Danforth Foundation

The major efforts of the liberal-minded Danforth Foundation are directed toward higher education. For example, it supports the training of college professors and seminar workshops for college personnel. Four of the foundation’s nine trustees are Danforth descendants, two of whom are in the St. Louis Social Register. One of them, William H. Danforth, is a Harvard-trained physician who heads the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Founda¬tion. The Danforth Foundation would seem to be at the other end of the pole from the Lilly Foundation and the Pew Memorial Trust. In summarizing our study of leading foundations, we would emphasize that the “seed money� they provide for important intellectual and cultural projects helps to shape the framework of American society to a great extent. Sponsorship of a project by one of these foundations implies that it meets with the approval of at least some members of the upper class. By encouraging some projects and discouraging others, the foundations create implicit values and set the limits within which cultural and intel¬lectual quests are undertaken. We will now turn to five associations or committees which are equally important in shaping this cultural—intellectual framework and equally closely associated with members of the American upper class. Further, several of these associations work closely with the large foundations.