The aim of the original seven committees was to “aid in stimulating greater interest in foreign affairs on the part of community leaders in widely separated areas.”146 By 1944–1945, there were twenty committees with over nine hundred members.147 According to Percy Bidwell, the organizing secretary of the committees, their principal function was to aid the formation of constructive local and regional leaders of opinion that would back a globalist foreign policy.148 In terms of membership, one third of the committee men were in business, one of the most prominent being Charles E. Wilson, the president of General Motors. Sixteen percent were educators and 15 percent lawyers, and there was a smattering of trade-union leaders and farmers’ representatives. There were also a number of congressmen and newspaper columnists and editors. Frank Capra and Walt Disney were two prominent members of the Los Angeles committee.149
Most of the committees had a lively program of regular meetings, organized study, and research and participated in a two-day annual national conference of all such bodies.150 The New York Council used the committees as vehicles for its influence and for gathering public-opinion data from across the country. The CFR published, for a time, a summary of regional committee reports, “Some Regional Views on Our Foreign Policy,” replacing them in 1945 with more specific surveys, “with a view to making the results available to the Department of State.”151 In 1944, Secretary of State Cordell Hull permitted State and Treasury Department members to visit the committees “as part of their official duties.”152
Bidwell believed that the committees had become very influential in their localities.153 More independent reports from local committee secretaries, CFR men on speaking tours (such as Allen W. Dulles), and the State Department placed greater value on their work and effects. Even a postwar State Department assessment of the committees (in 1952) argued that they had played a vital role “in the forming and supporting of sound foreign policy.”154 Indeed, during the war, the State Department had consciously sought to “discreetly guide… [such private committees] in channels which seem to the Department to be useful and away from schemes which the Department feels are dangerous or utopian.” The CFR’s committees in particular were of great interest to official policy makers who wanted to manipulate their discussions and, indirectly, local public opinion. Assistant Secretary of State Hugh Wilson argued that the CFR ought to “send a man here [Washington] on current questions. This man could talk with the proper people in the State Department, preparing a memorandum on his own which would not be attributed to the Department, and circulated for the confidential information of the men on the selected [Committees on Foreign Relations] list.” Of course, another official wrote, “we could [so] arrange [it]… that the men on the selected list would not be notified that this was State Department material.”155 As their original organizing secretary, Francis P. Miller, wrote in his memoirs, the committees were not only important “listening posts to sense the mood of the country” but also played “a unique role in preparing the nation for a bi-partisan foreign policy.”156 They were a fundamental part of the Carnegie Corporation’s strategy for educating public opinion in the period immediately before the outbreak of World War II and during it.
The initiation of the committees’ project by the Carnegie Corporation and its continued funding of it are highly significant in understanding its institutional culture and position within the foreign policy establishment. This culture was intensely political and “statist”; the corporation saw the problems of American foreign policy as its own and tried, within its “proper and legitimate” sphere of action, to solve them. Before proceeding, however, CC officials were careful to consult with the State Department, lest their initiatives be considered less than “helpful.”
The construction and strengthening of regional elite opinion were vital aspects of America’s rise to globalism, dovetailing with the CFR’s and others’ work in Washington, D.C., and with that of Earle at Princeton. It further undermines, therefore, Karl and Katz’s view that the foundations were disinterested and nonpolitical. By mobilizing regional elites, the Carnegie Corporation and the CFR were attempting to generate a new internationalist consensus by both challenging isolationism in its heartlands and by arming with knowledge and arguments its own internationalist allies. This was a conscious attempt to mobilize bias behind a particular conception of America’s role in a new world order.
A REJECTED APPLICATION
The claim above is reinforced by the reception accorded a radically different proposal by the Columbia University sociologist Robert Lynd, which was rejected for funding by Carnegie philanthropy. Lynd’s “A Proposed Study of the Potentialities of Democratic Processes in a Period of Mobilization” was to be conducted over a period of fifteen months in eight sections, costing $233,000.157 Lynd assumed that for America to wage a war against fascism, it would need to mobilize its own people; the problem was that, left to the state bureaucracy and its corporate allies, there would develop bellicose militarism, undermining civil liberties. Democracy, Lynd argued, ought to be a system in which humans can realize their full potential and satisfy their needs, and if this tendency could be strengthened, people would fight wars without resorting to chauvinistic propaganda. His study envisaged a sociological survey of the social condition of the people, their basic physical needs, their information requirements, and so on. Fighting a war against fascism, therefore, would enhance democracy rather than diminishing it.158 This proposal, sent out to twenty-six referees, was rejected by just five reviewers. Among its champions were Lynd’s fellow Columbia University professors Charles Beard and Philip Jessup.159
The voices of the critics, however, carried more weight with CC. The most severe critic, Howard J. Savage, of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, was vituperative. Lynd and Savage approached the problem of war mobilization and the nature of democracy from completely opposing perspectives. Savage emphasized his military record and claimed that Lynd’s “sociological fuddy-duddy” could not possibly “prepare people to kill others.” Savage further argued that Lynd only concerned himself with one threat to U.S. democracy, namely Nazism, and said nothing “of a communistic menace.” Lynd’s proposal, lambasted as the “nadir of stupidity,” was rejected by both Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations.160
Rejection of Lynd’s proposal after Savage’s ruthless critique is instructive as to the vision of democracy, national purpose, leadership, mass mobilization, and war that was held by CC and RF. The latter were considered “tough minded,” worldly, practical; Lynd, by contrast, was bookish, rhetorical, and a “do-gooder.” Philanthropy’s fertilizer was more appropriate for Yale, Earle, et al. than for Lynd. Lewis Coser’s argument that foundations are the “gatekeepers of ideas” who fertilize and foster certain lines of research rather than others rings true.161
INTERNATIONAL NETWORKS, 1930s–1950S
The foundations’ national and international network-building initiatives were integrated. The Big 3 foundations and their networks were involved in a self-conscious hegemonic project for globalism and against isolationism; their domestic activities were aimed at promoting the idea that America was dependent on and connected to the world and could no longer ignore world affairs. If America, the self-evident good country of the “chosen people,”162 did not “nip” global threats in the bud, it would suffer economic hardships and threats of (or actual) military attack, and the forces of “evil” would dominate the globe.163 Indeed, the overall U.S.-stated aim in the definitive Cold War justification, NSC-68, recognizes a desire “to foster a world environment in which the American system can flourish,” to be achieved through containing the USSR, but it is also “a policy we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat… [a] policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community” of U.S.-dominated organizations, such as the IMF, World Bank, NATO, the Marshall Plan, and so on.164 As the world got smaller, interventionism made (common) sense.165 It was seen by U.S. state and private elites that leader
ship of international organizations constituted “from an American vantage a desirable world order.”166 And in those world orders, international organizations were rarely permitted independent powers, and the U.S. always (and unsurprisingly) “sought to protect its interests.” To Craig Murphy and Robert Cox, international organizations such as the International Labor Organization and the League of Nations represent the international institutional architecture for capitalist accumulation regimes.167 Relatedly, James T. Shotwell, the Columbia University historian and Carnegie Endowment representative at the ILO, noted quite explicitly the procapitalist and anticommunist aims of the organization in an article entitled nothing less than “The International Labor Organization as an Alternative to Violent Revolution.” In it, he argued that the Bolshevik revolution and political instability across Europe forced labor issues onto the Paris Peace Conference’s agenda. Subsequently, peacemakers worked to “prove to the workers of the world that the principles of social justice might be established under the capitalist system.”168
The foundations’ international network building was as strategic as their national enterprises. As Rockefeller officials noted when selecting London-based colleges (such as the London School of Economics) for investment, that city’s institutions were already part of a worldwide imperial network that offered significant advantages. Influencing the questions asked and methods of research engaged in at the heart of the British Empire meant multiplier effects across the globe.169
The major American foundations played key roles in generating several international organizations in and through which their ideas could be expressed and the idea of international governance could be normalized, especially after the U.S. Senate’s nonratification of the League of Nations. Creating international forums for discussing labor conditions, trade, legal norms, war debts, reparations, war, and peace provided opportunities for U.S. elites to promote their own positions but also to try to cooperate in advancing non-nationalist, anticolonial, and noncommunist arguments. Despite the idealistic character of the declarations of American internationalists and of their more recent supporters,170 this was a bid for hegemony. As Ikenberry notes, “hegemonic control emerges when foreign elites buy into the [potential] hegemon’s vision of international order and accept it as their own.”171 Such persuasion is conducted by “direct contact with elites in these states, including contact via diplomatic channels, cultural exchanges, and foreign study.”172 He might have added private international organizations to that list. For American internationalists, building international organizations was for the purposes of what later became known as “track two” diplomacy, where state and other elites meet informally to air differences during protracted international negotiations between states.173
The foundations funded the long-term cooperative efforts of the American CFR with its British counterpart, the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA, also known as Chatham House).174 Founded as two branches of one Institute of International Affairs, the CFR and Chatham House became national organizations in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, their cooperation developed and became “special”: they were champions of Anglo-American cooperation and, indeed, alliance, as the best way of combating “aggressors” and securing world peace. They established joint conferences and study groups from the 1920s right into the Cold War, informal and semiformal diplomacy that shadowed their official counterparts in their respective governments—for example, on naval matters, trade, war debts, postwar issues in the Pacific region, and so on. While they did not “resolve” problems, they created spaces within which policy-oriented elites were able frankly to air their grievances and indicate how much political room for maneuver their respective governments enjoyed. They also created and reinforced habits of Anglo-American cooperation and dialogue.175 During World War II, when both organizations were heavily incorporated into their respective official foreign policy–making bureaucracies, the two groups’ leaders together and with their respective governments planned the postwar international institutional architecture that became known as the Bretton Woods system: the International Monetary Fund (IMF), International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, or World Bank), and the United Nations.176 In regard to the latter, the role of the CFR as an organization and of Isaiah Bowman is well documented. It is clear that, for Bowman and the CFR, the United Nations was for the maintenance of national security, and international organization would be the route to avoiding “conventional forms of imperialism.”177 American power would be exercised through an American-led “international” system.
Building, and modeled, on that core cooperation between CFR and RIIA, there developed from the 1920s momentum behind an institutes-of-international-affairs “movement.” Institutes developed in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa as well as in Italy, Belgium, Holland, Germany, and France. Adapted to their own domestic conditions, these institutes received funding from the major American foundations,178 because their general aims were similar to the foundations’ own conception of international affairs at a time of increasing nationalist rivalries, economic autarchy, and military conflict: to increase international dialogue to avert war and economic depression and to build international habits of mind and activity.179 As Dobell and Willmott conclude, the institutes represented the founding generation of a “transnational elite” that went on to play important roles in laying the foundations of the contemporary world order.180
Even more than that, however, foundation elites aimed at building international associations and networks of democratic countries as bulwarks against aggression and militarism. Their schemes are interesting, as they have, since the end of the Cold War, once again become fashionable. The recently U.S.-mooted “community/concert/league of democracies”181 (and the less well-known but interesting “Anglosphere,”182 which promotes the union of English-speaking peoples) had its 1930s and 1940s counterpart: Federal Union (FU). Championed by the New York Times journalist Clarence Streit and Chatham House’s Lionel Curtis, Federal Union (between Britain and its imperial subjects, America, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the Scandinavian nations) was conceived of as a union of democratic, peace-loving nations of “advanced” peoples, a 1930s version of democratic peace theory in action.183 The racism inherent in Federal Union was clear to—and condemned by—contemporary observers as a “great blonde beast,”184 especially as its founders intended to diminish the voting power of Indians and other people of color by using taxable capacity as the basis of representation in the federal assembly.185 Taxable capacity was finally chosen after consideration of various disenfranchisement methods such as literacy tests, which were used in the Jim Crow deep South of the United States. Of course, despite high levels of sympathy among British and American elites, including Prime Minister Churchill, Federal Union never came about. Nevertheless, it provides an insight to what Anglo-American elites thought about the world and how they sought to act upon it. And the moving spirits behind the movement were part of the American foundations’ far-flung but well-connected networks. This was at a time of crisis for the League of Nations, which had been powerless to prevent Nazi and other aggressions and during a time of exploration of various schemes for “world order.” When wartime discussions began—within and between CFR-RIIA and their respective foreign offices—the core ideas/values of FU played an important role.186 The leaders of the institutes-of-international-affairs movement and Federal Union overlapped, as did their funding sources. Together, they made more dense the elite international networks through which American foundation leaders sought to embed their values in the international system.187
American foundations were major supporters of international cooperation in informal, private associations. Such associations took the form of institutes of international affairs; the Institute of Pacific Relations, for discussions between the powers of the Pacific rim; supporting the social-justice aims of the International Labor Organization (ILO; Carnegie was particularly active in
this respect);188 and even building international legal institutions such as the Permanent Court of Justice (once again, a significant Carnegie-backed project). American philanthropy also supported the International Studies Conference (ISC) of the League of Nations’ International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), which, by 1945, had developed into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).189 While James Shotwell of the Carnegie Endowment served as the American committee’s chairman (1932–1943), the ISC and IIIC both received generous funding from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.190
The foundations were themselves international organizations or, rather, national organizations with international reach. The CEIP, for example, had a European office in Paris as well as representation in Geneva (the headquarters of the League of Nations). The Rockefeller Foundation was internationally oriented from its earliest days, particularly in relation to its work on illness and disease but also in its work with the American churches at home and overseas.191 The Carnegie Corporation, which was particularly active within “British” Africa, had offices clear across the continent.192
CONCLUSION
American philanthropy played a vital role in America’s rise to globalism and in the concomitant rise of a Realist tradition as a dominant feature of American IR. The initiatives reviewed show that the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations were engaged in a hegemonic project to assist the American state to enhance its institutional capacity and expertise in order better to project its power. The role of the American state in leading this effort—with the active participation and assistance of private elites such as the CFR, FPA, IPR, CEIP, and so on—was well understood. Yet that would never be enough: the universities would have to play their role, especially in producing more and better-trained graduates with methodological and theoretical approaches that lent themselves to adaptation in the world of policy making and implementation. Area studies and IR programs, therefore, with notions of state power, balance of power, vital interests, and the inevitability of war were funded at elite institutions such as Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Johns Hopkins, as were prestigious research fellowships’ programs, conferences, seminars and, later, professional societies: a networked infrastructure for building successful academic careers and for producing new generations of graduates and institutions to employ them. The professional networks, once established, became powers in their own right, generating specific types of knowledge; privileging specific methodologies and theoretical frameworks; monopolizing access to research councils, philanthropic and state funding, and policy makers; and policing the networks’ ideological-intellectual boundaries.
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