The network concept encompasses, combines, and synthesizes “public” and “private” domains, “society” and “state.” The network is an alloy—neither entirely private nor public but a complex mixture, a hybrid form that may be peculiar to societies featuring a “weak” state. This book has shown how closely connected and interpenetrated were foundations and the American state. Indeed, foundation and other “private” elites of the Progressive era worked outside electoral politics and Congress, or rather around them, and worked directly with the federal executive. Because they viewed the state as embodying the very spirit of responsible citizenship, of civic patriotism, they wanted to modernize it, strengthen it, to make it more effective in governing an increasingly complex America and ordering a “dangerous” world. The philanthropic foundations considered in this book were fully representative of such attitudes and tendencies, part of a Gramscian “state-spirited” and networked Establishment of power that accommodated several interconnected and like-minded components, not to mention a “revolving door” among them (chapter 2). They also recognized a division of labor among them, with each “assigned” a specific role in the processes of building American hegemony.
The idea that the foundations are “independent” of the state must be revised. The evidence presented here strongly suggests this. However, something must be recognized: the “independence” fiction has some “reality” in the life of the foundations. They choose to do what they do; they could do otherwise. In their day-to-day lives, foundation trustees and officials do not receive state directives, nor do they issue their own to anyone else. What they have, and what binds them so closely to the state, however, is more powerful and significant than any official directives: they have an organic unity with the state and the rest of the Establishment, born of a shared worldview underpinning the conviction that the United States is a society with superior ideas, culture, and economic system, one that is destined and duty bound to lead the world.
The foundation-state relationship, therefore, is not a conspiracy—it may be quite secretive and operate “behind the scenes,” but it is not a criminal enterprise. It is, however, strongly undemocratic, because it privileges the “right” people, usually those with the “right” social backgrounds and/or attitudes. This clearly jars in an open society like the United States, where rank and background are supposed to constitute no barrier to representation. It also violates the norm of accountability, since foundation elites do not operate through elections or elected representatives.
In promoting themselves as independent, foundations also proclaim their aloofness from the worlds of business and the marketplace. Yet their trustees have overwhelmingly been recruited from the ranks of the corporate community—Wall Street is and has been very well represented at Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Unsurprising though that is, it undermines the self-image of foundations as being above business concerns. They could never really be beyond business: they are headed by businessmen, they were formed by industrialists, and they invest in and receive income from the engines of capitalist globalization. Yet, the fiction has some “reality.” The income foundations receive may be “invested” in schemes with little or no chance of success. Foundations, as nonprofit organizations, can take risks that businesses in competitive markets may be unable, or less able, to take. But this may suggest, as some have, that foundations are a little like venture capitalists.
This raises a related question. Are not the three foundations chosen for this study quite different and competitive among themselves, which increases the pressure on them to take fewer risks and “achieve” more—produce better results—than their “fellow” philanthropies? There is certainly plenty in the record above to indicate that this is not a new issue. There is a degree of “philanthropy envy”; doing good for mankind is serious business, honoring most those seen to be leading the way with innovative and successful programs. But the focus of this book has been broad—trying to paint a “big picture” while presenting detailed cases to illustrate salient features of American philanthropy over a century or so. That is not to suggest that the foundations are identical, however, but merely to point out that the blurring of distinguishing lines is a by-product of the approach taken here, suiting the purposes of this book—to examine the overall picture of the Big 3 foundations’ activities and effects over a long timeframe.
Nevertheless, there is an implicit claim that more binds the Big 3 than divides them. Captivated by liberal internationalism, their ties were amplified by defining their opponents as backward looking, narrow minded, or parochial—anyone on either the left or right opposing American interventionism and empire building. This includes Robert Lynd in 1940, who warned of the dangers of corporate-led war mobilization for civil liberties; the marginalization of the historian-activist Charles Beard once he criticized increasing U.S. belligerence in the late 1930s; African American supporters of African independence in the 1950s; and the Marxist left in Chile in the 1970s. C. Wright Mills’s proposed study, The Cultural Apparatus, was rejected for funding by Ford, as they feared it would be “another Power Elite,” a radical critique of the American power structure and its global consequences.2 Such cases should be seen as casting light on the very large and sustained funding of think tanks and university programs that broadly advanced the liberal internationalist cause, as detailed in this book.
Another issue that arises concerns the character of the foundations’ influence on research and researchers. It is sometimes argued that the approach taken here suggests that foundations “dupe” or “suborn” researchers or otherwise interfere with research results. There is no evidence that the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations have ever engaged in such activities. No claim to that end is made in this study. Indeed, this study has throughout endorsed the approach taken by Harold Laski when he noted that foundations do not control research: “It is merely the fact that a fund is within reach which permeates everything and alters everything.” Furthermore, Laski argues, “the foundations do not control, 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.”3 The point is that foundations operate structurally, technocratically, and from the top down, rarely, if ever, micromanaging research or researchers.
The top-down technocratic character of American philanthropy has hardly been dented, in practice, by the greater reliance on the rhetoric of empowerment. Consider two recent examples that illustrate the point and suggest that even newer philanthropies are continuing to advance along the same lines. First, consider the Rockefeller Foundation’s focus on “smart globalization,”4 suggesting that RF was previously somewhat less smart, hence its failure to achieve key development goals. What is “smart globalization”? It is recognizing that globalization is a revolutionary process engineering radical change. This does not sound especially insightful. Smart globalization accepts that there are upsides and downsides, winners and losers, and tries to maximize benefits and minimize costs. How would the foundations apply this insight of smart globalization to their funding practices? The answer to this is clearly the key. According to one document, the practical implications of smart globalization are “a closer interaction of foresight and development experts and practitioners… [so they] work more closely together to coherently address the multitude, interlocking global challenges of the 21st century.” Stronger, better-networked experts and practitioners would “harness the creative forces of globalization to ensure that the tools and technologies [of progress] are accessible to more people, more fully, in more places.” According to the same document, a smart-globalization “mindset has influenced and directed the ongoing work of the Rockefeller Foundation.”5
This leads to a consideration of the second instance of top-down technocratic values at the heart of American philanthropy. The Gates F
oundation (GF)—the world’s largest foundation, even before Warren Buffet’s donations, the interest on which will add $1.5 billion annually to the foundation’s spending power—leads the way. Yet, despite its valuable programs of immunization and vaccination and the rhetoric of partnership and empowerment, the overall mindset remains elitist, top down, and expert led. As Time magazine noted in 2006, the Gateses are “shrewd about doing good… rewiring politics and re-engineering justice… making mercy smarter and hope strategic.” In the same issue, Time noted that the Gateses are “intellectually captivated by the scientific challenge of treating the diseases of the poor” and hope to invest “resources and rigor into the fight just when scientists are inventing new tools…. They [Bill and Melinda] run the foundation like a business…. And both use the language of business to describe the human experience.”6 Roy Steiner, the deputy director of GF’s agricultural development department, emphasizes that “we believe in the power of technology.”7 To one armed with “science” and technology, the world resembles a laboratory and its people experimental subjects, and every problem requires ambitious high-tech solutions.
Additionally, the recent “discovery” that Africa was left out of the 1960s “Green revolution” led to a joint venture between the Gates and Rockefeller foundations that incorporates profit-making investors such as Monsanto. Starting in 2006, they hope to replicate the “success” story in contemporary Africa.8 In their program—Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)—supported by President Barack Obama,9 there is little or no recognition of some of the key failures of the Green revolution in India, including the exacerbation of rural poverty and inequality, higher levels of landlessness, and, therefore, greater migrations to already overpopulated cities.10 Like the previous Green revolution, AGRA offers high-tech solutions that are likely to exacerbate the very problems they claim to be solving.11
What have been the effects thus far of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa? It is still early days for AGRA, but an internal Gates Foundation memo noted that, despite the rhetorical focus on “smallholders,” the strategy will “require some degree of land mobility and a lower percentage of total employment involved in direct agricultural production”—that is, land-ownership concentration and an exodus to the cities, where opportunities are few.12 The promotion of subsidized fertilizers is also likely to aggravate future food production. It is also clear that ending African hunger may not be at the top of the list of the Gates Foundation’s priorities. As a report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, funded by GF, noted, the United States must “reassert its leadership” in “spreading new technologies” to increase trade and, ultimately, “strengthen American institutions.”13
The obvious question is: why are the Gates and Rockefeller foundations repeating the mistakes of the past? Don’t they realize what happened before? The short answer is that they are fully aware of the consequences and failures of past policies and believe that they have learned lessons. But their commitment to high-tech expert-led solutions, free-market and “comparative-advantage” economics, and to American/Western power and global leadership soars way above the oft-expressed and lofty interest in feeding the hungry and poor of this world.14 The foundations have a demonstrable “imperial or hegemonic planning mentality that excludes the necessary role of local knowledge” or people, as James Scott argues with reference to modern states.15
And herein lies the problem of American philanthropy, limiting the possibility of radical reform. The elitist, scientistic, technocratic, and market-oriented mindset that dominates America is virtually hard wired into the dominant structures of society, economy, and polity. American business culture gave life to scientific, industrialized foundations, leaving an indelible imprint on their instincts, approaches, and practices. Philanthropy—or philanthrocapitalism—today reflects its context while simultaneously and continuously constructing and reconstructing it in an age of rampant neoliberalism, the iron grip of which shows no signs of relaxing. The mental images with which major foundations operate make the world only partially legible but almost wholly open to manipulation and reconstruction.16
The Big 3 operate today in a more crowded field. The Gates Foundation dwarfs them. There are numerous conservative foundations—Coors, Scaife, Bradley—that fund right-wing think tanks, media, and lobbying organizations. Yet the Big 3 remain highly significant. They are active, well organized, dynamic, and experienced. Between them, they have a three-hundred-year-strong record of domestic reform and global institution building. Their example is emulated by newer philanthropies, multiplying the Big 3’s influence.
To be sure, there is the possibility that American foundations will respond with “new” ideas about global hegemony, given the rise of new powers, actors, and peoples across the world. They are likely to promote empowerment, institutional reform, and political accommodation of rising powers like China and India but unlikely to champion a radical restructuring of the global order. They could look backward to alternative models of
U.S. philanthropy—such as the radical American Fund for Public Service—that were innovative experiments in empowering those struggling to promote working-class welfare, immigrants’ rights, and civil liberties for those fighting for radical social and economic reform. But this is also highly unlikely in the era of neoliberal philanthrocapitalism. The foundations remain primordially attached to the American state, a broadly neoliberal order with a safety net, and a global rules-based system as the basis of continued American global hegemony.
NOTES
1. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOUNDATIONS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
1. Time (December 26, 2005/January 2, 2006). The Gateses were named two of Time magazine’s three “Persons of the Year”; the other was Bono of the rock group U2.
2. Although there are many other significant American foundations, the Big 3 were simply the most globally engaged and, therefore, the most worthy of more or less exclusive attention, although chapter 8 also considers an aspect of the role of the German Marshall Fund.
3. Jacqueline Khor (associate director, Rockefeller Foundation), “Innovations in Philanthropy: The RF’s Perspective,” Knowledge@SMU, http://www.knowledge.smu.edu.sg/index.cfm.
4. Simon Bromley, American Power and the Prospects for International Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008).
5. Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on U.S. Foreign Policy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1983).
6. Historians have also neglected the study of elites in America’s evolution; see Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, eds., Ruling America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 2.
7. Donald Fisher, “The Role of Philanthropic Foundations in the Reproduction and Production of Hegemony: Rockefeller Foundations and the Social Sciences,” Sociology 17, no. 2 (1983): 206–233; Martin Bulmer, “Philanthropic Foundations and the Development of the Social Sciences in the Early Twentieth Century: A Reply to Donald Fisher,” Sociology 18 (1984): 572–579.
8. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., eds., Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973); Samuel P. Huntington, “Transnational Organizations in World Politics,” World Politics 25, no. 3 (1973).
9. Huntington, “Transnational Organizations,” 344. Even Philip G. Cerny’s more critical account of the roles of states and private actors in globalization processes is based on Lindblom’s neopluralist perspective (Cerny, “Multinodal Politics,” Review of International Studies 35 [2009]: 421–449).
10. Kenneth Prewitt, “The Importance of Foundations in an Open Society,” in The Future of Foundations in an Open Society, ed. Bertelsmann Foundation (Guetersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation, 1999), 17–29.
11. Ibid., 9.
12. Helmut Anheier and Diana Leat, From Charity to Creativity: Philanthropic Foundations in the Twenty-First Century (Stroud, U.K.: Comedia, 2002); cited in H. Anheier and S. Daly, “Philanthropic Foundations: A New Global For
ce?” in Global Civil Society 2004–05, ed. Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor (London: Sage, 2005), 159.
13. Anheier and Daly, “Philanthropic Foundations,” 160, 174.
14. Robert W. Cox, “Civil Society at the Turn of the Millennium,” Review of International Studies 25 (1999): 10.
15. Khor, “Innovations in Philanthropy.”
16. Peter Haas, “Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 3.
17. Inderjeet Parmar, “Catalysing Events, Think Tanks, and American Foreign Policy Shifts: A Comparative Analysis of the Impacts of Pearl Harbor and 11 September 2001,” Government and Opposition 40, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1–26.
18. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994).
19. Though it acknowledges their importance, foundations are not a central focus of Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The vital roles played by private actors in global civil society building is part of a whole complex of roles involving states and intergovernmental organizations that is transforming world politics; see Cerny, “Multinodal Politics.”
20. Ronald Radosh, Prophets on the Right (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975); Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935–1941 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966); Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse (New York: Collier, 1961).
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