Biography of Martha T. Muse
Researched and written by Dr. Kathy Waldron
Treasurer and Director emerita of the Tinker Foundation
December 2024
Martha Twitchell Muse served as the Tinker Foundation’s President for 27 years and its chairperson for 33 years before retiring in 2008. She personally drove Edward Larocque Tinker’s agenda for the Foundation – to “promote peace, goodwill and understanding between the United States and the other countries of the world with particular emphasis on the countries of Latin America where national defense and future economic growth are so closely related to ours.”
Ms. Muse was born in 1926 in Dallas, Texas, to John Blackburn Muse and Kathryn Poole Burbank. She moved to New York City with her mother after her father’s death in 1941. She received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College in 1948 and a master’s degree in political science with a specialization in international affairs from Columbia University in 1955. After graduating, she worked in New York City in the advertising industry before joining the Foundation in 1965 as its first executive director. Upon Dr. Tinker’s death, she became the Foundation’s President. That same year, she also became Chair of the Board.
To academics and the wider Latin American business and philanthropic communities, Ms. Muse’s name was synonymous with the Tinker Foundation. Described by many as a “force of nature,” she was widely respected for her knowledge of Latin America, where she traveled extensively throughout her life developing personal relationships with many leading political and cultural figures in the region.
Ms. Muse was not timid about undertaking new projects and finding new paths for the Tinker Foundation. As she noted in a report of the Foundation’s activities from 1959 through 1967, “Since its inception in 1959, the Foundation has sponsored a number of projects, always however, with the emphasis upon the establishment of a personal relationship, a person-to-person involvement. The underlying philosophy of the Foundation is based upon the premise that when individuals are given an opportunity to know one another, this knowledge goes a long way towards dispelling suspicion and distrust.” She wrote further that “The Tinker Foundation, though small in terms of many of the vast foundations, has a unique advantage. It is a foundation that is not afraid to experiment when an experiment has an opportunity to succeed…The Tinker Foundation would like to find itself in that happy position of fostering new ideas, testing those ideas until possible solutions emerge, and the ideas become institutions or workable solutions standing on their own merit.”
In her leadership, Ms. Muse made use of this particular strength of the Foundation as well as her own attributes and talents. Many who knew her over the years attested to her remarkable ability to read people and situations and then pick opportunities best positioned to make a difference. If she believed in the person and his or her ideas, she was willing to commit the Foundation to providing funding until the organization attracted other supporters and expanded its impact.
During her tenure, the Foundation supported hundreds of organizations and disbursed millions of dollars. These included small and large grants, single- and multi-year grants as well as ongoing support for critical institutions focused on Latin American development, such as the Council of the Americas and Inter-American Dialogue.
“The Tinker Foundation, though small in terms of many of the vast foundations, has a unique advantage. It is a foundation that is not afraid to experiment when an experiment has an opportunity to succeed…”
All foundation leaders with sufficient longevity leave their mark on their institutions through signature programs they establish and nurture. While it is not possible to name all the significant programs Ms. Muse selected, several stand out for their uniqueness and effectiveness. She initiated several distinctive investment areas, including funding for ACCION International, the Jimmy Yen Rural Reconstruction Movement, and the Tinker-funded student field research program administered by United States’ universities. Later, she became an early proponent of judicial reform efforts and the conservation of natural resources in Latin America. Finally, Ms. Muse advocated for greater scholarship on and philanthropic support for Antarctica. Her commitment to furthering understanding of the continent was recognized in 2009 with the establishment of the Tinker-Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica (2009-2018).
In addition to her leadership at the Foundation, Ms. Muse held many distinguished external positions throughout her long, productive, and trailblazing career. She was the first woman appointed as a trustee of Columbia University and was among the first women to be appointed to the Board of the New York Stock Exchange. She served on numerous corporate boards, including The Bank of New York, May Department Stores, and Sterling Drug, as well as not-for-profit boards such as The Americas Society, the Spanish Institute, and the Luso-American Development Foundation. She received several awards for her contributions to U.S.-Latin American relations, including the Orden el Sol del Perú, Orden de Bernardo O’Higgins (Chile), Orden de Mayo al Mérito (Argentina), and the Ordem Nacional do Cruzeiro do Sul (Brazil).
Martha Muse retired from the Tinker Foundation in 2008 and died six years later on February 9. Her legacy at the Foundation is carried on through many of the programs she initiated, forming the basis for ongoing efforts in student research and academic exchange, environment, democratic development and governance, and education.
