A Memorial Tribute to Robert L. McNeil Jr. (1915–2010): Benefactor of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies

Robert L. McNeil Jr., who died on May 20, 2010, at the age of ninetyfour, was a skilled scientist and an extraordinarily generous arts patron. Over a long career he did a great deal to promote the scholarly, intellectual, and cultural life of the Philadelphia community. The McNeil Center for Early American Studies is a prime example of his beneficent spirit. Acting entirely on his personal initiative, he gave the Center a series of gifts that more than tripled its endowment, and he also provided it with a splendid new building on the Penn campus. As the past and present directors of the Center, we wish to pay public tribute to Bob McNeil for all that he did to strengthen and sustain its programs.Bob essentially had two careers. He began in the 1930s as a research chemist working in the family business, McNeil Laboratories. He soon developed the aspirin-free analgesic Tylenol, which made him a wealthy man. In 1959 Bob and his brother Henry sold their pharmaceutical business to Johnson and Johnson, and in 1964 Bob stepped down as chairman of McNeil Laboratories, when he was not yet fifty years old. In 1963 he started the Barra Foundation and channeled much of his fortune into it. Though he continued to participate in the pharmaceutical industry and other business ventures, for the rest of his life he was a full-scale philanthropist, awarding grants for projects in the arts and culture, education, health, and human services, mainly in the Philadelphia area. At the same time he assembled a major personal collection of American art and antiques that was focused on the period 1775-1825, including the work of some sixty early Philadelphia silversmiths and a notable group of paintings by members of the Peale family.Bob's interest in what would become the McNeil Center evolved in gradual stages. In the 1970s he came to know Richard Dunn when both were members of the board of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. During the same period Bob engaged a group of historians to write a collective volume entitled Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, which was subsidized by the Barra Foundation and published in 1982. In the process, Bob became aware that five of his authors - Mary and Richard Dunn, Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Edwin Bronner, and Edwin Wolf - were leading participants in the founding of the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.In 1977, with the encouragement of Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Vartan Gregorian of Penn, Dunn had written a proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a grant to establish the Philadelphia Center. Knowing that the Mellon Foundation had recently awarded conservation grants to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Philosophical Society, he emphasized that the new Center would facilitate scholarly research at these institutions. The Mellon Foundation accepted this argument and made a generous grant to Penn for this project. The Philadelphia Center began operations in 1978.Wanting to launch the Center with a big scholarly effort, the Dunns put together a team of editors to produce a select edition of The Papers of William Penn, published in four volumes by the University of Pennsylvania Press between 1981 and 1987. To cover the large editorial costs, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Penn Papers a series of four grants but required the editors to raise sizable matching funds. Four times the Dunns asked the Barra Foundation for help. Characteristically, Bob always declined to donate the full amount, but he provided instead one third of the match, which paved the way to raise the rest from other donors. Thanks in large measure to Bob, the $1 million cost of this project was covered.During the 1980s the Philadelphia Center evolved into a lively community of early Americanists. While Dunn was absorbed in the Penn Papers project, Richard Beeman directed the program for five years and Stephanie Wolf for one. …