Journal Article Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools Get access Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools. By Steven Conn. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. x, 277 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Paper, $21.95.) David C Hammack David C Hammack Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 109, Issue 4, March 2023, Pages 907–908, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad010 Published: 01 March 2023

Phoebe Apperson Hearst explores the thinking and strategies of a middle-class border-state girl as she became an influential Gilded Age philanthropist. Phoebe Hearst's philanthropy ranged widely, from San Francisco schools to women's rights, from the Young Women's Christian Association to the research university. Hearst (1842–1919) helped many young women gain the education, credentials, and rights required for self-support and careers. Alexandra M. Nickliss seeks especially to clarify Hearst's thinking as she moved, step by careful step, from work in her teenage years as a Cumberland Presbyterian home companion and country school teacher of limited education to marriage with George Hearst, a wealthy man twenty years her senior, to motherhood, and to civic prominence. She shows how Hearst drew strength and knowledge from lasting relationships with her son's wet nurse, a remarkable woman school administrator, prominent museum leaders, and many others. As Hearst coped with a San Francisco from which her husband was usually absent, she found herself through repeated independent trips to Europe, through social affairs, and through giving to medical and educational causes in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. When her husband died in 1891 during his term as a U.S. senator, she accepted control of his complex business assets (worth between $10 and $20 million or perhaps more), just as her son, William Randolph, needed funds for his newspaper empire. Nickliss leaves to others the study of her engagement with the family's mines and company towns across the United States and in Mexico and Peru, although these were likely relevant to her philanthropy.

The United States offers a challenging case for the comparative study of philanthropic foundations. Depending on definition, foundation numbers total 80,000 or 130,000. They hold comparatively large assets per capita, though they vary enormously in assets; most are quite small, and compared with government and profit-seeking business, their wealth and their influence are very limited. Public controversies shape and confuse much of the discussion about them: the increasing inequality in the distribution of wealth, the continuing subordination of people of color and women, the impact of money on elections and on public policies and international relations, the prominence of the largest endowed, nonprofit universities and hospitals. Seeking to evaluate the critiques as well as the foundations’ positive contributions, the U.S. researcher encounters all “the combined complexities” that bedevil comparative international studies of foundations. Deriving their corporate charters from the states, they operate under diverse legal environments and vary in self-understanding and operations. American foundations prize their autonomy, though regulation denies them the privacies and choices available to business firms and the superrich. Historically close affiliations with religion brings many funds under constitutional provisions that restrict public access to information. Although the data are incomplete and superficial, high-quality nonprofit websites and archives do provide much federally mandated and other data. Focusing more on change and the protection of values than on relief of basic need, they underwrite highly diverse and competing purposes; many of them promote the leading universities, hospitals, and arts organizations in their home regions. Recent donors, determined to achieve defined outcomes, have increasingly used community foundation or commercial advised funds rather than independent foundations. Finding that their resources are too limited to advance favored policy or social changes, a number of celebrated funds have recently sought to increase their influence through expertise, collaboration with communities and other organizations including businesses, supplementing grants with loans, and other initiatives.

The Capitalist and the Critic: J. P. Morgan, Roger Fry, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By Charles Molesworth . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN: 978-1-4773-0840-0. - Volume 91 Issue 3

American philanthropy supported both religious and secular ideals during the decades on either side of 1900. Through philanthropy, Americans reinforced and challenged divisions over religion, race, science, and national identity. Philanthropy did not directly confront poverty. Nor was philanthropy ever sufficient to support its cherished religious and nonprofit organizations, which relied on government support in the forms of tax exemption, outright government subsidies, and earned income. To persuade donors, volunteers, members, legislatures, courts, parishioners, students, patients, and others to support them, charitable organizations claimed they were simply “doing good.” Because people deeply disagreed as to what is “the good,” charitable organizations and their donors reflected commitment to ideals as well as disparity and division. Increasingly, charities pursued religious aims that were more and more varied, as well as more and more purposes that were secular.

In Age of System, Hunter Heyck explains why social scientists?shaped by encounters with the ongoing "organizational revolution" and its revolutionary technologies of communication and control?embraced a new and extremely influential perspective on science and nature, one that conceived of all things in terms of system, structure, function, organization, and process. He also explores how this emerging unified theory of human behavior implied a troubling similarity between humans and machines, with freighted implications for individual liberty and self-direction.

Conflicting cultural and religious values pose challenges - challenges that are too often ignored - to efforts to comprehend and to solve tough social problems. Value-conflict challenges call for much more thoughtful attention both by analysts seeking to understand the sources of problems, and by advocates for particular solutions. This contribution to the ARNOVA Policy Brief series draws on a wide range of historical and social research to advance its argument for recognizing value conflicts.

Inderjeet Parmar describes the several Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, together with the Ford Foundation, as important to “elite dominance of U.S. foreign affairs” and to “creating national and global networks of intellectuals committed to a Progressive-era state-building project for globalist ends” (256 –257). He sees this project as having begun long before 1917 as part of a persistent “cold war,” well described by the words of William Appleman Williams as “an ongoing confrontation between modern Western capitalism and its domestic and international critics” (121). Parmar argues that the “big 3” foundations advanced this global capitalist project in several ways. During the 1920s and 1930s, Rockefeller and Carnegie funds sought to discourage isolationism and encourage an internationalist outlook by financing international studies and area studies at Yale, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the Social Science Research Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Institute of Pacific Relations; by promoting discussion groups organized by the Foreign Policy Association; and by underwriting public opinion research at Princeton. In Parmar’s account, the project continued without pause after World War II as organizations and individuals funded by these foundations participated in U.S. and British efforts that created the Bretton Woods system, mounted the American studies movement in the U.S., Britain, and Europe, and sought to introduce European leaders to Americans through summer seminars in Salzburg and at Harvard (the latter led by Henry Kissinger) and through the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Parmar sees subsequent foundation support for Asian studies and African studies, the Ford Foundation’s efforts to introduce what it saw as modern economics into Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s, contributions by all three foundations to build a substantial modern university in Nigeria, and Ford’s engagement with economic and development education in Chile, as continuations of the same project.

America's grantmaking foundations have grown rapidly over the course of recent decades, even in the face of financial and economic crises. Foundations have a great deal of freedom, enjoy widespread legitimacy, and wield considerable influence. In this book, David Hammack and Helmut Anheier follow up their edited volume, American Foundations , with a comprehensive historical account of what American foundations have done with that independence and power. While philanthropic foundations play important roles in other parts of the world, the U.S. sector stands out as exceptional. Nowhere else are they so numerous, prominent, or autonomous. What have been the main contributions of philanthropic foundations to American society? And what might the future hold for them? A Versatile American Institution considers foundations in a new way. Previous accounts typically focused narrowly on their organization, donors, and leaders, and their intentions - but not on the outcome of philanthropy. Rather than looking at foundations in a vacuum, Hammack and Anheier consider their roles and contributions in the context of their times and their economic and political circumstances.