Carlton K. Matson assumed the directorship of the Cleveland Foundation in September 1924, after serving as interim director following the departure of Raymond Moley. Like his predecessor, Matson was a graduate (class of 1915) of Oberlin College. After earning a master’s degree in political science from Columbia University—his thesis examined the State of Ohio’s budget—he worked at New York City’s Bureau of Municipal Research and briefly for a newspaper. He then accepted a position as publicity director of the Welfare Federation of Cleveland and during his time there co-authored a report for the Cleveland Foundation’s recreation survey. Fred Goff subsequently hired Matson to head Cleveland Trust’s public relations department. Matson left Cleveland Trust to pursue a career in financial advertising in Cleveland and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In sum, the foundation’s second director was not “from the conventional uplifter genus,” as Oberlin’s alumni magazine put it shortly after his appointment. “Mr. Matson … has the inquiring mind—almost a restless, unquiet mind,” the magazine went on. “Yet his feet stay on the ground.”

Matson lived up to his advance billing as a realist. At the time of Goff’s death in 1923, the foundation’s endowment was generating less than $15,000 annually in unrestricted income. With its subsidy from Cleveland Trust reduced to $5,000 a year, there was little means to undertake exhaustive, expensive municipal studies. This may not have greatly concerned Matson, who perceived that too many Clevelanders thought that the foundation was a research organization. If the community trust was to fulfill its basic mission of disbursing grants annually for civic benefit, Matson realized that he would have to become actively involved in fund-raising.

In the summer of 1926, he began sending copies of a newspaper article on community trusts to various prominent Clevelanders, a means of introducing himself disguised as a solicitation of their comments. He also systematically sent to every attorney in Cleveland a copy of a speech recently given at the City Club of Cleveland by Ralph Hayes, the director of the New York Community Trust. In the address, Hayes, who had been Goff’s personal assistant at Cleveland Trust, stated his conviction that the invention of the community foundation would one day be ranked as Cleveland’s most important contribution to the world of ideas.

The feedback that Matson received from his mailings betrayed the ignorance, indifference or resistance of the very persons he hoped to convince to endow the foundation or persuade their wealthy clients to do so. Also resulting in disappointment was his attempt to effect a merger of the foundation and the Welfare Federation, whose annual Community Fund campaign consistently generated millions of dollars for its member social service agencies. In the process of pleading the case for the merger, however, Matson converted investment banker Warren S. Hayden, a member of the federation’s executive committee, into a dedicated advocate for the Cleveland Foundation.

Hayden sent a letter to the president of Cleveland Trust in early 1928 that urged the bank to establish a multiple trusteeship as a means of securing a broader base of support for the Cleveland Foundation. Although Hayden spoke solely as a public-spirited citizen, because of his position on the board of the Union Trust Company, Cleveland’s largest bank and, as such, second-ranked Cleveland Trust’s closest competitor, his words carried the promise of the financial community’s cooperation.

Sentiment slowly crystallized among Cleveland Trust officers in favor of multiple trusteeship, but Matson, who had helped to pave the way for this expansion of the foundation’s fund-raising powers, did not witness the Cleveland Foundation’s official affiliation with four additional Cleveland banks in 1931. He had resigned in March 1928 to accept a newspaper editorship. He later directed the Buffalo Foundation for two years.

Matson’s restless intellect eventually brought him back to Cleveland, where he became a greatly admired chief editorial writer for the Cleveland Press. He died in 1948.