Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  THE WORLDVIEW OF FOUNDATION LEADERS

  The broad outlines of a worldview among foundation leaders is now visible: most notable, of course, is the firm, indeed unshakeable, attachment to American global leadership, a “hardwired” attitude that will be systematically portrayed in the empirical chapters to follow. Suffice it here to say that David Rockefeller, son of Junior and his true heir, sums up the position very well:

  The world has now become so inextricably intertwined that the United States can no longer go it alone…. We are the world’s sole superpower and its dominant nation economically. One of our principal duties is to provide judicious and consistent leadership that is firmly embedded in our national values and ideals. To do otherwise is to guarantee a return to the conflict that characterized the blood-drenched twentieth century.86

  The American system of values—free enterprise, individualism, limited government—is deeply ingrained in the foundations’ own benefactors and originators: indeed, the Rockefellers, Carnegie, and Ford built their industrial empires in the very spirit of the American “dream.” Below is an attempt to sketch out a collective portrait of the kinds of views that prevailed among foundation elites and that contextualize the kinds of mission the foundations pursued, how they saw themselves and others at home and abroad, and how they wanted to go about “doing” philanthropy. Four interrelated themes are clear from such an exploration of foundation leaders’ subculture: their religiosity, scientism, racism, and elitism.

  “God gave me my wealth,” John D. Rockefeller Sr. once responded to critics who demanded he admit the “tainted” character of his vast fortune.87 Foundation leaders are overwhelmingly drawn from “among the believers”: Protestants, an elect group, the chosen few, in their own eyes, the real “owners” of America. Being among the most successful people of their generation, such a self-image is hardly surprising. It is a short step from this to a belief in their own superiority—as a social group, a national elite, as opposed to the “lower” classes in America or, equally, over “lesser” peoples overseas. The linkage of religion and the “elect,” self-made earthly success and their movement in restricted social and racial milieus associated with elite schools, Ivy-covered universities, “blue-blood” law firms and pinstriped State Department officialdom mixes a potent cocktail that tends both to cohere the “in” group and to cast among the damned everyone else: nonelite white Americans, non-Protestants—let alone African Americans and swarthy, non-Anglo-Saxon foreigners. The “in” group “knows” and “decides”; the “out” groups are the objects of knowledge.

  Andrew Carnegie stands out as broadly secular and even opposed to religion and theology. His conversion to this state, however, rendered him righteous enough merely to have replaced the Christian missionary with a biological evolutionist missionary who, at least superficially, championed “social Darwinism” and the ideas of Herbert Spencer. According to Stephen Wall, Carnegie had long searched for a credible faith to replace Scottish Presbyterianism.88 His utopia, it seems, was the triumph of capitalist industrialism—as exemplified by his steel plants at Pittsburgh. In practice, Carnegie was a pragmatist: Spencerian attachments aside, he rejected laissez-faire notions because of the necessity of government to modern economy as a source of steel contracts and for providing some minimal protection for workers.89 Carnegie also effectively rejected the idea of “eugenic superiority,” because of his belief that it was from the ranks of the poor that real leaders emerged—much as he had himself. By 1900, Carnegie declared himself a Progressive.

  Of course, even the religiosity of the Rockefellers had made its compromises both with wealth and secular thought, transforming itself into an even higher “scientific” truth. In our case, “social-scientific” truth, emerging from and combining evangelical zeal with a worldly vision for constructing the kingdom of God on earth. According to Greenleaf, “scientism [assumes that]… genuine knowledge is only possible on the basis of matter of fact carefully observed, catalogued, or categorized in some way and, if possible, measured, quantified, and subsumed under a law or functional generality.”90 In this late nineteenth-century development were planted the seeds of modern social science.91 It is unsurprising to note that the founders of American social science were often clergymen or otherwise steeped in religion.92 The quest for personal salvation in Protestantism was transformed in the late nineteenth century into a social ethic. The kingdom of heaven was to be built and perfected on earth; God was immanent in all material forms, including social institutions, as T. H. Green had taught.93 Evangelical zeal was, henceforth, to be transformed into earthly good works. The “social gospel” demanded the purging of sin in all corrupt national institutions and life—business, politics, state, church, and university. Leaders of this movement included the theologians Washington Gladden and Harry Emerson Fosdick, the philosophers William James and John Dewey, the scientists Asa Gray and Alfred North Whitehead, the political scientists Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann, and the social scientists Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Ward, Richard T. Ely, John Bates Clark, and Woodrow Wilson.94 McLoughlin argues that the “key concepts” of Progressivism were “relativism, pragmatism, historicism, cultural organicism, and creative intelligence,” producing new values such as “efficiency, integration, systematization, regularization, and professionalization.”95 Social science, therefore, emerged as a rational enterprise for social engineering to modernize America, to deal with tumultuous internal change, and strengthen it for world leadership. Recall that “scientific giving” was the great innovation of the Big 3, a rational activity—an investment—with a view to securing certain kinds of social outcomes.

  The architect of “scientific giving” was probably the Reverend Frederick T. Gates, a one-time Baptist clergyman and Rockefeller adviser.96 It was Gates who helped modern philanthropy to “move charitable activities away from treating the symptoms of social problems toward… eliminating the underlying causes.” According to David Rockefeller, this led to an “embrace [of] a scientific approach and to support the work of experts in many fields.”97 Giving became a systematic activity that also rationalized the structure of organizations that applied for Rockefeller funding. Gates eschewed “retail” philanthropy for “wholesale,” top-down giving, because the former was chaotic and “subversive of discipline and effectiveness.”98 By giving to carefully scrutinized national organizations, Gates claimed that “Mr. Rockefeller’s business sagacity was satisfied, and he came to have hardly less pleasure in the organization of his philanthropy than in the efficiency of his business.”99 Andrew Carnegie ran his own philanthropic foundations in much the way he had run his business empire—with hard-headed efficiency and dead-eyed focus: “I never like scattering my shot,” he noted.100 The effect of large foundation funds on university research, lamented Laski, was the effective control over the character, methods, and topics of research: “‘Dangerous’ problems are not likely to be investigated, especially not by ‘dangerous’ men,” citing a project not funded by a foundation because its “completion would be displeasing to Signor [Benito] Mussolini.”101 The mere existence of large funds influenced the development of research: “the foundations do not control,” Laski counseled, “simply because, in the direct and simple sense of the word, there is no need for them to do so. They have only to indicate the immediate direction of their minds for the whole university world to discover that it always meant to gravitate swiftly to that angle of the intellectual compass.”102

  Ethnocentrism abroad was founded, of course, on a belief in “scientific” Anglo-Saxon superiority at home. Philanthropy aimed at the social uplift of other races, especially African Americans, through education. But their appointed leaders—in this case the General Education Board, an agency for several major philanthropies in the education field—were heavily influenced by racist beliefs. Gates himself withdrew his children from a mixed-race public school in Montclair, New Jersey, because black and immigrant children allegedly were “ill-mannered, filthy, and unsa
nitary.” Blacks required vocational training only: “Latin, Greek and metaphysics form a kind of knowledge that I fear with our colored brethren tend even more than with us to puff up rather than build up,” Gates believed.103 Rockefeller-financed schools in the South accommodated racial segregation. As Wallace Buttrick, the executive secretary of the GEB, noted, “The Negro is an inferior race—the Anglo-Saxon is superior.” Southern blacks were suited to “the menial positions, and [to] do the heavy work, at less wages, than the American white man” or immigrant.104 Though neither Junior nor Senior supported such crude racist views, they were willing to kowtow to Southern segregationists; in the end, 90 percent of GEB funds were allotted to white Southern schools rather than their target group.105 As Louis Harlan shows, northern philanthropists tacitly acquiesced in Southern blacks’ disfranchisement and Jim Crow segregation in return for security for their investments in “industrial” education for blacks.106 Indeed, reintegration of the post-Reconstruction South with northern industrial capital required a largely un- and semiskilled black agricultural workforce that would in turn “permit the Southern white laborer to perform the more expert labor, and to leave the fields, the mines, and the simpler trades for the Negro.”107 Therefore, agitation over racial equality merely created political instability and, consequently, uncertainty for northern investors. William H. Baldwin of the GEB wanted blacks to concentrate on laboring in the fields, shops, and mines, to aspire to what the existing Southern environment offered, the Tuskegee model of racialized education. Interestingly, in taking such a stance, northern philanthropists rejected and marginalized, through the power of the purse, the racial-equality educational strategies of northern missionary societies.108 Despite some protests, such as at Fisk in 1925, Southern blacks were often muted in their criticism of racialized educational philanthropy for fear of losing even that support.109

  The major foundations were also guilty of racialization, the most dire example being the Carnegie Corporation. Although more detail is provided in chapter 6, it is important to note that CC was especially supportive of racial segregation. In his in-depth study of philanthropy and Jim Crow, Philip Stanfield concludes that “the Carnegie Corporation was the most racially exclusive of the major foundations and was very supportive of white supremacy in apartheid societies. It dared not allow blacks any decision-making power in areas such as race-relations research and the development of black libraries. According to Carnegie Corporation protocol, black destiny was to be decided by whites only.”110

  Andrew Carnegie shared these views.111 He championed the superiority of the “English-speaking peoples,” calling for a “race alliance” of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, and the United States, under the latter’s leadership. Carnegie’s attachment to social Darwinism and its mantra of “survival of the fittest” and echoes of the cult of manliness so common in Anglo-America at the time are of a piece with his calls for an Anglo-Saxon alliance.112 Given their superior qualities, Anglo-Saxons were duty bound to export good government, the fruits of their industry, and their civilization to the four corners of the world. Andrew Carnegie, of course, famously opposed the American annexation of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. His reasons for doing so, however, focused on the damage that would be done to American civilization by the inclusion of inferior breeds like the Filipinos, who did not even posses the advantage or grace of living in territories bordering the United States.113

  CONCLUSION

  Elitist, technocratic, utilitarian, and ethnocentric, the foundations’ leaders presided over huge endowments that were aimed at social engineering. Their philosophy was generally practical, pragmatic, and utilitarian. The foundations were unconcerned with “ivory-tower” thinking for its own sake: they were deeply concerned that knowledge and expertise be mobilized. Their desired approach was through certified experts: social-scientific technocrats who “knew” and who would prescribe “solutions,” ones usually directed at the relatively powerless whose subjective needs went unacknowledged. They claimed to want to address the underlying causes of social ills but failed to acknowledge—indeed, they could not—that the corporate capitalist system from which the foundations constructed their original endowments and the corporate investments from which the endowments continued to generate their income might have been significant contributory factors behind social problems. Instead, they were convinced that corporations served the national or global interest and that most problems stemmed from the individual—poor socialization, lack of education, problems of personality, family dysfunctionality, and the like. Ameliorative reform rather than radical change mark the foundations’ approach to social issues.

  The evidence presented above demonstrates the elitist, unrepresentative, and unaccountable character of the leadership groups that formed and ran the major philanthropic foundations. It also provides some insights as to their “worldview,” the mindsets with which they acted on the nation and world. Their ethnocentrism and sense of social, national, and racial superiority provide an instructive underpinning for an understanding of their “internationalism.” Theirs was an intensely “nationalist” internationalism, in the words of Sondra Herman,114 an internationalism that promoted American power as the “last best hope of mankind,” to paraphrase President Abraham Lincoln. America’s anticolonial and anti-imperial past and its superior industrial and political systems marked it out as the most progressive force in world affairs—a force for peace, prosperity, and freedom. America would eschew empire in favor of international organizations representing the rights of small nations and big powers, peaceably resolving international disputes and ensuring international security. Economically and commercially, especially with the necessity of moving beyond their domestic market and into the world trading system, philanthropic leaders, including the erstwhile protectionist Andrew Carnegie, grew increasingly attached to an open trading system within a multilateral framework of international organizations. Rockefeller and Carnegie philanthropies backed movements in the United States and elsewhere, especially Britain, that supported first the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. Within these and other international organizations, the United States—usually in alliance with Britain—was to exercise leadership. This represented a broadening out of the appeals of Anglo-Saxonism to a wider range of countries, including the Scandinavian democracies, on which more will be noted in chapter 3. Ultimately, however, the major foundations were interested in building American global hegemony. Building hegemony required not only the promotion of liberal internationalism at home but also the marginalization of its principal opponent, American “isolationism.” It is to this dual task that our attention now turns.

  3

  LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS OF GLOBALISM, 1930–1945

  Social scientists are as much justified in making their skills and knowledge available for the conduct of the war as the natural scientist who works on gunsights.

  —Joseph Willits

  Promoting globalism, defeating isolationism, and winning World War II were key victories in the forging of the liberal-internationalist U.S. foreign policy Establishment.1 Less well known is the role of major foundations in promoting the hegemony of globalism and undermining isolationism and in the more “hard-headed” Realist approaches to international affairs. In addition, foundations built and promoted effective international cooperation during the “isolationist” 1920s and 1930s as well as constructing and supporting formal and informal international organizations in and through which to promote American power in a “healthy international environment.”2 In combination, foundation-sponsored programs were influential in developing a Realist mindset, worldview, and knowledge base among strategic elites and more broadly in society.

  The rise and diffusion of Realism and globalism within and through the academy merely brought universities more closely into line with forms of thought and practice about how power works in the real world th
at predominated within the American state, and that helped develop a set of ideas within which the two worlds could cooperate more fruitfully with each other, given an appropriate division of labor. Realism’s and globalism’s diffusion through university teaching helped cement the hegemony of these ideas within strategic minorities in American public opinion: the educated classes. In the division of labor between scholars and state officials, IR (and other) intellectuals/academics were mobilized behind hegemonic projects designed intellectually to penetrate the academy, “isolationist” strongholds in the Midwest, regional elites, as well as overseas elites, while the U.S. state employed “hard-power” strategies.

  Realist knowledge and the IR discipline emerged at a time when “useful knowledge” was at a premium in the modernizing progressive university of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The logic of the private university in a competitive marketplace demanded the production of utilitarian forms of knowledge in order to generate income, professional accreditation, external research contracts, and stronger connections with corporations and the state. Additionally, the progressive university was increasingly dominated by men who saw the problems of the American state as their own and wanted to build a more powerful federal executive for domestic reform and world leadership. Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University and head of an important CEIP division, exemplified the progressive university leader.3