Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  FOUNDATIONS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

  FOUNDATIONS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY

  The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power

  INDERJEET PARMAR

  COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-51793-5

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Parmar, Inderjeet.

  Foundations of the American century : the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the rise of American Power / Inderjeet Parmar.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-231-14628-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51793-5 (e-book)

  1. Ford Foundation—History 2. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching—History. 3. Rockefeller Foundation—History. 4. United States—Foreign relations—20th century. I. Title.

  HV97.F62P37 2011

  327.73009’04—dc23

  2011029190

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

  References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1. The Significance of Foundations in U.S. Foreign Policy

  2. American Foundation Leaders

  3. Laying the Foundations of Globalism, 1930–1945

  4. Promoting Americanism, Combating Anti-Americanism, and Developing a Cold War American Studies Network

  5. The Ford Foundation in Indonesia and the Asian Studies Network

  6. Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie in Nigeria and the African Studies Network

  7. The Major Foundations, Latin American Studies, and Chile in the Cold War

  8. American Power and the Major Foundations in the Post–Cold War Era

  9. Conclusion

  NOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is a pleasure to acknowledge debts incurred on the way to researching and writing this book. It has been many years in the making; indeed, we have become somewhat attached to each other. I do wonder how I will get along without it, this simultaneously enjoyable, stimulating, educational, but occasionally frustrating long-term relationship.

  I have received enormous assistance at various stages of this book project. Colleagues and friends have generously given up their time to discuss ideas, read draft chapters or conference papers, and listen to my not uniformly upbeat accounts of the book’s progress. Thanks to all of the following for their time and patience: Bob Arnove, Paul Cammack, Phil Cerny, Mick Cox, Nick Cullather, Michael Doyle, Rosaleen Duffy, John Dumbrell, Donald Fisher, Nicolas Guilhot, Jon Harwood, Doug Jaenicke, Matthew Jones, Dino Knudsen, John Krige, Mark Ledwidge, Leo McCann, Linda Miller, Mick Moran, Craig Murphy, Alex Nunn, Pierre-Yves Saunier, Giles Scott-Smith, Diane Stone, Srdjan Vucetic, and Japhy Wilson. I owe a significant debt to Ralph Young, a wonderfully warm and insightful former colleague, who asked me the question during a seminar presentation that led to my thinking of U.S. foundations as an aspect of American political development. If I have forgotten anyone I’ve exploited over the years, please do forgive me. Any errors or omissions are my responsibility—although, as a sociologist, I appreciate the social basis of those impostors, “success” and “failure”!

  I am very grateful to the archivists who take care of and make available to scholars the historical records of the Big Three foundations. In particular, Alan Divack and Anthony Maloney were absolutely wonderful during the several weeks I spent in the basement reading room at the Ford Foundation. I especially enjoyed our chats over doughnuts and coffee on Friday mornings. I remember our hopeful discussions about John Kerry’s chances of defeating George W. Bush for the White House in 2004. Alan’s knowledge and understanding of the foundation’s records was incredibly helpful, as were his comments regarding the nature of the foundation itself. Anthony was just amazing; he was always there for me, making my time at Ford productive and congenial. Thanks to you both. At a later stage, Idelle Nissila seamlessly took over from Anthony, assisting me with locating documents long after I had begun writing this manuscript.

  Tom Rosenbaum at the Rockefeller Archive Center was always helpful, encouraging, interested in my work, and very knowledgeable. I missed him during my last visit and hope he is enjoying his retirement. Darwin Stapleton’s friendly helpfulness was also much appreciated. The station wagon that the RAC uses to ferry researchers to and from Tarrytown station was also very welcoming and helpful. Thank you!

  The records of the Carnegie Corporation and other Carnegie philanthropies are located at the Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection at the Butler Library, Columbia University. It is a marvelous facility with an excellent staff. Thanks to you all, especially Brenda Hearing and Jane Gorjevsky, curators of the Carnegie collections, for your untiring efforts. Despite the wintry conditions that often prevailed in the reading room (thanks to a superefficient air conditioning system), I always felt very warmly welcome there.

  The British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, and the University of Manchester provided funds and research leave, which enabled me to spend several months in the United States over many years. Some aspects of the book benefited from the work of the SSRC’s initiative on think tanks, led by Nicolas Guilhot and Tom Asher, in the wake of the Iraq War. I am in their debt. Finally, generous research leave from the university upon completing a term as head of politics was essential to the completion of this book.

  At Columbia University Press, Peter Dimock proved an excellent commissioning editor, sharp publishing adviser, and all-round caring and warm human being. We met after a conference panel at the International Studies Association convention in Chicago in 2007 (I think) and, during our chat, he suggested I put together a book proposal for Columbia to consider. To say that that was a very welcome invitation would be an understatement—it was music to my ears! Thanks also to Peter’s assistant, Kabir Dandona. Since Peter’s departure, Philip Leventhal has been extremely helpful with editorial advice and, not to mention, generous with granting greatly appreciated deadline extensions!

  Much of the time taken to research and write this book was stolen from my family. My children—Rohan, Nikhil, and India—were very young (four and two years and not even a twinkle in the eye, respectively) when work on this book began in the late 1990s. In their own ways, they have contributed to the book’s completion. India is a welcome distraction, giggling chaos and random observations on legs; Rohan, a keen historian. Nikhil was especially helpful without knowing it: his ability to focus and dedicate every spare moment—when still a primary-school pupil—including fleeting moments in the car park before school to additional homework was inspiring. Because of him, I began using the car as a study space as well.

  But I dedicate this book to my wife and best friend, Meera: she enables everything, including me.

  1

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOUNDATIONS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

  And it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

  —Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

&n
bsp; American expansion has been characterized not by the acquisition of new territories but by their penetration…. a variety of organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, have attempted to pursue the objectives important to them within the territory of other societies.

  —Samuel P. Huntington, “Transnational Organizations in World Politics” (1973)

  When [Bill] Gates first started the charity organization, he sought advice from Vartan Gregorian, president of the $2.2-billion-US Carnegie Corporation of New York… “Bill Gates always has believed that with wealth comes responsibility, the same as Andrew Carnegie,” said Gregorian. “There are people who deal with symptoms—somebody is poor, you give money. That’s charity. Philanthropy… is to solve problems through investment and planning, not (just) through generosity.”

  —CTV.CA News, “Bill Gates to Devote More Time to Charity Work”

  It is difficult to believe that philanthropy—literally, “love of all mankind”—could possibly be malignant. When one reads of the millions of dollars donated to health schemes by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, for example,1 it is close to sacrilegious to suggest that such initiatives might be other than they seem. Yet I claim something close in this book, in which I analyze the influence of American foundations on U.S. foreign affairs from the 1930s to the “war on terror.” Philanthropic foundations, I argue, have been a key means of building the “American century,” or an American imperium, a hegemony constructed in significant part via cultural and intellectual penetration. This is as much the case within the United States—where a powerful East Coast foreign policy Establishment “penetrated” other regions and social strata—as it is in the world.

  Despite their image of scientific impartiality, ideological-political neutrality, and being above the market and independent of the state, the “Big 3” foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie) have been extremely influential in America’s rise to global hegemony over the past century.2 This book shows that they are intensely political and ideological and are steeped in market, corporate, and state institutions—that they are a part of the power elite of the United States. Working today in a much more crowded field, they continue to innovate, inspire emulation, and collaborate with newer philanthropies.

  Historically, the Big 3 foundations represented a strategic element of the East Coast foreign policy Establishment and the core of the latter’s mind-set, institutions, and activities, manifested by active leadership in organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association. Principally, the Big 3 were at the heart of the Establishment’s efforts to strengthen and mobilize, as necessary, the American academy behind its programs for American-led global hegemony, including the specialized study of foreign areas likely to be of concern to makers of foreign policy, as well as through developing the discipline of international relations. Foundation leaders were drawn from various sections of American elite society and were closely connected with the country’s biggest industrial corporations and elite cultural, religious, political, and state institutions. At the turn of the twentieth century, that elite focused its attention on America’s global role—as well as toward domestic political reform, to build a stronger federal executive. They sought to unite American society to build and catalyze anti-isolationist and globalist opinion (elite, attentive, and mass public), to build state capacities and political capital in the area of foreign affairs, and to improve the study of foreign areas and international relations in the universities. The foundations built the domestic intellectual and political bases that would assist America’s rise to global leadership. In addition, the foundations were directly engaged in extending and consolidating U.S. hegemony around the globe, especially during the Cold War, influencing intellectual, political, and ideological developments that transformed Chile, for example, from a welfare democracy into a neoliberal pioneer state under General Augusto Pinochet, following the bloody military coup of 1973.

  America’s journey to global leadership may be tracked through the rise of the major foundations through three overlapping but distinct stages, with each stage socializing elites at home and abroad and embedding liberalism into national and international institutions: Stage 1, at the domestic level, lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s, during which time the foundations helped construct the hegemony of liberal internationalism, marginalized isolationism, and built up the institutional capacities of the federal government, especially in foreign affairs. Stage 2 partially overlapped the first stage and lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s, during which time foundations helped socialize and integrate American and foreign elites and developed formal and informal international organizations. Stage 3 began in the late 1980s, when foundations helped reconceptualize American hegemony, promoted democracy and “global civil society,” and fostered “democratic challenges” to neoliberal globalization.3 The international orders constructed or aimed at were, and are, congenial to American interests.4

  The crucial point is that despite claims to the contrary, the Big 3’s large-scale aid programs for economic and political development failed to alleviate poverty, raise mass living standards, or better educate people. What that aid generated were sustainable elite networks that, on the whole, supported American policies—foreign and economic—ranging from liberalism in the 1950s to neoliberalism into the twenty-first century.

  FOUNDATIONS AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS: A NEGLECTED AREA

  There is only one other book-length treatment of American foundations’ roles in U.S. foreign policy, and it was published in 1983.5 Edward H. Berman’s excellent monograph provides a great deal of original evidence, which makes easier a more comprehensive and complementary coverage of the issues relating to philanthropic foundations. It is appropriate, however, that the issue is revisited in light of subsequent scholarly and political concerns, including the increased attention to nonstate actors in international relations and to the power of knowledge networks.

  Despite the importance of foundations, their role in foreign affairs is underresearched. This is puzzling. However, the very definition of what counts as “politics” marginalizes philanthropy. “Governmental” institutions and the “state” constitute key concerns in political science and IR, but foundations are often understood as independent of the state. “Political parties” are central to political science, but foundations are specifically, or so they claim, nonpartisan. The same might be said for other concerns like ideology and organized and special interests: American foundations are self-professedly “nonideological” and beholden to no “sectional” interests—they focus on all mankind. Of course, the study of foreign affairs is state-centric, reinforcing the idea that foreign policy is especially the remit of a few state experts with inside information. Foundations and even foreign affairs think tanks, therefore, do not appear important, by definition, when one thinks in statist ways.

  In addition, the study of elites—and foundations are quite elitist—has fallen by the wayside.6 It has been just over fifty years since the publication of C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, and no major event appears to have been arranged to mark that anniversary. A conference at the University of Manchester recently aimed to revive elite studies. Foundations as elite institutions therefore have not been studied by sociologists, for example, despite a lively debate on their role between Donald Fisher and Martin Bulmer back in the 1980s.7

  Of course, the nonstate actors’ approach was urged by Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and Samuel Huntington in the 1970s, noting the importance of philanthropic foundations as transnational actors.8 The private actor in world affairs was not displacing the state, but it had transformed the institutional environment of interstate politics to such a degree that the mutual interactions of private and public spheres required investigation. The upsurge of interest since 1989 in nonstate actors in global politics and the construction of global civil society, however, maintains the sharp distinction between states and private organizations in international affairs. In tan
dem with and related to this distinction, an attachment to pluralistic approaches to the study and understanding of power at the global (and domestic) levels remains—note the pluralistic character of America’s expansion as claimed by Huntington9—led by governmental and nongovernmental actors in service of their selfish interests.10 Extant research on foundations’ roles in the construction of twenty-first-century global civil society continues to be based on assumptions that governed scholarship on foundations during earlier periods. Prewitt argues, for example, that foundations represent a “third sector” in society that is beyond the state and the marketplace. As such, they operate not for the purposes of profit or politics but to make a broad contribution to enhancing the essential features of a pluralistic society.11 Anheier and Leat profess similar sentiments, arguing that foundations’ nonstate, nonmarket character “makes them independent forces of social change and innovation.”12 Given their global character, Anheier claims that foundations “are one of the main sources of support for global civil society organizations” that are, in turn, building a more open global order and trying to “humanize globalization.”13 These arguments about philanthropy as a benign, progressive, nonpolitical, and nonbusiness force are being challenged by an increasing body of research.

  In what follows, I offer a detailed, archive-based critique that takes a long view of U.S. foundations’ position in U.S. foreign policy. The book advances part of an agenda encouraged by Keohane and Nye in the 1970s, although there remain normative and theoretical differences between their approaches and those favored here. Four characteristics—or “fictions”—of the Big 3 foundations account for their significance, all related to their apparent independence: first, the “nonstate” fiction, at odds with their trustees’ statist mindset and their governmental connections; second, the “nonpolitical” fiction, despite the foundations’ connections with both main political parties; third, the “nonbusiness” fiction, even as foundations’ trustees serve as corporate directors and earn income from them; and finally, the “scientific/nonideological” fiction, despite the Big 3’s attachment to and promotion of the ideology of Americanism as liberal internationalism.14 Additionally, the foundations’ adaptability and sense of historic mission—changing tactics, same program15—meant that they successfully negotiated their way through the frequently hostile environment of American domestic politics and the equally turbulent wider world. Such agility during the isolationist 1920s and 1930s provides insights into how foundation programs and tactics would successfully adapt in states designated as “anti-American” during the Cold War era. In each such case, foundations showed tenacity and adaptability in allying with any nonhostile agency that furthered their goals and prepared for a more permissive climate.