Heavy Meddle
Foundations got "woke" in the 1960s (though that term is far more recent). Or as the subtitle to the Heather Mac Donald piece at City Journal puts it: "Philanthropic foundations once used their vast might to cure disease, promote art, and advance education. In the sixties, they decided to reform society. Result: catastrophe."

An excerpt from her piece:

No longer content to provide mainstream knowledge dispassionately, America's most prestigious philanthropies now aspired to revolutionize what they believed to be a deeply flawed American society.

The results, from the 1960s onward, have been devastating. Foundation-supported poverty advocates fought to make welfare a right--and generations have grown up fatherless and dependent. Foundation-funded minority advocates fought for racial separatism and a vast system of quotas--and American society remains perpetually riven by the issue of race. On most campuses today, a foundation-endowed multicultural circus has driven out the very idea of a common culture, deriding it as a relic of American imperialism. Foundation-backed advocates for various "victim" groups use the courts to bend government policy to their will, thwarting the democratic process. And poor communities across the country often find their traditional values undermined by foundation-sent "community activists" bearing the latest fashions in diversity and "enlightened" sexuality. The net effect is not a more just but a more divided and contentious American society.

How rich people and their foundations used to make society better instead of more screwed up:

In their early, heroic period, foundations provided a luminous example of how private philanthropy can improve the lives of millions around the world. Key institutions of modern American life--the research university, the professional medical school, the public library--owe their existence to the great foundations, which had been created in the modern belief that philanthropy should address the causes rather than the effects of poverty.

There was no more articulate exponent of the new philanthropic philosophy than Andrew Carnegie, a self-educated Scot who rose from impoverished bobbin boy in a textile mill to head America's largest coal and steel complex. He elaborated his theory of "scientific philanthropy," a capitalist's response to Marx's "scientific socialism," in The Gospel of Wealth (1889), an eloquent testament and a stinging rebuke to many a contemporary foundation executive.

The growing abyss between the vast industrial fortunes and the income of the common laborer, Carnegie argued, was the inevitable result of the most beneficial economic system that mankind had ever known. The tycoon, however, merely held his fortune in trust for the advancement of the common good; moreover, he should give away his wealth during his lifetime, using the same acumen that he showed in making it. The scientific philanthropist will target his giving to "help those who will help themselves," creating institutions through which those working poor with a "divine spark" can better themselves economically and spiritually. The "slothful, the drunken, [and] the unworthy" were outside his scheme: "One man or woman who succeeds in living comfortably by begging is more dangerous to society, and a greater obstacle to the progress of humanity, than a score of wordy Socialists," he pronounced.

Starting in 1901, Carnegie threw himself full-time into practicing what he preached. He created one of the greatest American institutions for social mobility: the free public library, which he built and stocked in nearly 2,000 communities. He established the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now the Carnegie Mellon University); the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, to provide pensions for all college teachers; a museum; a scientific research institute; a university trust; Carnegie Hall in New York City; the World Court building in the Hague; and a host of other major institutions. A Carnegie-commissioned report on medical education revolutionized medical training, sparking reforms that would give the U.S. the greatest medical schools in the world. Even so, his wealth grew faster than he could give it away. Finally "in desperation," according to his biographer, he created the Carnegie Corporation in 1911.

Finally:

Of course, even within the large liberal foundations, even within so seemingly monolithic a place as the Ford Foundation, there have always been pockets of sanity, where a commonsense approach to helping people and promoting stable communities has reigned. And there are some signs of more recent countercurrents to the prevailing "progressive" ethic--the Ford and Casey foundations, for example, both trumpet their fatherhood initiatives. Yet the impulse toward the activism that over the past 30 years has led the great liberal foundations to do much more harm than good remains overwhelming. In a pathetic statement of aimlessness, the president of a once great foundation recently called up a former Ford poverty fighter to ask plaintively where all the social movements had gone.

The mega-foundations should repress their yearning for activism once and for all. The glories of early twentieth-century philanthropy were produced by working within accepted notions of social improvement, not against them. Building libraries was not a radical act; it envisioned no transformation of property relations or redistribution of power. Andrew Carnegie merely sought to make available to a wider audience the same values and intellectual resources that had allowed him to succeed. Yes, the world has changed since Carnegie's time, but the recipe for successful philanthropy has not.