Frederick Taylor Gates - Philanthropy

Philanthropy

Gates focused exclusively on philanthropy after 1912. He moved Rockefeller from doling out retail sums to specific recipients to the wholesale process of setting up well-funded foundations that were run by experts who decided what topics of reform were ripe. In all Gates supervised the distribution of about a half-billion dollars. Although Rockefeller himself believed in folk medicine, the billionaire listened to his experts, and Gates convinced him that he could have the greatest impact by modernizing medicine—especially by reforming education, sponsoring research to identify cures, and systematically eradicating debilitating diseases that sapped national efficiency, like hookworm.

In 1901 Gates designed the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (now Rockefeller University), of which he was board president. He then designed the Rockefeller Foundation, becoming a trustee upon its creation in 1913. Gates served as president of the General Education Board, which became the leading foundation in the field of education.

By 1912, however, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was taking control of philanthropic policies, with Gates slipping to second place. Although Gates never quite lost his religion, he began shifting the direction from religious charities to decidedly more secular pursuits like medical research and education. Gates designed the China Medical Board (CMB) in 1914. Rather than viewing China through the traditional missionary lens of millions of heathens to be converted, Gates placed his faith in science. He complained the missionaries in China were trapped in the "bondage of tradition and an ignorance and misguided sentiment in the supporting churches." They had made few converts and fumbled the opportunity to spread Western science. There were hundreds of medical missionaries but they linked Western medical "miracles" to the teachings of Christianity. Instead of focusing on preventive health they urged sick and dying patients to convert. Gates planned to take over the Peking Union Medical College and retrain missionaries there. Working at the intersection of philanthropy, imperialism, big business, religion, and science, the China Medical Board was his last major project.

In 1924 Gates overreached, asking the Rockefeller Foundation Board to invest $265 million in the China Medical Board. The fantastic sum would make Chinese medical care the finest in the world, and would eliminate denominationalism influence from the practice of medicine and charity work in China. The Board refused and Gates became a victim of his own progressive emphasis on the "rule of experts;" the experts on China and medicine disagreed with him, he was marginalized and resignation from the CMB.

Gates was a progressive and committed to the Efficiency Movement. He looked for leverage whereby a few millions of dollars would generate significant changes, as in the creation of a new university, the eradication of hookworm because it reduced efficiency, or the revolution in hospitals caused by the Flexner Report.