by Jane Mayer
Another Olin-funded book that made headlines and ended in accusations of intellectual dishonesty was David Brock’s Real Anita Hill, to which the foundation gave a small research stipend. In the book, Brock defended the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas by accusing Hill of fabricating her sworn testimony against him during his Senate confirmation hearings. Later, though, Brock recanted, admitting that he had been wrong. He apologized for the book and said that he had been deceived by conservative sources who had misled him.
Still, the combined impact of the Olin grantees was “a triumph,” according to Miller. Writing as a conservative in 2003, he enthused that “a small handful of foundations have essentially provided the conservative movement with its venture capital.” He noted that in contrast to the days when Lionel Trilling had declared conservatism over, “conservative ideas are in broad circulation, and many believe they are now ascendant.” He added, “If the conservative intellectual movement were a NASCAR race, and if the scholars and organizations who compose it were drivers zipping around a race track, virtually all of their vehicles would sport an Olin bumper sticker.”
In time, the Olin Foundation’s success in minting right-leaning thinkers drew the envy of the Left. “On the right, they understood that books matter,” says Steve Wasserman, the head of Yale University Press, who formerly tried but failed to get wealthy liberal donors to match the intellectual investments being made by conservatives. “I remember meeting at a restaurant in California with some of the major Democratic operatives and funders, Margery Tabankin, Stanley Sheinbaum and Gary David Goldberg. I was telling them that they needed to figure out a way to fund books on the left. But books aren’t sexy. They weren’t interested. They didn’t think that in the political culture it mattered. The Democrats were hostage to star personalities and electoral politics.”
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The Olin Foundation’s most significant beachheads, however, were established in America’s law schools, where it bankrolled a new approach to jurisprudence known as Law and Economics. Powell, in his memo, had argued that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change.” The Olin Foundation agreed. As the courts expanded consumer, labor, and environmental rights and demanded racial and sexual equality and greater workplace safety, conservatives in business were desperate to find more legal leverage. Law and Economics became their tool.
As a discipline, Law and Economics was seen at first as a fringe theory embraced largely by libertarian mavericks until the Olin Foundation spent $68 million underwriting its growth. Like an academic Johnny Appleseed, the Olin Foundation underwrote 83 percent of the costs for all Law and Economics programs in American law schools between the years of 1985 and 1989. Overall, it scattered more than $10 million to Harvard, $7 million to Yale and Chicago, and over $2 million to Columbia, Cornell, Georgetown, and the University of Virginia. Miller writes, “John Olin, in fact, was prouder of Law and Economics than any other program he supported.”
Following Piereson’s cautious playbook, the program’s title conveyed no ideology. Law and Economics stresses the need to analyze laws, including government regulations, not just for their fairness but also for their economic impact. Its proponents describe it in apolitical terms as bringing “efficiency” and “clarity” to the law, rather than relying on fuzzy, hard-to-quantify concepts like social justice.
Piereson, however, admitted that the beauty of the program was that it was a stealth political attack and that the country’s best law schools didn’t grasp this and therefore didn’t block the ideological punch it packed. “I saw it as a way into the law schools—I probably shouldn’t confess that,” he told The New York Times in 2005. “Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects.” In a later interview with the political scientist Steven M. Teles, he added that he would have preferred to fund a conservative constitutional law program, but had the foundation tried such a direct political challenge, it probably would have been barred entry to America’s best law schools. “If you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand. But if you said you wanted to support Law and Economics, he would be much more open to the idea,” he confided. “Law and Economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral, but it isn’t in fact.”
The Olin Foundation’s route into the country’s best law schools was circuitous. The foundation began by financially supporting an early leading figure in Law and Economics, the libertarian Henry Manne, an acolyte of the Chicago school of free-market economics. Brilliant, impolitic, and an ideological purist, Manne “was considered a marginal, even eccentric character in the legal academy,” according to Teles, when the Olin Foundation first started funding him in the early 1970s. To the frustration of the foundation, though, he didn’t teach at high-prestige schools. In 1985, however, the foundation seized a golden opportunity to establish a beachhead at the pinnacle of legal prestige. That year, Harvard Law School was riven by controversy. Leftist professors were urging students to “sabotage” corporate law firms from within. Conservative professors and alumni were scandalized. The ruckus attracted national press coverage in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Among the many outraged Harvard Law School alumni was one of the Olin Foundation’s trustees, George Gillespie. Sensing an opening, he contacted a conservative Harvard Law School professor, Phil Areeda, whom he had been in school with, and offered the foundation’s help. The Olin Foundation took the initiative, and Harvard took the cash. Out of this ideological pact came the John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business at Harvard Law School, on which the foundation ultimately spent $18 million. The donation was the biggest in Olin’s history. Harvard’s president at the time, Derek Bok, was reportedly delighted at the new source of funding and the opportunity to soothe the disgruntled alumni.
After Harvard approved Law and Economics, other schools soon followed. By 1990, nearly eighty law schools taught the subject. Olin fellows in Law and Economics, meanwhile, began to beat a path to the top of the legal profession, winning Supreme Court clerkships at a rate of approximately one each year, starting in 1985. Many of the adherents were outstanding lawyers and not all were conservative, but they were changing the prevailing legal culture. By 1986, Bruce Ackerman, then a professor at Columbia Law School, called Law and Economics “the most important thing in legal education since the birth of Harvard Law School.” Teles, in his 2008 book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, described Law and Economics as “the most successful intellectual movement in the law of the past thirty years, having rapidly moved from insurgency to hegemony.”
As Law and Economics spread, underwritten at each step by the Olin Foundation and other conservative backers including the Kochs and Scaife, liberal critics grew alarmed. The Alliance for Justice, a liberal nonprofit in Washington, published a critical report in 1993 warning that “a small wealthy group” was trying to “fundamentally alter the way that justice is dispensed in our society.” It revealed that the Olin Foundation was paying students thousands of dollars to take classes in Law and Economics at Georgetown Law School and to attend workshops on the subject at Columbia Law School. Despite this ethically dubious situation, only one law school, at the University of California in Los Angeles, turned the Olin funds away, arguing that by plying students with grant money, the foundation was “taking advantage of students’ financial need to indoctrinate them with a particular ideology.”
More controversial still were Law and Economics seminars that the Olin Foundation funded for judges. The seminars were initiated by Henry Manne, who had become dean of the George Mason University School of Law in Virginia, which he was trying to transform into a hub of libertarian jurisprudence. The seminars treated judges to two-week-long, all-expenses-paid immersion training in Law and Economics usually in luxurious settings like the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Florida. They soo
n became popular free vacations for the judges, a cross between Maoist cultural reeducation camps and Club Med. After a few hours of learning why environmental and labor laws were anathema, or why, as Manne argued, insider-trading laws did more harm than good, the judges broke for golf, swimming, and delightful dinners with their hosts. Within a few years, 660 judges had gone on these junkets, some, like the U.S. Court of Appeals judge and unconfirmed Supreme Court nominee Douglas Ginsburg, many times. By one count, 40 percent of the federal judiciary participated, including the future Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Clarence Thomas.
A variety of major corporations eagerly joined Olin and other conservative foundations in footing the bills. A study by the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity found that between 2008 and 2012 close to 185 federal judges attended judicial seminars sponsored by conservative interests, several of which had cases before the courts. The lead underwriters were the Charles Koch Foundation, the Searle Freedom Trust, ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, and State Farm, the insurance company. Topics ranged from “The Moral Foundations of Capitalism” to “Terrorism, Climate, and Central Planning: Challenges to Liberty and the Rule of Law.”
Simultaneously, the Olin Foundation provided crucial start-up funds for the Federalist Society, a powerful organization for conservative law students founded in 1982. With $5.5 million from the Olin Foundation, as well as large donations from foundations tied to Scaife, the Kochs, and other conservative legacies, the Federalist Society grew from a pipe dream shared by three ragtag law students into a powerful professional network of forty-two thousand right-leaning lawyers, with 150 law school campus chapters and about seventy-five lawyers’ groups nationally. All of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court are members, as are the former vice president Dick Cheney, the former attorneys general Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft, and numerous members of the federal bench. Its executive director, Eugene B. Meyer, son of a founding editor of National Review, acknowledged that without Olin funding “it possibly wouldn’t exist at all.” Looking back, the Olin Foundation’s staff described it as “one of the best investments” the foundation ever made.
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John M. Olin died in 1982 at the age of eighty-nine, but after his death his foundation became even more robust. He left it about $50 million in his estate and another $50 million in a trust for his widow, which came to the foundation in 1993 after she died. The funds were well invested, growing to some $370 million in all before the foundation spent it down and closed its doors in 2005. Olin had directed his foundation to shut down during the lifetime of the trustees for fear that it would fall into the hands of liberals, as he believed the Ford Foundation had tragically done.
William Simon remained the head of the Olin Foundation until his own death in 2000. He also continued to amass a stupendous fortune of his own during the 1980s, using controversial financial maneuvers. By the late 1980s, Forbes estimated Simon’s wealth at $300 million.
Around the same time, the Olin Foundation made a key $25,000 investment of its own in an unknown writer named Charles Murray, funding a grant at the Manhattan Institute that would support a book he was writing that attacked liberal welfare policies. The backstory to Losing Ground, Murray’s book, was a primer on the growing and interlocking influence of conservative nonprofits. At thirty-nine, Murray was an unknown academic, toiling thanklessly at a Washington Beltway firm evaluating U.S. government social programs. Frustrated and just scraping by, he was about to try writing a thriller novel in order to make ends meet when his application for a job at the Heritage Foundation caught the eye of the conservative philanthropy world. Soon, he was the beneficiary of its growing network. Heritage placed an antiwelfare piece by Murray on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal. This sparked a grant from the Olin Foundation that enabled him to work full-time on what became his pathbreaking 1984 book, Losing Ground, even though he hadn’t previously considered turning his research into a book. “It was a classic case of philanthropic entrepreneurship,” Murray says. The hidden force behind Murray was Joyce, the Olin Foundation’s enfant terrible. “Mike Joyce was one of the most influential obscure people of the last century,” says Murray.
Losing Ground, which was written in a tone of sorrow rather than anger, blamed government programs for creating a culture of dependence among the poor. Critics said it overlooked macroeconomic issues over which the poor had no control, and academics and journalists were split, with several challenging Murray’s scholarship. Nonetheless, with ample funding from Olin and other conservative foundations, Murray succeeded in shifting the debate over America’s poor from society’s shortcomings to their own.
Despite Reagan’s professed antipathy toward big government, his administration steered cautiously away from Murray’s controversial libertarianism, preferring to criticize welfare cheaters rather than the whole idea of government-run antipoverty programs. But to the dismay of liberals, Bill Clinton, a “New Democrat,” later embraced his ideas, calling Murray’s analysis “essentially right” and incorporating many of his prescriptions, including work requirements and the end to aid as an entitlement, in his 1996 welfare reform bill. “It took ten years,” Murray has said, “for Losing Ground to go from being controversial to conventional wisdom.”
The Olin Foundation also backed what came to be known as the Collegiate Network, privately financing a string of right-wing newspapers on America’s college campuses. Among them was The Dartmouth Review, which infamously published an editorial in Ebonics proclaiming, “Now we be comin’ to Dartmut’ and be up over our ’fros in studies, but we still be not graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa.” The paper hosted a feast of lobster and champagne to mock a student fast against global hunger, sledgehammered shantytowns erected by students protesting apartheid in South Africa, and published a transcript of a secretly taped meeting of students belonging to Dartmouth’s gay student association. The Dartmouth Review became an incubator for right-wing media figures like D’Souza and the future conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. Its counterpart at Vassar, meanwhile, gave starts in journalism to the ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl and Marc Thiessen, an online columnist at The Washington Post best known for his defense of the Bush administration’s use of torture.
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As the Olin Foundation spent itself out of existence, Michael Joyce jumped to a new and far more powerful private foundation, started by another conservative family. In 1985, a corporate merger in Milwaukee created a spectacular windfall, boosting a previously sleepy local charity, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, overnight into a nonprofit juggernaut. Its assets rocketed from $14 million to over $290 million, making it one of the twenty largest foundations in the country. Swimming in cash, the foundation’s small, unpaid staff, which had mostly focused on conventional local do-gooding until then, sought out Joyce, telling him, “We’ve got money, and we want to do what you did at Olin. We want to become Olin West.” Almost on the spot, Joyce moved to Milwaukee to run the Bradley Foundation himself. He left Piereson behind to cope with Simon’s famously short temper and the twenty-year plan to spend the Olin Foundation out of business.
At the Bradley Foundation, Joyce had a freer hand. “He basically invented the field of modern conservative philanthropy,” according to Piereson. During the next fifteen years, the Bradley Foundation would give away $280 million to his favorite conservative causes. It was small in comparison with older research foundations like the Ford Foundation, but unlike Ford, under Joyce’s direction Bradley regarded itself as a righteous combatant in an ideological war, giving it a single-minded focus. At least two-thirds of its grants, according to one analysis, financed conservative intellectual activity. It paid for some six hundred graduate and postgraduate fellowships, right-wing think tanks, conservative journals, activists fighting Communism abroad, and its own publishing house, Encounter Books. Continuing the strategic emphasis on prestigious schools, the foundation gave both Harvard and Yale $5.5 million during its
first decade under Joyce’s management. It was an activist force on the secondary-school level, too. The Bradley Foundation virtually drove the early national “school choice” movement, waging an all-out assault on teachers’ unions and traditional public schools. In an effort to “wean” Americans from government, the foundation militated for parents to be able to use public funds to send their children to private and parochial schools.
When Joyce took over the Bradley Foundation, he continued to fund many of the same academic organizations he had at Olin, including half of the same colleges and universities. “Typically, it was not just the same university but the same department, and in some cases, the same scholar,” Bruce Murphy wrote in Milwaukee Magazine, charging that this led to a kind of “intellectual cronyism.” The anointed scholars were good ideological warriors but “rarely great scholars,” he wrote. For instance, Joyce stuck with Murray in the face of growing controversy over his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which correlated race and low IQ scores to argue that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite,” and was loudly and convincingly discredited. The Manhattan Institute fired Murray over the controversial project. “They didn’t want the grief,” says Murray. But Joyce reportedly kept an estimated $1 million in grants flowing to Murray, who decamped to the American Enterprise Institute. “I knew from Mike Joyce my fellowship was portable,” Murray says. But the controversy stirred by the book clouded the Bradley Foundation’s reputation. Joyce, who was accused of racism, said he received death threats. He felt so threatened he demanded enhanced security. The book, he acknowledged, left “an indelible imprint on us.”