How foundations that support child welfare lost their way

Imagine yourself as a successful entrepreneur in the 20th century. With a good idea, hard work, and some luck, you have managed to build a small fortune. And now you want to make sure that some of your money goes to help those members of society who seem to need it the most: orphans. So you donate to orphanages and start a foundation to help children whose parents have died or who are otherwise incapable of caring for them. Now imagine that, decades later, your money is being used instead to destroy the system that was meant to protect these children. And it’s all being done in the name of “justice.”  

This is the story of John Emory Andrus, who made his fortune as a chemical manufacturer and gave a significant amount of it to an orphanage in Yonkers, New York, called the Julia Dyckman Andrus Memorial. In 1935, the year after Andrus