St. Joan of the Arches: McDonald’s Heir Super-sizes Liberal Causes
Monday, April 29, 2013 at 2:46PM McDonald’s hamburgers make me sick. I abhor the whole fast food ethos. I’m embarrassed that every day 68 million people worldwide visit the Golden Arches, rub their stomach happily and say, “America’s greatest accomplishment - the Big Mac.”
Joan Kroc But I adore McDonald’s heiress Joan Kroc. I’m with those who call her St. Joan of the Arches.
Her husband was Ray Kroc, a small town milkshake machine salesman, who bought a small regional restaurant chain in the 50’s and turned it into the biggest fast food empire in history. Today, in 119 countries, 34,000 McDonald’s restaurants serve those 68 million customers every day.
That’s a lot of Big Macs. 550 million to be exact, consumed each year. Made Ray lots of money. When he died in 1984, Ray left Joan $2.3 billion.
By the time she died twenty years later, Joan Kroc had given all that money away.
Ray was an outspoken conservative, and his charitable giving was small gifts to medical research, trade schools and Richard Nixon.
But Joan did it differently. She gave big gifts and she gave to progressive and humanitarian causes. National Public Radio, the Salvation Army, University of Notre Dame’s Joan Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies - even black activist Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984, all got millions, and each got more money than Ray ever gave Nixon.
Some accused Joan of betraying Ray’s wishes, but she said he had trusted her with the fortune. Announcing her $1.6 billion gift to the Salvation Army to build and staff 50 community centers in poor neighborhoods, she told a crowd, “I’m sure this is something that Ray would have like me to do. I’m sure he’s looking down – ah, I hope he’s looking down….”
Joan Mansfield and Ray Kroc fell in love in 1957 over a piano bar; she was at the keyboard, he was the new brash owner of the small fledgling Macdonald’s hamburger chain and was trying to sell her boss a franchise. Both were married at the time, to other people, but the flame was kindled. 11 years later, they met again, she now in her 40’s, he in his 60’s, and married. Though different in age, style and politics, they loved each other deeply. When Ray died 15 years later he left Joan the Macdonald’s fortune, $2.3 billion.
Many successful American business executives become very generous people; folks like the Rockefellers and Carnegies and Gates have set up foundations and supported all kinds of cultural institutions and public health work, encouraged by the generous tax breaks that come with charitable donations. Kroc’s 50 Salvation Army youth community centers are reminiscent of Andrew Carnegie’s gift of hundreds of small town free libraries that continue to educate and inspire people nationwide. Joan’s care for the common person evokes the Gates Foundation’s work worldwide on public health and women.
But most American foundations are very cautious and conservative in their giving, fiercely protecting their assets, demanding strict control over grantees, and giving away only the minimum 5% annually require by law.
But even though Joan had become a big time rich person, she retained her small town Midwest ethos. She did start a foundation, but she disliked the paperwork and the cautious advisors, the fawning applicants and the slow return on generosity. If you asked her directly, you were usually turned down. She preferred anonymous cash gifts to folks like those she knew growing up in the Depression – flood victims, the homeless, abandoned animals, hospice care for the poor.
But she reluctantly went public with some gifts, like the huge Salvation Army donation, the largest single charitable gift in history. University of Notre Dame and the University of San Diego both named Peace Studies Centers in her name; she was a strong proponent of nuclear disarmament.
She and Ray owned the San Diego Padres baseball team. While Ray is remembered for going on the stadium address system during a losing game and saying “This is the stupidest game of baseball I’ve ever seen,” Joan started the first drug and alcohol support program for employees and players in Major League Baseball. After Ray died she tried to donate the team to the city of San Diego, but Major League Baseball (the owners, that is, major oligarchs in the Kingdom of Baseball) wouldn’t allow it. So she sold the team and gave that money away also.
Receiving a terminal diagnosis, she stepped up her giving in her last months. One of her last big gifts was $250 million to National Public Radio. Conservative lawmakers are constantly trying to eliminate NPR’s already meager budget, saying its news is too liberally biased. When Joan made her huge gift to NPR, one conservative commentator called her a “McNut.”
Every time I hear the NPR announcer say that the program I just heard was funded in part by the Estate of Joan Kroc, I feel slightly less bad about those times on the road when I’ve succumbed to the lure of the Golden Arches. My excuse has always been whiney kids or the only lights on a late night highway. But now I can say, “Those Chicken McNuggets I bought helped kids learn how to use computers at a youth center, gave immediate cash to flood victims, countered the lies of Fox TV with NPR. That’s a tasty meal.” Or, as McDonald’s current slogan goes, “I’m lovin’ it.”
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I got a lot of this info from a Washington Post article about Joan Kroc with a great headline: “Billions Served. McDonald’s Heiress Joan Kroc Took Her Philanthropy and Super-Sized It.”
Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter
Reader Comments (1)
Now I know who this is! I too have an ambivalent relationship with the Golden Arches. It was the first fast-food restaurant my family visited when I was young, and a special treat for our kids when they were little. Yet, always the mixed feelings, and now the total aversion. But I love this story about Joan Kroc and will think of her brave generosity next time I enjoy PBS and NPR!