Mary Danforth (photo by Kevin A. Roberts)
When a world-weary John Danforth said he thought the relationship between religion and politics should be studied more, he likely wasn’t the first person to have that idea. The difference was, in 2010 the Danforth Foundation gave $30 million to Washington University to open the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. An Episcopal priest and former U.S. senator, John wanted the academic center’s conferences, debates, and scholars to explore the relationship between religion and politics. He knew this center could not resolve all the controversies, but he hoped it would “encourage respectful and vigorous debate.”
This is what the Danforths do. Moral, thoughtful, and steadfast, they are compassionate capitalists who have used their Ralston-Purina largesse as seed money for St. Louis.
The money began with William H. Danforth, who founded the company in 1894. Its famous checkerboard logo? Its squares represented a perfectly proportioned balance of the physical, mental, social, and religious. That was how life should be lived, and he said so in a little morality book titled I Dare You!
His descendants took the dare. In the 84 years before it closed in 2011, the Danforth Foundation had donated more than $1.2 billion to causes and institutions in an effort to make life in St. Louis better.
The Danforths did not have to do this. William’s son Donald took over at Ralston-Purina, but grandsons John and his older brother William each could have bought a Caribbean island and lounged on the beach. Or they could have fallen victim to some myopic motivation and spent all that cash to further a narrow political agenda (see Koch Brothers, Rex Sinquefield).
Instead, the Danforth Foundation put down more than $226 million to open the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, betting heavily on biotech as the future of St. Louis. They spent $12.5 million on St. Louis 2004, a community project to mark the 100-year anniversary of the St. Louis World’s Fair. That widely ambitious and possibly over-the-top project that, though it may have fallen short of its vague and lofty goals, it led to improvements along Washington Avenue, a regional health commission, and a system of trails and greenways throughout the bi-state region.
On a more conventional front, the Foundation has given $423.3 million to Washington University. But it’s also given $19.5 million to City Academy, a K–6 grade private school on North Kingshighway founded by Donald Danforth III. His father, John and William’s brother, chaired the American Youth Foundation and founded a camp for kids with brain injuries. And John’s daughter, Mary Danforth Stillman, just founded the Hawthorn Leadership School, St. Louis’ first all-girls charter school. (It’s housed in the former all-boys McBride High School, formed for similar reasons a century earlier.)
For the Danforths, noblesse oblige is not a hobby, it’s a second job. Their public service has gone well beyond writing checks. At 32, John was elected attorney general of Missouri; eight years later, we sent him to the U.S. Senate. More of a Rockefeller Republican, yet from a state that was drifting further right, he managed to stay for three six-year terms.
William joined Wash. U.’s medical school faculty, then became the university’s chancellor. The minute he retired, a federal judge appointed him to negotiate a settlement to the St. Louis Public School desegregation case that had been stuck in the courts for 24 years. Three years later, we were voting on a sales tax increase to help fund the settlement and continue the inter-district student transfer program.
Not all of what the Danforths have done has been easy, and not everything has worked. Whether it was deseg, biotech, stem cell research, or John’s recent from-the-pulpit attack on negative campaign tactics after the suicide of Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich, each of their causes has drawn criticism from one side or another. But they are civically engaged, and they are loyal (some would say to a fault, remembering John’s hot defense of his friend Clarence Thomas for the U.S. Supreme Court). Most days, the very definition of being a Danforth is to remain clear-headed and moderate, capable of bridging divisive extremes. They’ve left their thoughtful fingerprints all over this town.
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