Century Foundation records

1906-2010 [bulk 1960-1996]

The Century Foundation is a non-profit research institution headquartered in New York City. The foundation supports the study of political and economic issues in the United States through the funding of research projects—primarily books and reports, but also pamphlets, papers, committees, task forces, conferences, seminars, and educational films—with the goal of analyzing and improving public policy. While the Century Foundation has supported research on the American economy and its effects on the democracy since its founding, funded authors and task forces have also examined issues surrounding the media, education policy, social justice, the electoral system, social security, and foreign policy.

The organization was founded as The Cooperative League by entrepreneur Edward Filene. With his brother Lincoln, Edward Filene ran the William Filene's Sons company, responsible for Filene's department store and Filene's Basement located in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. The Cooperative League formed in 1906, and its earliest purpose was to study economic and industrial issues. Through the organization's work, Filene hoped to directly support the establishment of credit unions in the United States. The Cooperative League was headed by a board of three trustees: the Filene brothers and Louis Brandeis, an attorney and later Supreme Court justice. The board met annually, though there is scant documentation of its earliest years or the specific types of activities the board pursued prior to the 1920s.

In 1919, the Cooperative League was incorporated in Massachusetts, and the headquarters remained in Boston until the organization's move to New York City in 1931. Edward Filene transferred 4,172 shares of stock in his company to the organization in 1922 to create its endowment. Concurrent with the stock transfer, Filene renamed the group the Twentieth Century Fund. The organization's newly defined purpose, as stated in its charter, was "the improvement of economic, industrial, civic, and educational conditions" by means of study, research, publication, and the support of charitable institutions. Edward Filene's vision for the Twentieth Century Fund was one heavily rooted in progressivism—he aimed for the foundation's work to propose effective, constructive, forward-thinking policy solutions through books, reports, and pamphlets that were intellectually accessible to government policy makers and the general public rather than strictly an academic audience. New trustees gradually joined to increase the membership of the board to nine members by the late 1920s, including Bruce Bliven, editor of The New Republic, and Henry S. Dennison, a Massachusetts manufacturer.

During the 1920s, while the fund ran with only the support of trustees, Filene, and his secretary, its efforts were concentrated on providing grant assistance to outside research committees and organizations. The fund provided the sole source of funding for the Credit Union National Extension Bureau, and slowly expanded to grant financial support for other organizations working for issues that aligned with Filene's business interests and liberal beliefs, such as the International Management Institute, the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, and the National League of Women Voters. In 1928, the fund hired Evans Clark as the first director. Clark undertook the organization's first significant internally-supported research project, American Foundations and Their Fields, to determine which fields of study were supported and served by existing philanthropic foundations in the United States. The foundations survey showed that the study of economics received a disproportionately small amount of funding from American foundations, leading the Twentieth Century Fund's trustees to ground its own research program in economic policy and social problems.

Under Clark's leadership, the fund hired staff to support its research activities, including economist J. Frederic Dewhurst and research associate Louise Fields. This period also saw the Twentieth Century Fund begin to limit its financial support of outside projects and organizations in favor of concentrating efforts on the foundation's own projects. By 1937, the entirety of the fund's yearly income was devoted to internally developed and supported projects. During board meetings, trustees deliberated over topics that merited critical investigation, and selected fund research staff or outside authors to study and report on the issue. From the early 1930s to the early 1950s, many projects were handled by a committee system. In committee-led projects, research staff members were selected to investigate a topic determined by trustees. A committee of authorities in the field, also selected by trustees, reviewed the research and prepared policy recommendations. Whether a project was headed by an individual author or by a committee, a report with supporting research data was ultimately published in book, pamphlet, or bulletin form under the fund's own imprint, with additional versions created, such as press releases and articles in the popular press, to disseminate the research findings to the widest audience possible.

Edward Filene's particular interests in credit unions, cooperative buying, and corporate governance formed the basis for the foundation's early studies, many of which were directed by Clark and Dewhurst. Throughout the 1930s, the fund's research projects also examined stock market regulation, pensions and social security, the cost of medical care, and labor issues. Fund publications such as Stock Market Control (1934) had considerable influence on New Deal legislation, with recommendations from the Twentieth Century Fund report appearing in the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Throughout the World War II era, the fund's work concentrated on postwar planning for economic demand and defense needs. J. Frederic Dewhurst's America's Needs and Resources (1947), a study that projected the industrial and economic needs of the country for the mid-century, was widely praised by economists and considered one of the fund's classic publications of the era. America's Needs and Resources was also a fund publication that benefitted from an aggressive and long-term dissemination campaign, drawing from the directives of a newly-formed trustee committee on dissemination. The book was updated in new editions and adapted into abridged versions with graphics, several films, and classroom filmstrips to broaden its potential audience and appeal to educational markets.

The fund underwent administrative changes and ideological growth in the 1950s, which resulted in an increase in projects undertaken as well as refinement in the way projects were developed. A Research Projects Committee, later simply known as the Projects Committee, was formed to appoint members directly to individual research committees, guide staff exploration of research topics before projects were formalized, oversee projects in process, evaluate incoming proposals, and consider grant applications, which the fund still accepted in small number. The committee, headed during this period by trustees Adolf A. Berle and Benjamin Cohen, could then evaluate the status of projects and refine proposals before making recommendations to the full board. By shifting this work to a committee, the board concentrated on larger issues, including pressing topics worthy of the fund's attention and the overall direction of the fund's research. The new organizational structure helped to increase the publication of major books and studies, and allowed the fund to support a larger range of projects, including short papers, seminars, and conferences. The number of committee-led studies also decreased dramatically by the 1950s in favor of books authored by individuals or two to three person research teams.

J. Frederic Dewhurst replaced Evans Clark as director upon the latter's retirement in 1953, but stepped down three years later to continue hands-on work as the fund's research director. August Heckscher was appointed fund director in 1956, and with Adolf A. Berle as chairman of the board, new trustees including Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and David E. Lilienthal joined the fund. Heckscher and the board sought to broaden the foundation's research scope, and throughout the 1960s, the fund's projects defined unique characteristics of American society and addressed pressing issues in foreign policy. Landmark works of this period include Jean Gottmann's Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (1961), which examined the corridor between Boston and Washington, D.C. as a unified region, and is credited as popularizing the concept of the metropolis. Prominent geographer George H. T. Kimble's Tropical Africa (1960) was a thorough survey of the continent's social, political, and economic conditions that aimed to create a more respectful, tolerant understanding of African cultures in American readers. Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations (1968) by Gunnar Myrdal was similarly a large-scale study of the political, social, and economic landscape of South Asia, in which Myrdal criticized American strategy in the war with Vietnam, prophesying that it would ultimately fail. Although grant funding was not regularly awarded—and differed from fund-approved projects in that it represented financial support for work occurring outside of the research program—the fund did make occasional grants to individual artists and authors working in fields that intersected with the foundation's research. The fund also made operating grants to new nonprofit organizations, contributing to the establishment of the Theatre Development Fund, the Black Academy of Arts and Letters, and the International Baccalaureate degree program.

Murray Rossant, serving as director from 1967 to 1988, greatly expanded the research program's output. The fund ceased its large-scale efforts in publishing its own studies, instead contracting with large commercial publishers and university presses to handle publication and distribution. By eliminating grants and devoting the majority of the fund's income to the direct support of research projects, the publication of books and reports increased in the early 1970s to ten to fifteen titles per year. With the increase in projects running concurrently, the lifecycle of each project became streamlined. Proposals were accepted from both trustee-suggested and unsolicited authors, and the director, appointed research staff, and peer reviewers suggested refinements for the project. The revised proposal, a timeline of work, and budget were then presented to the board. Once a project was approved, the author signed a contract with the fund and corresponded with the director and research staff throughout the research and writing phase. If a manuscript reached final draft stages, the author would then work with the fund's editorial staff to prepare the work for outside publishers. Administrative staff handled planning for book and report release events, though promotion was primarily the responsibility of the publisher. Throughout the life of the project, research staff kept the Projects Committee and full board apprised of its status in the staff report to the board, and projects nearing completion were promoted in the fund's Newsletter.

Rossant also instituted task forces to convene a panel of experts on issues in need of immediate examination. Task force members were solicited by trustees and the director, and the work of the group was grounded by a scholar's background paper—the writing of which was overseen by the fund research program. The topics studied by task forces included localized issues, such as the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid 1970s, to national education policies and international relations. While the groups typically met for no longer than one or two years, some reconvened regularly, as was the case for task forces examining the presidential election system. Task forces issued reports intended to guide policymakers, and the background paper and report were published together in one volume. Because the task force reports addressed current issues, the fund published their reports in-house under the Priority Press Publications imprint, which also handled small fund papers that would require longer lead time from a large press. Priority Press also offered printing services to outside foundations for small projects.

During Rossant's tenure, the scope of the fund's work widened to include the analysis of American social and cultural institutions. This line of inquiry resulted in studies on the impact of media in the United States, as well as direct financial and administrative support for the creation of the National News Council in 1973. As a media watchdog organization, the National News Council aimed to regulate American news organizations and discourage bias while still preserving the independence of the press; ultimately, it dissolved after eleven years. The issue of economic injustice came under the lens of the foundation's research during the civil rights era, delving into the effect of race and poverty on education policy and employment. The electoral system has remained at the forefront of the foundation's research projects since the early 1970s, resulting in reports on campaign finance, presidential debates, and political appointments.

Richard C. Leone served as president from 1989 to 2011, and the beginning of his tenure saw a revival of the fund's interest in foreign policy, as the nation grappled with making sense of a post-Cold War world, looking at improving multilateral institutions and reforming the nation's intelligence agencies. The fund also continued its examination of the media, particularly through the Perspectives on the News series and the Task Force on the Future of Public Television. The New Federalist Papers (1997), a volume of essays that defended the relevance of America's constitutional system in the modern era, showed the foundation's enduring interest in the health of the American political system. In addition, the fund launched several new domestic efforts during this period, most notably to preserve the nation's Social Security program, and to promote socioeconomic integration of public and higher education through the ongoing work of Richard D. Kahlenberg.

In 1999, the Twentieth Century Fund was renamed The Century Foundation. Under this new name, and immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the foundation added a new area of focus: keeping intact Americans' established civil liberties in the rush to increase national security. As The Century Foundation, the organization's work continues into the 21st century, with a focus on economic inequality, education, the social safety net, and international policy.