Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  COMBATING ANTI-AMERICANISM ABROAD

  The foundations actively supported organizations and pursued policies that combated anti-Americanism on a global scale during the Cold War, defining as anti-American practically any foreign criticism of the United States. This section explores one example of how the foundations combated what they perceived as anti-Americanism. In so doing, it becomes clear that the “anti-American” and pro-American aspects of foundations’ global roles represented two faces of the central aim of promoting U.S. power and undermining nationalism and/or leftism.

  THE FORD FOUNDATION AND THE CONGRESS FOR CULTURAL FREEDOM

  Combating anti-Americanism and fighting communism were very closely related, given the breadth of definition of both concepts, in the eyes of the Ford Foundation and of the U.S. Department of State and other state agencies. In fact, it is clear that communism represented the most stark version of anti-Americanism—a coherent worldview that challenged the free market, private property, limited government, and individualism. It should occasion little surprise, then, that Ford took a favorable view of one of the most notorious CIA programs—the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF),112 seen by its founders as “the cultural-intellectual equivalent to the political economy of the European Recovery Program (ERP) and the security framework of NATO.”113 CCF received important support from Ford’s board of trustees, which was packed with former CIA and OSS members, in addition to Marshall Planners and members of the U.S. High Commission in Germany, including John J. McCloy, for instance. The relationship with the CIA, CCF, and numerous other opponents of communism and anti-Americanism was close, enduring, and smooth.114 The only “disagreements” were over whether Ford should act as a conduit for CIA funds and over ways in which Ford could continue to fund CCF but not be publicly seen to be supporting a CIA initiative.115

  CCF’s worldview was dominated by positivistic empiricism, rationalism, technocratic modernism, and a general opposition to “totalizing” philosophies (i.e., Marxism, but also laissez-faire liberalism). The CCF represented a form of intellectual rationalization of the political economy of the Marshall Plan and the New Deal/Fair Deal of Roosevelt and Truman.116 It also shared the worldview, broadly, of the Ford Foundation.

  CCF’s anticommunism lost its edge, according to Scott-Smith, after the death of Stalin in 1953, and it found its new mission in promoting the benefits and advantages of Western freedom, pluralism, and social democracy. They championed revolution-free welfare capitalism and the rise of the classless society. As with Ford’s economists in Indonesia (see chapter 5), CCF stalwarts promoted variations of Keynesian economic management. In Europe, this line of thought led directly to “end of ideology” thinking from a trio of American social scientists—Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Edward Shils.117

  The political impact in Britain of the CCF was felt primarily in the politics of the Labor Party, which, to many American observers, had too powerful a left-wing, anti-American element at all levels.118 Opposition to U.S. foreign policy, the siting of U.S. military and air bases on British soil, and the Party Conference’s decision in 1960 that Britain should unilaterally disarm its nuclear weapons were indicative of Labor’s “anti-Americanism.” Therefore, CCF fostered the right wing of the Labor Party and movement—including Hugh Gaitskell, Denis Healey, R. H. S. Crossman, Tony Crosland, and Roy Jenkins. CCF’s Milan Conference of 1955 provided these Labor leaders—all MPs, and Gaitskell set to became Labor’s leader later the same year—a chance to build alliances with European “moderate” socialists and even with the “reformist wing of the US Democratic Party as represented by… such luminaries as J. K. Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jnr.” The aim, according to Scott-Smith, was to strengthen the reformist left and maintain their “Atlantic alignment.” Healey was a leading Bilderberger in the 1950s and 1960s.119 In 1961, of course, Gaitskell was able to reverse the “unilateral nuclear disarmament” decision.

  A key player in the Ford Foundation, CCF, and European labor politics was Shepard Stone.120 It was Stone with whom Denis Healey conducted the preliminary negotiations, at a Bilderberg meeting in 1954, that led to Ford’s funding the new London-based Institute of Strategic Studies. Ford provided $150,000 over three years to the new think tank, which supported the Atlantic Alliance and boosted right-wing Labor Party ideas favoring nuclear weapons and the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).121 It therefore provided intellectual and political support to opposing the left-wing, “anti-American” forces in the labor movement.

  Although the CCF was exposed as a CIA front in 1967, the Ford Foundation continued to support the organization. Some prominent former supporters—such as the French sociologist Raymond Aron and the labor theoretician W. Arthur Lewis—were unwilling to have anything more to do with CCF unless it changed its name, address, and funding sources. According to Aron, the anti-Soviet role of CCF was no longer necessary. CCF supporters agreed that “its functions in the Western world need new definition.” Francis X. Sutton noted that “anti-Americanism is now an important intellectual phenomenon in Western Europe. An American-financed organization cannot readily cope with this phenomenon; either it is actively pro-American or it bends unnaturally and awkwardly to be ‘fair.’” The Sutton memorandum noted that CCF publications, especially Encounter, had been not been “sufficiently critical of the United States,” especially over American policy in Vietnam. Sutton concluded that CCF was an absolute necessity in dealing with “problems of irresponsibility [among intellectuals] and decay of purpose,” despite “a certain tension” in Ford’s supporting semisecret activity.122 Sutton recommended an award of $4.65 million to a revamped, internationally funded CCF.123 In fact, trustees voted $7 million to the CCF’s successor, the International Association for Cultural Freedom, for 1967–1971,124 based on the same networks that had been constructed by the CCF and headed by Shepard Stone.

  CONCLUSION

  Anti-Americanism is neither a Cold War nor a post–Cold War phenomenon. As William Appleman Williams long ago noted, the United States has been fighting cold wars, mainly on an anti-American rhetorical basis, against all sorts of enemies, from left and right, from nationalist to communist to conservative. The Cold War did not begin in 1917 (or end, for that matter, in 1989–1991); it must be understood as “an ongoing confrontation between modern Western capitalism and its domestic and international critics.” The reason, according to Williams, that observers have mistaken America’s confrontations with the Soviet Union and Communist China for “the real cold war is that they were the first large nations to be successfully organized by the critics of capitalism.”125 The United States has defined all opponents of its expansionism as anti- or un-American.

  The foundations have reflected similar views, both at home and abroad. They promoted American studies networks to strengthen Americans’ emotional attachment to core values and denied funding to those they believed undermined Americanism—a right-of-center liberalism that promoted managed change and opposed anything to its left and right. Globally, the major foundations constructed networks of American studies scholars and associations, especially in Cold War Europe. Their promotion of pro-U.S. modernizing economists in Indonesia, Nigeria, and Chile (and in other parts of the world—see chapters 5–7) significantly affected those countries’ economic and political development. More clandestinely, the foundations backed the CIA-supported Congress for Cultural Freedom to combat anti-Americanism and procommunist forces.

  Taken together, U.S. foundations’ American studies programs were a powerful means by which global elites’ “anti-American” prejudices were addressed through initiatives that directly touched thousands—probably tens of thousands—of men and women. Indirectly, Ford’s public diplomacy struggle against “anti-Americanism” affected millions of students, academics, journalists, and newspaper and magazine readers.126 The Kissinger and Salzburg seminars were integrated, coherent, focused, well-organized, profoundly engaging, authentic educational programs desig
ned for two-way exchange and learning—and they were, thereby, not seen as condescending propaganda or even any kind of propaganda. The programs at Harvard and Salzburg created enduring nuclei of scholars and other opinion formers, networked with American institutions and faculty and with one another, functioning effectively long after the short seminars were over—what Spiller called “native scholar-power.” The message of the seminars was not only in the spoken and written word; it was in the very texture of the whole experience: members lived Americanism when they criticized and debated race relations or foreign policy.

  The Harvard and Salzburg seminars were successful for one other reason: they were directed at elites whose national and world orientations were not fundamentally antagonistic to the aims of American power. After all, most Europeans were products of a colonial culture constructed over centuries. As “postcolonial” powers, their worldview transformed into a neocolonial “developmentalism,” to redefine or, rather, recalibrate their relationship with the Third World. Their problems with the United States broadly sprang from resentment at their own nations’ fall from global grace alongside America’s ascendance as well as from a fear of the consequences of American power in the nuclear age. That is, overall, despite their skepticism, they were not beyond persuasion by a sophisticated elite diplomacy set in prestigious Harvard Yard or an eighteenth-century European castle to lend a patina of antiquity to the United States and significant gravity to the proceedings. They were susceptible to the exercise of “soft power” precisely because European elites had a vested interest in the world system, the management of which had passed largely into American hands after World War II.

  The Harvard and Salzburg programs supplemented and supported at the level of substate and private elite leadership what states were trying to achieve in this period: alliance formation as a way to greater Western penetration of the Third World, during a period of rising anticolonial nationalism and global competition with communism. Indeed, the programs were integrated into the objectives of the State Department, which worked with Harvard and Salzburg “intimately but unofficially.”127 Ford Foundation funding helped construct the infrastructure—the institutional settings, organizations, professional societies, conferences and seminars, alumni networks, publications—that enabled the formation and endurance of elite networks that influenced the climate of intellectual and popular opinion in an era of emerging American global leadership.128 Ford claimed to be acting nonpolitically, nonideologically, and independently of the state. Yet its outlook, as demonstrated by its own archival records, shows that Ford operated with a rather formal notion of “independence,” behind which lay a philosophy saturated with Gramsci’s concept of “state spiritedness.” In practice, the Ford Foundation was a strategic part of an elite state-private network that united key elements of a Cold War coalition—a historic bloc—behind an imperial hegemonic project.

  Of course, the foundations did not always succeed in attaining their goals in regard to Americanizing the world or even neutralizing all anti-American sentiment. Yet their influence should not be underestimated. Their resources were strategically targeted, in coordination with American state-led initiatives, over a long period of time and helped generate modernizing elites and cadres of Americanists who tended, at the very least, to take sympathetic views of America’s global role. In addition, by targeting funds at particular groups of scholars, the foundations were effectively depriving other academics, with other perspectives, of resources. The foundations engaged in a clear mobilization of bias whose outcomes tended to favor pro-American outcomes, under the public guise of funding “scientific” academic research and teaching. Anti-Americanism was, in part, the global “enemy,” around which at least some of the efforts of the American state and of foundations cohered in order to promote, strengthen, and defend American global power. The following chapter explores the Ford Foundation’s overt and covert activities—and their explosive effects—in undermining, combating, and, ultimately, replacing leftist nationalism in Sukarno’s Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s.

  5

  THE FORD FOUNDATION IN INDONESIA AND THE ASIAN STUDIES NETWORK

  U.S. interest in Southeast Asia rests largely on economic and strategic factors.1 American foreign policy makers became particularly concerned during World War II that Japan’s imperial expansion threatened American (and, more generally, Western) interests. Indeed, the Roosevelt administration—several months before the attacks on Pearl Harbor—declared that it would wage war on Japan should the latter threaten Indochina, Indonesia (at the time known as the Dutch East Indies), or Malaya.2 Southeast Asia was a rich source of mineral resources (the source of most of the world’s rubber, tin, rice, and tungsten, for example) and an important market for finished goods. It was also highly compatible with the American economy3 and seen as being as significant to American security as the Panama and Suez canals.4 After 1945 and the emergence of newly independent countries—India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, for example—American planners were additionally anxious about the growing influence of both communism and “neutralism” or “independence” as sources of foreign policy of the new states, movements in which Indonesia had taken a leading role by the mid-1950s.5 Yet American elites found woeful their own knowledge of Asian history, languages, and cultures. Without such knowledge—developed in a manner at once useful to scholars and to policy makers and referred to in militaristic terms as a way to “attack” a problem across a range of “fronts”6—it was feared that America would be unable to influence the development of Asia, leaving the way clear for communist control.7 This had occurred in China in 1949 with Mao’s successful revolution, and the war in Korea suggested that the threat remained grave.8

  That is the broad context for this chapter’s focus on Indonesia, which was seen as a key asset economically and strategically.9 It was also one of the world’s most populous countries, a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement, which aimed to steer a path between the superpowers, and it sustained the largest communist party and movement—numbering some fifteen million people—outside the Soviet Union and China.10 American elites wished to ensure that Indonesia entered the American orbit; was open to economic, financial, and commercial relations with the West; and was aligned against the communist powers in international politics. As a consequence, an American state-private network developed to “study” Indonesia in order better to intervene in its affairs and influence its political and economic development. In the long run, despite great anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s, Indonesia was politically and economically transformed and integrated into the American/Western orbit. This chapter explores the traumatic processes by which this occurred, focusing on the role, in close collaboration with agencies of the American state, of the Ford Foundation.

  Despite the importance of the Ford Foundation in the reconstruction of the postcolonial Indonesian state and society, there is no detailed empirical examination of its programs in that country. There is a single journalistic article—whose conclusions were hotly contested outside the scholarly realm—which makes controversial claims about the “imperial” role of Ford in Indonesia.11 Beyond that, there is only passing recognition, even though Chalmers and Hadiz argue that the impact of Ford-trained Indonesian economists in the late 1960s “fundamentally transformed the economy… [such that] by most criteria remarkable economic progress has taken place… creating a favorable investment climate for capitalist development.”12 Even Bresnan’s Managing Indonesia, a virtual Ford insider account of that country’s post-Sukarno economic and political transformation, omits discussion of the foundation’s transformative role, emphasizing instead the Indonesian economists’ autonomy.13 In stark contrast, however, in an internal Ford memorandum Bresnan wrote in 1970, he observed that “this elite [was] drawn from the economics faculties in which the [Ford] Foundation had invested so heavily.”14 George McTurnan Kahin’s recent memoir also holds back a great deal of information about the foundation’s role in that country, despite Kahin�
��s complaint that other scholars had “consciously or unconsciously swept under the rug” too much that was significant in political and economic outcomes in that country.15

  This chapter uses newly researched Ford Foundation archival sources to consider Ford’s roles in Indonesia and to adjudicate between competing claims about the functions of American philanthropy. On one side, neo-Gramscians claim that U.S. foundations represent a hegemonic force in American society and a force for promoting U.S. hegemony globally, especially during the Cold War.16 Gramscians would therefore expect to find, in the case of the Ford Foundation’s roles in Indonesia, strong evidence of private “ruling-class” organizations among those promoting policy-oriented scholars, academic, and intellectual networks for a major reorientation of the Indonesian academy, economy, and society, as part of the process of undermining and eliminating an anti-American regime. They would expect to find strong evidence of Ford’s penetration of Indonesian elites as part of their attempts to prepare a counterhegemonic movement against the established government of Indonesia.

  Conversely, it is argued by foundation insiders and a number of scholars that U.S. foundations are relatively benign forces for U.S. and overseas development and that they are organizations that are authentically nonpolitical and aim at the betterment and “humanization” of society and the world.17 Indeed, the Ford Foundation is regarded by many of its trustees as exuding “an aura of respectable honor.”18 Karl and Katz (and others), therefore, would expect to find, in the case of Ford’s role in Indonesia, disinterested, nonpolitical, and nonideological grant-making and investment initiatives that were independent of the American state; that is, they would expect to find evidence to confirm the Ford Foundation’s own publicly stated claims about its role.