The Henry Ford : sustaining Henry Ford's philanthropic legacy

Abstract

This dissertation argues that the Edison Institute (presently known as The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan) survived internal and external challenges through the evolution of the Ford family’s leadership and the organization’s funding strategy. Following Henry Ford’s death, the museum complex relied upon the Ford Foundation and the Ford Motor Company Fund as its sole means of philanthropic support. These foundations granted the Edison Institute a significant endowment, which it used to sustain its facilities in conjunction with its inaugural fundraising program. Navigating a changing legal, corporate, and philanthropic landscape in Detroit and around the world, the Ford family perpetuated Henry Ford’s legacy at the Edison Institute with the valuable guidance of executives and staff of their corporation, foundation, and philanthropies. Together they transitioned the Edison Institute into a sustainable and public nonprofit organization by overcoming threats related to the deaths of two generations of the Ford family, changes in the Edison Institute’s administration and organizational structure, the reorganization of the Ford Foundation, the effects of the Tax Reform Act of 1969, and legal complications due to overlap between the Fords’ corporate and philanthropic interests. The Ford family provided integral leadership for the development and evolution of the Edison Institute’s funding strategy and its relationship to their other corporate and philanthropic enterprises. The Institute’s management and funding can be best understood within the context of philanthropic developments of the Ford family during this period, including the formation of the Ford Foundation’s funding and concurrent activity.

This dissertation focuses on the research question of how the Edison Institute survived the Ford family’s evolving philanthropic strategy to seek a sustainable funding and management structure. The work examines its central research question over multiple chapters organized around the Ford family’s changing leadership at the Edison Institute, the increase of professionalized managers, and the Ford’s use of their corporation and philanthropies to provide integral support to the Edison Institute. In order to sustain the Edison Institute throughout the twentieth century, it adapted its operations to accommodate Henry Ford’s founding legacy, its legal environment, and the evolving practice of philanthropy in the United States.