Foundation Files Reveal Insights on Culture

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James Baldwin needed some money.

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: April 8, 2012

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The writer James Baldwin in 1979. His letters to the Ford Foundation two decades earlier are available to scholars.

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It was 1959, six years before Congress created national endowments for the arts and humanities to support struggling artists and cultural institutions. For Baldwin, who was straining to finish a novel and pay personal debts, the place to turn for cash was neither the government nor any literary agent but to a relatively obscure foundation official named W. McNeil Lowry.

Mr. Lowry had the last word in deciding which artists, writers and performers would receive grants from the Ford Foundation , the richest private source of cultural largess at the time. That made him the nation's unofficial mentor in chief during much of the 1950s and '60s, a cultural figure of remarkable influence who was virtually unknown to most of the public.

This month letters to and from Mr. Lowry as well as thousands of other Ford Foundation records, films, oral histories and unpublished reports were opened to researchers at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., where they will now be housed. At the Ford Foundation, based in Manhattan, most of the archives had been accessible on only a limited basis and were mostly intended for in-house use.

"Ford had run the archive, but they decided they were a foundation, not a research library," said Jack Meyers, president of the archive center, which houses the Rockefeller family's materials and records of other institutions. "Ford was the first billion-dollar foundation. It changed the way American philanthropy worked, and Rockefeller and Ford worked on so many projects jointly, it was a natural match."

The original grant applications and related documents were shredded years ago but were preserved on 12,000 reels of microfilm. They will afford scholars the opportunity to delve into the thinking of Mr. Lowry, a Ford Foundation vice president, and his associates in awarding grants. "Ford was a major player in the cultural cold war," said James Allen Smith, vice president and director of research and education at the Rockefeller Archive Center, "and no one was more influential in shaping the arts and humanities in the '50s and '60s than McNeil Lowry."

Ford's earliest grants were modest but nonetheless vital to the recipients, and the foundation helped showcase a diverse group of American artists when the United States was vying for cultural supremacy. By 1962 Mr. Lowry expanded its arts programs with $6.1 million in grants to nine nonprofit repertory theaters and later with stipends to writers, filmmakers, art schools, music conservatories and dance organizations.

Scholars are just beginning to sift through the newly available archives. But if the Baldwin letters are any indication, the microfilm, papers and reports could yield a harvest of insights on cultural figures who achieved greatness, and some who have been forgotten, who were struggling financially and were compelled to explain their predicament and their output.

In January 1959 Baldwin wrote Mr. Lowry that he was finishing a novel titled "Another Country" inspired by his experiences in New York and Paris.

"It is based on my arbitrary assumption (all novels are based on arbitrary assumptions) that the two most profound realities the American has to deal with are color and sex," he wrote.

Invoking Henry James, he went on to recap the relationship among the principal characters. "Stated that way, it sounds very bald," he wrote, "but I have worked very hard to 'entertain,' as James says, 'the reader' and to tell the truth."

Baldwin wrote that he had returned to New York to finish the novel and was already contemplating another, which was to take place in a border state on the day that slaves were freed and explore the impact of emancipation on blacks and their former masters.

"It is not an apologia, God knows, for that society," he explained, "but the novel is naggingly concerned with the questions, What is freedom? and: Who wants it?"

He wrote that his "only real key to an authoritative novel lies in finding out what the slave's attitude was toward himself," a task that he said he would pursue by following some more advice of Henry James: " 'Strive to be one of those people on whom nothing is lost.' I will keep my eyes open — and my mouth shut."

A few weeks later the foundation wrote to say that it had awarded Baldwin a $12,000 two-year fellowship "to enable you to concentrate upon your creative work as a writer" and to pay his debts.

The grant enabled him to begin "Another Country" again. In January 1962 he wrote Mr. Lowry that he had been wanting to thank him "but it seemed impossible — it really seemed dishonest — until I could report that the work was done."

It finally was.

"Had it not been for the Ford Grant, I would either be tearing it up until now, or I would have abandoned it," Baldwin wrote. "It is dangerous to tear up a novel too long, you lose it, and an abandoned novel can act as an obstruction which will destroy one's writing life. For a writer the destruction of his writing life is exactly the same thing as the destruction of his life."

"Another Country" was published in 1962 when Baldwin was 37.

What about the book about emancipation day?

"I looked at synopses of all of Baldwin's later novels and didn't find anything matching this description," Dr. Meyers said. "Not in his short stories, either, as far as I know.  He seems to have used the Ford grant to finish and revise 'Another Country,' but the other book remained unwritten."

Mr. Lowry joined the Ford Foundation in 1953 and became the director of its arts and humanities programs in 1957 and vice president in 1964. He retired in 1974. Lincoln Kirstein, a founder of the New York City Ballet, called him "the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced."

He died in 1993, nearly six years after Baldwin.

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Spam Invades a Last Refuge, the Cellphone

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Text message spam has started waking Bob Dunnell in the middle of the night, promising cheap mortgages, credit cards and drugs. Some messages offer gift cards to, say, Walmart, if he clicks on a Web site and enters his Social Security number.

By NICOLE PERLROTH

Published: April 7, 2012

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Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times

Bob Dunnell has reported some text spam to the Federal Trade Commission, to little avail.

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Replying "NO" or "STOP" to text spam may only verify to spammers that you have a working number that can then be resold.

Once the scourge of e-mail providers and the Postal Service, spammers have infiltrated the last refuge of spam-free communication: cellphones. In the United States, consumers received roughly 4.5 billion spam texts last year, more than double the 2.2 billion received in 2009, according to Ferris Research, a market research firm that tracks spam.

Spread over 250 million text message-enabled phones, the problem is not as commonplace as e-mail spam. But it is a growing menace, with the potential for significant damage.

"Unsolicited text messaging is a pervasive problem," said Christine Todaro, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission, the consumer watchdog agency, which is turning to the courts for help. "It is becoming very difficult to track down who is sending the spam. We encourage consumers to file complaints, which helps us track down the spammers, but even then it is a little bit like peeling back an onion."

Although some text spam is of the harmless, if annoying, marketing variety, a vast majority is more insidious, experts say. With one mobile tap, smartphone users risk signing up for a bogus, impossible-to-cancel service.

Or they may succumb to that offer for a Walmart gift card or a free iPhone in exchange for taking a survey and divulging all sorts of personal information, like their addresses or their transaction history — which can then be sold to digital marketers or even used to crack their bank accounts.

And, so far, it is hard to stop it. Even replying to unwanted messages with "NO" or "STOP" — the usual method for unsubscribing from an unwanted text message list — may only verify to spammers that you have a working number that can then be resold.

Scrambling to get a better grasp on the problem, the mobile industry last month joined with a maker of antispam software, Cloudmark, on a new reporting service that lets users forward mobile spam to "7726," a number that spells SPAM on most keypads. Carriers will then use that information to block numbers.

Mobile spam is illegal under two federal laws — the 2003 Can Spam Act and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act , which set up the Do Not Call Registry in 2003. Smartphone users can report numbers that spam comes from on both the Web sites of the F.T.C. and the Federal Communications Commission . The major wireless carriers — AT&T , Sprint , T-Mobile , Bell Mobility and Verizon Wireless — all also offer ways to report the numbers on their Web sites and can block numbers. A number of apps for Android phones also promise enhanced spam text filtering.

Spammers, though, are endlessly inventive. Mobile carriers and filtering software can detect when a large volume of spam is sent from one phone number, and when the texts try to get someone to click on a Web site.

So spammers are turning to large banks of phone numbers, regularly changing the Web sites they try to get consumers to click, and blasting their messages from the Internet using "over the top messaging systems," which let them send millions of messages cheaply. The minute a carrier blocks one number, spammers simply start using another.

"It seems this is all coming from different sources," said Mr. Dunnell, a financial security consultant in St. Louis, who reported some texts he received on the F.T.C.'s Web site and signed up for the Do Not Call list — to no avail. "I don't know what good blocking one number will do."

Spam on social media and instant-messaging services is also a problem, and there is more of it than of mobile spam, experts say, although security firms do not keep comprehensive figures. But the filtering technologies are more sophisticated.

As of last October, Facebook said it had blocked 220 million malicious links from a total of a trillion links clicked on Facebook a day.

Mobile spam, a more recent trend, is growing faster partly because spammers can blast their messages across providers, which share technologies; they have to customize for each instant-messaging provider and social media platform.

Legal remedies may provide some help against mobile spam. Verizon has brought 20 lawsuits against wireless telemarketers and spammers, most of which have been settled.

The F.T.C. tried its first mobile spam case in February 2011 against Phillip A. Flora of Huntington Beach, Calif., accusing him of sending more than five million text messages over a 40-day period at a "mind-boggling" rate of 85 a minute, according to court documents.

Prosecutors said Mr. Flora was draining users' allotted text message limits, which cost them money, and blasting messages at all hours of the night. The number of anyone who verified it by replying to the text message was sold to marketers.

The federal complaint against Mr. Flora said he charged $300 for every 100,000 text messages he sent — on top of what he made from selling cellphone numbers to third parties.

Mr. Flora settled the charges for $32,000 and agreed to cease sending spam texts. His lawyer, Michael A. Thurman, said his client "did not realize what he was doing was in violation of the law."

Text spam that tries to get consumers to reveal their personal information is similar to the e-mail frauds known as "phishing." In the mobile context, these spams are known as "smishing."

One of the two most common mobile spam messages last month, according to Cloudmark, the antispam software maker, was the "Need Cash Now" spam, in which users were promised quick cash if they disclosed personal and financial tidbits about themselves, which could be used to gain access to a bank account. The other was a gift card swindle, which lured users into taking a survey, in many cases on a spoofed Web site, and answering questions about their salary, debt levels, marital status and health history.

"Attackers gain multiple layers of revenue from that information," said Rachel Kinoshita, Cloudmark's head of security operations. "They amass a 360-degree view of their target and can sell that information to marketers or just phish their bank accounts."

Spammers can make a tidy profit blasting tens of thousands of messages at once. They use computers to generate millions of possible number combinations and then send messages to those addresses without knowing whether they have dialed a working number.

"If there weren't so much money to be made here, spammers would simply go away," Ms. Kinoshita said.

And of course smishing costs victims who do not have unlimited text message plans. Getting as few as 10 a month at 20 cents each would cost $24 more a year.

Mr. Dunnell has considered changing his cellphone number but concluded it would be too disruptive. "I just wish there was a better way to deal with this," he said.

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