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Born 1913.
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Biographical/Historical note
Thomas Baird Appleget was born in Hightstown, New Jersey, in 1893. In 1913 Appleget enrolled at Brown University and distinguished himself as associate editor of The Brown Daily Herald and editor of the Brunonian. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and graduated summa cum laude.
Upon graduation in 1917 Appleget took a position as Executive Secretary to Brown University President William Faunce. In 1918 he left this position to serve as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, but following the end of World War I he returned to Brown, where he was eventually promoted to Assistant to the President and worked in the areas of public relations and student recruitment.
In 1926 Appleget became Executive Secretary to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (JDR Jr.), who was also a Brown graduate. This position included diverse responsibilities related to the management of Rockefeller philanthropies. Appleget was also called upon for an array of special assignments, including a memorable 1926 flight with Charles Lindbergh. During a spring blizzard, Appleget was asked to accompany Lindbergh on a mission to deliver a newly developed Rockefeller Institute serum to aviator Floyd Bennett, who lay dying of pneumonia in a Quebec City hospital. Although Appleget and Lindbergh arrived safely, Bennett eventually died of his illness.
In 1929 Appleget left the service of JDR Jr. when he was appointed vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). Working out of the New York City office, Appleget led a number of initiatives with the Foundation, including the Refugee Scholars Program from 1940 to 1945.
In 1940 Appleget married Sara Elizabeth Love of North Carolina, and together they settled in Greenwich, Connecticut.
In 1949 Appleget returned again to Brown University, this time as Vice President, in which capacity he focused on public relations and fundraising.
Appleget retired from Brown University in 1959. He died of emphysema in 1982 at the age of 89.
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Chester I. Barnard brought years of experience as a successful and respected business executive to the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) when he was named president in 1948. His organizational skills proved effective during his short four-year tenure as he presided at a time of transition, when the Foundation sought out new directions in programming in the postwar era.
Chester Barnard was born in Malden, Massachusetts, in 1886. He lost his mother when he was five years old, but his father, a mechanic, encouraged philosophical debate and emphasized the importance of education. After completing grammar school, he apprenticed as a piano tuner, a trade that helped to fund his education.
Barnard used his earnings from piano tuning to fund his way through Mount Hermon Preparatory School and eventually earned a scholarship to attend Harvard University. At Harvard he continued working while pursuing a degree in economics. While he excelled at Harvard, nearly completing a four-year course in three years, he left school before graduating. Barnard was unable to fulfill an obligatory science requirement while working to pay his living expenses.
He left Harvard in 1909 and immediately went to work at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) as a statistician. From this entry-level position he rose rapidly through the ranks to become vice-president of the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania in 1926 and president of New Jersey Bell Telephone Company in 1927. Yet Barnard was not just a successful executive – he also applied himself to the study of management. He authored two seminal books in the field of management theory. The Functions of the Executive (1938) and Organization and Management (1948) focused on topics of company organization and human relations. The Functions of the Executive is considered to be a classic in the field and has been translated into several languages.
During World War II, Barnard contributed to the war effort by lending his considerable administrative and management talents to organizing and presiding over the United Services Organizations, Inc. (USO), a job which later earned him the Presidential Medal for Merit. In the postwar period, Barnard became interested in atomic energy, serving as a consultant to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and co-authoring a report on the international control of atomic energy.
In 1948 Barnard left Bell to accept the position of president of the RF. This appointment capped nearly a decade of involvement with the Foundation, where he had served as both a Foundation Trustee and a member of its Executive Committee.
Barnard remained at the RF for four years, retiring in 1952. Following his retirement from the RF, he continued working for the improvement of society. In 1957 he was appointed a member of the New York City Board of Health. As a member of this Board, he helped to create the city's new health code.
In addition to his interests in management, energy, health and social responsibility, Barnard possessed a life-long passion for music. This passion led him to help found and support the Bach Society of New Jersey and the Newark Arts Theatre.
Chester Barnard died in 1961 at 74 years old.
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Biographical/Historical note
Mary Beard devoted her entire life to improving the field of nursing. Her persistent efforts played a key role in the greater professionalization of the field, both in the United States and worldwide.
Born in 1876, Beard enrolled in the New York Hospital School of Nursing in 1899. She graduated in 1903 and immediately took a position as a home nurse with the Visiting Nurse Association (VNA). By the time Beard left the VNA in 1910, she had been serving as the director of the organization. She worked briefly at the Laboratory of Surgical Pathology at Columbia University before heading to Boston in 1912. There she became director of the Boston Instructive District Nursing Association. This position allowed her to organize the medical care of Boston's poor and to focus her attentions on prenatal and maternity care. In the same year Beard also helped to found the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, an organization devoted to the improvement of nursing practices and education. She served as president of the organization from 1916 to 1919 while simultaneously chairing a Council of National Defense Medical Board's Committee on Public Health Nursing during World War I.
In 1924 Beard began working with the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). She quickly proved instrumental in the Foundation's efforts to improve the standards of nursing education worldwide. In 1931 she was named Associate Director of the RF's International Health Division (IHD). In this role, Beard investigated nursing education in both Europe and Asia and develpoed new programs to improve training in these regions. One of these programs involved creating opportunities for women from Europe and Asia to study nursing in North America, where they would receive the knowledge and skills necessary to train others in their home countries.
In 1938 Beard assumed the directorship of the American Red Cross Nursing Service and chairmanship of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Service's Subcommittee on Nursing, where she organized the education and assignment of nurses for wartime duty. She retired from the Red Cross in 1944 and died in New York City in 1946.
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Biographical/Historical note
John Clifford Bugher was born September 26, 1901 in Upland, Indiana. He attended the Taylor University in Upland and was a mathematics instructor there while a student. He graduated in 1920 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Bugher then attended the University of Michigan, where he received a second undergraduate degree in 1921. He worked at the University of Michigan as an assistant Bacteriology instructor until 1926 when he enrolled in the University of Michigan Medical School. On April 1, 1926, he married Elizabeth Foust. Bugher graduated from the Medical School in 1929 and became a full-time instructor in Bacteriology. From 1933 until 1937, he remained at the University of Michigan as an Assistant Professor in Pathology. In 1938, he joined the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Division. He assisted in research at the Yellow Fever Laboratory in Bogota, Columbia from 1940 to 1943, when he went to Lagos, Nigeria to start their Yellow Fever Institute. He stayed in Nigeria as the director of the Institute until 1948. For his work on yellow fever, Bugher received the Cruz de Boyaca from the Columbian government, honorary doctorates from Taylor University and the University of Michigan, and honorary appointment as a Commander in the Order of the British Empire.
During 1951-52, he served as a consultant for nuclear affairs to the Rockefeller Foundation, before leaving to serve as Deputy Director (and later Director) of the Atomic Energy Commission's Division of Biological and Medical Sciences. Until he left the post in 1955, he defended government testing of nuclear testing against critics who suggested that it might have an impact on the health of Americans. From April 1955 through March 1959, Bugher was Director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Education and Public Health. Subsequently, until his retirement in 1966, Bugher was the Director of the Puerto Rico Nuclear Center.
Bugher was a prolific author who wrote a number of important works about medical science and nuclear issues, including several textbooks of medical science and biology, Epidemiology of Jungle Yellow Fever in Columbia (1944), Progress of Nuclear Energy (1956), and numerous scientific articles. After retirement, he and his wife moved to Delray Beach, Florida, where he worked on a book about the technical uses of radioactive isotopes in biological research. John Bugher died in 1970 in Palm Beach, Florida.
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Biographical/Historical note
Robert F. Chandler, Jr. was an agricultural sciences officer for the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and Founding Director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center (AVRDC). He was one of a generation of RF agricultural scientists working to eradicate global famine in the decades following World War II.
Chandler was born in Columbus, Ohio on June 22, 1907. He earned his B.S. degree in horticulture from the University of Maine in 1929, and his Ph.D. in pomology at the University of Maryland in 1934. He spent the first two decades of his career in academia, first as a forest soils professor at Cornell University, and then as Dean of Agriculture and Director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of New Hampshire. Chandler served as President of the University of New Hampshire from 1950 to 1954.
In 1946, Chandler took a brief leave from Cornell to work as a Soils Scientist in the RF's Mexican Agricultural Program (MAP). He returned to the Foundation in 1954 to become Assistant Director for Agriculture, and was promoted to Associate Director in 1957. In 1959, Chandler established the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños, the Philippines, which sought to fight famine in Asia by increasing rice production. Under Chandler's directorship IRRI staff dramatically boosted rice yields through the development of new varieties, including the IR8 "miracle rice." Chandler retired from the IRRI in 1972, and documented the Institute's history in his 1992 book, An Adventure in Applied Science: A History of the International Rice Research Institute.
From 1972 to 1975, Chandler served as founding director of the Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center, a research institute in Taiwan focused on developing vegetable crops in Asia's tropical regions. The AVRDC successfully developed high-yielding, heat-tolerant tomato plants, as well as other vegetable varieties suited to tropical conditions.
Chandler continued working to eradicate world hunger long after his retirement in 1975. He served as an advisor and consultant for the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, Near East Foundation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development, among others. He received several awards including the International Rice Year Award from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in 1966, the Star of Distinction from Pakistan in 1968, the Star of Merit from Indonesia in 1972, the Golden Heart Award from the Philippines in 1972, and the Order of the Brilliant Star from China in 1975. In 1988, he was awarded the prestigious World Food Prize.
Chandler died on March 23, 1999, at the age of 91. In a memorial symposium honoring Chandler, plant pathologist and Nobel laureate Norman E. Borlaug described him as "one of those pioneers whose boundless energy and enthusiasm--and complete dedication to a cause--helped to make rice available for hundreds of millions of people in the developing world."
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Joel Colton was a distinguished historian of modern Europe who specialized in French history and culture. Named the Rockefeller Foundation's (RF) director for humanities in 1974, Colton's appointment marked the Foundation's renewed focus on the humanities, which had not had their own director within the Foundation since 1962. His tenure with the RF was characterized by a commitment to humanities scholarship, public engagement, and a firm belief in the humanities' relevance to public discourse.
Colton was born on August 23, 1918 in New York City. He earned his B.A. degree at the City College of New York in 1937, and his M.A. in history at Columbia University in 1940. Colton then earned a master's degree in education at City College and worked as a teacher in training at the Bronx High School of Science from 1941 to 1942.
Colton served in the Army during World War II, including an eighteen month commission as a military intelligence officer in Europe. After the war, Colton returned to Columbia to work toward his doctorate. In 1947, he took a position teaching European history at Duke University, and completed his Ph.D. in 1950. From 1967 to 1974, he served as the chair of the University's history department. In 1974, Colton accepted a position as the Rockefeller Foundation's director for humanities. His leadership reflected his belief that the humanities should play a central role in contemporary life and his commitment to publicly-engaged scholarship. He oversaw the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships in the Humanities to support humanistic scholarship with contemporary relevance. From 1978 to 1980 Colton served as the liaison to the RF-sponsored Commission on the Humanities, which examined the role of the humanities in American education and public life. The Commission's final report, The Humanities in American Life, was published in 1980.
Colton organized three conferences at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center: "Modernization, Economic Development, and Cultural Values" (1978); "Human Rights, Human Needs, and Developing Nations," co-hosted with Malcolm Richardson (1979); and "International Philanthropy and the Humanities," co-hosted with Kathleen McCarthy (1981). Colton took a study leave in 1981, and began working as a consultant to the Foundation. In 1982, he coauthored a history of the RF's humanities work, "The Humanities and 'The Well-Being of Mankind:' The Humanities at The Rockefeller Foundation Since 1928," with Malcolm Richardson. Colton returned to teaching at Duke in 1982, and retired in 1989.
Colton received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1957), Rockefeller Foundation (1961-62), and National Endowment for the Humanities (1970-71), and was honored as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979. He authored several books, including Compulsory Labor Arbitration in France, 1936-1939 (1951), Leon Blum: Humanist in Politics (1966), and a book for the Time-Life "Great Ages of Man" series, Twentieth Century (1968). He is perhaps best known for coauthoring the classic textbook, A History of the Modern World. First written by Princeton historian R. R. Palmer in 1950, Colton and Palmer (and later a third historian, Lloyd Kramer) collaborated on the subsequent 9 editions. The textbook has been translated into ten languages.
Joel Colton passed away on April 17, 2011 in Durham, North Carolina.
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Biographical/Historical note
Frances Elisabeth Crowell was a staff member of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and a dedicated nurse and social worker who devoted much of her life to the task of improving nursing education and standards.
Crowell completed her nursing training in Chicago in 1895. After graduation she moved to Florida, where she served as superintendent and part owner of the Pensacola Infirmary. At the Infirmary, later renamed St. Anthony's Hospital, Crowell opened a school to train nurses.
Ten years later, Crowell relocated to New York to study social work at the New York School of Philanthropy. In 1906 she began working as a special investigator with the Association of Neighborhood Workers, producing research on the state of midwifery and its role among New York women, especially immigrant populations. She continued to compile research and produce significant studies on this topic while simultaneously serving as Executive Secretary of the Association of Tuberculosis Clinics in New York.
In 1917 Crowell devoted herself more fully to the eradication of tuberculosis when she joined the International Health Division (IHD) of the RF and began working for its Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France. As part of the Commission, Crowell trained medical personnel and organized dispensaries in order to help contain the tuberculosis epidemic in post-war France. Crowell remained in France until 1923, when she joined the Division of Studies Program of the RF. The new appointment allowed Crowell to remain in Europe, and it greatly expanded her influence, as she was charged with developing programs in nursing education throughout the continent.
Crowell left the RF in 1941 and spent her remaining years in Italy. Although retired, she advised the American Red Cross in Italy during World War II. Crowell died in 1950 and was laid to rest in Santa Margherita, Italy, along the Mediterranean coast.
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Biographical/Historical note
Leland C. DeVinney was a sociologist who worked for the Rockefeller Foundation for more than two decades. His time with the Foundation bridged two distinct periods in its history, as it moved from an academic structure focused on the advancement of knowledge, to an interdisciplinary approach devoted to the application of knowledge to specific problems. DeVinney's career reflected this change, as he moved from a Social Sciences program officer in the 1950s to the head of the Foundation's new Equal Opportunity initiative in 1963.
DeVinney was born on May 14, 1906, in Gobleville, Michigan. He received his B.A. degree from Albion College (1931), his M.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1933), and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago (1941). He held a variety of jobs while in graduate school. From 1931-1932, he was Manager of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and Assistant to the President of Fisk University. The next two summers he worked for Depression-era relief programs, first as Assistant Director of Relief in Polk County, Wisconsin, and then as Assistant Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration's Chicago Regional Office. After earning his M.A. degree, DeVinney became a member of the social sciences faculty at the University of Chicago and taught sociology courses while pursuing his doctorate. Upon completion of his Ph.D., DeVinney was hired by the University of Wisconsin as an Associate Professor of Sociology.
DeVinney's academic career was interrupted by World War II. He served in the U.S. Army, working his way up to become military chief of the Research Branch of the War Department's Information and Education Division. After the war, sociologist and Research Branch head Samuel Stouffer hired DeVinney to help publish the results of their wartime survey of American GIs. DeVinney coauthored Volume I of the resulting publication, Studies in Social Psychology in World War II , popularly known as The American Soldier (1949).
In 1948, the Rockefeller Foundation hired DeVinney as Assistant Director of Social Sciences, with a focus on demographic work. In his early years with the Social Sciences Division, grantmaking--and indeed the Foundation itself--took a largely academic approach, focused on supporting research at institutions including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Brookings Institution. When the Humanities and Social Sciences were joined into one division in 1962, DeVinney became Deputy Director and later Associate Director of the Humanities and Social Sciences. With the Foundation's reorganization in 1963 into interdisciplinary, "goal oriented programs," he was placed at the helm of the new Equal Opportunity Program. Under his direction, the program focused on training and developing minority leaders, strengthening Southern educational institutions for African Americans, and preparing African American college applicants. He continued this work until his retirement in June 1971.
DeVinney died on November 27, 1998.
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Wilbur George Downs was a naturalist and virologist. Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, he received his B.A. and M.D. from Cornell University.
Downs' professional career began as a Field Staff Member for a New York biological survey. He then held an internship and residency at the New York Hospital before serving as First Lieutenant with the AUS in Trinidad. Next, Downs travelled to the South Pacific and Bougainville as a Malaria Control Officer and later to Okinawa, Japan as Lieutenant Colonel, Malaria Control Officer of the Preventative Medicine. Downs remained in Okinawa as the Acting Chief of Preventative Medicine until 1946, when he retired from the army. Back in America, Downs became a professor of epidemiology at Yale Medical School and subsequently assumed the role of clinical professor. In 1964, Downs was the recipient of an honorary M.A. from Yale University. Throughout his military career, Downs also worked extensively for the Rockefeller Foundation. Beginning in 1940, Downs received a fellowship from the International Health Division, which enabled him to acquire a M.P.H. from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. He worked on the Epidemiological Survey of Malaria in Trinidad and Tobago before being assigned to Mexico as a Malaria Control Researcher. In Mexico, he was among the first to question the use of insecticides like DDT in trying to control the disease. From 1946 to 1952, Downs was the Director of the Public Health and Malaria Investigation Program of the International Health Division in Mexico. In 1952, Dr. Downs was asked by the Rockefeller Foundation to establish a program in Trinidad investigating arthropod-borne viruses. He founded the Trinidad Regional Virus Laboratory, now the Caribbean Epidemiology Center in Port-of-Spain. Here, Downs trained numerous arbovirologists and was part of a team that isolated and characterized more than thirty-five new viruses. Downs continued his career as the Associate Director for the Medical and Natural Sciences Division until 1964 when he became the Director of the Medical and Natural Sciences Virus Program. Between 1961 and 1991, Wilbur George Downs was the Director and subsequently, an Administrator, for the Yale Arbor Virus Research Unit. Downs served as a member for multiple scientific committees and societies during his career. He was a consultant to projects in the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and a member or chairman of advisory committees for the World Health Organization, the United States Public Health Service, the State Department, the Department of Defense and the National Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, he received a Bronze Star for his work in the military, the Richard M. Taylor Award (American Committee of Arthropod-Borne Viruses) and the Walter Reed Medal (ASTMH.)
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Edwin Rogers Embree was an early voice championing the Rockefeller Foundation's (RF) expansion into the humanities and social sciences.
Born in Osceola, Nebraska in 1883, Embree moved with his family to the racially integrated town of Berea, Kentucky in 1891. His formative childhood years in Berea and his family's abolitionist history shaped his lifelong commitment to racial equality.
Embree received his B.A. from Yale University in 1906. He spent a year in New York City as a reporter for the New York Sun before returning to New Haven in 1907. He spent the following decade working at Yale first as assistant editor of the Yale Alumni Weekly and then in several university administrative positions, while also earning an M.A. degree from the university in 1914. Embree's administrative work at Yale brought him to the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1917 he was appointed secretary of the RF under president George E. Vincent.
When Embree joined the RF, the Foundation's efforts were focused primarily on medicine and public health projects. Embree advocated for expanding their work into the humanities and social sciences. In a rousing 1924 address to RF Trustees and the General Education Board, he asked, "Of what good is it to keep people alive and healthy if their lives are not to be touched increasingly with something of beauty?" His speech received a lukewarm response from the Trustees, however. Embree instead channeled his efforts into directing the newly formed Division of Studies (DS), which was created in 1924 to administer all Foundation work in areas outside of medicine and public health. When the DS was eliminated in 1927, Embree went on to serve briefly as the RF's vice president. His vision for a robust humanities and social sciences program would not be fully realized until after his departure from the RF in 1928. That same year, the Foundation reorganized and established a Division of Humanities and a Division of Social Sciences.
Embree left the RF in 1928 to become president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which supported educational, public health, and welfare programs for African Americans. When the Fund closed after expending all of its funds in 1948, Embree went on to serve as president of the Liberian and Africa Foundations, collectively focused on improving health, education, and welfare in Africa.
In addition to his long philanthropic career, Embree was a prolific author. He wrote numerous articles, essays, and several books including Brown America: The Story of a New Race (1931), Brown Americans: The Story of a Tenth of the Nation (1943), and Thirteen Against the Odds (1944).
Edwin Rogers Embree died in New York City on February 21, 1950, at the age of 66.
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