Sam Walton on Philanthropy

Helen Walton's influence persisted past the founder's death and into institutional philanthropy. When Sam Walton died in 1992, his Walmart ownership passed to her and the couple's four children, and at one point she ranked as the richest American and among the wealthiest women in the world. As president of the Walton Family Foundation, she directed a three-hundred-million-dollar gift to the University of Arkansas in 2002 — at the time the largest donation ever made to an American public university — following an earlier fifty-million-dollar gift to its business school. She established the Walton Scholars program, which supports one hundred fifty students annually and brings Central American students to the United States to study democracy and free enterprise, and she founded a Bentonville children's enrichment center that now bears her name. Late in life, affected by dementia, she painted watercolors her daughter Alice described as lyrical and whimsical.

Sam Walton endowed the Walton Family Foundation in 1987, five years before his death, directing it initially toward charter-school education and later extending its programs into environmental issues, particularly water-related causes. The foundation became one of the largest family philanthropies in the United States: Alice and Jim Walton committed two hundred fifty million dollars in 2016 toward charter-school facilities through its Building Equity Initiative, part of a one-billion-dollar, five-year pledge to expand educational opportunity by partnering with charter operators, researchers, and education reformers. The institutional pattern mirrored the founder's method in business — concentrated bets, measurable outputs, and leverage through capital rather than overhead. The charter-school focus traces to the founder's own directive at the foundation's creation. Combined with Helen Walton's university giving and the Walton Scholars program, the family's philanthropy operates as deliberately as the retail business that funds it.

The final thirty months of Walton's life compressed Walmart's transformation from regional powerhouse into multinational. American sales had quadrupled to thirty-two billion dollars over the previous five years by 1990, the year Walmart acquired the food-service distributor The McLane Company. In 1991 the company opened its first store outside the United States, in Mexico City, and launched the Sam's American Choice brand under the Made in America initiative, meant to stimulate American suppliers to produce more products at lower prices. On March 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush presented Walton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Walton died on April 5, and his eldest son, S. Robson Walton, took over as chairman of the corporate board on April 7, 1992 — a year in which Walmart operated in forty-five states. Eighteen months after his death, in December 1993, the company's stores crossed the billion-dollar mark in sales in a single week.

Walton was treated for hairy-cell leukemia in 1982 and diagnosed with bone cancer in 1990, undergoing radiation and chemotherapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and he died of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, in Little Rock on April 5, 1992 — a week after his seventy-fourth birthday and three months shy of Walmart's thirtieth anniversary. Days earlier, according to his son, he was still reviewing sales data from his hospital bed. Word of his death went out over the satellite network to every one of the 1,960 stores of a company that then employed four hundred thousand people and generated nearly fifty billion dollars in annual sales across 1,735 Walmarts, 212 Sam's Clubs, and 13 Supercenters. In March 1992, a month before he died, President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in retail.