Frederick T. Gates

Frederick Taylor Gates (1853-1929) was an American clergyman, educator, philanthropist and principal business and philanthropic advisor to billionaire John D. Rockefeller from 1891 to 1924. As much as anyone he invented the modern philanthropic foundation and set standards for giving money away efficiently.

The son of a Yankee Baptist minister, Gates was born in Broome County, New York, graduated from the University of Rochester in 1877, and from the Rochester Theological Seminary in 1880. From 1880 to 1888 he served as pastor of the Central Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He left the pulpit to become the secretary (chief executive officer) of the newly formed American Baptist Education Society; he was a master organizer and fund-raiser. Gates championed a Baptist university in Chicago to fill a void that existed in Baptist education. On January 21, 1889 he met with John D. Rockefeller, a lifelong Baptist. Rockefeller approved Gates' funding plans for the reorganized University of Chicago; and poured tens of millions into the school, creating one of the world's great universities overnight. Gates served for many years as a trustee on the UC board.

Gates became Rockefeller's key philanthropic and business adviser, working out of Standard Oil Company headquarters at 26 Broadway, New York. Gates oversaw Rockefeller's investments in a series of investments in many companies, but not in his personal stock in Standard Oil. From 1892 onward, faced with his ever expanding investments and real estate holdings, Rockefeller recognized the need for professional advice and so he formed a four-member committee, later including his son, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to manage his money, and made Gates its head and as his senior business adviser. Gates steered Rockefeller money predominantly to syndicates arranged by the investment house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and, to a lesser extent, the house of J. P. Morgan. Gates served on the boards of many companies in which Rockefeller had a majority shareholding; Rockefeller at that time held a securities portfolio of unprecedented size for a private individual. Rockefeller himself regarded him as the greatest businessman he had encountered in his life

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 send place. Although Gates never quite lost his religion, he 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 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. Like Andrew Carnegie who offered pensions to retired professors if colleges would drop their religious affiliations, Gates proposed using Rockefeller money to make disturbing changes.

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. They 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.

Bibliography

• Baick, John S. "Cracks in the Foundation: Frederick T. Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the China Medical Board." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2004 3(1): 59-89. Issn: 1537-7814 Fulltext: at History Cooperative, the most useful analysis
• Berliner, Howard S. A System of Scientific Medicine: Philanthropic Foundations in the Flexner Era. Tavistock, 1985. 190 pp.
• Brown, E. Richard Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (1979), sees Rockefeller philanthropy as bad because it reflected Western imperialism
• Chernow, Ron, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., 1998.
• Gates, Frederick Taylor. Chapters in my Life. 1977. autobiography
• General Education Board The General Education Board: An Account of Its Activities, 1902-1914 (1915).
• Nevins, Allan, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.
• Ninkovich, Frank. "The Rockefeller Foundation, China, and Cultural Change," Journal of American History 70 (March 1984): 799-820. in JSTOR
• Starr, Harris Elwood, "Frederick T. Gates" in Dictionary of American Biography, Volume 4 (1931).