In the early 1950s, against the backdrop of the Cold War and growing concerns over potential clandestine efforts at internal subversion, the United States Congress launched an investigation into the activities of major tax-exempt foundations. Thus the Reece Committee was born, spearheaded by Congressman B. Carroll Reece, with the aim of establishing whether certain large and influential foundations, like the Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation, were using their tax-exempt status and their substantial resources to influence American society in ways that might be considered subversive or to fund activities that might undermine American institutions.
An earlier investigation, by the Cox Committee, had mostly cleared the targeted foundations of any wrongdoing, however Congressman Reece questioned these findings and believed that a more thorough and detailed examination into the foundations’ activities was necessary. At the heart of this new Committee was Norman Dodd, a former banker, who was appointed as the Committee’s Director of Research. His findings, especially those related to the foundations’ role in shaping education and public policy, have since become a focal point for discussions about the influence of elite institutions on American life.
The Committee’s revelations
During the early 20th century many of of these institutions, originally created by industrial tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie to manage their fortunes for charitable purposes, rose to great prominence and by the 1950s, their wealth, influence and reach had reached staggering levels, across the US and even internationally. They were funding universities, think tanks, and social programs and while their declared goals were philanthropic, e.g. promoting education, science, and public welfare, critics soon suspected that they were actually pursuing political and ideological agendas.
The Reece Committee conducted an exhaustive investigation from 1952 to 1954, including interviews with key foundation officials, scrutiny of grant records, and on-site reviews. The Committee’s findings were published in 1954 and came as shock to many. The investigation concluded that the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller foundations were not in fact charitable organizations with the benign goals of advancing the public good, but instead they were powerful entities using their wealth and resources to manipulate social institutions, to shape and control public opinion through channels of social influence like the media, and to advance specific political ideologies. The Committee accused these organizations of engaging in propaganda and applying institutional pressure to reshape American society in ways that aligned with socialist and globalist agendas.
A focal point of of the Reece Committee’s investigation was the foundations’ impact on education and its findings presented evidence that these institutions were funding programs and curricula designed to change the role of education from a tool of enlightenment into a propaganda machine and a vehicle for indoctrination of young minds. The foundations supported progressive educational reforms and specific academic disciplines, promoting collectivist ideologies over individualism and traditional American values. For example, the Rockefeller Foundation’s funded social science research prioritizing studies that promoted central planning and globalist policies, often at the expense of national sovereignty. Dodd described this as the “debasement of education” and he believed it was part of a larger effort to destabilize the moral and political foundations of American society, as it was clear that by controlling education, these foundations could also control future generations.
These efforts were also complemented by the foundations’ influence over media and advertising, through targeted grants to various think tanks, publishers, and advocacy groups that aligned with and promoted these ideas. The Reece Committee’s findings also suggested that this control extended to key institutions like government agencies, and even religious organizations, all with the mission to co-opt centers of power and to eventually manufacture consensus and garner support for legislation that favored socialism and globalism.
A silent revolution
Arguably the most alarming claim in the Reece Committee’s findings was that the foundations it investigated were actively working towards orchestrating a “silent, non-bloody revolution” in the United States. According to Dodd, their end game was to shift power away from Congress, the nation’s most representative body, and to concentrate it in the executive branch, thereby paving the way for semi-autocratic governance. By funding policy initiatives and by supporting campaigns that aimed to strengthen the presidency and federal agencies and to further the centralization of power, the foundations were accused of intentionally undermining the checks and balances and the core democratic principles that are fundamental to the American political structure.
The targets of the investigation were also accused of working towards the degradation and the debasement of the population, in order to make the body politic more malleable and more susceptible to the collectivist propaganda they were pushing. In other words, if people are desperate enough, they don’t look for realistic, long term solutions that require hard work and sacrifice; instead they fall for promises of “free stuff” and the follow dreams of a socialist utopia.
As Rowan Gaither, the director of the Ford Foundation, explained to Norman Dodd: «All of us here have at one time or another served in the OSS [the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA], or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We [still] operate under those same directives. The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we should use our grant making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union».
This push to form a coalition with the USSR might seem inconceivable from a contemporary point of view. How and why could anyone try to dismantle the core of a free society and morph it into a tyrannical, inhumane communist regime, modeled after the brutality of the Soviet Union? And what kind of madman would want to merge with this monstrosity, this dark stain upon human history, that claimed countless lives and destroyed even more?
At face value, this might seem difficult to grasp from our perspective today, but if one really thinks about it, it is actually rather relatable. At that time there were many communist sympathizers that these foundations could work with to advance their goals, as is the case today. Then, as now, some of those were simply naive, gullible, useful idiots, and others, like those that ran the foundations themselves, had much darker incentives. After all, under communism, “some pigs are more equal than others”, and there are always those on top who run the show. It’s not a stretch to surmise that they hoped they would be on that top.
Lessons learned or forgotten?
Today, most people haven’t even heard of the Reece Committee and this is problematic on multiple levels. For one thing, those responsible largely got away with their actions and continued to operate against the interests of the public. But much more importantly, a lot of other bad actors also joined the path these foundations paved. Today, there are innumerable organizations that are tax exempt, and even taxpayer funded in many cases, that are actively working towards promoting the same ideologies and the same toxic, misanthropic principles. They have gained substantial political power and influence with the media, the academia and even the top levels of government, not only in the US, but across the globe.
Claudio Grass, Hünenberg See, Switzerland. www.claudiograss.ch
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