| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Foundations: An Investigative History. By Mark Dowie. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. xl, 320 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-262-04189-8.)

The high-profile philanthropy of Bill Gates and George Soros is evoking the era of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and the emergence of general-purpose foundations early in the twentieth century. Mark Dowie, a prize-winning, left-leaning journalist, thinks it is time to take stock of these important institutions, whose numbers and endowments have grown substantially. He is not impressed with what he finds. He characterizes foundations as cautious, conservative "drag anchors." Grant dollars, Dowie says, have gone disproportionately to the elite professional classes, university-based scientists, and think-tank experts to pursue unimaginative work that perpetuates the status quo and with it the institutions that create wealth and, as it happens, more foundations. . . .

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