Foundations of the American Century

by Inderjeet Parmar

  21. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); George Rosen, Western Economists and Eastern Societies (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

  22. Manuel Castells, The Informational City (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 169–170.

  23. D. Swartz, Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 101.

  24. Barry Karl and Stanley N. Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” Daedalus 116, no. 1 (1987): 1–40; Barry Karl, “Philanthropy and the Maintenance of Democratic Elites,” Minerva 35 (1997): 207–220.

  25. Swartz, Culture and Power, 225.

  26. Robert J. Brym, Intellectuals and Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980); M. Reza Nakhaie and Robert J. Brym, “The Political Attitudes of Canadian Professors,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 24, no. 3 (1999): 329–353.

  27. Brym, Intellectuals and Politics, 19.

  28. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, eds., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971).

  29. Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980).

  30. Harold Laski makes this point well (“Foundations, Universities, and Research,” in The Dangers of Obedience and Other Essays [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930], 171).

  31. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, 84.

  32. Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).

  33. Landrum R. Bolling, Private Foreign Aid: U.S. Philanthropy for Relief and Development (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1982), 1.

  34. Ibid., 61–62.

  35. Sutton, cited in ibid., 71.

  36. Ibid., 68–69.

  37. Robert F. Arnove, “The Ford Foundation and ‘Competence Building’ Overseas: Assumptions, Approaches, and Outcomes,” Studies in Comparative International Development 12 (September 1977): 105–106.

  38. Ibid., 113.

  39. Kenneth W. Thompson et al., “Higher Education and National Development: One Model for Technical Assistance,” in Education and Development Reconsidered: The Bellagio Conference Papers, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, ed. F. Champion Ward (New York: Praeger, 1974), 203. Emphasis added.

  40. Michael P. Todaro, “Education for National Development: The University,” in Education and Development Reconsidered: The Bellagio Conference Papers, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, ed. F. Champion Ward (New York: Praeger, 1974), 204.

  41. Kenneth W. Thompson and B. R. Fogel, Higher Education and Social Change (London: Praeger, 1976), 3.

  42. Ibid., 51–52; italics added.

  43. Ibid., 209–216.

  44. Ibid., 13.

  45. Robert F. Arnove, “Foundations and the Transfer of Knowledge,” in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 315.

  46. Ibid., 320–322.

  47. Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The U.S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Routledge, 2006).

  48. Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary, Theories of the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); Peter B. Evans, Theda Skocpol, et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1973); for a direct test of all three theories, see Inderjeet Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

  49. Michael Mann, States, War, and Capitalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

  50. This should not be taken to mean that there are no such zerosum relationships between state and society; it is argued that such relationships are not necessarily the more decisive ones in understanding “how power works” in U.S. democracy.

  51. Godfrey Hodgson, “The Establishment,” Foreign Policy (1972–1973): 4–5.

  52. Ibid., 5.

  53. Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal,” Diplomatic History 10, no. 4 (October 1986): 363–372; Ellis W. Hawley, “The Discovery and Study of a ‘Corporate Liberalism,’” Business History Review 12, no. 3 (1978): 309–320.

  54. Michael Wala, The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy During the Early Cold War (Oxford: Berghahn, 1994).

  55. Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International Organization 38, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 46.

  56. Arthur S. Link and R. L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1983); William E. Leuchtenberg, “Progressivism and Imperialism,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (1952–53): 483–504.

  57. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism.

  58. Diane Stone, Capturing the Political Imagination (London: Frank Cass, 1996), 86.

  59. William Drake and Kalypso Nicolaidis, “Ideas, Interests, and Institutionalization: ‘Trade in Services’ and the Uruguay Round,” cited in ibid., 97.

  60. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1987), 262. Schumpeter argues that “the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”

  61. Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

  62. Chadwick Alger, “The External Bureaucracy in United States Foreign Affairs,” Administrative Science Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1962): 50–78.

  63. Karl Marx, cited by Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quartet Books, 1984), 162–163. Marx further noted that “the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”

  64. Inderjeet Parmar, “Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Mobilisation of American Public Opinion, 1939–1945,” Review of International Studies 26, no. 1 (2000). The consent of the governed is “organized…. The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations; these, however,” Gramsci concludes, “are private organisms, left to… private initiative”; cited in Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy: A Comparative Study of the Role and Influence of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1939–1945 (London: Palgrave, 2004), 18.

  65. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 146–147. The eighteenth-century conservative political theorist Edmund Burke noted that a key part of the state’s stability was derived from a partnership “not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born”; see his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; London: Penguin, 1986), 194–195.

  66. Hoare and Nowell-Smith, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 16.

  67. M. A. C. Colwell, “The Foundation Connection,” in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad, ed. Robert F. Arnove (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980); Anheier and Daly, “Philanthropic Foundations,” 171; Peter D. Bell, “The Ford Foundation as a Transnational Actor,” in Transnational Relations and World Politics, ed. R. O. Keohane and J. S. Nye (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 121, 125.

  68. Karl and Katz, “Foundations and Ruling Class Elites,” 19–20.

  69. Ibid.

  70. Ibid.; W. Weaver, ed., U.S. Philanthropic Foundations (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); J. Bresnan, Managing Indonesia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 78–83, 282; J. Bresnan, At Home Abroad: A Memoir of the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, 1953–1973 (Jakarta: Equinox, 2006).

&n
bsp; 71. Anheier and Daly, “Philanthropic Foundations”; M. Edwards, Civil Society (Cam bridge: Polity, 2009).

  72. Inderjeet Parmar, “Anti-Americanism and the Major Foundations,” in The Rise of Anti-Americanism, ed. B. O’Connor and M. Griffiths (London: Routledge, 2006), 169–194.

  2. AMERICAN FOUNDATION LEADERS

  1. Joan Roelofs, Foundations and Public Policy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2003).

  2. Jules Abels, The Rockefeller Billions (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 361.

  3. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1987), 262; Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930; London: Unwin, 1961).

  4. Robert D. Dean, Imperial Brotherhood: Gender and the Making of Cold War Foreign Policy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

  5. B. Ginsberg, The Captive Public (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

  6. Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 641.

  7. Emily Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

  8. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (London: Cape, 1967).

  9. Joseph Nye, Soft Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

  10. Robert Divine, Second Chance (New York: Athenaeum, 1967).

  11. In this, as in the case of civil rights in the 1960s, the foundations did not cover themselves in glory; see Richard Magat, The Ford Foundation at Work (London: Plenum Press, 1979).

  12. Douglas Brinkley, “Dean Acheson and the ‘Special Relationship’: The West Point Speech of December 1962,” Historical Journal 33 (1990): 599–608.

  13. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana Press, 1989), 313.

  14. H. G. Aubrey, The Dollar in World Affairs (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 13.

  15. R. Hofstadter, “The Psychic Crisis of the 1890s,” in R. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952).

  16. Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 317–318.

  17. Roosevelt to the U.S. Congress, cited by Thomas G. Paterson, et al, American Foreign Relations: A History Since 1895 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1995), 44. Interestingly, Roosevelt toured several Caribbean countries circa 1906 and inaugurated antimalaria and other public health schemes and built ports; this was later followed by Rockefeller philanthropy as new and based on human welfare. TR did the same for strategic and economic reasons and to protect American soldiers. This highlights a recurrent theme: how American philanthropy followed the state.

  18. This is not too far from a Durkheimian analysis of the traumas resulting from the shifts from mechanical to organic solidarity in modern industrial societies, which is normally accompanied by intensified class and other conflict; see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (New York: Free Press, 1969).

  19. Hofstadter, “The Psychic Crisis of the 1890s,” cited by Thomas G. Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Policy, vol. 1: To 1914, 3rd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath and Company, 1989), 393.

  20. Ibid.

  21. Indeed, this is a feature also of the so-called new philanthropy of Bill Gates and George Soros. The very drivers of capitalist globalization also claim to advance the best “cure.”

  22. Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 583.

  23. Ibid., 717.

  24. Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1962), 361.

  25. Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 541.

  26. Ibid., 547.

  27. Ceane O’Hanlon-Lincoln, County Chronicles (Mechling Bookbindery, 2004), 2:79.

  28. Abels, The Rockefeller Billions, 156.

  29. Ron Chernow, Titan (New York: Vintage, 1999), 575.

  30. Ibid., 585, emphasis added. See also, Kirk Hallahan, “Ivy Lee and the Rockefellers’ Response to the 1913–1914 Colorado Coal Strike,” Journal of Public Relations Research 14, no. 4 (2002): 265–315.

  31. Barbara Howe, “The Emergence of Scientific Philanthropy, 1900–1920,” in Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 25–54.

  32. Sheila Slaughter and Edward T. Silva, “Looking Backwards: How Foundations Formulated Ideology in the Progressive Period,” in Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 71.

  33. Ibid., 73.

  34. Howe, “The Emergence of Scientific Philanthropy, 1900–1920,” 26.

  35. Preface, Index to Reports of Officers, Vol. 1, 1921–1951 (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1953).

  36. Carnegie Corporation Annual Report (1945), 17–18.

  37. Carnegie Corporation Annual Report (1952), 19–20.

  38. Root cited in Parmar, “Engineering Consent: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Mobilization of American Public Opinion, 1939–1945,” Review of International Studies (2000): 26, 35.

  39. Howe, “The Emergence of Scientific Philanthropy, 1900–1920,” 25–54.

  40. Parmar, “American Foundations and the Development of International Knowledge Networks,” Global Networks 2, no. 1 (2002): 13–30.

  41. Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976), 8.

  42. Allan Nevins, Study in Power: John D. Rockefeller, Industrialist and Philanthropist (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 1:2.

  43. Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 13.

  44. Nevins, Study in Power, 2:426.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 35. Emphasis added.

  47. Ibid., 40, 56–57.

  48. Ibid., 40–41.

  49. Chief Justice White of the U.S. Supreme Court opined that Rockefeller’s “very genius for commercial development and organization… necessarily involved the intent to drive others from the field and to exclude them from their right to trade, and thus accomplish the mastery which was the end in view.” http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gildedpower/text2/standardoil.pdf.

  50. Abels, The Rockefeller Billions, 360.

  51. Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 88.

  52. Hallahan, “Ivy Lee and the Rockefellers’ Response to the 1913–1914 Colorado Coal Strike,” 280.

  53. Chernow, Titan, 624.

  54. Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 82.

  55. Abels, The Rockefeller Billions, 306.

  56. Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers, 143.

  57. Ibid., 635.

  58. Ibid., 152.

  59. Ibid., 152.

  60. Ibid., 158.

  61. Wall, Andrew Carnegie.

  62. Ibid., 789.

  63. Ibid., 792.

  64. Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grassroots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972); Anne Jardim, The First Henry Ford (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1970).

  65. Jardim, The First Henry Ford, 153–154.

  66. Henry Ford, My Life and Work (London: Heinemann, 1923), 206–207. “Let every American become steeled against coddling…. It is a drug. Stand up and stand out; let weaklings take charity,” Ford argued (221).

  67. Ibid., 210.

  68. Cited in Clarence Hooker, “Ford’s Sociology Department and the Americanizing Campaign and the Manufacture of Popular Culture Among Assembly Line Workers c. 1910–1917,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 20, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 49.

  69. Ford’s Americanization programs were taken up and implemented across Detroit; Hooker, “Ford’s Sociology Department,” 49.

  70. Martin Walker, Makers of the American Century (London: Vintage, 2001), 55.

  71. The biographical data in this section are drawn from the excellent dissertation by Alexander Nunn, The Rockefeller Foundation: Philanthropy and Effect (unpublished B. SocSci Politics dissertation, University of Manchester, 1998; in author’s possession). The relevant data are cited with Alex Nunn’s kind permission.

  72. Several trustees did not specify the precise number o
f club memberships in their Who’s Who entries, merely noting several and ending with “and many more.”

  73. I. Parmar, Think Tanks and Power in Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004); Mark L. Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968).

  74. Larry L. Fabian, Andrew Carnegie’s Peace Endowment (Washington, D.C.: CEIP, 1985).

  75. Alger Hiss, Oral History Memoir, 50; Carnegie Corporation Project, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University.

  76. Lawrence Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

  77. Divine, Second Chance.

  78. Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1947).

  79. Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), ix. Nielsen also noted that the Big 3 were a “a microcosm of… the Establishment, the power elite, or the American ruling class”; 316.

  80. Ben Whitaker, The Philanthropoids: Foundations and Society (New York: William Morrow, 1974), 90.

  81. Cited in Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on U.S. Foreign Policy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1983), 36.

  82. Shoup and Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, 59.

  83. McCloy was declared “the Chairman of the Establishment” by John Kenneth Galbraith, and rightly so: see Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon and Schuster).

  84. For a more thorough discussion of this concept, see Helen Laville and Hugh Wilford, eds., The U.S. Government, Citizen Groups, and the Cold War: The State-Private Network (London: Routledge, 2006).

  85. Thomas R. Dye, “Oligarchical Tendencies in National Policy-Making: The Role of Policy-Planning Organizations,” Journal of Politics 40, no. 2 (May 1978): 309– 331.

  86. David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), 419.

  87. Abels, The Rockefeller Billions, 177.

  88. Wall, Andrew Carnegie, 365.

  89. Ibid., 392.

  90. W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition (London: Methuen, 1983), 239.