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Then why do foundations make the mistakes they do? Said Secretary Moe: "Senator Guggenheim,* as you know, was a miner, a mining man, and he understood what a grubstake was . . . He used to say: 'When you are grubstaking, you take chances. You act on the best evidence you've got, but still you have got to take chances.' We who operate really on the frontiers of knowledge and understanding have to recognize that we are not the Almighty. And not being the Almighty, we can't find out everything ... If [applicants for a grant] are members of any movement . . . which does their thinking for them or which indicates what their conclusions must be or ought to be, they are not free to follow their evidence and their own thinking; and they get no money from us. [But] unorthodoxy of thinking, in a man who is free to think, is no bar and must not be a bar . . . "If this foundation . . . should attempt to prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics . . . science, art, or in any other manifestations of the mind or spirit, it had better not be in existence."
* For news of another case argued by Lawyer Davis last week, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.
* The late Simon Guggenheim, a Jewish immigrant's son who, with his six brothers, built up the American Smelting and Refining Co. into one of the world's great mining empires, served as U.S. Senator from Colorado from 1907 to 1913. A lavish Lord Bountiful ("Have a new school on me," he would say), he set up his foundation in 1925 in memory of his son, to support "an endless succession of scholars, scientists and artists . . . [to] advance human achievement."