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Raising funds was one of the difficulties faced by hospital reformers in their aim to support black hospitals. Given the lack of financial capabilities of the patients and the increasing expense of operating these hospitals, black reformers recognized that no movement for the improvement of black hospitals could succeed without the white's cooperation and financial assistance. This chapter studies the activities of three white philanthropic foundations—the Duke Endowment, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, and the General Education Board—with regard to black hospital reform. In particular, this chapter illustrates how the Rosenwald Fund maintained a broad-based black health program that supported programs in professional education, public health, outpatient services, and hospital care; the Duke Endowment's substantial financing for the operation and construction of black hospitals in North and South Carolina; and the General Education Board's (GEB) donation of funds for educational programs at selected hospitals.

Chapter One explores the emergence of three 20th Century foundations that promoted southern education reform, the General Education Board, the Rosenwald Fund, and the Negro Rural School Fund (Jeanes Fund). The annual Conference for Education in the South began at Capon Springs, West Virginia in 1898 and brought together an assembly of leaders in farming, business, church, and school, but quickly became an important venue for far-reaching collaboration between reformers, university scholars, northern businessmen, and southerners who represented state interests. The foundations involved in southern education developed from the extensive collaboration that these meetings produced. This chapter argues that education reform was instrumental to the broader goal of state building, and foundation programs specifically targeted state and local governance capacity. An effective public system of education required governance structures that could provide sufficient oversight, integrate a range of state and local agencies, and promote the organization and participation of local communities. Schooling promoted those administrative structures and helped to organize rural black communities. Foundation programs extended black educational opportunity and strengthened local governance capacity, but restricted the quality of education that would be available. Yet, their programs also had the potential to affect black agency over the longer term.

This chapter examines the Rockefeller philanthropies' winding road into Mexico, beginning at the dawn of the twentieth century and culminating in the establishment of the Mexican Agricultural Program in 1943. The chapter opens with the General Education Board's early and quixotic attempt to overcome rural poverty in the US Cotton Belt, exploring the competing visions that fractured its campaign. Measured by its lofty rhetoric, that program was undeniably a failure. Still, during the agrarian ferment of the 1930s, an unexpected alliance of US southern reformers—led notably by ambassador to Mexico Josephus Daniels—pushed the Rockefeller Foundation to replicate its earlier efforts in Mexico. By 1943, when the foundation formally partnered with the Mexican government to work in agricultural reform, that push would reach its successful climax.

As Frank McVey hastily accepted the University of Kentucky presidency, some believe that this was because he needed to avoid tension brewing in North Dakota. Abraham Flexner, who served as the secretary of New York's General Education Board was the one who recommended McVey to the presidential search committee after hearing about the opening in his home state. Although McVey was working on the East Coast, the search committee was able to contact him in a week. The committee immediately wanted to pursue McVey for the position. The Board of Trustees supported the recommendation. Both of McVey's parents offered advice regarding the position. This chapter looks into some of McVey's earlier experiences as he was recommended for the presidency.

George I. Sánchez was a devotee of the intellectual tenets of the Progressive Education Movement, particularly its social reconstructionist wing, and of the New Deal. The GEB funded a small division within New Mexico's state educational bureaucracy for Sánchez to give him the opportunity to preach reform for the state's schools. A crusading bureaucrat, Sánchez generated a great deal of controversy over his advocacy of studying racial prejudice and for proposing a restructuring of school funding mechanisms that would take initial steps to equalize New Mexico's poorest and wealthiest schools. Sánchez's schemes to turn New Mexico into a hotbed of educational progressivism and research on Mexican Americans generated dangerous controversy.

The early life of George I. Sánchez is a narrative of educational triumph at a time when Chicana/o experiences with public schools in the U.S. were uniformly negative. He overcame a childhood of grinding poverty in mining camps throughout the Southwest, with a newly minted high school diploma became a teenaged public school teacher in rural schools, and married and began a family. In addition, with the financial support of the General Education Board (GEB), Sánchez earned degrees in education at the University of New Mexico, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of California, Berkeley. His success owed to hard work and the drive that stemmed from his imagined sense of distant ancestral glory and his belief in his unique opportunity to reclaim this lost prestige.

Of all the changes in American higher education in the twentieth century, none has had a greater impact than the rise of the two-year, junior college. Yet this institution, which we now take for granted, was once a radical organizational innovation. Stepping into an educational landscape already populated by hundreds of four-year colleges, the junior college was able to establish itself as a new type of institution—a nonbachelor’s degree-granting college that typically offered both college preparatory and terminal vocational programs. The junior college moved rapidly from a position of marginality to one of prominence; in the twenty years between 1919 and 1939, enrollment at junior colleges rose from 8,102 students to 149,854 (U.S. Office of Education 1944, p. 6). Thus, on the eve of World War II, an institution whose very survival had been in question just three decades earlier had become a key component of America’s system of higher education. The institutionalization and growth of what was a novel organizational form could not have taken place without the support and encouragement of powerful sponsors. Prominent among them were some of the nation’s greatest universities—among them, Chicago, Stanford, Michigan, and Berkeley—which, far from opposing the rise of the junior college as a potential competitor for students and resources, enthusiastically supported its growth. Because this support had a profound effect on the subsequent development of the junior college, we shall examine its philosophical and institutional foundations. In the late nineteenth century, an elite reform movement swept through the leading American universities. Beginning with Henry Tappan at the University of Michigan in the early 1850s and extending after the 1870s to Nicholas Murray Butler at Columbia, David Starr Jordan at Stanford, and William Rainey Harper at Chicago, one leading university president after another began to view the first two years of college as an unnecessary part of university-level instruction.

At the end of World War II, a sense of expectancy pervaded America’s colleges and universities. Enrollments had dropped during the war years, and many institutions looked forward to the return of millions of veterans. These veterans were themselves eager to get ahead in civilian life after the hardships of war, and the nation was eager to reward them for the sacrifices that they had made. Already in 1944, as the war was coming to a close, the prestigious Education Policies Commission of the National Education Association and the American Association for School Administrators came out with a report entitled Education for All American Youth. Though focused more on secondary than higher education, the report sounded some themes that were to shape thinking about education for veterans as well. Perhaps the most powerful of these themes was the belief that the war had called on all of the American people to make sacrifices and that efforts must be made to see that no segment of the population would be excluded from the rewards of American society. For higher education, in particular, this meant that new measures would be required to realize the traditional American dream of equality of opportunity. Alongside the idealistic impulse to extend to veterans unprecedented educational opportunities, there was also the fear that the nation’s economy would be unable to provide work for the millions of returning soldiers. The massive unemployment of the Great Depression had, after all, been relieved only by the boost that war production had given the economy. The end of the war therefore threatened—or so it was widely believed at the time—to send the economy back into a terrible slump. With so many soldiers returning home, the possibility of such a downturn frightened policy elites and the public alike, for it was almost certain to revive the bitter social and political conflicts of the 1930s. Together with more idealistic factors, this concern with the effects of the returning veterans on domestic stability led to one of the major higher education acts in American history: the G.I. Bill of 1944.