Foundations of the American Century

The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power

Inderjeet Parmar

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231517935
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

Inderjeet Parmar reveals the complex interrelations, shared mindsets, and collaborative efforts of influential public and private organizations in the building of American hegemony. Focusing on the involvement of the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations in U.S. foreign affairs, Parmar traces the transformation of America from an "isolationist" nation into the world's only superpower, all in the name of benevolent stewardship.

Parmar begins in the 1920s with the establishment of these foundations and their system of top-down, elitist, scientific giving, which focused more on managing social, political, and economic change than on solving modern society's structural problems. Consulting rare documents and other archival materials, he recounts how the American intellectuals, academics, and policy makers affiliated with these organizations institutionalized such elitism, which then bled into the machinery of U.S. foreign policy and became regarded as the essence of modernity.

America hoped to replace Britain in the role of global hegemon and created the necessary political, ideological, military, and institutional capacity to do so, yet far from being objective, the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations often advanced U.S. interests at the expense of other nations. Incorporating case studies of American philanthropy in Nigeria, Chile, and Indonesia, Parmar boldly exposes the knowledge networks underwriting American dominance in the twentieth century.

1

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOUNDATIONS IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY

And it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

American expansion has been characterized not by the acquisition of new territories but by their penetration…. a variety of organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, have attempted to pursue the objectives important to them within the territory of other societies.

—Samuel P. Huntington, “Transnational Organizations in World Politics” (1973)

When [Bill] Gates first started the charity organization, he sought advice from Vartan Gregorian, president of the $2.2-billion-US Carnegie Corporation of New York… “Bill Gates always has believed that with wealth comes responsibility, the same as Andrew Carnegie,” said Gregorian. “There are people who deal with symptoms—somebody is poor, you give money. That’s charity. Philanthropy… is to solve problems through investment and planning, not (just) through generosity.”

—CTV.CA News, “Bill Gates to Devote More Time to Charity Work”

It is difficult to believe that philanthropy—literally, “love of all mankind”—could possibly be malignant. When one reads of the millions of dollars donated to health schemes by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations, for example,¹ it is close to sacrilegious to suggest that such initiatives might be other than they seem. Yet I claim something close in this book, in which I analyze the influence of American foundations on U.S. foreign affairs from the 1930s to the “war on terror.” Philanthropic foundations, I argue, have been a key means of building the “American century,” or an American imperium, a hegemony constructed in significant part via cultural and intellectual penetration. This is as much the case within the United States—where a powerful East Coast foreign policy Establishment “penetrated” other regions and social strata—as it is in the world.

Despite their image of scientific impartiality, ideological-political neutrality, and being above the market and independent of the state, the “Big 3” foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie) have been extremely influential in America’s rise to global hegemony over the past century.² This book shows that they are intensely political and ideological and are steeped in market, corporate, and state institutions—that they are a part of the power elite of the United States. Working today in a much more crowded field, they continue to innovate, inspire emulation, and collaborate with newer philanthropies.

Historically, the Big 3 foundations represented a strategic element of the East Coast foreign policy Establishment and the core of the latter’s mind-set, institutions, and activities, manifested by active leadership in organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association. Principally, the Big 3 were at the heart of the Establishment’s efforts to strengthen and mobilize, as necessary, the American academy behind its programs for American-led global hegemony, including the specialized study of foreign areas likely to be of concern to makers of foreign policy, as well as through developing the discipline of international relations. Foundation leaders were drawn from various sections of American elite society and were closely connected with the country’s biggest industrial corporations and elite cultural, religious, political, and state institutions. At the turn of the twentieth century, that elite focused its attention on America’s global role—as well as toward domestic political reform, to build a stronger federal executive. They sought to unite American society to build and catalyze anti-isolationist and globalist opinion (elite, attentive, and mass public), to build state capacities and political capital in the area of foreign affairs, and to improve the study of foreign areas and international relations in the universities. The foundations built the domestic intellectual and political bases that would assist America’s rise to global leadership. In addition, the foundations were directly engaged in extending and consolidating U.S. hegemony around the globe, especially during the Cold War, influencing intellectual, political, and ideological developments that transformed Chile, for example, from a welfare democracy into a neoliberal pioneer state under General Augusto Pinochet, following the bloody military coup of 1973.

America’s journey to global leadership may be tracked through the rise of the major foundations through three overlapping but distinct stages, with each stage socializing elites at home and abroad and embedding liberalism into national and international institutions: Stage 1, at the domestic level, lasted from the 1920s to the 1950s, during which time the foundations helped construct the hegemony of liberal internationalism, marginalized isolationism, and built up the institutional capacities of the federal government, especially in foreign affairs. Stage 2 partially overlapped the first stage and lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s, during which time foundations helped socialize and integrate American and foreign elites and developed formal and informal international organizations. Stage 3 began in the late 1980s, when foundations helped reconceptualize American hegemony, promoted democracy and “global civil society,” and fostered “democratic challenges” to neoliberal globalization.³ The international orders constructed or aimed at were, and are, congenial to American interests.⁴

The crucial point is that despite claims to the contrary, the Big 3’s large-scale aid programs for economic and political development failed to alleviate poverty, raise mass living standards, or better educate people. What that aid generated were sustainable elite networks that, on the whole, supported American policies—foreign and economic—ranging from liberalism in the 1950s to neoliberalism into the twenty-first century.

FOUNDATIONS AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS: A NEGLECTED AREA

There is only one other book-length treatment of American foundations’ roles in U.S. foreign policy, and it was published in 1983.⁵ Edward H. Berman’s excellent monograph provides a great deal of original evidence, which makes easier a more comprehensive and complementary coverage of the issues relating to philanthropic foundations. It is appropriate, however, that the issue is revisited in light of subsequent scholarly and political concerns, including the increased attention to nonstate actors in international relations and to the power of knowledge networks.

Despite the importance of foundations, their role in foreign affairs is underresearched. This is puzzling. However, the very definition of what counts as “politics” marginalizes philanthropy. “Governmental” institutions and the “state” constitute key concerns in political science and IR, but foundations are often understood as independent of the state. “Political parties” are central to political science, but foundations are specifically, or so they claim, nonpartisan. The same might be said for other concerns like ideology and organized and special interests: American foundations are self-professedly “nonideological” and beholden to no “sectional” interests—they focus on all mankind. Of course, the study of foreign affairs is state-centric, reinforcing the idea that foreign policy is especially the remit of a few state experts with inside information. Foundations and even foreign affairs think tanks, therefore, do not appear important, by definition, when one thinks in statist ways.

In addition, the study of elites—and foundations are quite elitist—has fallen by the wayside.⁶ It has been just over fifty years since the publication of C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite, and no major event appears to have been arranged to mark that anniversary. A conference at the University of Manchester recently aimed to revive elite studies. Foundations as elite institutions therefore have not been studied by sociologists, for example, despite a lively debate on their role between Donald Fisher and Martin Bulmer back in the 1980s.⁷

Of course, the nonstate actors’ approach was urged by Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and Samuel Huntington in the 1970s, noting the importance of philanthropic foundations as transnational actors.⁸ The private actor in world affairs was not displacing the state, but it had transformed the institutional environment of interstate politics to such a degree that the mutual interactions of private and public spheres required investigation. The upsurge of interest since 1989 in nonstate actors in global politics and the construction of global civil society, however, maintains the sharp distinction between states and private organizations in international affairs. In tandem with and related to this distinction, an attachment to pluralistic approaches to the study and understanding of power at the global (and domestic) levels remains—note the pluralistic character of America’s expansion as claimed by Huntington⁹—led by governmental and nongovernmental actors in service of their selfish interests.¹⁰ Extant research on foundations’ roles in the construction of twenty-first-century global civil society continues to be based on assumptions that governed scholarship on foundations during earlier periods. Prewitt argues, for example, that foundations represent a “third sector” in society that is beyond the state and the marketplace. As such, they operate not for the purposes of profit or politics but to make a broad contribution to enhancing the essential features of a pluralistic society.¹¹ Anheier and Leat profess similar sentiments, arguing that foundations’ nonstate, nonmarket character “makes them independent forces of social change and innovation.”¹² Given their global character, Anheier claims that foundations “are one of the main sources of support for global civil society organizations” that are, in turn, building a more open global order and trying to “humanize globalization.”¹³ These arguments about philanthropy as a benign, progressive, nonpolitical, and nonbusiness force are being challenged by an increasing body of research.

In what follows, I offer a detailed, archive-based critique that takes a long view of U.S. foundations’ position in U.S. foreign policy. The book advances part of an agenda encouraged by Keohane and Nye in the 1970s, although there remain normative and theoretical differences between their approaches and those favored here. Four characteristics—or “fictions”—of the Big 3 foundations account for their significance, all related to their apparent independence: first, the “nonstate” fiction, at odds with their trustees’ statist mindset and their governmental connections; second, the “nonpolitical” fiction, despite the foundations’ connections with both main political parties; third, the “nonbusiness” fiction, even as foundations’ trustees serve as corporate directors and earn income from them; and finally, the “scientific/nonideological” fiction, despite the Big 3’s attachment to and promotion of the ideology of Americanism as liberal internationalism.¹⁴ Additionally, the foundations’ adaptability and sense of historic mission—changing tactics, same program¹⁵—meant that they successfully negotiated their way through the frequently hostile environment of American domestic politics and the equally turbulent wider world. Such agility during the isolationist 1920s and 1930s provides insights into how foundation programs and tactics would successfully adapt in states designated as “anti-American” during the Cold War era. In each such case, foundations showed tenacity and adaptability in allying with any nonhostile agency that furthered their goals and prepared for a more permissive climate.

Holding such fictions as articles of faith permits foundations to act as unifiers of a political system divided by sovereignties and characterized by mass democracy and group competition. The Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie philanthropies mediate among the concerns of the state, big business, party politics, and foreign policy–related academia; articulate a divided system; and constitute and create forums for constructing elite expertise, consensus, and forward planning. Nevertheless, foundation networks did not always succeed and, importantly, were most successful during conditions of crisis,¹⁶ such as the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the outbreak of the Korean War, and after 1989. However, the foundations are adept at network building and well prepared to interpret and promote crises as opportunities to policy makers and public alike.¹⁷

FOUNDATIONS AND THE AMERICAN STATE

The foundations enjoyed a close relationship with the American state even if there were times when they found themselves marginalized—particularly during the 1920s and early 1930s. Despite its “private” character, U.S. philanthropy sees itself as directed at the “public” good. Philanthropic foundations have served as a catalyst for powerful reform movements—including temperance, social assistance for the poor, health and safety legislation, against corruption in politics, educational reform, and “Americanization” programs for immigrants. This publicly oriented self-concept emerged as opposition to the “local” and support for the “national.” Powerfully opposed to parochialism, the party machine, the congressional pork barrel, and mass politics, the foundations favored the construction and strengthening of the federal executive branch and the mobilization of elite opinion¹⁸—academics, policy makers, journalists, students, corporate directors, the attentive publics—initially behind programs of American globalism and, after the Cold War, behind globalization, democracy promotion, and global civil society building. In short, the foundations were created and led by self-conscious Progressive-era state builders, private citizens who backed state power for globalist ends; today, they are self-conscious global civil society builders.

The foundations were established when America’s federal executive institutions and “national” consciousness were weak and the individual states strong; the foundations spent hundreds of millions of dollars in encouraging private parastate institutions to carry out functions such as urban renewal, improving schools, and promoting health and safety in workplaces, which were later subsumed and developed by the federal state, as well as to develop a supportive base in public opinion; the foundations helped to “nationalize” American society. Today, they are trying to achieve similar aims at the global level. Where the global system is institutionally relatively weak and nation-states jealously guard their sovereignty, the foundations are assisting in global institution building and in constructing a global “civil society” that sustains and develops such institutions,¹⁹ and this is also part of developing the infrastructure for continued American hegemony.

FOUNDATIONS AND NETWORKS

Domestically, the big foundations sponsored a vast range of programs that, inter alia, transformed the American academy, sustained an array of globalist foreign policy think tanks, and vigorous foreign affairs media coverage. Foundation sponsorship helped the State Department to improve the training of its foreign-service officers as well as funding academics to boost the department’s research capacities. In the universities, the foundations pioneered area studies and IR programs in elite academies such as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Additionally, and perhaps more profoundly, such new disciplines were armed with positivistic social-scientific methods that, despite their scientific claims, were particularly effective in generating results of policy-related use. Foundation leaders, in effect, helped to create and perpetuate elite networks of academics, think tanks, publicity organizations, emerging mass media, and public officials. These networks proved powerful in constructing and mobilizing a globalist elite and broader support in the United States, a nation renowned for its strongly “isolationist” tendencies, on the political left and right.²⁰

Overseas, the foundations were active in network building and perhaps even more influential, especially in the areas of political and economic development, in promoting capitalist “modernization.”²¹ Through the mobilization of academics in area studies, political science, economics, and sociology, the big foundations built elite academic institutions overseas, networks of scholars focused ar...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• 1. The Significance of Foundations in U.S. Foreign Policy
• 2. American Foundation Leaders
• 3. Laying the Foundations of Globalism, 1930–1945
• 4. Promoting Americanism, Combating Anti-Americanism, and Developing a Cold War American Studies Network
• 5. The Ford Foundation in Indonesia and the Asian Studies Network
• 6. Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie in Nigeria and the African Studies Network
• 7. The Major Foundations, Latin American Studies, and Chile in the Cold War
• 8. American Power and the Major Foundations in the Post–Cold War Era
• 9. Conclusion
• Notes
• Index