Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  Almost 50 percent of the sample of trustees were “career” businessmen (sixteen of thirty-three) and were involved in a wide range of economic sectors, with one of the best examples being Pittsburgh’s Howard Heinz, the president of H. J. Heinz Company from 1919 to 1941; another was Alanson B. Houghton, the chairman of the Corning Glass Works Co. from 1918. Thomas J. Watson was president of International Business Machines (IBM). These sixteen men were businessmen by occupation, but, in all, thirty-three trustees were either presidents or directors of at least eighty-four industrial, commercial, or financial concerns across America. The corporations included General Electric, U.S. Steel, Mutual Life Insurance Co. of New York, and several banks.

  Closely connected with the business world were the nine lawyers within the sample, five of whom were partners within their own practices. Two names stand out among this group: the first was John W. Davis, of Davis, Polk, Wardwell Gardiner, and Reed of Wall Street, New York. Davis was the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former U.S. congressman for West Virginia (1911–1913) and former U.S. solicitor general (1913–1918), and a Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. Second, there was John Foster Dulles, partner in Sullivan and Cromwell of Wall Street, a leading lawyer of his generation and future secretary of state.

  Several CEIP trustees were highly active in business organizations. The most active was Watson, of IBM, who played a leading role in the International Chamber of Commerce (as its president) and was a former director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). In addition, Watson was a member of organizations such as the Business Advisory Council of the U.S. Department of Commerce, the National Foreign Trade Council, the National Industrial Conference Board, and the Economic Club of New York. Eliot Wadsworth was the president of the Boston Chamber of Commerce (1937–1939), chairman of the U.S. section of the International Chamber of Commerce (1937–1945), and a director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1934–1940). Watson and Wadsworth were joined on the CEIP board by the former U.S. Chamber of Commerce presidents Harper Sibley and Silas H. Strawn, the Chicago banker and lawyer.

  Thirty-three trustees had at least forty-two “associations” with government/politics; three had been U.S. congressmen and one, a state governor. Two trustees had held the position of assistant secretary to the Treasury, and another two the post of U.S. solicitor general. The largest single agency of the federal government with which CEIP trustees were connected was the State Department (seven links), although there were three with the War Department, and one each with the Office of War Information (OWI) and the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Four trustees had held the position of ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary, five had been in the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and three had attended the San Francisco Conference in 1945. Six trustees had been members or leaders of U.S. delegations at the numerous international, financial, economic, and disarmament conferences of the 1920s and 1930s. In short, of the forty-two “governmental connections” identified, thirty-two (or 76 percent) were directly concerned with America’s foreign relations. Carnegie Endowment trustees were predominantly Republicans (eight), with four declaring themselves registered Democrats.

  The academic world was underrepresented when seen in the light of the business, legal, and governmental connections of Carnegie trustees. Ten lectureships were declared by trustees, constituting over 30 percent of the sample, although only six trustees were career academics (18 percent). There were, however, several outstanding academics of that generation represented, including Professor James T. Shotwell, the historian and expert on international affairs (Columbia); Philip C. Jessup, the international-law professor (Columbia); and Ben Cherrington, the director of the Social Science Foundation at the University of Denver. Each of these men were exceptional academics as well as activists for the globalist cause. In addition, there were three university presidents among the trustees: Butler (Columbia, 1901–1945), Henry M. Wriston (Brown, 1937–1955), and Francis P. Gaines (Washington and Lee, 1930–1959).

  There were ten trustee connections with the press and radio. One of the most important publishers among the trustees was William W. Chapin, a Quaker from Philadelphia. He owned a number of regional newspapers in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco, as did Peter Molyneaux of Texas. By the 1940s, Molyneaux was a radio commentator and editor of several influential news and financial periodicals. The importance of these connections is clear for an organization interested in the enlightenment of public opinion.

  Carnegie Endowment trustees were connected with a number of other prominent foreign affairs organizations, usually in a leading capacity, such as the Institute of Pacific Relations, the League of Nations Association, the Commission to Study the Organization of Peace and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. There were sixteen such connections, but over half (nine) were with one organization alone—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Of these nine trustees, six were CFR directors: Philip C. Jessup of Columbia University; Philip D. Reed of General Electric; Henry Wriston (president of Brown University); the banker Norman H. Davis; the lawyer John W. Davis; and the international lawyer, financial expert, and General Electric and U.S. Steel Corporation director (among others) Leon Fraser.

  CEIP and RF trustees were steeped in a series of relationships with a broader business, political, academic, and foreign policy elite. They were leaders and activists, editors and directors, lawyers and businessmen, politicians and their advisors. All of them were leaders in at least two fields—their occupations and as trustees—and many of them were active across a whole range of issues and organizations.

  Several overlapping memberships of the two philanthropies are also important: John W. Davis and John Foster Dulles were trustees, along with Douglas S. Freeman, of both RF and CEIP. The elite think tank with which trustees of both RF and CEIP are most commonly associated is the elitist and internationalist Council on Foreign Relations, with which each foundation had nine trustee connections. Government service is another common factor: CEIP and RF trustees had impressive histories of serving numerous administrations in times of peace, crisis, and war. Between them, there were over 130 governmental positions, up to and including a secretary of state. Forty-one of the RF’s trustees’ total of ninety governmental connections were within the realm of foreign affairs; for CEIP, thirty-two of its trustees’ forty-two governmental posts were in foreign affairs. Finally, the two sets of trustees most frequently belonged to one elite club: New York’s Century Club, which proved to be a key venue in 1940 for CFR elites in developing a manifesto in support of American intervention into World War II. Thus we can see reasonably strong specific shared experiences and interconnections between private foundations, an elite think tank, and the federal government’s foreign policy apparatus.

  FORD FOUNDATION TRUSTEES, 1951–1970

  The Ford Foundation (FF) had sixty-nine appointed trustees in the period from 1951 to 1970, half of whom (thirty-five) served several terms, leaving an actual total of forty-four trustees over the first twenty years of its modern existence. Information from Who’s Who, Who Was Who, and other biographical sources was available on thirty-three trustees; their collective portrait is summarized below.

  The cohort of Ford Foundation trustees analyzed here were a microcosm of the Cold War American power elite. Their number included four national security advisers and National Security Council members (including McGeorge Bundy); three presidents of the World Bank (including John J. McCloy, sometimes referred to as “the chairman of the American Establishment”); two major newspaper publishers (John Cowles and Mark Ethridge); the chairmen of Shell, General Electric, Standard Oil, and the Ford Motor Company (John Loudon, Charles E. Wilson, Frank W. Abrams, and Robert S. McNamara, respectively); five university presidents; and a secretary of defense (McNamara).

  By region of birth, Ford trustees were widely distributed: from the East Coast (seven), Midwest (eight), West (six) and South (five). They
were born mainly between 1890 and 1920, the period of “psychic crisis” mentioned above as a significant factor in generational socialization, coming to maturity from 1914 through to the 1939–1945 war; almost half of the trustees (sixteen) served in the armed forces in the two world wars. Educated mainly at elite private schools—at least four trustees had attended either Groton, Hotchkiss, or Phillips Exeter Academy—they went on to Ivy League universities in large numbers, with a total of twenty-one registrations recorded at such institutions, including Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. Harvard alone records fourteen trustees as alumni. The remainder studied at the University of California, University of Chicago, MIT, and a host of other elite academies. In total, thirty-three trustees recorded fifty university registrations, indicating high levels of postgraduate study.

  Academia features very strongly as a source of employment among trustees, with twenty-four academic appointments. On the whole, however, the cohort of trustees under consideration consisted of men active across a range of professions—including banking, law, and business. They were leaders of several business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council, and the Conference Board. In total, there were thirteen trustee leadership connections with significant business organizations. Between them, the trustees held at least seventy-six corporate directorships in concerns that included household names like General Electric, Shell, Studebaker, Standard Oil, Chemical Bank, Chase Manhattan, and Bechtel.

  The quality and quantity of linkages of the Ford trustees with the American state were impressive. Mention has already been made of Secretary of Defense McNamara (1960–1968) and connections with the National Security Council. There was, in addition, one undersecretary of state (William H. Donaldson, in the Nixon administration), twelve links with the State Department, and seventeen with the Department of Defense. McGeorge Bundy was Ford Foundation president (1966–1979) after serving as national security advisor to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He attended the elite Groton School, like so many of his fellow Boston Brahmins, and graduated from Yale, where he was a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones society. As a political scientist at Harvard, Bundy was recruited by President Kennedy in 1961 and played a key role in the most important foreign policy decisions of the time—the failed attempt to overthrow the Castro administration in Cuba and the decision to escalate the Vietnam war. In total, Ford trustees had 104 connections with the American state, at least thirty-three of which were with foreign affairs and national security agencies.

  Ford trustees were overwhelmingly Protestant, Republican, and white; there was just one black trustee—Vivian Wilson Henderson, an economist. The trustees were well connected with other foundations’ boards, including Carnegie philanthropies and the Sloan and May foundations (six links in all). In addition, Ford trustees were connected with the RAND Corporation—the U.S. Air Force’s think tank—as well as with the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations (six leading members were found among trustees). As expected, trustees belonged to a range of elite country and gentleman’s clubs, including Cosmos, Metropolitan, and Century.

  According to Waldemar Nielsen, a former Ford Foundation staff director, “foundations are at or near the centre of gravity of the American Establishment,”79 and this applies to a far broader range of foundations than just the Big 3. Ben Whitaker found, for example, that over 50 percent of trustees from the thirteen largest U.S. foundations were educated at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale; were aged between fifty-five and sixty-five years; and were either Episcopalians or Presbyterians.80 Additionally, foundations’ trustees were heavily interlinked, flowing steadily between powerful institutions. As Mary Colwell demonstrates, foundation trustees were equally closely linked with organizations that received philanthropic largesse. The elitist Council on Foreign Relations, she shows, received one quarter of its income in 1961 from the Big 3. At the very same time, on the CFR’s membership roster were ten of the fourteen Carnegie, ten of the fifteen Ford, and twelve of the twenty Rockefeller trustees. In 1964, John J. McCloy was simultaneously chairman of the CFR, chairman of the Ford Foundation, a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation, and chairman of Chase Manhattan.81 According to Shoup and Minter, almost half of all top foreign policy officials in Washington, D.C., between 1945 and 1972 were CFR members.82

  There is little doubt that America’s Big 3 were close to the apex of elite power in the period from the Great Depression to end of the 1960s. Their trustees were drawn from among the largest corporations, the most prestigious universities, and Wall Street’s most strategic law firms and financial institutions, and from public officials, especially from the State and Defense departments, and they had extensive wartime service. Among trustees were some of the most important architects of the Cold War, such as John Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, and John J. McCloy. Rusk served longer as secretary of state (1961–1969) than anyone other than Dean Acheson and served as Rockefeller trustee and president of the Rockefeller Foundation (1950–1961). He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and studied law at the University of California–Berkeley. McCloy was a graduate of Harvard Law School, president of the World Bank (1947–1949), U.S. high commissioner in Germany (1949–1952), chairman of the Rockefellers’ Chase Manhattan Bank (1953–1960), trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation (1946–1949 and 1958), and chairman of the Ford Foundation (1958–1965). He chaired the Council on Foreign Relations from 1954 to 1970. McCloy served in advisory capacities to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan.83 John Foster Dulles graduated from Princeton University and George Washington University, was a leading Wall Street lawyer (Sullivan and Cromwell), a founding member of the Council on Foreign Relations, chairman of the CEIP, and served President Eisenhower as secretary of state (1953–1959). In the latter capacity, Dulles was strongly involved in the CIA-backed decision to overthrow Iran’s premier, Mohammed Mossadegh, in 1953, part of Dulles’s commitment to move U.S. policy beyond “containment” and to embrace “rollback.”

  Such experience and connections are more than of passing interest to organizations such as the Big 3: they are a rich source of collective expertise, organizational experience, and global knowledge as well as of “inside knowledge” of matters at the heart of the American state. These are the men who “know the world” and frame foundations’ programs, whose very raison d’être is to promote the networked institutions of “knowledge for use”: universities, research institutes, think tanks, policy-advocacy groups, professional scholarly societies, journals, and conferences. It should occasion little surprise that such knowledge makers are thoroughly interconnected with the foreign affairs apparatus of the American state in numerous “state-private” networks.84

  Since that time, of course, there have been numerous momentous changes in the world: the defeat in Vietnam, a land laid waste by saturation bombing—the result of strategies masterminded by Robert McNamara, among others; a second Cold War under President Ronald Reagan; the fall of the Berlin Wall; the onset of economic globalization; the terror attacks of 9/11, and an illegal war in Iraq that began in 2003. How have the foundations’ boards reflected such historic transformations? To be sure, they are keenly interested in the world and America’s place within it. The financiers of movements in support of America’s “rise to globalism” after 1945—helping build the postwar international infrastructure (IMF, World Bank, United Nations)—have embraced globalization and transnationalism. This is reflected in their leadership: the Ford Foundation increased its trustees drawn from (ethnic and racial) minorities from 6 percent in the 1980s to 24 percent in the 1990s and its complement of women from 13 percent to 18 percent, and it recruited foreign nationals, such as Nigeria’s General Obasanjo (who went from supporting a military coup in the 1970s to becoming the country’s elected president at the turn of the twenty-first century). Ford’s Susan Berresford, a graduate of Vassar and Radcliffe colleges, was appointed the first woman head of any Big 3 foundation in 1996. In 2008, almost 50 percent of the Ford b
oard of trustees was composed of women, while eight of eighteen trustees in the Rockefeller and Carnegie corporations were female. This constitutes a major change for the Big 3, of course, though a brief perusal suggests that by practically all other indicators, the women recruited are elites who were educated in the very same exclusive institutions as the men who ran the foundations for most of their history.

  The Big 3’s recruitment among foreign nationals has been of a piece with its increasing appointment of senior women. Ms. Mamphela Ramphele, the World Bank’s managing director, was recruited by Rockefeller, in addition to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former academic champion of leftist “dependency” theory and by 2001 the former president of Brazil and a neoliberal economic reformer. At the same time, the recruitment by the Big 3 among U.S. elite males continued apace: RF was joined by the trustee Thomas J. Healey, formerly of Goldman Sachs, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, President Reagan’s assistant secretary to the treasury, and a Hoover Institution board member. Thomas H. Kean was first appointed a Carnegie Corporation board member in 1991, rising to chair in 1997. In December 2002, Kean was appointed by President George W. Bush to direct the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States (the “9/11 Commission”), a bipartisan group charged with investigating the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001. Kean subsequently served as the chairman of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, a nonprofit entity created with private funds to continue the commission’s work of guarding against future attacks. He rejoined the board of CC trustees in 2005.

  Foundation programs have not visibly shifted their focus because of such recruitment. Instead, such recruitment serves to underline their ability to adapt to new environments and largely continue their historic mission of promoting U.S. elite interests. The evidence presented above paints a portrait of deep and powerful oligarchic tendencies in American society and government, challenging the notion of discrete, fundamentally competitive forces battling it out. That is not to say that there are no battles; it is merely to argue that consensus building is also central to an understanding of how power works in the United States and that the major philanthropic foundations were, and are, central to the elite consensus-building project.85