I recently wrote about an unusual controversy at Pathfinder International, the Boston-area non-profit focused on helping improve access to the full range of reproductive services to women across the developing world. The organization’s founder, Proctor & Gamble heir Clarence Gamble, had eugenicist beliefs, and the board ordered an investigation of his past and how it may have infected the institution.
Now the remaining members of the Gamble family — Clarence’s children Judy Kahrl and Walter Gamble — have resigned from the organization and urged others to spurn it over their failure to fully explore and disclose his legacy. That’s right: the children — now in their 80s — want more disclosure of his past and they also have concerns about the organization’s leadership. Details in the story, which ran in the Maine Sunday Telegram last month.
COLIN WOODARD is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist. He is the author of six books that have been translated into a dozen foreign languages and inspired an NBC television drama. He is currently Director of Nationhood Lab at the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Affairs at Salve Regina University. As State and National Affairs Writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram he won a 2012 George Polk Award and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2016. He is a contributing editor at POLITICO and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, Smithsonian and dozens of other major publications.