Cracks in the Foundation:Ê
Frederick T. Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and the China Medical Board

John S. Baick
Western New England College¹

As his lengthy career neared an end, Rockefeller advisor Frederick T. Gates made a bold and unsuccessful proposal to the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1924, asking them to invest $265 million in the China Medical Board. Founded in 1914, the China Medical Board (CMB) was one of the earliest ventures of the Rockefeller Foundation, the most prominent of the Progressive Era's giant secular philanthropic foundations. The CMB was also the last major philanthropic effort by Gates, the man most responsible for shifting the Rockefellers from denominational charity to international philanthropy. After a decade in existence, the CMB had not come close to realizing the hopes of its founder. Only with this massive, unpre- cedented infusion of capital, Gates explained, could his dream "spring into existence full panoplied."2 This dream was never fully realized because of its astonishingly grandiose scale and complexity: its goal was to make Chinese medical care the finest in the world, and in the process close the chasm that he saw between denominational Christianity and the needs of the modern world. Although the story of the China Medical Board is the story of a failed vision, it also affords a glimpse of the cracks at the base of modern American philanthropy.	1
American secular capitalist philanthropy has its origins in the ill-defined border between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, as newly-created foundations—brazenly confident in their inevitable success—sought to use their founders' immense wealth to change American society and the world. These foundations embody some of the hallmarks of Progressive thinking, such as the faith in experts and in their ability to address social problems. But these new institutions also reveal many of the weaknesses of the era, including elitism, arrogance, and naivetŽ. It is ironic that these institutions were called foundations, for they were far from deep or secure, but enmeshed in the agendas of their founders, officers, and the nation. As a crucial building block for the Progressive Era, foundations were almost laughably flawed in their conception and contradictions. Indeed, a closer examination of the most notable of these foundations—the Rockefeller Foundation—reveals profound cracks in matters of ideology and implementation.	2
To understand this tension, one should start with Frederick T. Gates, the driving force behind the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation. Gates was less a representative Progressive figure than a transi- tional figure from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. His creation of the China Medical Board is an important case study to examine the opportunities and contradictions of capitalist philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation has been subject to a broad range of scholarship ranging from the hagiographic to the hypercritical. The history of one piece of the Rockefeller Foundation suggests that there is a need to revise and complicate our understanding of one of the earliest and most influential of the secular charitable foundations.	3
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