0 1 5

Museum Giving brings alive

George Washington... musical instruments... the Bible... tenements... heartland art... Jewish culture.... the costs of communism… baseball... math... and even

Motherly Dinosaurs

REDISCOVER

AMERICA’S

STORY

Get Your Copy at

www.50CoreDocs.org This collection includes documents such as Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, Calvin Coolidge’s “Speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” and the Constitution of the United States.

The Ashbrook Center is an independent center at Ashland University, offering programs with a national scope to restore and strengthen the capacities of the American people for constitutional self-government.

M A N Y O F T H E M OST REM ARKABLE ACH I EVEM ENTS IN

BUI LDING U.S.

PROSPERITY... entrepreneurial education • science research • family reinforcement • help for the disabled • disaster relief • boosting vets • racial uplift • youth character building • homeless aid • financial education • first-gen college scholarships • anti-violence programs • prisoner re-entry • pension and insurance expansion • settling refugees and immigrants

… ARE PRODUCTS OF PRIVATE

PHILANTHROPY

L e a r n m o r e a t P h i l a n t h r o p y R o u n d t a b l e. o r g / a l m a n a c / p r o s p e r i t y

table of contents

PHILANTHROPY

features

departments

10 Museums Across America

4 Briefly Noted

A creative cornucopia of galleries from math to space to baseball is brought to the public by the generosity of donors. By Ashley Edokpayi, Caitrin Nicol Keiper, Ashley May, Andrea Scott, Liz Essley Whyte, and Karl Zinsmeister

18 T he Dinosaur Discoverer

How a misfit revolutionized paleontology— with a big boost from philanthropy. By Ari N. Schulman

A Secret Santa. Disaster giving. Taxing

church attendance. Adopt a neighborhood.

6 Nonprofit Spotlight Inmates change their lives with great works of literature.

7 Interviews Steve Green The Hobby Lobby president describes his forthcoming Museum of the Bible.

30 Heartland Art

50 Ideas

36 A Tribute to Life

53 Books

A new exhibit at Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum showcases the full range of American artistry. By James Panero

With major support from Tad Taube, the Polin Museum honors a millennium of Jewish history. By Andrea Scott

42 P atriots and Papers

Philanthropists fulfill George Washington’s dying wish and build a Presidential library. By Marques Chavez

46 T he Power of Ownership Fighting poverty from the ground up. By John Murdock

Philanthropy’s Dangerous Rival The clamor for limitless government threatens every private initiative. By George F. Will

Save the Pawns Too many aid agencies treat people in developing countries like chess pieces. By Tate Watkins

The Slow Boat to Utopia Ten years in, the ballyhooed Millennium Villages Project is mostly a bust. By Travis Kavulla

56 Face to Face Photos from our 2014 Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City and our Choice and Quality in K-12 meeting in Indianapolis.

60 President’s Note

A P U B L I CATI O N O F THE

Adam Meyerson PRE SI D E N T

Karl Zinsmeister

VI C E PR E S ID E N T , P U BL ICA T IO N S

Caitrin Nicol Keiper E D I TO R

Andrea Scott

A SSO C IAT E E D IT O R

Taryn Wolf

A RT D IR E CT O R

Ashley Edokpayi I NTE RN

Arthur Brooks John Steele Gordon Christopher Levenick Bruno Manno John Miller Tom Riley Naomi Schaefer Riley William Schambra Evan Sparks Justin Torres Scott Walter Liz Essley Whyte

C O NTR IBU T IN G E D IT O R S Philanthropy is published quarterly by The Philanthropy Roundtable. The mission of the Roundtable, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt educational organization, is to foster excellence in philanthropy, to protect philanthropic freedom, to assist donors in achieving their philanthropic intent, and to help donors advance liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility in America and abroad. All editorial or business inquiries: Editor@PhilanthropyRoundtable.org Philanthropy 1730 M Street NW, Suite 601 Washington, DC 20036 (202) 822-8333 Copyright © 2015 The Philanthropy Roundtable. All rights reserved. Cover: Julius Csotonyi

Restoring the American Dream in 2015. By Adam Meyerson

WINTER 2015

briefly noted

got into the spirit of Christmas by paying off layaway balances.

Aid workers deliver clean water to

Port in a Storm When a disaster hits, Americans are eager to open their wallets to help. Unfortunately they get lots of chances. In a typical recent year there were 300 major natural calamities worldwide, causing 10,000 deaths and $180 billion in damages. Yet donors often have no clear idea of what happens to their contributions or whether they are used in the best ways possible. Recently, the Center for Disaster Philanthropy teamed up with Foundation Center to try to help the major donors who often lead disaster recoveries improve the targeting of their help. Their 2014 report, Measuring the State of Disaster Philanthropy, 4

Haitians affected by Hurricane Sandy.

PHILANTHROPY

Church Tax Since 2012, Germany has made giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s, a legal mandate. The government acts as an intermediary for tithing. Contributions of around an additional 9 percent of income taxes are collected from Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish, and other registered believers and used to finance the activities of their church or synagogue. Refusal to pay the tax can cause churchgoers to be denied communion and other rites, even funerals. Not only church and state but also commerce are now enmeshed in Germany: a new twist to the law has banks actively investigating the religious affiliations of their customers in order to levy the corresponding tax on their accounts. Clergy of participating denominations lobbied heavily for the law before its passage. Facing declining congregations, they saw it as a steady way to secure their revenue. Ironically, if predictably, Germans are now cutting ties with their churches in droves in order to avoid the compulsory levy. Meanwhile, some Muslim leaders, whose congregations are not yet included in the program, are seeking to join it. Some denominations opted out, not taking any money from the government, and exempting their members from the tax. “For us, it’s about building a living congregation, and the freedom to choose how you want to worship is very important to us,” one evangelical pastor told the Wall Street Journal.

University of Central Florida

An anonymous donor

Logan Abassi, United Nations / MINUSTAH; ivanastar / istockphoto.com

Laying Away Treasure Many Americans were charmed when, a couple weeks before Christmas, an anonymous lady walked into a Toys R Us store in Bellingham, Massachusetts, and paid off the remaining layaway balances of 150 families. Described as a “bubbly, older woman” living in the area, she gave the store manager a hug and a $20,000 check to close all the accounts. She wasn’t the first such angel—in 2013 a Florida man spent about the same amount at a local Walmart paying off the balances of strangers. S ome of the Bellingham beneficiaries were interviewed by the local paper. Linda, who had only $9 when she went into the store to hold some toys for her two boys, had a remaining balance of just $50, “but to me that’s a lot of money, and that someone would go and do that gave me chills.” An elated Diane Brewer said the gift meant she wouldn’t have to work extra shifts during the holiday to pay for her child’s presents. Some other beneficiaries took the counsel of the man born on Christmas day who said “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys.” They announced they were taking the funds they had expected to pay on their store balance and donating them to charity.

looks at 884 grants totaling $111 million made by foundations like Gates, Cargill, Rockefeller, Moore, Lilly, and Hilton that are among the most bountiful disaster-relievers. Funded by Lori Bertman and the Pennington Foundation, the report looked at 2012 disasters from Hurricane Sandy to droughts, avalanches, earthquakes, monsoons, and typhoons worldwide. The broader categories included not only natural disasters, such as weather emergencies, but also manmade accidents and complex humanitarian emergencies. The majority of this funding was for natural disasters. Almost half was given in relief efforts, with the rest going to things like recovery, reconstruction, and preparedness. The report is part of a larger initiative to track disaster-response dollars. An online data platform will be launched in late 2015, adding more “tools to the toolbox” of foundations that want to act in response to dire human need.

Q&A WITH HARRIS ROSEN Twenty years ago, hotelier and philanthropist Harris Rosen developed and funded a simple approach to improving the lives of families in the poor Orlando neighborhood of Tangelo Park. He provides home-based preschool for all two-, three-, and four-year-old children in the neighborhood, and full college or career scholarships to all students who graduate from Dr. Phillips High School. The results are impressive—high-school graduation rates have soared, crime rates are down, property values are on the rise, and new families are moving into the neighborhood. Could his model be replicated by other donors to improve life outcomes for families in troubled neighborhoods around the country? Rosen recently explored this question with Philanthropy; for more, see PhilanthropyRoundtable.org.

Q: Why did you devote yourself to this one neighborhood?

childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to college, to the Army, to the acquisition of my first hotel and more—I’ve been blessed with more than I could have ever dreamed about. I wanted to say “Thank you, God,” and “Thank you, America.” I decided to find an underserved neighborhood where many of the youngsters aren’t thinking about high school, college, or a career, and help them get a good education. I found Tangelo Park, a small Orlando neighborhood of about 800 families. Back then, it was one of the worst areas in the state—drug trafficking, prostitution, unsafe streets, and high-school graduation rates of less than 50 percent. I first thought about funding a college scholarship program, but quickly realized that wouldn’t be much help alone given the high-school dropout rate. A friend advised me to reach the kids while they were young. We decided to offer free preschool for all neighborhood kids between two and four, and free vocational school or college. University of Central Florida

Logan Abassi, United Nations / MINUSTAH; © ivanastar / istockphoto.com

A: Throughout my life—from my

Q: How did you introduce your idea to the community?

I reached out to the neighborhood association head and the principal of the elementary school, and asked if they would

The neighborhood is changing for the better. People are investing in and beautifying it. Home values have tripled. Instead of mass migration out we are seeing people move in. And crime is down. The sheriff recently told me that he refers to Tangelo Park as “an oasis,” with less crime there than in some affluent communities.

Q: That’s a lot of positive news coming out of one small community.

A: It’s all about developing lifelong

invite everyone to a community meeting. Word traveled fast that there was some crazy guy offering free college scholarships to all the neighborhood kids, so by the time the meeting came around, the community center was packed. First we would create preschool learning centers in neighborhood homes. I promised to cover the cost of refurbishing the homes to provide a dedicated area for the kids to eat, play, learn and engage. The homeowner/ caregiver would be trained, certified, and paid to teach and care for the kids. I would also cover all the costs associated with the center’s operation—kids’ lunches, computer, toys, etc. On the college end, any child accepted into a Florida two- or four- year public school or vocational program would receive a full scholarship, including books and travel. The place went crazy—lot of hugs, lot of thanks.

Q: Can you share some of the outcomes you’ve witnessed?

Since that time, 250 youngsters from the neighborhood have gone to college; the elementary school has been designated an “A”-rated Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test school for five of the past seven years (one of only two or three low-income schools to have that top rating). Graduation rates, which were below 50 percent when we started, are now close to 100 percent. More than half of the youngsters go to college. The others go to community college, vocational training, or enlist in the military. Their graduation rates are well above the national averages. WINTER 2015

expectations and helping families achieve them. We mentor the parents so they are comfortable doing homework with their children, interacting with their kids’ teachers and principal, and encouraging their kids to go to school properly dressed and respectful. Many of the parents did not have good educational experiences themselves, so this is a big deal. But we are with them the whole time.

Q: Preschools are offered everywhere

with varying degrees of success. What makes yours different?

There are fewer than six kids in each home preschool, operated by the homeowner whom we vet, train, and certify. In essence, they are very much like the moms of the 1950s who watched over all the neighborhood kids. The majority of our students enter elementary school on or above track. Our preschool graduations are held at the church, complete with caps and gowns. I give out the diplomas and switch the tassel on their caps to the other side. That’s one of the magic moments. For some of the parents, it’s the first graduation they’ve ever attended. I tell them to get used to a string of future graduations and successes— elementary school, middle school, high school, and hopefully college. This helped something else unexpectedly work out beautifully—because the schools are right in the neighborhood and the parents know the people who are taking care of their kids, many of the parents saw the opportunity to go back to school and further their own education. If there was a program like Tangelo Park in every underserved neighborhood in America we would close prisons, build more colleges, and lift our economy in such a positive way. It would change America. 5

nonprofit spotlight HORIZON COMMUNITIES IN PRISONS

Led by volunteer Randy Robertson, inmates discuss Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor.”

Everyone must demonstrate a willingness to change. Before they’ll be considered, they must show for a period of months that they can live peaceably with others. Many men testify that these prison communities become like the families they never had. Each is expected to behave responsibly, and dishonest actions are addressed firmly, with love. The goal is healthy relationships with others. “I was able to really take a look inside of me and deal with the issues that brought me to prison,” says one inmate. “There was nowhere to run after Bible study,” notes another, emphasizing the importance of community accountability. Nationally, inmates are rearrested within three years of their release at a disheartening rate of 68 percent. But recidivism for Horizon graduates from an Ohio prison between 2001 and 2008 was only 12 percent. At another facility in Oklahoma, misconduct reports on participating inmates fell to near zero. And at a Texas long-term correctional institution, none of the 25 Horizon graduates released during 2003-2007 returned to prison. Horizon was named “A Model for the Future” by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in an assessment of prisoner-reentry programs. Funders include the Priddy Foundation of Texas and individual donors like Randy Robertson, who created the great books PHILANTHROPY

reading program. A retired businessman, Robertson was a longtime Tomoka volunteer. A few years ago he attended a conference by the Trinity Forum, a nonprofit that creates abridged versions of works with a powerful moral component to make them more accessible. When his involvement with Horizon came up, a Trinity Forum staff member asked if he’d like to develop a pilot reading project for prisons. Robertson spent $3,000 of his savings to buy eight Trinity Forum Readings each for more than 80 Tomoka Horizon members. Horizon’s courses typically focus on practical aspects of improving interpersonal relationships or becoming employable. This was the first time Horizon inmates got a liberal-arts class. They looked up words they didn’t know. They worked through confusing passages. They discussed characters, and parallels with their own lives. When Robertson comes on Tuesday nights, they erupt into cheers as he enters the room. Some of Tomoka’s toughest criminals have been visibly changed by this community reading. In the first few weeks, one would rant and make threatening gestures. By the end, he had a different message. “Talk is cheap,” he said. “It’s about right actions and attitudes. It’s about love. It’s about dilemmas faced…grace prevailing.” —Morgan Sweeney

Kyle McQuillen

Every Tuesday evening, a group of inmates at Florida’s Tomoka Correctional Institution gathers in a circle, heads bowed, holding hands. They pray that God would use the next few hours to spread His love deep within their hearts. This love comes to them through a surprising avenue: classic literature. The syllabus includes stories of hard choices and redemption. In a selection from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, dejected ex-con Jean Valjean receives grace from a Catholic bishop and turns his life around. The Sunflower—by Simon Wiesenthal, a survivor of multiple Nazi concentration camps—reflects on the limits of forgiveness. In Amazing Grace, slave-ship captain and brute John Newton encountered forgiveness so boundless that he left his lucrative career and helped to end British Empire slavery. One inmate later expressed to the discussion leader how much the readings meant to the participants. “Guys still think about and discuss those stories on a daily basis,” he wrote, months after the class ended. “Not one week goes by that someone doesn’t use [a character] in our group talks.” This volunteer-led program is an offshoot of a larger ministry, Horizon Communities in Prisons. Horizon was started by Texan businessman Ike Griffin and his wife, Mickey, who began volunteering in prisons together early in their marriage. They heard of an experimental program in Brazil encouraging behavioral change through communal living and accountability. With some small foundation support, the Griffins started the first Horizon Community at Tomoka; it soon spread to nine other prisons in Florida, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Texas. When inmates join Horizon, they move to a dorm with the other program members.

interview STEVE GREEN

Washington Post / gettyimages

To visit Steve Green’s office on the outskirts of Oklahoma City one must drive down what seems like a very long stretch of road, along which a new Hobby Lobby headquarters building appears out the window every 30 seconds or so. Real estate. Marketing. Human resources. Finally the executive off ices. The size of this company—and its impact on Oklahoma—becomes obvious on this drive. The numbers on this privately held business reinforce the point: Hobby Lobby and its affiliates employ 28,000 people, have combined sales of $3.3 billion, and operate retail craft stores at more than 600 locations. But Steve Green, who helped his father build the company and is now president, has more than business on his mind. These days he spends about 75 percent of his time, he explains in his soft Oklahoma drawl, on a philanthropic project. He’s creating the Museum of the Bible. Green and his family have spent the last five years gathering what is now one of the world’s largest collections of Biblical artifacts, featuring 40,000 antiquities—everything from one of the largest private collections of Dead Sea scrolls, to Torahs that survived the Holocaust, to Elvis Presley’s personal copy of the Good Book. They then spent $50 million to buy the Washington Design Center, a hulking brick structure just blocks from the National Mall, to house the collection. Now the sound of construction can be heard on the first floor of the building, and the Green family hopes to open the doors of a powerful new museum in 2017. Philanthropy sat down with Steve Green to talk about the museum and what he wants visitors to learn there.

Philanthropist and Hobby Lobby president Steve Green is designing a museum in downtown D.C. to bring the Bible alive for everyone—believers and nonbelievers, scholars and novices alike. Here he stands in the basement of the construction site.

distribution around the world. My brother has a Christian book supply store. So it was just a natural fit for us to put up a Bible museum. Years ago I committed to reading the Bible daily. It’s exciting to glean a new understanding of a verse you didn’t see before. And then there are times when Philanthropy: Why is the Bible so you read through it and you say, “Well I don’t know what that’s all about.” It’s a important to you and your family? Green: Our family has had a love of the never-ending journey. Bible passed down for several generations. My father was a minister. My Philanthropy: Why did you choose Washgrandmother worked in youth camps. My ington as the location for the museum? parents grew up in Christian homes and Green: We originally were looking in Dalwere given a love for the Bible, and they las. But we commissioned a survey, and it taught us to have a love for God’s word. showed that we would be best attended As a company we have supported Bible in D.C. WINTER 2015

Philanthropy: What do you want people to leave the Bible museum feeling and knowing? Green: We want to invite all people to engage with this book. We want them to understand it better. You know, over 90 percent of the homes in this country have a Bible. But I think we’re probably less familiar with it today than ever, because we don’t teach it as we once did. This book claims it’s for all people. So it’s an invitation for all people to come and learn about and engage with it, and hopefully they will leave with a curiosity to want to know more. Philanthropy: Tell us about your favorite item from the collection. 7

interview are coming out that scholars never knew were available. And it’s been said that a very small percentage of what could be dug up archaeologically has been. How much more evidence is there out there that is yet to be discovered? I suspect there’s a lot that we don’t even know about today.

A rendering of “Abraham’s Tent” to be erected on the storytelling floor of the Museum of the Bible.

Green: It’s hard to narrow it down. The Codex Climaci Rescriptus is a significant item. This text from roughly the fifth century shows how the Bible was translated and loved from early on. It’s one of the earliest relatively complete manuscripts of the Bible in the world. The Aitken Bible tells us a little bit about the founding of our nation, and gives us some insight into our founders— that Congress itself would commission Robert Aitken to print this book when the British weren’t allowing exports of any Bibles to America. There are just a handful of Aitken Bibles; roughly 30 of them are known. 8

These artifacts give us a window into how the Bible was valued and appreciated, from ancient times to the founding of our nation. To hold some of them is just a thrill. It’s a fairly small world, Bible collecting, and so word has gotten out of what we’re doing. It’s exciting, the items that have come our way that we’d never imagined having the opportunity to purchase when we started. Philanthropy: It’s surprising that these artifacts aren’t locked away in a museum already. Green: We will present thousands and thousands of items that have been in private collections for centuries. Some things PHILANTHROPY

Philanthropy: Tell us more about what the museum will look like for visitors. Green: The first floor, which tells the history of the manuscript, goes into the languages and is more scholarly. The second floor covers the impact the book has had. It will be interesting for people to realize that this book has affected their lives in ways they’ve never thought about. Many of our universities were influenced by the Bible. Much of the influence for our hospitals and medical system was from the Bible. The sciences we know today were largely birthed out of a Biblical worldview. Our nation’s founders were grounded in Biblical principles. Applied Biblical principles are good for the economy. In many areas of our lives, this book has had an impact. The third floor presents the narrative of the book—it’s for the person who doesn’t know anything about it yet. We just want to try to tell what this book says. There is a beginning and an ending, and all of these stories put together make up a bigger story.

Museum of the Bible

Philanthropy: You’ve also started a research arm of the museum, the Green Scholars Initiative, which allows academics to study your collection. What do you hope they will discover? Green: Recently, with the Codex Climaci Rescriptus, Tyndale House at Cambridge University announced a new discovery. A scanning technology called multispectral imaging reads at different stops on the light spectrum, trying to pull up underlying layers of text out and making the top text go away. We had Cambridge analyze those scans, and they found some of the earliest astronomical drawings that are known. So there’s no telling what could be discovered. Some of the items have never been studied.

Museum of the Bible

So from the scholarly to novices, we How are you working together with them? have something for everybody. How do you reconcile those competing viewpoints about what the Bible is? Philanthropy: What will the history floor Green: In the scholars we have worked teach museumgoers? with, as well as the design firms, we’re Green: The history floor starts with the not looking for theological agreement. archaeological evidence, which is a fairly new Because it ’s really not about what I science. Archaeology has really developed believe; it’s about what the book says. just in the last 150 years. After presenting the We want scholars who are willing to give archaeological evidence we go into the man- an accurate record of what an artifact is; uscript evidence. I think the takeaway for the it doesn’t matter what their beliefs are. person who’s willing to let the evidence lead Just give us the information. That’s what him is that the Bible is an accurate historical I have to try to do as well—not bring representation. But it’s up to the visitor to in my beliefs. Because it’s not about a make that decision. faith; it’s not about a religion; it’s about a book. What does this book say? What Philanthropy: What kind of artifacts does it say about itself ? And what is the would a visitor see on the impact floor? evidence for it? That’s what we’re trying Green: The Thomas Jefferson letter will be to do with the museum. It’s not evangelone, in which he argues that the principles ical. It’s more informative. It’s more of that should be cherished most are those that a journalistic look, not an opinion piece protect the citizens from civil authorities on the Bible. through religious freedom. Georgetown and Baylor are working together on a study that Philanthropy: How will the museum shows when religious freedoms are applied make the Bible come alive for people? in a nation, it’s good for the people. It’s good Green: There will be live docents who will for the poor; it’s good for women. So the be dressed in character. There will be a principles of the Bible, when applied, have Nazareth village—to try to recreate what it been good. was like in the town that Jesus grew up in. There are those who would say that When you see a wine press, when you see the Bible has been the scourge of the earth. a synagogue, you can say: “OK, I can put When man has misused the Bible, for his myself in the context, and it makes some of own ill intent, he has created wars and the this make more sense. I understand these like. But we don’t blame the book for when stories better.” man has misused it. Each of the floors has a theater that helps tell the story in a creative way. On Philanthropy: And maybe Elvis Presley’s the narrative floor, the New Testament copy of the Bible will show the Bible’s story is told in the theater. On the history impact on rock ‘n’ roll? floor, there are video vignettes that transGreen: The Smithsonian says one of the port the visitor to the sites where some most popular items from its collection is the of these archaeological discoveries were ruby red slippers from the Wizard of Oz. So made. We use animatronics—William it could very well be an Elvis Presley Bible Tyndale, accused of heresy for translating that draws the most attention in our build- the Bible into English, tied to the stake, ing. When you see how broadly this book has speaking his last words. It makes it more been applied, from people like Elvis Presley than just a Tyndale Bible under a glass to Presidents to sports figures to people of all case. When visitors know the story they walks of life, you realize this book has had a have more appreciation for the artifact. part in lots of lives. Philanthropy: A few articles in the press Philanthropy: You’ve brought some peo- have taken a skeptical tone toward the ple to work on this project who might not museum, often expressing antagonism share your theological view of the Bible. toward faith in the public square. Do WINTER 2015

you feel as if you have to prove yourself to those people? Green: This is a book that has strongly influenced our world. Even the atheist Richard Dawkins argues that it ought to be part of our education for literary culture. In his book The God Delusion he gives over 100 examples of phrases in our language that came from the King James Bible. I was on CNN and the segment before me was a report about someone acting as a good Samaritan. If you don’t know what the Good Samaritan story is, you just lost the context of that report. So for somebody to say we shouldn’t know the Bible doesn’t make sense. We ought to know it, and if it is done appropriately—here are the facts, you do with them what you will—it’s hard to see why anybody would object to that. Philanthropy: What is the museum’s financial status? Green: We just started our fundraising effort. We believe there will be broad interest from a lot of different people—of the Jewish faith, the Catholic tradition, the Protestant tradition. I think many will be saying, “Can we come together on what we agree upon? That this book has had an impact, and we ought to know about it.” We just want to let people know what we’re doing, and that if you are interested in coming along and being a part, we’ll let you do that. That’s new for us. We’re normally on the giving side, not the asking side. Also: the museum will charge an admission. So there will be cash flow there. There is a broad love for this book. Philanthropy: Where do you think this museum fits into your legacy? Green: We have been involved in philanthropic ventures for years. We grew up tithing. It’s been a part of what we do as a family. There are a lot of things the family has done that we are excited about. But this is one that is more visible. The museum isn’t about an individual or a family. The Bible is the hero. P 9

flags of every country with which we have diplomatic relations; on the right, a map marked with with every U.S. diplomatic outpost.

PHILANTHROPY

USDC Rendering

A rendering of the forthcoming U.S. Diplomacy Museum. On the left wall are the

MUSEUMS ACROSS

America USDC Rendering

here are 35,000 museums in the United States, a core of our cultural and educational life. They reveal the past, attest to nature’s amazing secrets, bring great art to all, and celebrate humanity in countless ways. Most rely on generous philanthropic support. Later in this issue, we showcase several intriguing museums in depth. This warm-up tour aims to give you a quick glimpse of the range of institutions that museum donors are now bringing to the public. From the nearly 80-year-old Baseball Hall of Fame, to a recently opened trove of the world’s coolest musical instruments, to a hoped-for remembrance of communism’s victims, there is almost no intellectual or aesthetic niche beyond the reach of human curiosity and philanthropic sponsorship today.

With reporting by Ashley Edokpayi, Caitrin Nicol Keiper, Ashley May, Andrea Scott, Liz Essley Whyte, and Karl Zinsmeister.

WINTER 2015

The family of seven ran a sewing business from the front room of their three-room apartment.

M O B I L I TY I N BRICKS AND M O RTA R

A blazing kiln perches on a sidewalk in the middle of the day, a mysterious extension of the Chinese laundry nearby. Lost to the world around them, three men are studiously casting packet after packet of gilded tissue paper into the hungry flames. They are, it turns out, observing a Chinese ritual of sending money to the dead. It’s just another day in New York, celebrated city of immigrants. Just around the corner from this scene, ancestor spirits are being pulled back to the present. At the Tenement Museum, their true stories testify to just how far Americans have traveled. The museum “summons the ghosts of the past,” as president M orris Vogel puts it, to show those of us living today where we started. Millions of people passed through this Lower East Side neighborhood on 12

their way from old country to new world. They came with nothing, lived one on top of the other, created opportunities where none existed before, and helped forge the identity of a nation. Between 1863 and 1935, 7,000 individuals lived in 97 Orchard Street—now the site of the Tenement Museum. The building was condemned in 1935 but never got torn down. The ground floor was used for many years as a family saloon, a discount underwear shop, and for other commercial activities. In the late 1980s, historian Ruth Abram raised funds to buy the building and sent “an army of graduate students” to sleuth out anything that could be learned about its former residents. The troops pieced together records to reveal the stories of several families who lived in 97 Orchard Street at different points in time. Their apartments were then re-created with period artifacts to give an intimate glimpse of actual lives. PHILANTHROPY

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

The Tenement Museum re-creates the kitchen of a Polish family who came to New York in 1890.

One apartment introduces the ogarshevskys, Lithuanian immigrants R at the turn of the century struggling to decide which of their traditions are essential even in their new land, and which they must leave behind. Another showcases the Baldizzis, Depression-era Italians who like many others found work in a garment factory. Another dramatizes the Irish Moore family struggling to keep body and soul together. One little home brings to life the Gumpertz family, Germans who sought a better lot here in the 1870s but at first found conditions as dire as they were back home. Not long after they arrived the father abandoned them, never to return, but the gift of a sewing machine from a neighborhood Jewish charity allowed the mother to keep her family from becoming destitute. Eventually they prospered. As in the other apartments, a side table contains a file that brings us up to date on the family’s story. Nathalie Gumpertz’s great-grandson served in World War II. He went on to become a professor at Yale, where he taught future President George H. W. Bush. His son died in the 9/11 attacks. New York donors Shelby White and Leon Levy got involved with the museum early on, when it came to light that their family owned one of the buildings on the block. They helped convert the building into an education center, naming it for Levy’s mother. “The way they have captured a part of the history of the city, it just can’t be replicated,” says White. “It shows how people came, lived under difficult conditions, and triumphed over them. That’s the American dream.” Philanthropist Merryl Zegar, co-chair of the museum board, is leading a $20 million capital campaign to expand the facility. A tenement further down the block that continued to house people after 1935 will be used to tell more recent stories: Holocaust refugees, mid-century Chinese immigrants, more recent arrivals from the Caribbean. Like White, Levy, and many other Americans, Zegar can trace her own lineage to this area. Her grandfather grew up in this neighborhood and later start ed his own business—a candy store. “There’s so many of us who have these strings interwoven,” she says. “America is a great tapestry.”

National Museum of Mathematics

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

M AT H M AG I C

“Everyone knows that square wheels don’t roll,” says Glen Whitney, founder of the Museum of Mathematics in New York. That is, until they step inside his lair. Two squarewheeled tricycles roll smoothly around an undulating track, engineered with numbers to defeat narrow thinking. Everyone also knows that math is boring, is too hard, is just bad news—right? That’s how Whitney felt about it as a student, until he wound up going to math camp one summer (“I would have gone to broccoli camp” just to get out of the house, he recalls). The puzzles, patterns, and conundrums he decoded in those woodsy cabins while laid up with a soccer injury challenged him to explore a whole new layer of reality—hidden, but also in plain sight. He built the museum, he quips, “so that other kids wouldn’t have to break their collarbones” to find this out. After he became a math professor and then an investment researcher at Renaissance Technologies, Whitney took his kids to a little museum on Long Island founded by high-school math teacher Bernard Goudreau. “This is a great country,” he marveled. “We can have a museum about anything, even mathematics!” A few years later Whitney heard to his dismay that the Goudreau—the sole math museum in North America—had shuttered. So he quit his job and raised $22 million to build another one, with seed funding from Renaissance founder James Simons. On the day of Philanthropy’s visit, the Museum of Mathematics (known as MoMath) was teeming with schoolkids on a field trip. They solved mazes, played chords on a harmonic web, used the magic power of multiplication to activate a two-story 3D paraboloid, and turned into dancing trees on a screen with a fractal-based video feed. Teachers

Patrons of MoMath ride square-wheeled trikes around the yellow-brick road on their visit to the wonderful wizard of math.

report that weeks after a visit, students are often still jazzed about what they learn at MoMath and how it connects to classwork and real life. MoMath’s newest initiative, just opened in December 2014 after a successful million-dollar fundraising campaign, is an exhibit called Robot Swarm. Dozens of glowing motorized vehicles scoot around, crab-like, under a glass floor where visitors stroll, reacting to the humans and to each other according to easy visitor commands such as “follow me” or “avoid all other robots.” The underlying algorithms demonstrate natural processes like flocking behavior or crystal formation. And they greatly excite barefooted teenagers. When MoMath was just getting set up, Whitney paid $350 for a phone number that with the addition of just two

symbols would be a valid math equation. It seemed like a ridiculous expense at the time, with funding so uncertain, yet too charming to pass up. And in the end it paid off. At the conclusion of a seemingly dead-end meeting with some Google representatives, Whitney provided the phone number and challenged them to explain it—exactly the sort of puzzle that Google is famous for posing to its job applicants. Furious scribbling and head-scratching ensued. At last somebody solved it, amidst much rejoicing. “These guys are as crazy as we are,” said one rep. Google gave the museum $2 million—the best return on a $350 investment that former quantitative specialist Whitney has ever seen. (The number is 212-542-0566. Add = and x to that to get the equation: 212 542 = -05 x 66.)

“This is a great country. We can have a museum about anything, even mathematics!” WINTER 2015

F L I G H T O F F A N CY

C R E AT I N G A C U LT U RA L V I L LAG E

Members of the Clark family, heirs to the Singer Sewing Company fortune, have resided in the bucolic village of Cooperstown, New York, since the mid1800s. When the Depression damaged the area’s prosperity, Stephen Clark and other representatives of the Clark Foundation (founded in 1931) sought to revive local business and tourism by creating a museum celebrating the national pastime. The Baseball Hall of Fame cheered up Americans in 1936 by announcing its inaugural class of five members—Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson. The Hall went on to become a classic of American culture, and the progenitor of many other museums. It attracts 350,000 visitors a year, has a $12-million annual budget, and employs 100 full-time staff in a village of a little more than 2,000 people. The current chairman of the board of directors of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is Jane Clark, who is also president of the Clark Foundation. The entire Cooperstown region has become one of the great museum communities in the country, and the Clark Foundation has been instrumental in making this so. In the decades before and after the founding of the Hall of Fame, Clark relatives and foundation executives were also instrumental in building up the historic Farmers’ Museum, the Fenimore Art Museum, the New York State Historical Association, and the Glimmerglass Opera. With half a billion dollars in assets, and nearly $20 million of annual giving, the foundation also supports the historic Otesaga and Cooper inns, village beautification, land preservation, local sports, the regional hospital, and scholarships for children. The Clark family has thus created a whole ecosystem of museums and art— and a true center of Americana. 14

M AY T H E M U S E B E W I T H YO U Film director George Lucas has a fascination for popular art, and has collected (and in a few cases created) some of the best examples of recent generations. Now he is giving his trove of vintage paintings, classic films, and digital art to the public, along with a dramatic new building in Chicago to house it all. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, currently in the design stage, will exhibit images that tell a story, from cave art to comics to iconic photos. “Lucas has his finger on the pulse of popular culture and the way people respond to myth and magic,” says V irginia Mecklenburg, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Mecklenburg organized a 2010 exhibit of Norman Rockwell paintings and illustrations drawn from Lucas’s collection. She describes the art and artifacts he has assembled as “one of the best historical collections in the world.” Along with those items, Lucas has given nearly $800 million for a permanent endowment, and an estimated $300 million to fund the museum’s design and construction on the Chicago lakefront. Don Bacigalupi, founding director of Crystal Bridges and the mastermind of “State of the Art” (see pages 28 to 33), has been hired to be the museum’s president. PHILANTHROPY

Not everyone can clamber into a rocket and fly off into space, but Charles Simonyi has been up yonder twice. The Hungarian-American tech billionaire and philanthropist first leapt into the business stratosphere by creating Microsoft Office, and then made history in 2007 as one of the world’s first space tourists. He followed this with a second launch, again taking him to the International Space Station, in 2009. Rather than send an awed postcard back to friends on Earth, Simonyi decided to help other civilians share a taste of his out-of-thisworld experiences—by donating $3 million to create an interactive astronautical gallery at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. Located at Seattle’s airport, the Museum of Flight is one of the largest private air and space museums in the world. It features the first presidential jet, a replica of the missing plane flown by Amelia Earhart, a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and one of the world’s first pressurized gliders. Boeing’s original manufacturing plant, the “Red Barn,” also sits on the grounds. The Charles Simonyi Space Gallery gives visitors a chance to explore the “adventure of space flight” inside its NASA Space Shuttle Trainer—a 15,000-square-foot machine that rises more than four stories and extends 100 feet in length. Originally used for astronaut training in Houston’s space center, it is a full-fuselage simulator containing everything on a real shuttle except the wings. Visitors can sit in the cockpit and putter around the cargo bay, without their keys floating out of their pockets. Vehicles from recent space expeditions and artifacts like space suits are also showcased in the exhibit, as is the Russian Soyuz capsule that returned Simonyi to earth after his second trip. This is the only Soyuz exhibited in America outside one at the Smithsonian. It’s a little scorched from Earth reentry, when its shield smoked away at a couple thousand degrees. But if you can’t take some heat, space flight is not for you.

At the Charles Simonyi Space Gallery, visitors can explore the final frontier in a

Ted Huetter / The Museum of Flight, Seattle

real retired NASA simulator used for astronaut training.

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A tear-stained blindfold from the Iranian hostage crisis. A sculpture made from the parts of a disabled nuclear warhead. A Kalashnikov filled with vodka. Come 2016, these artifacts and others will have a home at the brand new U.S. Diplomacy Center, a 15,000-square-foot transparent glass pavilion adjacent to the headquarters of the State Department. Originally conceived by retired Ambassador Steven Low in 2000, the center will highlight and explain the triumphs, challenges, and day-to-day life of U.S. diplomats. While there are more than 400 museums associated with branches of the military, Low found that there were none touching on the Foreign Service. He set out with his friend retired Maryland Senator Charles Mathias to change that. The State Department offered space, security, and personnel to curate artifacts and programming, but the funds to build and maintain the museum would need to come from private philanthropy. Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, known as an ace political fundraiser, took the lead, and over four years the museum raised $38 million in private funding, enough to break ground. At the ceremony in September 2014, six living secretaries of state hoisted a shovel. Exhibits highlighting how diplomacy affects everyday life in America will be unique to this museum. Corporations like Intel and Microsoft are contributing to displays that show how global commerce and diplomacy affect each other. A simulation room will allow student groups to step into the shoes of a diplomat and negotiate an important issue. No word yet on whether there will be a display of striped pants.

THE WIDE WO R L D O F M U S I C

Ever wanted to bang a gong the size of a living-room wall, or play a theremin, an electronic instrument that produces eerie tones activated by moving your hands around a pair of antennae without any touching? Look no further than MIM. The remarkable Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix is the largest museum of its kind in the world, and became enormously popular with visitors almost as soon as it opened in 2010, quickly climbing to one of TripAdvisor’s top 25 museums in the U.S. The brainchild of philanthropist and lead-donor, Target chairman and passionate music-lover Robert Ulrich, the $150 million facility includes 6,000 instruments from all over the world (or, in the case of the theremin, instruments that seem like they properly belong in space). Visitors can bang and strum away in the Experience Gallery, or check out self-playing instruments in the Mechanical Music Gallery. A 300-seat theater hosts concerts of all sorts, and a Conservation Lab shows how experts restore old and damaged instruments. A unique Geographical Gallery where visitors can “travel the world through the magic of music” especially appeals to Ulrich, who loves the idea of using music to explore the riotous cacophony of human cultures. “It’s as though you’re taking your home theater and traveling to every country in the world,” he says. “It appeals to everyone,” of every demographic. “We may not follow a particular rock band, we may not play an instrument, but we all use music for all kinds of different things, whether it’s fun, or celebration, or a wedding, or consolation.” Music is “the language of the soul.”

The Clark family’s creation of the Baseball Hall of Fame has led to a whole ecosystem of museums and art in Cooperstown. 16

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courtesy of MIM

A D I P LO M AT I C L I F E

Exciting hands-on opportunities at the Musical Instrument Museum have this young drummer ready to burst into flame.

H O P I N G TO REMEMBER THE 100 M I L L I O N

courtesy of MIM

As the Berlin Wall cracked and then tumbled amidst stunned celebration, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, historian Lee Edwards and economist Lev Dobriansky were already wondering: How would future generations interpret the momentous triumph of liberal democracy over communism? Would those who died in communist countries, and those who struggled to overturn totalitarian rule, be remembered? A bipartisan initiative in the 1990s produced a modest memorial—a bronze replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” made famous by the students of Tiananmen Square. Websites were launched to begin historical documentation (V ictimsofCommunism.org and theGulag.org). A high-school curriculum was released in 2013 to educate students and teachers about communism’s ideology, history, and legacy. Now Edwards is leading an effort that hopes to raise $70 million to create a museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to the victims of communism, featuring oral storytelling from witnesses who lived under communist rule. The museum foundation does not accept U.S. government funding (though governments of former communist countries may contribute—Hungary pledged $1 million), so it is individual donors who will decide whether a museum on communism rises to remember the 100 million people who died during 70 years of global experiments in collectivism. P WINTER 2015

Jack Hornerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unusual set of strengths and weaknesses made him an unlikely candidate for academic glory but a great bet for

Museum of the Rockies

independent-minded donors.

PHILANTHROPY

How a misfit revolutionized paleontology— with a big boost from philanthropy By Ari N. Schulman

Museum of the Rockies

ack Horner likes to break things. Precious things—like dinosaur bones, or the occasional 80-million-year-old egg. A lot of people think of a dinosaur bone “as a treasure, just the way it is,” he says, leaning forward and staring intently, “even though it’s obvious that there’s more information inside than there is outside.” Against resistance, Horner proved that in some specimens overlooked by other scientists there is much more than meets the eye. Which is fitting, because he was nearly an overlooked specimen himself. Jack Horner revolutionized paleontology with what he found inside dinosaur fragments. He is equally renowned for a series of landmark field discoveries of fossils, and for a body of theorizing that upended many previous ideas about dinosaur behavior. The scientific adviser for the Jurassic Park movies (and inspiration for the paleontologist character in those films, Dr. Grant), Horner’s is the kind of singular, eccentric scientific mind that even a Spielberg fictionalization can’t do justice to. Born a year after the end of World War II, infancy found Horner on the banks of a desert river—not quite in a basket and reeds, but

living in a canvas tent in Montana. Along with his parents, his tentmates included a serpent: a bull snake who paid rent in pest control. Outside was a deafening rock-crushing machine that churned out product for the family gravel business. They eventually moved into a more middle-class existence. But Horner was never fully tamed. He blew out the windows of the family basement with a chemistry experiment, built a Van de Graaff generator and a Tesla coil, and launched a rocket fueled by zinc and sulfur at the local airport. He found his first dinosaur fossil at age eight. These successes were diversions from a tortured educational experience that continued well into adulthood. While he was winning high-school science fairs, he was failing in class after class. In one he received a D-minus-minus-minus, which his teacher invented for the occasion because, as he told Horner, “he never wanted to see me again.” Owing in part to Montana’s forgiving state university admissions policy in the 1960s, Ari N. Schulman is a senior editor of The New Atlantis.

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PHILANTHROPY

Julius Csotonyi

Horner was able to enroll at the University of Montana as a geology major. But he flunked out of college seven times. His education was also interrupted by a tour of duty in Vietnam, during which he says he kept sane by polishing the mirror for a telescope he was building. When Horner finally “finished” college, he had no B.S., no B.A., indeed little academic credit of any sort. But he had a lot of knowledge and an unbroken determination to become a dinosaur paleontologist. He even had a “thesis of sorts”: research and data which would later be the foundation for three published papers. But with no degree and a near-zero GPA, he worked for a while as a truck driver, then along with his brother bought and ran the family gravel business. He continued to hunt fossils in his spare time, along with his college friend and longtime dig collaborator, the late Bob Makela. And Horner applied for paleontology jobs at every museum he could think of. Again and again. Finally he landed a position, low-ranked and low-paid, as a technician at Princeton’s Natural History Museum. One summer early on, when he needed $10,000 to cover the costs of his dig season, Horner took his first stab at a grant application. His best (actually only) idea was to write to the Rainier Brewing Company and request sponsorship, “explaining that Bob and I drank a lot of Rainier whenever we were in the field.” Amazingly, Rainier came through with the funding, but Princeton officials told him “there is no way in this world you’re going to take money from the Rainier Brewing Company.” In the end, the university supplied him with $10,000, and Rainier sent 125 cases of beer. Horner’s talents in the fossil beds got him promoted to a research position, and soon he had his first publication in the prestigious journal Nature, and was running his own projects. By 1982, he’d been hired by Montana State University in Bozeman to launch and head a dino- A Maiasaur tends to her hatchling in this rich speculative image created for Philanthropy by leading paleoartist Julius Csotonyi, saur research program at the Museum of the Rockies. On the day of his fortieth birthday in 1986, the incorporating advice from Jack Horner on likely physiological, landscape, and behaviorial details. University of Montana granted the dropout an honorary Ph.D. He received word simultaneously that he’d been awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” By the full of tiny fossils and fished out two small bits for an 1990s, Horner’s dinosaur research program had become additional opinion. Horner believed they belonged to one of the most productive in the world, regularly dyna- a baby duck-bill. miting tenets of conventional wisdom. Baby dinosaur specimens were almost unknown in the Americas. So Horner and Makela drove out to where the Good mother lizard fossils had been collected. They found a nest with the babies Horner’s first big discovery came in 1978. In Mon- still inside, the first such discovery anywhere. Within days, tana for the summer dig season, he and Bob Makela they had excavated 15 nests. As the dig expanded it became visited an amateur collector who’d found some fossils clear they were on to an entire colony, and that the colony and wanted an opinion on them. Horner identified was one of several in a vast nesting area used across dino them as belonging to an adult duck-billed dinosaur, generations. Over 20 years, Horner and his team excavated and of no particular significance. They were headed hundreds of eggs, including some containing the first fosout the door when the collector picked up a coffee can silized dinosaur embryos ever discovered. He also recovered

Julius Csotonyi

no less than 10,000 Maiasaurs. (Horner interprets this killing field as an entire herd wiped out in a volcanic explosion, the bones later scrambled by a flood.) And his crews have found several of America’s most famous Tyrannosaurus Rex skeletons, including five discovered in just one summer. Plucking groundbreaking finds from a vast landscape of rubble and common fossils takes cultivated perception. Many fragments of baby dinosaur bones had actually been found by collectors decades before, but misidentified as belonging to some unknown species of small animal, with scant attention paid. Horner anticipated the revolution latent in those practically invisible scraps of fossil in a coffee can. He’s fond of quoting Branch Rickey’s aphorism about baseball: “Luck is the residue of design.”

the skeletons of scores of babies, juveniles, and adults at the site that came to be known as Egg Mountain. These finds, fleshed out with a compelling analysis by Horner, provided the first strong evidence that dinosaurs, unlike reptiles, but like birds and mammals, had cared for their young. The specimens belonged to a new genus that Horner christened Maiasaura, or “good mother lizard.” Horner found that Maiasaurs had a high growth rate and metabolism consistent with at least partial warm-bloodedness, and migrated seasonally in herds to avoid predators, to a breeding ground 60 miles away. This work transformed understanding of dinosaur behavior, in particular demolishing the view that they had no family or social lives. Horner’s instincts have led him to many other great finds. In 1984, he and a grad student uncovered a layer of ancient ash that turned out to be the edge of a bone bed over a mile long, containing the jumbled remains of

The making of a dino prodigy If discerning patterns invisible to others are why Horner isn’t still driving a truck for a living, the discernment of others has also played a role in his success. His mentors looked past his outward failures and saw Horner as Horner could see certain fossils: something remarkable that to everyone else looked common. It was Horner’s parents who encouraged his love of learning as a boy, and drove him around to f ossil-hunting expeditions. It was a Montana geology professor who, blissfully ignorant of Horner’s grades, recognized a budding intellect behind his science-fair project and encouraged him to apply for college. It was a college adviser who wrote letters of support that allowed him to keep r e-enrolling each time he flunked out. It was his supervisor at Princeton who saw the scientist in the technician. It was institutions like the Museum of the Rockies, the University of Montana, Montana State University, the National Science Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation that took the researcher who lacked any degree at all and, on the strength of his work, finally admitted him into the circle of academic legitimacy. And all along the way, it has been philanthropists who underwrote his research even when conventional funding sources closed their doors to him. The NSF provided critical funding in Horner’s early years as head of MSU’s paleontology program, and continues to offer

Horner’s discovery and analysis of Maiasaura provided the first strong evidence that dinosaurs cared for their young and formed familial and social bonds. WINTER 2015

accessible manner.” The Museum of the Rockies was able to take complicated information and tell a story. Siebel decided to help the museum grow. With a $2.3 million gift and hands-on involvement, he helped Horner open the Siebel Dinosaur Complex in 2007. The new wing lives up to Siebel’s vision of a museum experience that’s more than butterflies pinned to a wall. Walking into the hall, you’re met first by low light and an exotic soundscape—the chirps, squeaks, and caws of insects, dinosaurs, and other animals of a wild habitat long gone. A long-necked sauropod strides high above the hall. And two gaudily feathered and colored Deinonychus predators clamber up its neck, intent on murder.

The Siebel Dinosaur Complex dramatically illustrates the

In the next room, the complex turns from immersion to investigation. A row of Triceratops skulls in increasing order of size and animal age illustrates the sequencing techniques that Horner innovated to produce novel conclusions about dinosaurs’ growth patterns and life cycles. The largest skull has a pair of prominent holes absent in the others. The exhibit explains how Horner showed that these holes were not, as first believed, the indicators of some new, larger tri-horned species, but rather a trait that Triceratops developed later in their lives. A separate display shows a recreated Triceratops, with one half displaying the skeleton and the other covered in mock skin. Ringed around the room are similar specimens and exhibits for myriad other species.

Jurassic and Cretaceous periods at the Museum of the Rockies, home to the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in the world.

programs, and founding the Meth Project, a public education and advertising initiative that helped cut Montana’s meth abuse by two thirds, and has expanded to seven other states (see “Lassoing Montana Meth,” May/June 2007). Siebel has been a part-time resident of Montana for decades, and owns and operates the 75,000-acre Dearborn Ranch there. When he first visited the Museum of the Rockies, he says, he was struck by “not only the research that they were doing,” but by the way they illustrated the course of life “over a couple hundred million years in a very 22

PHILANTHROPY

Museum of the Rockies

some support. But NSF grants are often capricious and limited to narrow projects. For unproven ideas, for iconoclastic approaches, for general support, Horner (and thousands of other scientists) relies more on philanthropists than on the science funding bureaucracies. Philanthropy has been especially important in bringing science to the public. While Horner was building a renowned dinosaur research program in the 1980s and 1990s, the museum had no space to display even its most impressive new specimens. Enter Tom Siebel. Siebel was the founder of software firm Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2006. He is active in philanthropy, giving to numerous scientific, educational, and community

Museum of the Rockies

The power of philanthropy Paleontology funding needs fall into three major categories: field excavations, staff and equipment for research, and museums where findings can be displayed. The latter category is the most expensive, and the most reliant on donor support. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History closed its fossil and dinosaur hall in 2014 for a massive, five-year-long renovation funded largely by a $35 million gift from David Koch. The new hall will feature a specimen from the collection of the Museum of the Rockies—one of the world’s largest and most complete T. Rex skeletons, excavated by Horner’s team 25 years ago.

wandered off from the site to eat his lunch in solitude on a ledge. Glancing up, he saw sticking out of the cliff face a bone he recognized as belonging to the foot of a T. Rex. A massive excavation ensued. It was funded primarily by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold. When the specimen had finally been prepared in a plaster jacket, the crew had no way to move it out. It weighed 3,000 pounds, and they were miles from any roads. Enter donor improvisation number two: Philanthropist Terry Kohler lent a helicopter belonging to his Windway Capital Corporation to remove the piece. Kohler, a former Air Force pilot, flew the bird himself. He continued to help fly

Donors are also very important in the other two categories: digs and study programs. Though Montana State University covers some of his overhead, most of Horner’s work actually depends on grants and donations. His entire program, including lab equipment, salaries for staff, summer digs, and stipends for grad students, has cost only $11 million over its now third-of-a-century operation. Horner expresses gratitude to the university and the NSF but notes that “quite frankly, my donors are more engaged than the government is.” The ability of philanthropy to respond quickly, and flexibly, without suffocating rules or red tape, often makes it invaluable. An example from the summer of 2000: During the dig of an Edmontosaurus, a crewman

fossils out of Horner’s digs for many years, and gave $650,000 to analyze them. Even with the helicopter, the jacketed specimen turned out to be too heavy to lift. As a result, the crew had to fracture the Tyrannosaur’s femur. But this didn’t panic Horner, and indeed he turned it into another great discovery. After the bone had been sawed in half, one of Horner’s students, Mary Schweitzer, took the opportunity to peer inside. Using acid to dissolve hard mineralizations, Schweitzer discovered something shocking: preserved blood vessels and cells—the first soft tissue ever found in a fossil, and a 68-million-year-old one to boot. The bone’s interior also revealed a kind of tissue, previously known only in birds, WINTER 2015

that suggested that the animal was female (a determiThe scientists recognized the specimens as resination usually impossible to make from dinosaur bones) due of the recently discovered class of creatures called and had died within a week or two of laying eggs. dinosaurs, and knew there must be more. Thus began a protracted battle between the two men, each seeking Battling for bones to purchase the loyalty of the collectors and to assemPhilanthropy has been intertwined with dinosaur ble expeditions to find and clean out the biggest fossil research from the beginning. As John Noble Wilford beds before the other could. At one point, one of Marsh’s recounts in The Riddle of the Dinosaur, the two tower- men smashed fossils he couldn’t collect in order to keep ing patrons of the original dinosaur fossil expeditions Cope’s men from getting them. But both made signifito the American West were Othniel Charles Marsh, a cant scientific contributions, describing nearly 2,000 new

PHILANTHROPY

genera and species between them, until Cope’s funds were exhausted 12 years on and the battle of the bones drew to a close. At the start of the twentieth century, Andrew Carnegie created a new wing for his Pittsburgh museum and commanded his chief collector, Earl Douglass, to

Museum of the Rockies

paleontology professor at Yale with an inherited fortune, and Edward Drinker Cope, an independent scientist in New Jersey with a smaller but also substantial personal war chest he was willing to apply to fossil hunting. In 1877, each received shipments from amateur collectors in Wyoming Territory and the new state of Colorado.

Ari Schulman

A student volunteer carefully excavates a fragment of Diplodocus bone at Horner’s Hell Creek dig.

Museum of the Rockies

Ari Schulman

find something “big as a barn” to fill it. Douglass soon obliged with a nearly hundred-foot-long specimen of a long-necked herbivore, one of the largest land-animal skeletons ever found. Carnegie liberally funded the massive excavation at what is now Dinosaur National Monument in Utah, and the new species was dubbed Apatosaurus Louisae after Carnegie’s wife. Douglass later turned up another new species, nearly as giant, which was christened Diplodocus Carnegii. It ended up in the new Pittsburgh wing, and replicas were dispatched to other museums far and wide. Digging with donors Montana is a newish state but an ancient land. Tens of millions of years ago the area was perched on the edge of an inland sea that teemed with life. The petrified layers of coast and ocean sediment laid down in that age now jut upward, eroding away. On a bright July day, I trailed behind Horner’s dusty pickup out to a dig site 30 or so miles from Bozeman. The site is stunning: much of the lush movie A River Runs Through It was filmed on the Gallatin River, in view of the dig, and beyond the river the peaks of the Rockies rise into view. The dig is perched on a hill, private property. The landowners have donated its use to Horner’s team summer after summer for decades. Horner comes out periodically to check on progress. On a day-to-day basis the operation is overseen by his collaborator Bob Harmon. Like Horner, Harmon is a former amateur collector, a one-time carpenter who Horner brought into his crew. The hammer-swinger rewarded Jack by finding the T. Rex sticking out of the cliff; the specimen was named “B. Rex” in his honor. Today Bob is chief preparator at the Museum of the Rockies. But it’s really an MSU grad student, Cary Woodruff, who’s running this show. The work is providing material for his thesis on development of the Diplodocus. He’s trying to find out when in childhood and adolescence the animals had their “growth spurts.” Here the crew is unearthing a sub-adult Diplodocus that Woodruff describes as “remarkably complete.” The site previously yielded an Apatosaurus. To get down to the layer of rock where the bones lay, the diggers use powered jackhammers. But once in the bone zone, all work must be done by hand. During my visit the crew is nibbling through a thick sandstone that comes off not in chunks but little flakes, with an individual worker sometimes excavating just a few handfuls over the span of a day. This chiseling requires sitting in an awkward position and repeating the same motion for hours straight—during which the romance of encountering a creature that lay hidden in stillness for epochs softens a smidge.

But the work passes amidst lively conversation, ambling from the rivalry between geology and biology to the asteroid extinction hypothesis to, of course, the relative merits of the various Jurassic Park movies. It continues later at the dinner table, where the crew toys with a coprolite (fossilized dino doo) that serves as a table weight preventing trays of food from sliding down the precipitously slanted buffet. Often leading these conversations are Ed and Janet Sands, loyal Horner donors who are on a s ummer

Philanthropist and pilot Terry Kohler helped Horner’s team fly fossils out of hard-to-reach dig sites.

road trip and have stopped in at the dig for a spell. During the day, Ed is down on the ground, chiseling away with the rest of the crew, while Janet is perched on the elevated rim of the site, making lovely field sketches and watercolors of the excavation. The Sands have a family foundation based in Santa Barbara, and they were introduced to Horner by Ed’s brother Dave, a fellow professor at MSU who researches biotech solutions to crop pathologies. Dave and his wife Kippy are also longtime donors to Horner, along with several members of their extended family. (In the acknowledgements of Horner’s latest book, he simply thanks “the Sands families.”) Ed and Janet also fund research on human origins. They have worked closely with Donald Johanson, the Arizona State University paleoanthropologist who was one WINTER 2015

The power of being dyslexic One morning during our sauropod dig, the Make-AWish Foundation brings a young boy out to the site, and he gets to join in as a junior paleontologist for a few hours. Horner does this kind of thing often. He once flew overseas on a few days’ notice to meet another boy in the late stages of a terminal illness. Horner’s zeal for helping young people may come in part from a determination to do better for his students and other children than most of his teachers did by him. It was not until he was in his thirties that Jack discovered why he had struggled so mightily 26

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during his school years: He has dyslexia. When he was a student, the condition was not widely known or understood by educators. Horner’s disability is usually described in media reports as mild. But, he tells me bluntly, “I can’t read. I honestly, absolutely cannot read.” He points up at a nearby sign. “When I read anything, I have to read every single letter, one letter at a time.” In part, he says, it’s a matter of lacking short-term memory, so that it can be difficult even to remember all of the letters in a word by the time he gets to the end of it. Horner is involved with groups that gather dyslexics to discuss how they can succeed in a lexical world. He

Janet Sands, faithful contributor to Horner’s program, paints watercolors of the dig in her journal while her husband Ed helps search for fossils.

is also connected to researchers like Harvard’s Vanessa Rodriguez who are working to help teachers learn how to recognize young students like himself. Sometimes teachers will bring these pupils to Horner, and he’ll take them out to his digs. “It’s pretty easy to tell when a kid really wants to learn something,” he says, even if he “fails all of his tests, or can’t read.” Many of Horner’s observers see his learning disability as conferring a paradoxical advantage, like the heightened ability of the blind to hear. In Horner’s case, he seems to have an acutely increased spatial intelligence. “Talk about

Janet Sands

of the discoverers of the three-million-year-old hominid skeleton popularly known as Lucy. At the dig, Janet is in the midst of planning the second Santa Barbara Symposium on Human Origins at the city’s Museum of Natural History. Horner usually comes to the Sands when some fairly modest and definite need arises in his program, often involving graduate students. These students, says Janet, “just need a little helping hand.” “More than a dinner,” she laughs, pointing to the meal that she and Ed prepared and offered up this evening. “Then later you’ll see what that student has discovered and published. And that’s really, really exciting.” Cary Woodruff, one of their current beneficiaries, describes how funding for his Diplodocus digs, the labwork, staff time, and his conference travel all depend on the support of donors like Ed and Janet. “You want to talk about a result—bang for your buck—you literally get to launch a student’s graduate career.” Horner has been “very, very, very encouraging of young scientists,” Janet later says, noting his open-mindedness and his emphasis on building an effective team. She argues that “historically, a lot of science is done in a silo,” but rather than shielding his own work Horner engages with researchers across disciplines—and, crucially, with students. “Education’s a great multiplier,” she says. Students “affect their colleagues and other students over a lifetime career.” Ed and Janet Sands see a special mandate to support science education, because they believe science has a unique ability to inspire young people to learn. They also fund Science Matters, a public-private partnership that aims to make inquiry-based science part of the elementary curriculum in Santa Barbara’s public schools. Janet has worked closely with students and says that the science courses are always the ones that get them most engaged. “It’s just an eye-opener. These kids know they’re on the bottom end of the social scale, yet you give them an academically excellent science curriculum and you can just see them straighten up when they come to class—‘they think I’m smart.’ It’s amazing.”

Janet Sands

learning differences, my God, he’s got thinking differences,” says Tom Siebel. “He just does not think like the rest of us.” Horner certainly seems to have an uncanny ability to pick significant finds out of crowded fields of information. Rather than reading, he says, he sees and thinks in images. He even tries to teach his literate students “how to be dyslexic.” He tells me, “That is the only way dyslexics learn: you have to interact with things.” In addition to breaking bones open to examine their internal microstructures, Horner has brought sophisticated imaging technologies such as CT and LIDAR scanners to possible fossil sites. He has pioneered new visual analyses of excavated bones and used the results to draw dramatic

Since 1980, the main source of funding for Jack Horner’s pathbreaking dinosaur discoveries and lab research has been private philanthropy. Horner reports that a couple dozen interested individuals and a few foundations have underwritten his investigations and exhibits, donating a cumulative $11.5 million. These gifts have paid for projects ranging from his historic Hell Creek digs, to the equipping of his cellular paleontology lab, to the soft-tissue analysis of fossil bones, to the excavation of 450 dinosaur skeletons in Mongolia’s Gobi desert. Horner has publicly credited the following givers: Tom and Stacy Siebel Terry and Mary Kohler C. and W. Kohler Charitable Trust Merck Family Fund Nathan Myhrvold George Lucas Gerry Ohrstrom Ed and Janet Sands David and Kippy Sands Steven Spielberg Klein and Karen Gilhousen Catherine B. Reynolds James Kimsey Whitney MacMillan Jack Ostrovsky Paul Prager Jim and Bea Taylor Reed and Barbara Toomey Newt Gingrich Ted Turner Paul DelRossi Paul Bertelli Rick and Linda Allen Elizabeth Moore Joyce Grande Penny Hatten Ingrid Poole Kathy Kennedy Damaris Waggoner E. L. Wiegand Foundation Murdock Charitable Trust

conclusions about dinosaur biomechanics, metabolisms, and growth rates. Horner sees spatial intelligence as about something more than just vision. He’s expanded his approach into a kind of general theory of inquiry, which he’s variously described as “imaginative” or “being dyslexic.” At one point, Horner draws in a deep breath and says, “I think people read too much. I really do. I think they just read way too much, and they end up thinking like people before them. So they end up with a lot of preconceived ideas of what is and what isn’t.” He encounters this problem with his students, who “just regurgitate that same old stuff.” He tells them “if you quit reading and start thinking, and start using your brain to actually acquire your information visually…then you can come up with other ideas.” WINTER 2015

Horner couldn’t convince any museum to let him break open its eggs and bones. So he went out and found his own. 28

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the established idea of T. Rex as apex predator. Then she adds, “But I think it’s great that he’s raising the question.” Chasing the chickenosaurus Walking the walk, Horner has not shied from public reversals of his own beliefs over the years. One dwarfs the others in audacity. In 1997, Horner praised Jurassic Park’s depiction of dinosaurs, but pooh-poohed the movie’s premise, saying that the creatures “are long gone from this planet and they will never return.” The idea of bringing them back to life “is fantasy in the first degree.” But in a limited way, Horner is now trying to do just that. In a 2009 book and a TED Talk that’s been viewed 2 million times, Horner describes his plan. While the DNA molecules of the dinosaurs themselves have long since degraded, much of the information they contained is preserved in their living descendants—birds. By manipulating the genomes of birds in their embryonic stage, researchers could eventually flip on and off the right combinations to recreate certain dinosaur traits. Or some reasonable facsimile. Horner calls the hypothetical critter a “dino chicken,” or “chickenosaurus.” He describes his role in the project as “instigator and recruiter.” Among the team he’s assembled are researchers at McGill University who are working on restoring the tail and teeth that birds lost long ago. Horner has received a number of philanthropic donations for the project, including $1 million from George Lucas. He thinks a few significant traits of dinosaurs could be reverse-engineered within three to five years. Horner is a bit evasive on just what the point of this project is. He has talked about the raw scientific knowledge that could result, possible medical applications, but also, whimsically, about the fun of having a dinosaur as a pet, or of the addition of a new special item to the menu at KFC. The imaginative and inspirational value of the project seems to be its first appeal for him. Children, he says, can’t get interested in the nitty-gritty of genetics and developmental biology “unless they can tie it together with something they know. And dinosaurs are a thing they know. We can teach them just by talking about the dino-chicken project.” Something similar, he thinks, is true for grown-ups: Regardless of the project’s success or failure, it could unify efforts around an ambitious scientific goal, with benefits that can’t be entirely foreseen in advance. Dino Chicken is Horner’s answer to the Apollo Project. But in keeping with his suspicion of entrenched thinking, he doesn’t mind the opportunity to tick off establishment science either. When he puckishly tells me that the project “irritates a lot of people, and a lot of them are scientists,” I sense that this is not incidental to why he’s pursuing it.

Museum of the Rockies

The blinders of conventional wisdom Horner—who has coauthored ten books for children and adults, and is highly fluent in the scientific terminology and theories of his discipline—is being more rhetorical than literal in some of this. He is deeply serious, however, about getting people to recognize how often their lines of inquiry are constrained by conventional thinking. His irreverence about breaking dinosaur eggs is a case in point. In the 1970s, he “couldn’t find a museum in the world” that would let him break open eggs or bones. So he found his own, and “just so happened to have a ball-peen hammer.” It was the same story with baby dinosaur remains. Many paleontologists believed that for some reason or another they had just not been preserved in the fossil record. When Horner was first shown the bits of baby Maiasaura skeleton, he quickly realized that this belief had become self-fulfilling: paleontologists had only been looking for bones in certain kinds of geological formations because those were the only ones where they’d found them before. Finding Maiasaura eggs in a different sort of formation simply meant that the dinosaurs which lived and died mainly in coastal areas had migrated far inland to breed. This quickly improvised insight prompted him to keep looking when he found the first nest, realizing that where there was one there might well be more. Horner believes the same blinders have delayed many other developments in the field, including the recent discovery of fossilized soft tissue. Much of the reason soft tissue hadn’t been found before is that the prevailing theories of fossilization deem its preservation impossible. So no one looked for it. Even the word dinosaur, Horner believes, has hampered the study of these creatures. Meaning “fearfully great lizard,” the term coined soon after they were discovered has prejudiced generations of paleontologists into believing that dinosaurs must be fundamentally reptilian, delaying recognition of the myriad traits they more closely share with birds. In recent years, he’s taken on one of dinosaur paleontology’s most sacred cows: the idea that Tyrannosaurus Rex was a menacing predator. To the consternation of countless young fans, Horner suggests that T. Rex may have been a plodding, opportunistic scavenger—less lion than hyena. And not prone to chasing Jeeps full of terrified scientists. One paleontologist, asked if she agrees with this theory, says, “Oh, not at all.” She outlines her case for

Horner’s theory that Tyrannosaurs were scavengers, not predators, is controversial among paleontologists—one

Museum of the Rockies

of the many ways that his work has challenged the field.

Philanthropy and eccentricity Jack Horner is a living testament to one of the great lessons from the history of science: discovery is intertwined with the peculiarities of personality and human interest. Advances in paleontology and other sciences have often been driven by the idiosyncrasies of its leading figures, and by inflammation of the imagination and the spirit along with engagement of the mind. Philanthropists, much more than government agencies and other science bureaucracies, have been able to recognize and reward the deeply personal spurs behind much scientific advance. “When I would go to the NSF and ask for money for a good project,” says Horner, “they would oftentimes say, it is a good project, and we’d like to fund it, but can you do it for half as much?” But when he went to private donors the response would often be, “are you sure this is enough?” When people put up their own money, “if they really like what you’re doing, they want to see the project succeed.” Public funding agencies are bound by safe, established views, by political priorities, by bean-counting measurements, and by a desire for certainty. Their

priorities are rarely ambitious or at all imaginative, says Horner. Government grant proposals must be narrow, describable in detail even before they begin, and able to show immediate results. (Horner shares this experience with many other practitioners at the leading edge of other fields of science. See, for instance, Philanthropy’s interview with Leroy Hood at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/topic/philanthropic_ freedom/interview_with_leroy_hood.) Horner’s philanthropic donors are vastly more willing to be flexible and patient, to take more risks, to pursue aims that are open-ended, and even sometimes, as Horner describes the dino-chicken project, a little “wacky.” That’s why private support has been so important in his career. Philanthropy’s tolerance for adventurous inquiry has been a perfect match with Jack Horner. Near the end of our last meeting, I ask the unlettered professor if there are questions I should have asked him. He furrows his brow, pauses for a long moment, and answers, “I don’t know.” Smiling, he adds, “I like any good question.” P WINTER 2015

Artist and scientist Isabella Kirkland depicts an imaginary rainforest canopy that brings together real species from Vietnam, Africa, and the Amazon, including many just discovered recently. Recalling a research trip to Costa Rica where she saw a swarm of butterflies trying to surmount a gust of wind blowing over a ridge, Kirkland wanted to capture in this painting that interplay of air and life above the canopy.

PHILANTHROPY

Isabella Kirkland, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Emergent,â&#x20AC;? 2011, Oil and alkyd on polyester over panel 60x48 in.

HEART ART

T LAND T A new exhibit at Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum showcases the full range of American artistry

Isabella Kirkland, “Emergent,” 2011, Oil and alkyd on polyester over panel 60x48 in.

By James Panero

ucked in the northwest corner of Arkansas, in so-called “flyover country,” the town of Bentonville may not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking about innovation. But take a closer look. There’s the bustle of the glistening airport next door in Fayetteville, where 50 flights a day now converge from 14 cities coast to coast. There’s a healthy population that looks as if it’s been making good use of the town’s network of hiking and biking trails. There’s the sparkling town square. And facing the town square is an unassuming storefront that reads “Walton’s 5-10.” This is where it began, when Sam Walton opened a discount store in 1950. His enterprise has since grown into the world’s largest private employer—with 2.2 million people on the payroll across 11,000 stores in 27 countries. And just up the road from the original discount store, Walmart continues to maintain its home office.

James Panero is executive editor of The New Criterion. WINTER 2015

A mission of discovery This spirit lives on in Bentonville’s latest innovation. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 less than a mile from the original Five and Ten. Founded by Alice Walton, Sam’s only daughter, and constructed with funds provided by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks the conventional thinking on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be. Even before it opened, there was the name. By identifying the institution after the natural water source that bubbles up beneath its patch of hill country, rather than after the patrons, the museum signals the middle-American modesty of the gift. A Walton museum could have gone anywhere—to Alice’s adoptive state of Texas, to expanding some famous existing institution, to creating a new edifice in one of the urban areas already known as a locus for art. Instead, Alice Walton brought her American treasures to the Ozarks, to a densely wooded ravine, and gave north of $1 billion to erect a striking new museum (designed by Moshe Safdie) for them. Sam Walton once wrote that his daughter was “the most like me—a maverick.” A hint of confirmation comes from the fresh and unexpected exhibition that has just been shown at Crystal Bridges. “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” looks to America’s

“Since we have a new museum of art in the middle of the country, we have a vantage on what’s happening in the American scene that’s more open.” 32

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two-million-odd working artists in an attempt to uncover those whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated. The stories of how Crystal Bridges curators discovered these artists are part of the exhibition. The works on display were assembled through a 100,000-mile coastto-coast-to-coast search that led to nearly 1,000 studio visits, with 102 of those artists represented in this show. “The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton tells me. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time. They tell the story of America and enrich our understanding and appreciation of our nation.” “State of the Art” stands in contrast to the existing “biennial” exhibitions that have purported to survey what’s going on in contemporary art and decide who’s in and who’s out. It cast its net far beyond the small subset of name-brand and trendsetting artists. “The mainstream is very narrow,” says Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.” Bacigalupi says the inspiration for this project dates back to 2009, with the unorthodox location of the future museum serving as an impetus. “Since we have a new museum of American art in the middle of the country,” he told his board, “we have a vantage on what’s happening in the American scene that’s less biased, perhaps, than a New York perspective, or an L.A. perspective, or even a Chicago, San Francisco perspective. We might have a more open feel to what’s happening.” The hard work began in early 2013, when Bacigalupi and his assistant curator Chad Alligood hit the road. Following the tips of 65 recommenders—curators, critics, collectors, academics, artists who run art spaces and programs—they worked their way across the country, region by region, in “a grassroots outreach effort.” At the heart of the search were their visits to the working studios of artists. “Knowing the artists we all know wasn’t enough,” Bacigalupi writes in the exhibition catalogue. “We wanted to locate those who are not known to all of us. We would have to invent a new approach, or perhaps return to a long-gone, seemingly obsolete way of working. We’d have to get out there and see what art was being made, not just what art was being shown.” The travel statistics from the ensuing year and a half illustrate how broadly the pair hunted for indigenous talent: 218 flights. 2,396 hours in rental cars. Temperatures ranging from 104 (San Antonio) to -16 (Omaha).

Meg Hitchcock, “Subhan’ Allah: The Lord’s Prayer,” 2013 Letters from the Koran and Bible on paper, 30x22.5 in

Behind its working storefront, the Five and Dime today leads into a small Walmart Museum. Featuring a re-creation of Walton’s office, one of the pickup trucks he used for hunting, and banners and brochures bearing the slogans that informed his personality and sense for business, the museum is a reminder of how Walton worked against the grain as one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary market disruptors. Before there was Amazon or Uber, there was Sam Walton on a mission to give his customers the nation’s lowest prices, which he saw as a liberalizing force for good. Walton had a friendly, open, small-town personality that was reflected in the culture of his stores. He cared little for establishment thinking or the trappings of trendy acclaim. “Swim upstream,” Walton wrote in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

– z

the teachings of world religions. Here, letters from the Koran m

Meg Hitchcock, “Subhan’ Allah: The Lord’s Prayer,” 2013 Letters from the Koran and Bible on paper, 30x22.5 in

Meg Hitchcock cuts out letters from one sacred text to spell out a passage from another sacred text, to explore

spell out the New Testament’s Lord’s Prayer, while ta

letters from the Bible spell out the Islamic prayer “Subhan’ Allah.”

il–

The mandala shape is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism.

WINTER 2015

Humane art The grassroots process of conducting studio visits and face-to-face conversations across the country—rather than just tapping existing art networks and personal connections, art fairs, and websites—is as much what “State of the Art” has contributed to the art world as the work the curators unearthed. Their selections skew to art that evinces social engagement and tells a story beyond itself. Bacigalupi says they were particularly looking for “works of art that have a generosity of spirit, that open themselves to conversation, rather than works that are closed or hermetic.” Take, for example, the three pieces from Meg Hitchcock. Born into an evangelical Christian household, Hitchcock has expanded her spiritual inquiry and devotional practice into her art. She constructs intricate collages of words cut from religious texts and reassembled into elaborate black-and-white geometric designs or organic patterns. “Meg’s work is incredibly evocative. It’s powerful,” says Bacigalupi. “It’s brilliantly made and executed, and it has a kind of immediate appeal.” Then there’s Isabella Kirkland, an artist based in Sausalito, California, who doubles as a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Working in a houseboat studio—with a cat whose hair forms her finest brushes— Kirkland paints astonishingly verdant scenes of nature in hyper-accurate, highly staged detail. She portrays species that live so far out of human sight—200 feet up in the canopy—that they have only recently been discovered. “I don’t want to be a scientific illustrator,” she writes. “I really want to talk to a different audience with this work. I want to celebrate this stuff and get people interested in it.” 34

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Another highlight is Vanessa German, an artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who repurposes found materials to make totemic “juju” dolls. “It’s immediately evident that German is a force of nature,” the curators note in the catalogue, “and her presence is one of caring and protection in a notoriously difficult area.” Recently German created Art House in a once-derelict home known for its violent past. Here she now brings together neighborhood children to “create beauty.” As someone who was “surrounded by a lot of death” as a kid, German says, “I am always looking for a way to be the most alive while I’m alive.” Amidst the saga of their road trip (finding a studio tucked among weeds and broken glass in the back of a

deserted Coca-Cola bottling factory in Mississippi; handling day-old goats with artist-farmers in Gainesville, Florida; meeting creators in a 22-inch January snowstorm that paralyzed Baltimore), Bacigalupi says he and Alligood uncovered “incredible life stories that lead to the work” the artists make. Tim Liddy, an artist in his early fifties that they met in St. Louis, was a hockey player and “devoted to the notion of becoming a professional.” In “a tragic accident at 16 years old, he broke his neck and became paralyzed.” Left with few gross motor skills, therapists “put a pencil in his hand,” which “set him off on a lifelong course to becoming an artist.” Today Liddy paints exacting trompe l’oeil images, moving around his studio on a Segway. Such encounters resonated with the mission of Crystal Bridges. “The populist notion of building a museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a place where there is no history of visual-arts institutions,” says Bacigalupi, “making this gift to this community, this region, this country, is very much the underpinning of the show.… That kind of openness is a big part of it.” Pitching in The intensive travel and research that made “State of the Art” possible could not have taken place without substantial funding, and Bacigalupi had initial concerns

Kim Cadmus Owens, “Smoke and Mirrors: Coming and Going,” 2011 Acrylic and oil on canvas, diptych 48 x 156 in. overall. Courtesy of the Artist and Holly Johnson Gallery

“We’d get to the region,” says Bacigalupi. “We’d rent a car, and we might see 12 artists a day for the next five or six days.” One time they covered 368 miles of territory in a single day. They were methodical in logging what they found, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video. Bacigalupi was excited to return to the front lines of art. “I haven’t been a curator in 20 years. I’ve been a museum director since then. To be back in touch with so many artists, and to see the generation come up after me, new practices, new approaches, new artists, it’s incredibly exhilarating. Of course, it’s also exhausting to do all that work and all that travel,” he says, but it “makes me optimistic about the future of both art and the country to see these folks and ideas and the ways they are communicating and interacting.” Bacigalupi characterizes the project as a “call to action—to ourselves and to our colleagues elsewhere—to get out and pay attention to the artists among us, in all our communities, big and small.” (Bacigalupi’s own next call to action is to become the founding president of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, described on page 14.)

Kim Cadmus Owens, “Smoke and Mirrors: Coming and Going,” 2011 Acrylic and oil on canvas, diptych 48 x 156 in. overall. Courtesy of the Artist and Holly Johnson Gallery

when describing the concept to the museum’s broader base of supporters. There were no big-name artists, he notes. “No big themes. No splash. No precedent. No imagery to show them. I had to sit before the potential philanthropists and say, ‘Here’s this idea of unknown artists that we’re going to bring together and build this

admission to the museum is underwritten by Walmart, complimentary admission to “State of the Art” has been sponsored by Walmart and Sam’s Club. Donor support not only created the exhibition, but is now enabling extensive educational outreach. Many of the featured artists are being brought in to meet visitors and lead discussions.

Dallas-based painter Kim Cadmus Owens illustrates the frenetic digital ruckus that increasingly invades everyday experience. “Smoke and Mirrors: Coming and Going” depicts a street near her studio. The two-part image has pop-up-like menus for stores under construction, and a blur of colorful motion.

grand show.’ And I thought I was going to be greeted with blank stares and they were going to laugh me out of the room.” Instead, the opposite occurred, and the exhibition became a “remarkable lesson in philanthropy. To a person, everyone we spoke to, whether corporate, individual, or foundation, wanted to be involved. They got excited by the notion that we were expanding the field.…We raised all of the money we needed to do this big show in a very short space of time.” Exhibition sponsors include the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, L’Oréal Paris, John Tyson and Tyson Foods, 21C Museum Hotels, and the museum’s Global Initiative Fund and Art Now Fund. Just as free general

“This region,” notes Bacigalupi, “was once incredibly poor. People had to pitch in together to succeed, to survive. So there is this notion of community sharing, all in, everyone participates. It is part of the fabric, the culture. People want to help, to support each other, they want to share. They want to be a part of it.” Surveying the 19,000-square-foot show now in place, Alice Walton couldn’t be more impressed with the communal result. “I’m amazed and so proud to see how it has all come together,” she tells me. “We were excited about the idea of ‘State of the Art,’ and firmly behind the concept of visiting artists, in their studios, all across the country. Now to walk through the galleries and see this variety of work, brought together in one place.…The art inspires and moves me.” P WINTER 2015

PHILANTHROPY

Andrea Scott

The bright, modern design of the Polin Museum presents Jewish history in an optimistic, appreciative light.

A TRIBUTE TO

With major support from Tad Taube, the Polin Museum honors a millennium of Jewish history By Andrea Scott

Andrea Scott

t Kazimierz Square, in the old Jewish quarter of Kraków, a violin’s vibrato gently rises with the breeze. The Star of David is proudly displayed on synagogues—as a badge of honor, rather than a symbol of ostracism—with Hebrew lettering on restaurants lining the cobblestone square. The streets and cafés are filled with lively music and savory knishes. Some of the 30,000 visitors attend scholarly lectures or try out a Hebrew lesson in the synagogue, while others hold hands and dance in the street to the klezmer tunes’ clarinet and tambourine. This ancient district, home to Schindler’s factory (familiar from Steven Spielberg’s 1993 hit Schindler’s List), was the center of Jewish settlement in the fifteenth century, and was a home for Jews in 1941. Today, it is the site for one of Poland’s biggest celebrations, the Jewish Culture Festival. Further north in Warsaw, there are more signs that, as philanthropist Tad Taube puts it, Jewish life is “alive and well” in Poland. Even amid the

Life

resurgence of anti-Semitism in some parts of the country, there is a renaissance of Jewish identity. Taube has helped make this revitalization possible, supporting the Jewish Culture Festival, the rehabilitation of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, the Jewish Community Centers in Warsaw and Kraków, and much more, while heading several American foundations over the past three decades. His latest contribution is to a striking new museum that gives tribute to a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland. The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, standing on the sanctified ground of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, opened on the seventieth anniversary of that act of resistance. Its “Core Exhibition” was recently opened, in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s crumbling. But the museum also aims to remind the world that there is more to Jewish heritage than war and persecution. At one time, Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in the world. (Three quarters or

Andrea Scott is associate editor of Philanthropy.

WINTER 2015

A new home in America Born in Kraków (“I tell you, such a jewel”), Tad Taube spent his childhood in Warsaw and Toruń, a German-speaking town in the Polish Corridor near the Baltic Sea. While attending a French Catholic school in Warsaw as a child, he was pulled out by a rabbi for Hebrew lessons when the other students had Catechesis. But it was on a train from Warsaw to Paris during the summer of 1939, just before the German invasion of Poland, when young Taube developed a deeper awareness of his Jewish identity. He was eight years old and

“There is no history of Poland without the Jews, and no history of the Jews without Poland.” 38

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traveling with his father’s college friend in hopes of reuniting with his parents in America, and their train ran through the heart of Nazi Germany. With “Jew” imprinted on his documents, answering to the Gestapo at multiple checkpoints throughout the journey was “quite frightening.” The duo safely arrived in Paris, but had to wait several weeks before obtaining travel papers. Finally, temporary documents were secured and the pair endured a miserable crossing to Ellis Island. In Poland, the Taubes had been an “upper-middleclass Jewish family in the world of commerce.” Tad’s parents went on a business trip to the United States, and decided to stay. After the Nazi occupation of Austria and the Kristallnacht attacks on German Jews, “they connected the dots and came to the conclusion that this part of the world was going to be a difficult place in the years ahead, and they made a conscious decision not to go back.” That decision saved their lives. Back in Europe, most of Taube’s extended family, including his grandparents, perished in the Holocaust. His cousin Nita lost both her parents—murdered at Auschwitz. She survived because she was “spirited away” by Catholic nuns and hidden in a convent throughout the war. Taube’s parents later found and adopted her, raising her as his sister.

Wojciech Krynski; Aleksander Prugar / Taube Philanthropies

more of American Jews have roots in greater Poland, Taube says.) Jewish history is rooted in Poland’s very core. The museum moves visitors through an enchanting narrative, from traveling merchants to Middle Ages settlements, from the rise of Jewish self-government, to Jewish intellectual society. Of eight galleries, only one focuses on the Holocaust. This museum commemorates not death, but life.

Following the October 2014 grand opening of the Polin Museum in Warsaw (left), former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski (above, at left) tours the museum’s Core Exhibition

Wojciech Krynski; Aleksander Prugar / Taube Philanthropies

with museum benefactor Tad Taube.

R eunited with his family in the United States, Taube decided he was going to be like “every other red-blooded American kid.” He attended summer camp in upstate New York and worked diligently to become fluent in English—his third language after German and Polish—and spoke without any accent within weeks. “I didn’t want anybody to identify me as some kind of refugee, so I was really driven to become a part of this great country.” Tad’s mother had brought some of her jewelry on her trip, and its sale was the family’s initial source of income. Eventual financial deterioration led them to move near Polish friends in California. His mother found work as a waitress and his father as a janitor, and they slept on a Murphy bed in the living room. Young Tad was given the tiny bedroom, and “life was very difficult.” But life improved. As a boy, Taube had a brief acting jaunt with a few Polish-speaking roles in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer war propaganda films. He led a group of children selling U.S. savings stamps and bonds to help finance the war, and was a junior air-raid warden. The conversation with his father about college went like this: “‘Son, have you given any thought to college?’ ‘Dad, I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I’m going to UCLA.’ He said, ‘You’re going to Stanford.’ And that

was the conversation. I say this to show I was raised in a very authoritarian European household.” Taube arrived at Stanford in the summer of 1949, studying history and engineering. After completing ROTC he served in the Air Force during the Korean War. Following early success with a Silicon Valley company, Taube decided to dip his toes into real estate, where he connected with family friends Joe and Stephanie Koret, owners of the women’s apparel company Koret of California. One day, Taube found himself in an intimidating meeting with Koret’s senior staff. Joe asked the new broker why his company was unable to make any real-estate deals. Taube went for broke: “I suggest you empty the room and find somebody you trust to go out and make deals for you,” he declared. “And Joe kind of sat back in his chair and took a deep breath and said, ‘Gentleman, you heard what Mr. Taube said, leave the room.’ Then he turned to me and he said, ‘So go out and make some deals.’ That was the beginning of our relationship.” Taube did go out and make some deals, and pretty soon came to be considered a part of the Koret family, serving on the company board for years. At one point, in a moment of panic when the company shares were selling for pennies—and then nothing— on the New York Stock Exchange, he was asked to WINTER 2015

Jewish-oriented charitable trusts. Koret donates to philanthropic activities in Israel, and makes significant contributions to major universities there, including Hebrew, Technion, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Ben Gurion. Its domestic philanthropy is focused on Bay Area universities, charter schools, and K-12 education. The

A Polish couple explores a temporary exhibit at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

The handcrafted interior ceiling replicating a seventeenth-century synogogue.

take on the role of CEO. The company, then called Koracorp Industries, was bought by Levi Strauss & Co. in the early 1980s, and Taube headed back into the r eal-estate business. He also turned his attention to helping found the United States Football league, which played in spring and summer rather than fall, and became owner of the Oakland Invaders. Despite his personal history, it was not until mid-adulthood that Taube began to reflect on Judaism’s importance as a tradition, and his own responsibility to pass it forward. “It took a certain level of maturity for me to recognize who I was and what my mission in life had to be,” he says—a mission that he now calls “the fight for Jewish survival.” When the Koret Foundation was born in 1979, Taube was named charter director and then, after Joe’s death, president. He also launched his own philanthropy, which today consists of the Taube Family Foundation and the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture. The Koret Foundation, whose assets are around $300 million, is one of the country’s largest 40

PHILANTHROPY

Rest here, weary travelers The spark for the Polin Museum came in 1993. A civic initiative was inspired by the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., opened that year. By 2005, historical and Jewish organizations had established a partnership with the city of Warsaw and the national culture ministry to pursue the idea of a museum. Taube became involved after seeing a presentation by the Polish consul-general of Los Angeles. When Poland lost its Jewish population, it “was almost as if our culture had been amputated,” Taube learned. The Nazis were not just bent on eliminating the Jewish people but also every trace of Jewish history and life. “They did that by destroying every synagogue,” he says. “They burned books, they bulldozed cemeteries, they expunged city and university records of Jewish names.” That day, Taube joined “a small army” spanning the United States and Poland bent on recovering this history. The municipality of Warsaw donated the land on the site of the 1943 uprising, facing Natan Rapoport’s Monument to the Ghetto Heroes. Museum creators say they could have built elsewhere—D.C. or Israel, for example—but building the museum on the ground where the story takes place is powerful.

Andrea Scott; Photo courtesy of M. Starowieyska, D. Golik and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

foundation’s support for a museum in Warsaw is an innovative and exciting venture.

Andrea Scott; Photo courtesy of M. Starowieyska, D. Golik and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews

The Polish government contributed $80 million to erect the building. About $30 million from private sources created the exhibits. Donors included the Taube and Koret foundations, which committed $20 million between them, plus American donors Sigmund Rolat, Monica and Victor Markowitz, and Irene Pletka, and Polish donor Jan Kulczyk. The museum traverses a millennium of Jewish life and culture in Poland, from the earliest period of Jewish settlement to the current revival of Judaism. The narrative begins in a forest—where Jews hid to escape persecution—with the legend of Polin, the museum’s namesake. Weary Hebrew travelers arrived in Poland to the sound of birds chirping “po-lin, po-lin,” which resembles “rest here” in their language. It seemed like a heavenly sign of their safe arrival. Next is a handpainted medieval gallery. Visitors head into the village market, bursting with eggs, chickens, bread, and other goods. Wooden signs address trivia like “Is this fish kosher or not?” and “Why garlic is good.” A fat goose—the holiday entrée of the Jewish tradition— roosts on one of the displays. Museum director Dariusz Stola, a historian with more than 25 years of Polish and Jewish research experience, offers me a seat on a wooden bench in the village pub. One hundred scholars from the U.S., Poland, greater Europe, and Israel were involved in creating the exhibits’ content, he explains. Graphics, maps, scenography, images, and light fill the walls of each room. The galleries include dozens of films and interactive multimedia stations. A theater hosts musical performances ranging from classic Jewish choirs to cabarets. The museum’s sleek, modern design, the result of an architectural competition, boasts a greenish glass façade and curved stone interior. Light pours in through the largest window in Poland. Outside, families are picnicking and playing catch on the lawn; couples are walking arm in arm. It is clear this is meant to be a place of healing and renewal. The heart of the museum is the Core Exhibition, directed by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, a longtime NYU professor of Eastern European Jewish culture. It features a timber-framed synagogue roof and vibrant interior ceiling, handcrafted to replicate a seventeenth-century structure in Gwoździec, in what is now Ukraine. The 30-ton roof was constructed by volunteers without a single nail or modern tool, and the ceiling was decorated in painting workshops held at synagogues in three Polish cities. The bimah—the platform where the Torah is read during services—was also created this way. Outreach is important to the museum, says Stola, and the construction workshops were a way of involving

Poles in the very formation of the museum. A mobile exhibition has been going from town to town to raise appreciation of local Jewish history. The hardest part of the exhibit to design was the post-war gallery, the museum team says. It was important that the Holocaust not be the final exhibit, to show that Jewish life went on. Only about 300,000 Polish Jews survived the war, which was followed by a time of uncertainty, emigration, and reintegration back into society. The final gallery presents the efforts of rebuilding life in Poland, and the cultural and social achievements by the Jewish community in the decades since. This post-trauma chapter, along with the vibrant exhibits chronicling a millennium of preceding life, emphasizes the enduring contributions of the Jewish people to Polish culture. Changing the story After 32 years, Taube is now stepping aside from the Koret Foundation. He will keep busy mentoring local founders of business startups and managing a donor-advised fund at Stanford. There are also murmurs of his involvement in the creation of an off-season pro-basketball league. But his Jewish philanthropy remains closest to his heart. “I want to improve the Jews’ image of themselves,” he says. “And I want to see the world abandon its attempt to make Jews the victims.” The development of the Polin Museum has been the “fulfillment of a dream,” he says. The museum anticipates at least half a million visitors in its first year. An effort is underway to bring all Polish students to the museum at least once during their schooling. Another initiative aims to sponsor the visits of students from Israel and the United States. As Pitr W iślicki of the Jewish Historical Institute puts it: “There is no history of Poland without the Jews, and no history of the Jews without Poland.” This new facility offers the public “a way to honor those who died by remembering how they lived—and how they lived for 1,000 years,” says Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. The Polin Museum is a place where endurance triumphs over evil, and destruction and death bow to life. A tribute to ineradicable history and joyful existence, it fills the air with its own gentle birdsong: L’chaim! L’chaim! P

“I want to improve the Jews’ image of themselves. And I want to see the world abandon its attempt to make Jews the victims.” WINTER 2015

Painter Rembrandt Peale, born on George Washington’s birthday, shared a special bond with the nation’s first President. As a teenager, Peale had the opportunity to paint the President in person just a few years before he died. For the rest of his life, Peale would make more than 80 attempts “to fix on Canvass the Image which Association, full-scale, high-quality replicas are available to educators for free.

PHILANTHROPY

Taryn Wolf

was so strong in my mind,” finally succeeding with the “Porthole Portrait.” Through the Mount Vernon Ladies’

Patriots

and Papers

Philanthropists fulfill George Washington’s dying wish and build a Presidential library By Marques Chavez

avoid parades, without full success), Washington expressed his desire for a library: “I have not houses to build, except one, which I must erect for the accommodation and security of my military, civil, and private papers, which are voluminous and may be interesting.” Washington would pass away just two years later, though, with no library in sight. For a couple of centuries, his estate remained without a repository for the records of his great life. Starting with Herbert Hoover in 1934, the National Archives has established a library to house the papers of every U.S. President. A few libraries honoring earlier Presidents have also been created by state governments, historical societies, or other private groups. Yet there was no Washington library, though his estate, Mount Vernon, is among the great triumphs of private initiative in historical preservation. In 1853, a woman passing by on the Potomac River noted the shameful disrepair that Mount Vernon had fallen into, and remarked to her daughter that if the men of this country could Marques Chavez is director of communications at The Philanthropy Roundtable.

Taryn Wolf

ne month after his Presidency ended, George Washington found himself in uncharted territory. By limiting his administration to two terms and then stepping aside, and in other ways refusing to be treated like a king, he had set powerful precedents for modesty in a democratic executive, and established the peaceful transfer of power that we take for granted today. But now he had to find a whole new role. Certainly Washington intended to keep informed on national developments. “Let me pray you to have the goodness to communicate to me occasionally, such matters as are interesting, and not contrary to the rules of your official duty to disclose,” he wrote to his friend and longtime colleague Secretary of War James McHenry in April 1797. Like many observers, Washington was troubled by events in France—“beyond calculation, and so unaccountable upon any principle of justice.” He no longer had any duty to respond, though. The private life he had so often longed for now beckoned. At the same time, Washington was mindful of a need to tend to his legacy. After describing to McHenry his journey home (studiously trying to

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PHILANTHROPY

Liz Essley Whyte; Taryn Wolf

that we wanted to be a part of making Washington more prominent for school-aged kids in this generation and in generations to come.” Since that decision, the Reynolds Foundation has donated $70 million to Mount Vernon. That has yielded a new museum and education center, a distance-learning program, and a traveling exhibit. Rees approached Smith and Anderson in 2009 about the possibility of funding the construction of Washington’s library. “It was a natural opportunity to do what Washington wanted to do and provide a home for scholarly research,” Anderson says. The Reynolds trustees were also impressed with the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the way it rescued the estate, and the way it continues to manage the property today. “We’re the oldest historical preservation society in the country,” notes Barbara Lucas, the Association’s regent. The group accepts no government funding, relying exclusively on private donations. This “gives us the benefit of being our own bosses. We are accountable to ourselves,” Lucas says. “We’re also not subject to the ebbs and flows of government funding.” (During the 2013 government shutdown, when the National Park Service made a show of blocking access to properties in an apparent effort to inspire public backlash, it tried to barricade the Mount Vernon parking lots, claiming they were federal property. But Mount Vernon officials Busts of the founding fathers defended their turf, and, as virtually the only historical look out over the sunlit reading attraction in the area left open, flocks of school groups room at George Washington’s and tourists and scout troops made it busier than ever.) library. A rare-books vault With a lead gift of $38 million from the Reynolds preserves the first President’s Foundation, Mount Vernon launched a capital campaign own collection, while a to fund construction of the Washington library and faciliresearch wing convenes tate its inaugural slate of programs. The campaign exceeded modern scholarship on its target, raising a total of $106.4 million from more than American history. 7,000 donors, and the library opened in late 2013. The tremendous response in fundraising, and the warm reception not take care of it, perhaps the women would. The daughter, Ann Pamela that academics and the general public gave the new library, Cunningham, was inspired. She founded a group called the Mount Vernon quickly turned it into the preeminent research facility on Ladies’ Association, which worked tirelessly to raise the funds to buy the the nation’s first executive and his founding era. property in 1860 and manage it ever since. These patriotic mothers turned the home of our founding father into one of the nation’s leading historical The other Mount Vernon attractions. The books and papers of George Washington, however, stayed Among the donors who seized this opportunity to promote deeper understanding of U.S. history was Karen Buchwald locked away in storage. Wright. Born on the fourth of July (a family tradition that also includes her grandfather and one of her sons— A library at last In 2001, Fred Smith and Steve Anderson, chairman and president of the try orchestrating that at home!) and hailing from Mount Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, were in Washington, D.C., to announce a Vernon, Ohio, Wright seems destined to have become a $30 million grant to the Smithsonian Institution for the purchase and exhi- patriotic philanthropist. She is CEO of Ariel Corporation, bition of the iconic Lansdowne portrait of George Washington. Jim Rees, a manufacturing company founded by her father in 1966 then president of the Mount Vernon estate, invited them out to see the home that makes industrial-scale natural-gas compressors. Natural gas is now booming in America, but Wright of the nation’s first leader. Their tour that day would ultimately transform the landscape at Mount Vernon, and help fulfill one of Washington’s final wishes. remembers hard times. The low point came in 1983 when “Jim Rees mentioned during our visit that George Washington’s prom- her father had to lay off half of his employees. “That was inence in the history texts was decreasing,” Anderson recounts. “We decided very traumatic,” says Wright, who had just delivered a baby

Liz Essley Whyte; Taryn Wolf

at the time. “My dad came in to meet his first grandchild and started crying because he felt so bad about laying people off. When we could, we hired back almost everybody, and most of them are still here.” Wright worked in the company’s marketing division before taking time to raise her sons at home. “As a mother you have to be a psychologist, diplomat, disciplinarian, philosopher, manager, leader, doctor. And it’s never the same crisis on a day-to-day basis,” she says. “That is where I learned all the skills that I needed to run a company.” And run it she did: After her father’s retirement she took the helm in 2001, a single mother of four. Then the 9/11 terrorist attacks plunged the country into recession. Learning on the fly, at that precarious moment, Wright’s can-do spirit prevailed. To avoid layoffs, she sent workers off for vocational training during slumps in production. During Wright’s 14 years in the driver’s seat, Ariel’s workforce has tripled, and sales have quadrupled. It is now the largest employer in its part of Ohio, and the largest reciprocating-compressor company in the world. Wright feels a keen responsibility to support her community. That means keeping the company healthy, and contributing generously to local philanthropy. When she first heard of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, she was intrigued to learn about her hometown’s namesake and impressed by the Association’s educational efforts. “We are not paying attention to the things that children need if they are to learn to love America,” she says. The teacher training and other programs offered through Mount Vernon, she believes, are a substantive step in the right direction. When the library campaign began in earnest, she was eager to sign on. The heart of today’s library is the Karen Buchwald Wright Reading Room, resplendent in polished American sycamore—a tree Washington knew quite well. The walls are lined with busts of many of the nation’s founding fathers: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison. In the peaceful sunlit room it sometimes feels as if the life-like images might just float down to the tables and begin arguing anew about the course of the nation. Wright would welcome such magic. Growing up, she says, “I read and read and read and read about all the founders,” crediting them as a formative influence. Among the gems of the library are 62 titles that were owned by Washington himself (housed in a rare-books vault made possible by John and Adrienne Mars). In the general collection are more than 12,000 modern books, journals, audio-visual items, information files, and electronic resources; 6,000 historical manuscripts; more than 5,000 special collections items such as scrapbooks, photographs, postcards, and other memorabilia; archives and early records; and the office and files of the Papers of George Washington project.

Chief librarian and archivist Mark Santangelo describes how scholars are beginning to use the library’s extensive resources, telling the story of a retired Marine and West Point mathematician who was interested in studying Washington’s maps and plans from his early career as a surveyor. Like any good rare-books staff, Santangelo says, they provided him with high-quality photocopies to handle. The Marine insisted that he needed to see the originals. Why? He was looking for pinpricks made by a compass, from which he could infer Washington’s evolving knowledge of trigonometry. That kind of original scholarship, says Santangelo, “is exactly what we’re here for.” Founding friends Just as the first philanthropic priorities of Karen Wright and the Reynolds Foundation (whose main focus is the region surrounding its Nevada headquarters) are local, most of David Rubenstein’s giving is connected to his hometown—but in his case home is Washington, D.C. The Carlyle Group co-founder, another significant donor to the library, has made his mark on cultural and historical establishments all over the nation’s capital, developing a reputation as a patron of patriotic institutions in D.C. His contribution to the library is a venue for lectures and seminars. Its main hall seats up to 100 people, while four smaller seminar rooms accommodate more intimate functions. All rooms are equipped with state-of-the-art audio/visual equipment to allow for distance hookups to classrooms, conference centers, and media outlets. The Washington library also offers fellowships supporting doctorate-level research. Thanks to a gift from Richard and Helen DeVos, a few scholars are even able to study and live on-site. Part of the mission of a research library, notes Lucas, “is that we want to stimulate new scholarship, new information on Washington that’s relevant today.” One of the first fellows, Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Edward Larson, has just published a book based on his scholarship: The Return of George Washington. Mount Vernon’s donors are united on one point: Anything that expands knowledge of our first founder and his remarkable colleagues in peaceful revolution is a good thing. Such understanding ultimately accumulates to the benefit of the American public, and people all around the world who care about free and just governance. P

The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the nation’s oldest historic preservation society, is supported entirely by philanthropy. WINTER 2015

Agros

PHILANTHROPY

The POWER of

OWNERSHIP Fighting poverty from the ground up By John Murdock

Agros

hi-Dooh “Skip” Li likes to tell of an airline agent who once said to him, “You just handed me an American passport that says you were born in India. You’re talking to me in Spanish, but you look Chinese. What are you, really?” “I told him I wasn’t sure, and we both had a good laugh,” Li writes. The agent might have scratched his head even more if Li had told him what he was up to— traveling to war-torn Guatemala on a wing and a prayer in response to a divine nudge. But over the next 30 years, Li would help more than 1,000 peasant farm families become landowners, a previously unfathomable dream for the poorest of the poor in Central America. His nonprofit Agros (based on the Greek word for “field”) would arrange the purchases and front the capital. Over time, the families would pay Agros back, earning full title to the land and changing the entire trajectory of their lives. Like Guatemala in the 1980s, Li’s own life had once been thrown into chaos by revolution. His memoir, Buy This Land, describes how being kidnapped as young boy helped him escape the communist takeover of mainland China. As a child he bounced from one country to the next, at times as a diplomat’s son and at others as a refugee. He eventually became a lawyer in Seattle, where he was captured again—by a vision for privately funded land reform in Latin America. Lend to own It was 1982. An Argentinean pastor guest-speaking at his church made an offhand comment about the impact Christians might have on the then-roiling region of Central America. What if believers bought land for the poor who were being threatened by communist revolutions? Unable to get the challenge out of his mind, Li

set off for Guatemala with little more than his faith and some rusty Spanish. What he saw there, and heard from aid workers, spurred on Li. People who farmed land they could never own were highly vulnerable, with little opportunity to work toward a better future. But this could change. “Ownership was the key,” Li writes. “It all boiled down to this essential fact.” It wasn’t long before Li surprisingly found himself invited to the presidential palace for a U.S. government presentation on a land reform program. The agency hoped to connect poor Guatemalans to the soil, but it would take 12 bureaucratic steps involving the U.S. Congress and national banks. Li spoke up and sketched out his private two-step approach: Donors secure the land and then distribute it directly to the poor. Guatemala’s President Efraín Ríos Montt was supportive and encouraged them to start with a particular 8,000-acre spread. Li feared that the price, the massive scale, and entanglements with a shaky political regime could soon lead to failure. Instead, Agros began with an 800-acre plot. The new nonprofit stabilized the title to the land by paying back taxes, and offered loans so families could buy their own plots to live on and farm. Agros also funded charitable services to make the people healthier and the land more productive. And despite guerrilla attacks, the Buen Samaritano project survived and eventually thrived. When most of the loans were repaid, the first Agros “title ceremony” was held there in 1995, a celebration for those who now formally possessed the keys to their own castles. Living up to their village name, the Buen Samaritanos decided to use the money they once devoted to John Murdock is an attorney and writer in Texas.

WINTER 2015

repayment to buy additional land so that more families could have the same opportunities. Meanwhile, Agros began to purchase tracts elsewhere, expanding beyond Guatemala to Nicaragua, El Salvador, southern Mexico, and Honduras. Over time, the organization has started other programs in the communities it serves. The model is still “built around land,” says Don Manning, current president of Agros, but it now combines property ownership with health services, agricultural husbandry skills, microloans, and help in establishing access to markets, both local and international. (The coffee their farmers grow makes its way into many U.S. stores, and if you are a fan of Tabasco sauce you may have dashed on some heat that had its roots in Agros land.) Education opportunities for farmers and their children have also been emphasized. From the beginning, Agros has purposely avoided political activism, despite temptations to hitch its wagon to various Central American leaders and stateside pressure from well-meaning friends to weigh in on U.S. foreign policy. “Each Agros village,” Li writes, “is a powerful political statement in itself that the poor

The opportunity to own land has helped 10,000 people raise their quality of life across the board. 48

PHILANTHROPY

have a right to live with honor and dignity.” That was enough politics without trying to pick the white hats out of an often complex and stormy sea of gray. This is not to say that Agros is blind to political realities, which it must navigate as a practical matter. In Mexico, for instance, the Agros model runs parallel to the ejido tradition, communal tracts of farmland parceled out by the government. Agros firmly holds that villagers must be willing to invest in and pay for their own land, an idea that has encountered some resistance. But others have accepted the bargain, and diligently worked to earn their property. In Nicaragua, where revolutionary Sandinistas cycle in and out of power, Manning says the Agros projects mostly escaped notice when there was just a 100-person village here and there. Now that Agros is expanding there, however, it is attracting more attention—and for the most part, mayors and local leaders love it. They see their constituents’ lives radically improving, and find it is in their own interest to support the program. Manning recalls a young woman at the first title ceremony he attended who, with assistance from Agros, had been able to attend a local university. She lived with her family and would take a bus back and forth to class, returning at night to run a literacy program in the village. “She had literally taught her father how to read and write,” says Manning. When her parents received their

Agros

Agros villagers in Guatemala dry coffee beans in the sun to prepare the crop for market.

Agros

land title, her father pulled out and delivered a beautiful speech that he had penned himself. Today, almost 10,000 people in 42 communities spread over 11,000 acres have directly benefited from an Agros project. Already, a third of the households with land loans have completed repayment and earned full title. It remains a trying time for people in Central America. The current regional threats are more from drug cartels than political revolutionaries, but the resulting violence and poverty are much the same. According to the World Bank, in Nicaragua over 40 percent of the population is in poverty and only 68 percent of the rural population has access to a safe water source. In Honduras, two thirds of the population is impoverished. The average beneficiary of an Agros investment comes into the project living on 50 cents a day. Their lives often change dramatically. According to recent surveys in Honduras and Nicaragua, 92 percent of Agros village members have access to safe drinking water, 93 percent of the children are in school, 84 percent are living in quality housing, and 100 percent have access to an income-producing asset— namely land. That last statistic is central to the others. From this small seed Much of the early seed money for Agros came from a tithe fund that Skip Li established at his small law firm. This was augmented by a $5,000 grant from the nonprofit World Concern, a $10,000 gift from Frank and Patti Holman, and early and consistent support from friends in the Seattle business community. Another jolt of energy came later, from caffeine. In 1996, Don Valencia was talked into joining the Agros board. As head of research and development at Starbucks, he could not find much time for extracurricular interests and was something of an absentee board member, until a fateful 1998 trip to El Salvador. The aim was to explore a potential joint venture with Habitat for Humanity, another organization that recognizes the value of ownership. The Salvadoran branch of Habitat had housing expertise, but also internal restrictions against purchasing land. That was just the niche that Agros knew how to handle. Could they join forces? The price tag, though, was daunting for a small nonprofit like Agros: $200,000 to buy a 264-acre parcel. Valencia was planning to resign from the Agros board and viewed this trip as his swan song. But he was deeply moved by the needs he encountered. In a matter of months he did resign—from Starbucks. He and his wife funded the entire cost of the El Salvador purchase, and he dedicated himself to Agros, stepping up as co-chairman of the board. During his tenure, he helped set a course that pushed the organization’s budget from $65,000 per year to the $4 million operation it is today.

That crescendo of service would turn out to be the finale to Don Valencia’s life. Cancer took him in 2007. Others picked up where he left off. Enter Joel Dobberpuhl, a Tennessee hedge-fund manager and part owner of the NHL’s Nashville Predators. Much as he loves talking hockey, Dobberpuhl gets even more excited when describing what he calls the “only home run I’ve hit in the last 20 years.” It happened on a field of dreams scratched out of the Nicaraguan forest. The Peter Hawkins Dobberpuhl Foundation, started by Joel and his wife, Holly, to honor the memory of their son who died as an infant, funded the multimillion-dollar purchase and development of 1,300 acres at a site called Tierra Nueva (New Earth). That land is putting 150 families on a firm path beyond poverty. Another 650 families in the area will benefit from the agricultural expertise of Agros and an improved regional water system associated with the venture. In finance, Joel honed his ability to find opportunities in out-of-the-way places. He has redirected more of his expertise to the charitable sector in recent years. The foundation is especially keen on so-called “social-impact investing” and other modes of philanthropy that can produce some return of capital. This allows money to be recycled into the undertaking, thereby extending the breadth or lifespan of the effort. Social-impact investing fit well with the Agros model, where one of the central founding principles was repayment. For the poor, Li writes, “Dignity does not come through handouts, but by achieving something as significant as land ownership by the sweat of their labor.” The repayments made by the occupants of the land do not equal the total investment made by Agros— which usually includes not only land but certain services, sometimes housing, maybe irrigation systems. But the payback is substantial, and invaluable both to the participants’ psychology and the organization’s financial reach. After John Sage of the Gates Foundation pointed the Dobberpuhls toward Agros in 2009, they visited several villages at different stages of the land-purchase process. They were impressed. Agros’s leadership has been just as impressed with them as generous donors and hands-on strategy partners. President Manning, who often uses Joel to test ideas, says, “Joel and Holly care that people have the opportunity to be who God created them to be.” A final beauty of the Agros ownership model is that it combines what is good for the poor with what is good for the land. Villages are designed to prevent erosion, efficient ovens are provided to reduce the need for firewood, reforestation renews acreage marred by war. The ultimate guarantor is that the farmers are owners. Because it is theirs, they take great pride in their land and treat it with care, knowing how valuable it is for generations to come. “The land to these families,” says Manning, “is the love of their life.” P WINTER 2015

ideas

Philanthropy’s Dangerous Rival

The clamor for limitless government threatens every private initiative BY GEORGE F. WILL

factions would give us the pluralist society in which civil society can flourish,” he wrote in Federalist No. 10. In Federalist No. 51, he argued not for a small republic but an extensive one in which opposite and rival interests operate in a kind of balance. That is the essence of our Madisonian system: a separation of powers, growing out of an historically based distrust of government’s imperial impulses, its metabolic urge to swallow all of society. Allowing independent powers to exist parallel to, and often in competition with, government is what preserves our freedom. Government by condescension Woodrow Wilson had a different view. Wilson was a progressive, and our first academic President. Not coincidentally, he was the first U.S. President to criticize the American founding, which he did not peripherally but root and branch—dismissing the Declaration as “Fourth of July sentiments.” Wilson said that government’s job was to see that “individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties.” Rights that can be adjusted by the government are rights that will be apportioned by the government. In the 1912 Presidential campaign, Wilson acknowledged that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power,” but then argued that the American system of limited government, of delegated and enumerated powers, was all very well when there were 4 million Americans living on the fringe of a continent, but not satisfactory anymore. A country united by copper wires and steel rails needs a more unified, energetic, and unlimited government. Wilson also noted that crises are periods of unusual opportunity for gaining a controlling and guiding influence on society. Therefore, leaders should maintain a PHILANTHROPY

crisis atmosphere at all times. Leaders are not there—in the boring language of Article 2 of the Constitution—to see that the laws are faithfully executed. That’s too cramped. In contrast, the founders designed a Newtonian Constitution held in equipoise by countervailing forces. But Wilson envisioned its replacement by a Darwinian Constitution; an evolving, living, and always permissive document. The government would be filled with benign, disinterested experts. Forget separation of powers. According to progressive doctrine, if all power is concentrated in Washington, and all Washington power in the executive branch, and all executive branch power in the President—who, at his discretion, can disperse power to expert disinterested czars—there will be nothing left over that the private sector has to do. Science will be brought to bear on society, and progress will bloom. Wilson got these ideas from Herbert Croly, whose 1909 treatise, The Promise of American Life, is still in print. Croly wrote, “The average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities.” “Unregenerate” Americans, he went on, would be “saved many costly perversions” if “the official schoolmasters are wise, and the pupils are neither truant nor insubordinate.” National life, that is, should be a school. Government is the principal, stern but caring. “The exigencies of such schooling frequently demand severe coercive measures,” said Croly. “But what schooling George F. Will is a syndicated columnist, commentator, and author. This is adapted by the editors from his talk at The Philanthropy Roundtable’s 2014 annual meeting, which can be heard in its entirety at PhilanthropyRoundtable.org/ annual/2014_ annual_meeting_resources_thursday.

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The vitality of the American philanthropic community is one of the wonders of the world, but today it is in danger. A robust philanthropic sector requires a large protected social space from which government is largely fenced out. But the government today knows no limits, will respect no boundaries, and increasingly will tolerate no rivals. This turn of events has deep roots in American history, well represented by the competing ideas of two graduates of my alma mater, Princeton. It’s James Madison, class of 1771, against Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879. Right now, Wilson is winning. James Madison represented the natural rights doctrine that inherently limits government. In this view, the most important word in our most important document, the Declaration of Independence, is the word “secure”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.…That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men…” Governments don’t give us rights, they merely secure them. The government is inherently limited by its job of protecting the most important things, which pre-exist government and do not come from it. This preserves an enormous private space in which civil society and philanthropic institutions can prosper. Before Madison, political philosophers had agreed that if democracy were to be possible anywhere, it had to be in a small, homogenous society—something like Rousseau’s Geneva or Pericles’s Athens. The assumption was that factions and pluralism were a problem for democracy. Madison turned this on its head. The worst outcome of democratic politics, he held, would be a tyranny of the majority. “A saving multiplicity of

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does not?” Croly was more candid than his modern acolytes. Alexis de Tocqueville predicted all of this, famously describing what he called a soft despotism: “Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.” This image of citizens as timid and compliant creatures over which the government is the shepherd, which terrified Tocqueville, is not far from the ideal of Croly and Wilson and their contemporary heirs. They want our history to unfold under the direction of a clerisy uniquely privileged with expertise, and because of that expertise, uniquely qualified to govern. Because of their unique qualification to government, they should not have to suffer rival sources of social authority and power in the private sector. Progressives acknowledge no limits in principle on the expansion of state power. This necessarily gives rise to government by condescension.

George Will exhorts donors to resist state encroachments on civil society.

later is still a neighborhood of immigrants. Today, they’re from Latin America and Asia. Then, they were from Eastern Europe. Today, 138 Griffith St. is a barbershop. Then, it was a men’s tailoring and pressing shop run by Joseph Meged, a 49-year-old Polish immigrant and father. He committed his crime in broad daylight. He brazenly put a sign in his shop window advertising that he would press a man’s suit for 35 cents. This was the second year of the New Deal, progressivism incarnate. The progressives knew that in a depression prices fall; therefore, a recovery could be had if prices were forced to rise. To force prices to rise, outlawing competition was necessary. Competition and price-cutting became anti-social. Progressives established the National Recovery Administration, which wrote codes of noncompetition. Businesses were encouraged to put Blue Eagle posters on their shop windows and fly the Blue Eagle flag over their factories. (The Philadelphia Eagles football team was founded at this time and named in When Uncle Sam knows best In April 1934, a crime occurred at 138 honor of the NRA, not the sharp-taloned Griffith St. in Jersey City, New Jersey. I independent creature that soars above our recently visited the area, which 80 years plains and mountains.) WINTER 2015

The National Recovery Administration said the proper price for pressing a man’s suit was 40 cents. Joseph Meged said it was 35 cents. So Meged was arrested, fined $100 (the median family income that year was $1,500), and sentenced to 30 days in jail. He wasn’t the only one. Prosecutions occurred all over this country under a government that demanded a monopoly on power right down to the price of pressing a man’s suit. The judge sentencing this poor Polish immigrant thought this was a teachable moment in the national schoolhouse. So he cancelled the fine and the sentence and hauled the defendant back into the courtroom so he could correct Meged like a parent. According to the New York Times, the judge “gave him a little lecture on the importance of cooperation as opposed to individualism.” Meged left the courtroom, went back to his shop, and replaced his sign which had so offended with the government poster of the Blue Eagle. The New York Times reported the next morning that Meged was a free man once more. Which is true, so long as one defines freedom as embracing the government’s propaganda symbol under the threat of fine and imprisonment. 51

ideas

Older but no wiser Economist James Buchanan won a Nobel Prize in 1986 for what is called public-choice theory. It postulates that government always protects its own powers and privileges, and that the factions within government act in self-interested ways. Public-choice teaches, for instance, that government has a permanent incentive for large deficit spending so that it can deliver current benefits while shoving the cost onto future generations, which cannot exact punishment with their votes. Today we borrow from the future to finance expanding consumption of government goods and services. In the process we ensnare ourselves in an ever-thickening web of dependency. The two largest financial transactions the average American family makes— to get a mortgage and to get a loan for college tuition—are now transactions with the federal government. In the last six years, the number of Americans on food stamps has more than doubled. For every two private-sector jobs we created in the last 15 years, one American went on disability. We have now reached the tipping point at which literally a majority of Americans are either employees of the federal government or its clients. The Troubled Asset Relief Program was supposed to be for buying toxic assets. Instead, it bought entire industries and increased the dependency of the private sector on the federal government. Banks, under new regulations, are increasingly public utilities susceptible to and dependent upon a government that would dictate credit allocation. Campaign-finance reformers make it the government’s job to decide for the American people the right quantity, content, and timing of political speech. What does the federal bureaucracy think about vouchers that let families make independent choices? It opposes them. Private property—formerly thought of as a zone of sovereignty—is now at the mercy of environmental controls and eminent domain seizures, which, after the Kelo decision, can take buildings and plots from one private owner 52

and give them to another simply because the second private owner may pay more taxes to the political class. You can keep your health-care plan, except if it does not pass government muster, and in any case you now know you’re dependent on the government. Even before the Affordable Care Act was passed, the majority of every health-care dollar went through the government. The welfare state has made today’s most active voting bloc, retiring baby boomers, heavily dependent on government, and resigned to their dependency. And so it goes. Where does energizing change come from? Ted Kennedy once said that all change in America begins at the ballot box—a very clear statement of the progressive view that government is the energizer and organizer of creativity. This was echoed by Vice President Biden, who said that “every single great idea” of the past few centuries “has required government vision and government incentive.” This view is refuted by every page of American history. Over three centuries it has mostly been restless businessmen, close-knit families and communities, and inventive social entrepreneurs who have created the enterprises, colleges, character-shaping organizations, and talented individuals that have propelled the United States into an unprecedented spot in human history. Very few of our revolutions began at the ballot box. Most began with the spark of individual genius, struck in virtuous homes, fed with tinder from cooperating fellow private creators, and fanned into open flame by the signals and rewards transmitted by free markets in ideas and goods. With the government grabbing more and more of our society’s controlling levers,

it remains to be seen if our social and economic triumphs of the past continue in the future. The reason the temperature has become so uncomfortably hot in American politics today is because the stakes are now so high. Progressives have developed so much momentum behind their demand that the government should direct the evolution of society that failing to develop at least a defensive ability to pull strings in Washington can damage even the most fertile economic or social entrepreneur. The great economist Joseph Schumpeter long ago predicted the conquest of the private sector by the public sector. Break all the little platoons in society with regulations, laws, and taxes, and there will be no intermediary institutions to buffer and moderate state guidance of individuals. Tocqueville would certainly recognize the soft despotism in today’s nanny state. He would, however, also see that the American people have within them reserves of independence that are not yet eradicated. The fermenting pluralism that he marveled at is still alive in two important sectors: our powerfully fecund entrepreneurs, with all the commercial power they can bring to bear on a problem, and our radically decentralized philanthropic sector, which sustains a civil society that still manages many of our most vital social functions. So far, entrepreneurs and philanthropists (they are often one and the same, in both their small and large variants) have maintained much of their vitality. But it would be a huge and a lethal mistake for these two independent forces not to understand that they are in the cross hairs of a movement that aims to delegitimize all non-state actors. Whether they are conscious of it or not, American philanthropists are on the front lines of an epic battle, and one that cannot be lost. P

Tocqueville would recognize the soft despotism in today’s nanny state, but he would also see that Americans’ independence has not yet been eradicated. PHILANTHROPY

books Save the Pawns

Too many aid agencies treat people in developing countries like chess pieces BY TATE WATKI N S

The Tyranny of Experts opens with a striking anecdote: In 2010, soldiers removed 20,000 people from their Ohio farmland at gunpoint. The farmers and their families had lived on the tract for decades, but they had to make way for a British company’s forestry plantation, a project that was backed by the World Bank’s private-investment arm. The soldiers burned some residents’ grain stores and houses, in the process killing an eight-year-old boy trapped inside a building. You might struggle to recall the atrocity. Author William Easterly explains why. While the events he reports happened as described, they didn’t unfold in rural Ohio. The setting was East Africa— specifically Uganda. Easterly has devoted much of his career to analyzing global development, a catch-all term for efforts by rich countries to economically improve poor ones. These undertakings have varying goals—some aim to increase access to education, some to decrease the rate at which young children die from disease, others to teach tropical farmers better growing techniques. A professor at New York University and a former World Bank economist, Easterly has for years critiqued the technocratic approaches that he says dominate the field. The subtitles of his first two books illustrate his perspective: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Harm and So Little Good, and Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. “Morally neutral approaches to poverty do not exist,” Easterly writes in his latest book. “Any approach to development will either respect the rights of the poor or it will violate them.” There are real risks to liberty in the dominant approach he describes today: a class of experts (often brought in from foreign countries) works with government bureaucrats in a poor country to decide the future of its people. “The conventional approach to economic development, to making poor countries rich,” he writes, “is based on a technocratic illusion: the belief that poverty is a purely technical problem amenable to such technical solutions as fertilizers, antibiotics, or nutritional supplements.” In Uganda, the World Bank experts saw the forestry project as a solution to poverty, and had no objection to seeing the government displace thousands of local residents by force. Yet the

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor By William Easterly

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timber plantation, Easterly notes, was no help to the families who were forced from their land. It’s hard to believe that the farmers’ land rights would have been so easily discarded—or that the resulting violence would be so obscure—if these decisions had indeed been imposed on Ohioans. This book finds instructive anecdotes in many historical times and places—pre-communist China, Colombia during “La Violencia,” Benin after it escapes colonialism. Easterly makes clear that today’s consensus about how to promote development predates its “official birth” under Harry Truman in 1949. He goes back to Woodrow Wilson’s 1919, when colonial and racial condescension was rife, and the world knew less about the damage the “best and brightest” can do to any society, even with the best of intentions. The default approach of development organizations, he says, is implicit acceptance, if not outright support, of whoever happens to control a country. Poor citizens are rarely consulted in any meaningful way. Experts who see poverty as a set of technical problems ignore how political institutions—or political oppressions—have created those problems. Too many modern development efforts, Easterly argues, wind up overlooking the commonest cause of poverty: “the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights.” Throughout this book, Easterly returns over and over to three modern illusions. The first is the belief that conscious design can bring about development much more quickly and easily than spontaneous solutions—which the author insists will surface wherever people are afforded economic and political rights. A related theme is that technocrats favor the collective abstraction of a “national interest” over the reality of individual interests. The third theme is that outsiders often ignore historical, cultural, and local considerations, approaching a poor country as if it were a “blank slate.” Easterly describes how foreign economists advised Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s p ost-independence dictator, to use government investment to develop industry. Nkrumah followed their prescription. To raise the funds needed, he taxed cocoa, one of the few industries already succeeding in Ghana—but a crop which happened to grow in the mountains inhabited by his main opposition. The taxes eventually throttled Ghana’s cocoa business and wider economy, while Nkrumah exerted himself more and more to repress the opposition. Easterly’s examples are sometimes more loose anecdotes than continuous narrative. But they support 53

The Slow Boat to Utopia Ten years in, the ballyhooed Millennium Villages Project is mostly a bust B Y T RAV IS KAV U LLA

The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty By Nina Munk

Tate Watkins is a journalist and coffee-farm developer in Haiti. 54

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Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University economist and celebrity academic, made a splash ten years ago with his plan to engineer the end of poverty as we know it. His philanthropically funded Millennium Villages Project (MVP) showered a few model African communities with aid, for the sake of demonstrating that their abject poverty was the result of surmountable cultural barriers coupled with a lack of outside investment. The professor (who had done some admirable work helping stanch inflation in several countries emerging from communism) had it all figured out. Sachs’s book was a bestseller, and then Hollywood anointed him as the savior of Africa in such works as the MTV documentary The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa. (Sachs likens his project to an “Extreme Village Makeover.”) In Nina Munk’s book The Idealist, however, he is a much more ambivalent figure. His passion for the poor pushes aside apathy and cynicism, but also prudence and attention to unintended consequences. His intelligence is commanding, but leaves no room for other input. Against sludgy bureaucracies and inept politicians he is a furious force, but his righteous indignation does not distinguish between louts and perceptive critics. Munk spent six years shadowing Sachs and reporting on his village projects. She sat with him in presidential palaces where he attempted to rouse Tanzania’s leaders and Uganda’s president to action. She watched him shout down a malariologist he encountered on an airplane. She observed as “villagers danced for him, dignitaries put on their Sunday suits and praised him, dozens of photos were snapped, and just before his arrival, schools and clinics were scrubbed clean.” Munk set out to write the story of the MVP without any preconceptions beyond her expertise as a financial journalist. Sachs’s enthusiasm was infectious, and his philosophy seemed logical at the start: poor villagers dwell in such extreme poverty, with so many interlocking problems, that any single intervention would be worthless. A chronic malaria patient, for instance, does not have the energy for entrepreneurship, so “development” in a capitalist sense is impossible. Sachs’s solution: pour money into everything at once,

Nina Munk

his thesis that residents of poor countries rarely have any say over how billions of development dollars are channeled. And that few of the development experts who wield that power ever question this arrangement. Today’s development problems, Easterly argues, come down to a “debate that never happened” between two Nobel-winning economists of the twentieth century. Swede Gunnar Myrdal saw national governments as the necessary mechanism of development. “From the development point of view,” Myrdal wrote, “the prevailing attitudes and patterns of individual performance in life and at work” are “deficient.” He advocated “putting obligations on people and supporting them by force” so that national development could be attained. Austrian Friedrich Hayek, on the other hand, championed the benefits that arise from a society’s spontaneous order, in which individual rights allow people to freely choose, and they migrate naturally to the optimal arrangements for exchanging goods, services, and ideas. Hayek saw no reason that poor societies couldn’t prosper in the same way that Western ones had centuries earlier. The missing ingredient was simply giving the residents of impoverished countries those same economic and political rights. Myrdal’s view won over the international aid apparatus, says Easterly, because it’s the one in which technocracy is necessary. If expert design instead of evolved solutions is placed at the heart of development, then central planners will have lots of job opportunities. If history, language, and local knowledge are defined as irrelevant or even retrograde, then many pedigreed experts will need to be brought in from the outside. “The sleight of hand that focuses attention on technical solutions,” Easterly writes, “while covering up violations of the rights of real people, is the moral tragedy of development today.” Philanthropists face some of the same risks as government agencies when it comes to helping the overseas poor. Private donors too can be tempted, as an illusory “shortcut,” to apply their expertise to help a population without respecting the individuals themselves. But philanthropists can also make decisions, much more nimbly than government agencies, to avoid actions that undercut the individual rights and dignity of poor people. These things, wise helpers will recognize, are not only as important as material needs on moral grounds, they are also the only reliable long-term bases for material prosperity.

Nina Munk

from public health to infrastructure to agronomy, with the hope of evolving a foundation for greater development. He started with an initial gift of $50 million from George Soros and $70 million from other donors. His projects were organized by five-year plans, but all too predictably the villages did not keep pace with the New York office’s script. Munk focuses on two model locations. The first is Dertu, a dusty crossroads for camel-herding Somali nomads in northeast Kenya. In addition to p ublic-health and education interventions (malaria nets, free lunches to entice children to attend school, employing itinerant teachers to follow the herdsmen), the plan for Dertu calls for changing the quality and marketability of livestock—the region’s only commodity. The MVP planners, however, collide with local culture. They fail at their principal goal of opening a local livestock market where a more liquid trade in camels could occur without the dayslong trek to the region’s capital. The problem? “The whole concept of selling one’s livestock is antithetical to Somali values,” Munk learns. Rather than a commodity like cotton or oranges, camels are “an end in themselves.” They are a signifier of a Somali herdsman’s manliness, honor, piety, and other virtues that have little place in most Westerners’ notion of “development.” What about the occasions where Somalis, in a pinch, do reluctantly sell their animals? The belief that the long journey to a distant market was inhibiting trade was also misplaced. As the local MVP director told Munk after ruminating on his failure, “These pastoralists, they will travel even 400 kilometers to get an extra hundred shillings.” Time is not money when you are a nomad. In his writings, technocratic Sachs is dismissive of culture as a barrier to development. “What look like immutable social values,” he argues, “turn out to be highly malleable to economic circumstances and opportunities.” He is proven wrong by the residents of Dertu and other spots in the real world. Many of the people Sachs sets out to aid don’t necessarily even regard themselves as poor. The Dertuites style themselves the lineal descendants of Abraham, take pride in their way of life, and are uninterested in exchanging it for something else. From the locals’ point of view, the fruits of Sachs’s intervention in their home region are depressing. Rather than living on the range, some of their neighbors become “drop-outs” who live on handouts. The people of Ruhiira, a lusher outpost among the rolling hills of southwestern Uganda, are not as

MVP planners tried to open a livestock market, failing to realize that Somalis do not sell their camels.

The program’s sudden largesse on select villages attracted itinerants and squatters, giving rise to shantytowns.

culturally impermeable as the Somalis of Dertu. Yet here too, the project’s big schemes run up against local notions of economy and agriculture. Growing the staple crops of a subsistence lifestyle (like matoke, the bananas that are Uganda’s most popular foodstuff ) is deemed undesirable by the MVP bureaucracy. They push food crops that are less prized but have commercial promise (like maize), or specialties that could command a high price on the international market (like cardamom). Sachs’s regional director convinces some Ruhiirans to grow maize, and with the purchase of fertilizer, a laudable bumper crop is produced. But selling the output proves nearly impossible. Transport devours the profit margin. Residents become desperate to trade so they can buy the foods they actually want to eat (they regard corn as “school food” or “prison food”). Soon, with the maize either spoiling or being sold at giveaway prices, the market collapses. Villagers ask, not unreasonably, why don’t we just grow what we like to consume? Sachs, meanwhile, cannot understand why Ugandans and other Africans aren’t making greater use of fertilizer. Drawing on the work of Esthler Duflo, an M.I.T. economist who has worked closely on the subject, Munk notes that at the beginning of the planting season “nearly every farmer intended to use and could afford to buy at least a small amount of fertilizer.” Yet when the time came, for their own reasons, only one third of them did. The MVP project’s massive free distribution of malaria nets creates other problems. The handouts put local vendors out of business. Then there is no supply when nets have to be replaced. Munk’s book details the premature babies who die because the village to which GE has donated electric incubators has no electricity. The Millennium Villages Project was supposed to have reached successful completion this year. Instead, the project grinds along with few triumphs and no end in sight. Certain humbler long-term efforts that worked with human nature and local culture (like the land-ownership transfers described on pages 46-49), instead of against them, could have wrought much bigger effects for far less money. But of course that wouldn’t have been as exciting as building a utopian community. Travis Kavulla has worked in East Africa, and studied economic development as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.

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Annual Meeting 2014

Our 23rd Annual Meeting was held October 9-10, 2014 in Salt Lake City. Holding our gathering in Utah, the most charitable of all of the United States, provided donors a firsthand look at the power of American generosity. Keynote speakers included columnist George Will, Eric Greitens of the Mission Continues, Team Rubicon’s Jake Wood, leading paleontologist Jack Horner, Children’s Scholarship Fund alum Jason Tejada, and Brent Adams of Brigham Young University’s Animation Department. Jon Huntsman Sr., funder of a leading cancer institute, received the William E. Simon Prize for Philanthropic Leadership.

left to right: 1. George Will, syndicated columnist 2. Robert Woodson, Center for

Neighborhood Enterprise; Jubal García, Outcry in the Barrio 3. Andrew Yang, Venture For America; Shaila Ittycheria, Enstitute; Stanley Thompson, Heinz Endowments 4. Steve PonTell, The California Endowment 5. Diana Davis Spencer, Diana Davis Spencer Foundation; Ginny VanderHart, DeVos Family Foundations

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left to right: 6. Carrie Morgridge and John Farnam, Morgridge Family Foundation

7. Steve Green, Hobby Lobby

8. American Heritage School’s Lyceum Orchestra 9. Kathryn and Menlo Smith, Sunmark Foundation 10. Brent McKinley, GFC Foundation; Edward and Suzanne Birch, Samuel B. and Margaret C. Mosher Foundation 11. Jason Tejada, Build America Mutual Assurance Company; Darla Romfo,

Children’s Scholarship Fund; Janice Riddell, William E.

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Simon Foundation

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left to right: 12. Marty Zupan, Institute for Humane Studies, George Mason University; Art Pope, John William Pope Foundation

13. B. J. Steinbrook, The Challenge Foundation; Checker

Finn, Thomas B. Fordham Institute; Earl Whipple, John Templeton Foundation 14. John Huntsman Sr., The Huntsman Foundation; Peter Simon, William E. Simon Foundation 15. Gineen Bresso, Jen Klaassens, Jan Preble, The Wasie Foundation 16. Howard Husock, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; Stephen Moore,

Heritage Foundation 17. Grant Coates,

The Miles Foundation; David Riggs, The Philanthropy

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Allison Mayer

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Roundtable

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Choice and Quality in K-12 Over 125 donors from across the U.S. gathered on October 28-29 in Indianapolis for Choice and Quality: Equipping Cities to Transform K-12 Education. Set in a city and state leading national K-12 reforms, donors learned new strategies to attract entrepreneurs and create the conditions for all schools to flourish. Attendees visited innovative schools, including two schools operated by Goodwill Industries aimed at developing critical job skills, the mixed-income private school Oaks Academy, and Carpe Diem and Phalen Leadership Academies, which use online content to personalize and augment teacher-driven learning. Attendees also engaged with two architects of the regionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reforms: former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson, and former state superintendent Tony Bennett.

left to right: 1. Al Hubbard, E&A Industries; Fred Klipsch, Klipsch Group

2. Peg Tyre, Edwin Gould Foundation; Phalen Leadership Academy student 3. Joe Ricketts, Hugo Enterprises; Oaks Academy teacher 4. Steve Friess, Lynn and Foster Friess Family Foundation; Polly Friess, Connemara Fund 5. Lorie Howley, Howley Family Foundation; Kellie Peters, Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation

Allison Mayer

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president’s note Restoring the American Dream in 2015

For over three centuries, America has provided more opportunity to more people than any other country in the history of the world. That great tradition is now in danger. The economic challenge of our times is not inequality. It is the decline of upward mobility. America has always been a land of rich and poor, but our poor historically have had the opportunity to better their lives and lay the groundwork for their children or grandchildren to enter the middle class. Today there are tens of millions of Americans whose incomes are stagnating, who own little wealth or property, and who see little hope for their families’ future. Philanthropists can help to restore the American Dream by addressing three great crises in our society. The first is the crisis in education. One third of American fourth-graders cannot read. Three quarters of twelfthgraders cannot meet world standards for math. In an ever more competitive global economy, this is a recipe for disaster. Americans will be unable to rise and flourish unless we stay ahead of the competition in the knowledge and skills needed for the twenty-first century economy. The second is the crisis in the labor market. Five years into an economic recovery, 16 percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are without a job. Joblessness of this magnitude for men in their prime working years is unprecedented since the Great Depression. Fifteen percent of male veterans aged 25 to 34—a highly employable population—aren’t even in the labor force. 60

They neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third is the crisis in the family. Businesses rise and fall in a dynamic economy. To sustain hope for the future and to protect people from falling between the cracks during hard times, it is crucially important to have both a public safety net and a resilient civil society of strong families, religious congregations, and communities where neighbors help neighbors. Unfortunately the growth of the public safety net in recent decades has coincided with the disintegration of civil society and the collapse of marriage in white, Latino, and African-American working-class neighborhoods. It is especially catastrophic that 40 percent of American children today are born out of wedlock. While many single mothers do a heroic job raising their children, the growth of single-parent households is economically, educationally, and emotionally devastating for children. A landmark recent study led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty revealed that the single most important determinant of regional variation in upward mobility rates in America is the percentage of children growing up in two-parent families. As Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution has shown, “for every child lifted out of poverty by a social program, another one is entering poverty as a result of the continued breakdown of the American family.” The good news is that philanthropists and the social entrepreneurs they support are finding solutions to all these crises. One of the greatest accomplishments of philanthropy in the past decade is the emergence of multiple charter-school networks where low-income children achieve high academic performance. During the PHILANTHROPY

next ten years, philanthropists have the opportunity to build on this record and to fund dramatic breakthroughs in the training of teachers, the advance of personalized digital instruction, and the expansion of school-choice initiatives. Organizations such as Project Lead the Way, Reasoning Mind, and the National Math and Science Initiative show the potential for transforming math, science, and technology education. To improve the labor market, philanthropists can build on the success of community colleges, apprenticeships, work-study programs, and job-training ventures that focus on teaching skills that businesses look for in employees. Since new firms have been the great engine of job growth in recent decades, the promotion of entrepreneurship is an especially promising philanthropic strategy. Funders can also explore public-policy reforms learning from states such as Texas, which accounted for one third of all America’s net job growth between 2003 and 2013. First Things First of Chattanooga has reduced divorces by 29 percent, reduced teen out-of-wedlock births by 62 percent, and increased the marriage rate by 16 percent in Hamilton County, Tennessee. Made possible by philanthropy, it offers a national model for reversing the decline of the family and creating a culture in which healthy marriages can thrive. Inventive donor actions like these can push success and mobility back into American dreams.

Adam Meyerson President

The Philanthropy Roundtable

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