Scope and Content Note
The records of the Harmon Foundation, Inc., span the period 1913-1967, with the bulk of the material between 1925 and 1933. The first of six series contains the General Office Files of the foundation. The second and largest series, Award Programs, contains records of award programs sponsored by the foundation during a five-year period. The third and fourth series, American Negro Artists and African Artists, contain biographical notes on American-American artists and African artists. The fifth series, African Art Centers, contains an exchange of correspondence between the Harmon Foundation and the directors or representatives of African art galleries, schools, and other cultural institutions. The last series consists of Miscellany.
William Elmer Harmon was born in Lebanon, Ohio, in 1862. His early ambition to be a doctor was frustrated by family difficulties that forced him to leave medical school and seek a business career. Successful as a salesman, Harmon invested savings of one thousand dollars to develop the “partial payment plan” for home buyers. He purchased a tract of land near Cincinnati, laid it out in lots, built wooden sidewalks, and advertised in a Cincinnati newspaper that houses were available for a “dollar down and a few cents a week.” By 1898 Harmon owned realty firms in Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York, and in 1900 he invested more than four million dollars for building sites in Brooklyn.
The Harmon Foundation was established in 1922. Endowments provided playgrounds throughout the country, tuition payments and vocational guidance for students, educational programs for nurses, and awards for constructive achievement among Negroes. In 1925, in a new foundation endeavor, Harmon gave fifty thousand dollars to the Religious Motion Picture Foundation to provide motion pictures of religious and moral character for use in church services.
Harmon's public philanthropy was directed through the Harmon Foundation, but innumerable requests fell outside its stated aims. After Harmon's death in July 1928, it was disclosed that he had used the name “Jedediah Tingle” to make thousands of private, anonymous bequests to needy persons.
The Harmon Foundation records in the Library of Congress do not include those relating to the foundation's loan program for students nor its endowment of playground and nursing associations. The Library's collection centers on the awards program sponsored by the foundation and on general files that provide some early history of the foundation.
The earliest exchange of correspondence is between William Harmon and Paul Kellogg. Kellogg, director of Survey Associates, was not directly connected with the Harmon Foundation, but he administered several early programs for Harmon. In their letters in the General Office Files series Harmon and Kellogg explore the possibility of establishing the foundation. The early date of the exchange, 1913-1925, makes it a valuable source for the history, purpose, and development of the foundation.
The Award Program series in the collection contains the records of the award programs for outstanding achievement. The awards for model farms, for political cartoonists, and for the blind comprise a significant volume of material, but the bulk of the series focuses on awards to African Americans. The competition for African Americans was open in nine fields: business, education, farming, fine arts, literature, music, race relations, religious service, and science. Awards were available to African Americans, men or women, born in the United States. The purpose of the awards was to stimulate creative achievement; to acquaint the public with the work being accomplished by African Americans; and to provide economic opportunity for talented but unknown African Americans. George Washington Carver and W. E. B. DuBois were already men of prominence when their names were proposed as candidates, but awards generally went to amateur competitors. Some of these went on to achieve outstanding success in their chosen fields. This series provides a glimpse of the kind of work being done by African Americans during this period and gives insight into the attitudes of those who were attempting to aid them.
A portion of the Award Programs series on African-American awards contains the records of art exhibitions held throughout the country. The exhibits were a direct outgrowth of the awards program and provided an opportunity for the candidates in the fine arts division to show their work and frequently to make sales. There is much routine correspondence in this part of the collection, but occasionally a correspondence file provides a record of the artist's development and growing success. The files of Hale Woodruff and Archibald Motley are of particular interest in this regard.
The African Artists series was compiled by the foundation in preparation for the writing of a book on contemporary artists of Africa. Some of the files contain only a name and the country in which the artist worked; some have a brief sketch of the artist's life. Many of the files, however, contain correspondence between the artist and the directors of the Harmon Foundation. The foundation tried to find American sponsors for the most promising of the African artists and occasionally arranged for their further education in the United States. This series contains several pieces of original work sent as samples to the foundation.
Correspondents include Will Winton Alexander, Caroline Alston, Ulli Beier, Blanche Byerley, Katherine Gardner, William Elmer Harmon, George Edmund Haynes, Walter G. Holmes, Paul Underwood Kellogg, A.W. Mitchum, Archibald John Motley, C.C. Spaulding, Laura Wheeler Waring, and Hale Woodruff.