The Foundation Statesmen
In 1933, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his oath of office, he inherited control of a vast country with a booming population, abundant resources, the world’s largest economy, and next to nothing in the way of central government.
At a time when other industrialized nations were erecting welfare states, the United States still lacked the capacity to tax most of its citizens. Its roads were mostly unpaved, its rail lines lay in private hands, its central banking system was rudimentary (a condition that had exacerbated the Depression), and local authorities—not the federal government—ran the schools and kept the peace. Foreign relations were no better. The US had entered World War I late and retreated immediately afterward, declining to claim the geopolitical spoils of the war and refusing to join the League of Nations.
How such an underdeveloped government became a leader in world affairs is something of a mystery. Where did it gain the capacity and unity of vision to become, if not a global empire, then something very much like it? How did it formulate and then act on a grand geopolitical strategy that required massive aid deployments, substantial foreign expertise, and military interventions throughout the globe? These questions are all the more puzzling because, domestically, the federal government would remain weak for decades after World War I, crippled by an entrenched and recalcitrant group of politicians who feared that any aggrandizement of the state might interfere with white supremacy in the South.
An intriguing explanation of how the US Government, politically hamstrung at home, could act with force and purpose abroad is contained in Inderjeet Parmar’s excellent Foundations of the American Century. Throughout the 20th century, Parmar argues, the weak state was supplemented by private foundations, which took on many of the functions of government. Unelected, unaccountable, and for the most part unchecked, these foundations channeled billions of dollars into positioning the United States as a world power. Immune to the vicissitudes of democratic politics, they functioned as a shadow government, implementing the goals of what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” the men of affairs who moved easily from corporate boardrooms to high-ranking government office, often in or around the State Department.
These men had money, often more of it than they knew how to spend. The endowments of the big three foundations—Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford—were drawn from the immense profits of the oil, steel, and auto industries. In part, the founding of these philanthropic institutions was a public relations strategy. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, still the first and second wealthiest men in history, had both been targeted by the press after turning armed strikebreakers on their employees. Henry Ford, the seventh richest, at first was hailed as a new kind of industrialist, deriving his profits from technical and sociological innovation rather than from naked power grabs. But after his men opened fire on a march of laid-off workers at River Rouge in 1932, killing five and seriously injuring nineteen, Ford, too, found himself the object of public scorn. (The “despot of Dearborn” is what Edmund Wilson called him, and that same year Aldous Huxley envisioned a dystopian society run on Fordist principles in Brave New World). Four years later, Ford established his own foundation, to which he and his son, Edsel, bequeathed 90 percent of the Ford Motor Company’s stock. After Ford’s death in 1947, nearly all of the profits of his firm, one of the world’s largest, went to the Ford Foundation. The result was a form of public expenditure for which there was no public oversight.
The money itself, though substantial, never threatened to surpass the size of the federal budget. What was important was how it was spent. The trustees of the large foundations comprised a cozy group of men—well-heeled, white, and Protestant—who were raised in the same milieu, attended the same colleges (over half graduated from Harvard, Princeton, or Yale), and belonged to the same social clubs. Such men could not help but share a worldview, and for most of 20th century there was no one in the room to argue the other side. Internally united and externally unimpeded, they acted with a speed and resolve that was impossible for elected politicians. While government officials mired themselves in political debates, foundation leaders acted: they commissioned research, trained students, launched pilot projects, cultivated allies among foreign governments, and built networks of experts. By the time the government overcame its inertia on an issue, it found a smooth and well-marked trail stretching ahead through the wilderness.
It is easy to overlook this quiet trailblazing because the big foundations rarely pushed extreme agendas, at least not at home. Unlike the think tanks of today, the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations were, and continue to be, studiously nonpartisan. They sought above all technocratic order: a strong federal government, a class of experts ready to guide it, and a docile public eager to follow. Abroad, they combined their faith in the rule of experts with the belief that the ideas and institutions best suited to the poorer countries of the world were those of the United States.
At their best, the foundations ushered the nation and the world along toward a more progressive state of affairs. In 1935, the Carnegie Corporation initiated a massive social scientific survey of African-American life in the United States. Afraid that a scholar from either the North or the South would bring too many prejudices to the study, Carnegie hired a Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal. It turned out to be an inspired choice. Myrdal was a born politician (he had been a member of the Swedish Parliament) and was able to glad-hand nearly every social scientist concerned with race in the United States, black and white, into producing research or advice for what became a commanding 1,483-page tome, An American Dilemma (1944). More than any other work of the time, Myrdal’s work cemented the view of racial liberals that the treatment of blacks in the United States was, as he wrote, “nothing more and nothing less than a century-long lag of public morals.” The book’s findings were not new, but the resources Carnegie invested in their production endowed them with an air of authority, and they served to center the national debate about race for decades to come. Ten years after the publication of Myrdal’s study, the Supreme Court cited it in Brown v. Board of Education, and echoes of An American Dilemma could be heard in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s casting of racism as a question of morality—rather than class or empire—in his address to the March on Washington.
There is much to admire in the far-sighted liberalism that guided the best of midcentury foundation philanthropy. But, as Parmar shows, the deft sense of the public interest that guided Carnegie’s support of Myrdal faltered abroad, where the foundations’ mission of development and state-building was undermined by their commitment to maintaining U.S. hegemony. Parmar’s most disturbing revelation concerns the Ford Foundation’s work in Indonesia. In the 1960s, while Ford’s leaders were laying the groundwork for the War on Poverty in the United States and funding the development of Sesame Street, they were also bankrolling a network of social scientists and economists around the University of Indonesia who would, with Ford’s approval, participate in the campaign to oust Indonesia’s elected but left-leaning President Sukarno. Concerned that Sukarno was too accommodating of Communism, Ford’s experts came to the aid of his rival, General Suharto, who gradually took control of the government over the course of three years, starting in 1965. Suharto would go on to rule the country in a corrupt, autocratic manner for over three decades, but the greatest tragedy of his rule came in the period of his ascent, when his supporters slaughtered some half a million alleged communists. Read more>>n+1: The Foundation Statesmen
