Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913 and endowed from the Standard Oil fortune, was the largest of the Rockefeller family's philanthropies and the institutional model for the family's approach to social engineering through medicine, education, and agriculture. Across the first half of the twentieth century its public-health campaigns in Latin America (against hookworm, malaria, and yellow fever) prepared the ground for American corporate penetration of the region, easing the human suffering that accompanied plantation agriculture and resource extraction without addressing its causes. By the Cold War the Foundation had become a reservoir of national-security policy talent, supplying secretaries of state and trustees who moved between its board and the highest levels of US government, and a funder of psychiatric research that intersected the CIA's mind-control programs.

Origins in the Standard Oil Fortune

The Foundation grew out of an apparatus the family had built in the United States before turning abroad. Rockefeller adviser Frederick T. Gates streamlined the family's giving, and the General Education Board, formed to promote "a comprehensive system of higher education in the United States," established farm demonstrations across the South between 1904 and 1914 that extolled machinery, fertilizers, and crop rotation, the same social formula that brought agribusiness to America at the expense of small farming, advanced during a period when Rockefeller money was invested in International Harvester and fertilizer companies. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission's campaign to eradicate hookworm, the South's "germ of laziness," swept away opposition "armed with science and the Standard Oil fortune."¹

By the 1920s the Foundation owned stock in thirteen oil companies and nine pipelines in the United States, along with thirty-five railroads and thirty-five other corporations in steel, gas, banking, and real estate, many already doing substantial business in Latin America and the Far East. Charles Evans Hughes, Standard Oil counsel and a Foundation trustee, became President Warren G. Harding's secretary of state, prompting a British Foreign Office complaint that "Washington officials begin to think, talk, and write like Standard Oil officials."²

International Health Board in Latin America

Under Raymond Fosdick, whom Colby and Dennett describe as having the Foundation "at the vanguard of turning Latin America into [an] open field," the International Health Board (IHB) carried the model abroad. Guatemala was at the center of attention: Standard Oil had begun exploratory drilling, and the IHB, enlisting the commander of Guatemalan border troops, succeeded in getting revolutionary Mexico quarantined on yellow fever grounds. The resulting cordón sanitario allowed martial law to be imposed on the restless towns and on the sugar and coffee plantations along the route of the United Fruit Company's International Railways. A hookworm campaign in Guatemala examined more than 227,000 people and treated 132,000 for $165,000, which the family regarded as a bargain in goodwill and a foothold in the region.³

The general Jorge Ubico, later Guatemala's dictator, got his first political break in 1918 as military overseer of the Rockefeller anti-yellow-fever campaign, during which he subjected Indians to extreme eradication measures including burning their homes "as the only way out." George Vincent, a president of the Foundation through the 1920s, personally signaled the family fortune's reorientation "toward the Third World" during the period when Nelson Rockefeller was forming his own Latin American ambitions. The Foundation's projects in sanitation and medicine, in Colby and Dennett's account, "attacked these symptoms, but not their social causes," serving "the businessman's concern for productivity" by producing healthy workers for the export economy.⁴

Agricultural and Linguistic Surveys

The Foundation's survey programs doubled as intelligence-gathering. The Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes toured Mexico for the Rockefeller Foundation's Agricultural Survey and gathered seven tons of rubber seeds in the Putumayo and Vaupés regions of southern Colombia while passing on intelligence about the political sympathies of his Colombian colleagues. The anthropologist Sol Tax, named head of the Foundation's Yucatán Linguistics Surveys on the strength of his claim that language was the last barrier to Indian assimilation, led the first expedition of the CIAA-funded National Indian Institute's anthropology committee, an intellectual lineage that anticipated the Summer Institute of Linguistics's later pacification work.⁵

State Department Pipeline

The Foundation's board functioned as a recruiting pool for US foreign policy. In 1952, as John Foster Dulles prepared to become Eisenhower's secretary of state, he turned over the chair of the Foundation to John D. Rockefeller 3rd and tapped his friend Dean Rusk for the presidency. When John F. Kennedy formed his cabinet in December 1960, Robert Lovett, a Foundation trustee, declined State, Defense, and Treasury and instead recommended Rusk, then the Foundation's president, who took the call from the president-elect while attending a board meeting and became secretary of state; trustee Chester Bowles joined him as undersecretary. Earlier figures linking the Foundation to the foreign-policy establishment included UN undersecretary-general Ralph Bunche (a former grantee and trustee), Council on Foreign Relations guiding light Fosdick, Union Theological Seminary president Henry Pitney Van Dusen, and Colombia's Alberto Lleras Camargo, who collaborated with Nelson Rockefeller and became a Foundation trustee.⁶

The chairman of the board at the end of 1976 was Cyrus Vance, a trustee from 1970 who had chaired the board since 1975. The trustees listed as of December 31, 1976 included W. Michael Blumenthal, Theodore Hesburgh, Vernon Jordan, Lane Kirkland, Bill Moyers, Robert V. Roosa, Frederick Seitz, Paul Volcker and Clifton Wharton, with John D. Rockefeller 3rd as honorary chairman. The president's report for 1976 states that in the selection of Americans to serve the incoming administration of Jimmy Carter the chairman of the board, Vance, had been appointed Secretary of State and the chairman of its Audit Committee, Blumenthal, Secretary of the Treasury, and that "Mr. Vance becomes the third Trustee in the history of the Foundation to be named Secretary of State, the others being John Foster Dulles and Dean Rusk."⁷ In October 1975 Vance had headed a world affairs delegation to China, which the president's report mentions in connection with a Foundation working paper, "China Diary."⁷ He rejoined the board in 1980 and retired effective June 30, 1982, having served on its Executive and Finance Committees; the 1982 report notes the retirement in the same year of the chairman, Hesburgh, and of the former chairman, Vance, whose combined service on the board was 30 years.⁸

Mind-Control Research Funding

The Foundation's reach extended into the psychiatric research that the CIA would later exploit. In 1943 it funded the establishment of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal (the book renders the name "Allen"), the psychiatric institute later directed by D. Ewen Cameron, whose depatterning experiments became MKULTRA Subproject 68. The Foundation also funded Sensory Deprivation research, the technique of strapping subjects in a sealed box cut off from light, sound, smell, and touch; in March 1955 the National Institutes of Health began CIA-funded experiments using the standard method minus the practice of releasing subjects on request, after which mind-control experiments spread under funding directed by Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA's Technical Services Staff, part of an old-boy network that included Nelson Rockefeller's former CIAA associate J.C. King. Colby and Dennett note that Nelson "needed little introduction to MKULTRA," the CIA's use of the health and welfare bureaucracy for mind-control work having begun during his own tenure as undersecretary of HEW.⁹

New School for Social Research

The Foundation paired with the New School for Social Research in 1933 to bring German and Central European scholars to the University in Exile. Alvin Johnson and the Foundation agreed on a dozen individuals to rescue, and the Foundation's Paris associate Tracy Kittredge wrote on the State Department's view of the question on March 29, 1933. The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars acted for the Foundation in these early cases and did not seek permanent United States posts for the men it supported.¹⁰ Johnson later went to Raymond Fosdick, then the Foundation's president, for travel and two-year stipends for five scholars, and the Foundation supplied expert information on who was a Nazi or Fascist.¹¹

The New School's history states that after Johnson had raised only $10,000, Hiram J. Halle gave the whole $60,000 for the University in Exile, and that additional funding from the Foundation "enabled him to enlarge his rescue efforts."¹² Daniel Bessner describes Halle as associated with the Foundation, which he says spent $1.4 million helping displaced scholars.¹³

The Rockefeller Archive Center's account of the Foundation's refugee scholar program states that Foundation officers worked closely with Johnson, with whom they had been working since 1933, and that the Foundation depended on the Emergency Committee to find permanent employment for scholars and on the United States Department of State to secure non-quota visas.¹⁴ Johnson's memoir has his request to Fosdick growing from five scholars to fifteen and then twenty-five, then to a project of one hundred, which Fosdick put to his trustees and approved the next day; the New York Times obituary of June 9, 1971 states that the Foundation "approved the request and assured the financing of 100 emigres."¹⁵ The Foundation's grant records group the New School's files under the refugee-scholar program, with a separate file for the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes and wartime projects including Totalitarian Communication Studies and War and Peace Studies.¹⁶ A July 31, 1941 letter from Marc Bloch to Johnson, written after the French government barred French males of military age from leaving Paris, is filed in the Foundation's records.¹⁷

The Foundation funded the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication at the New School, led by Hans Speier and Ernst Kris, which analyzed radio broadcasts from totalitarian countries and was coordinated with the British Broadcasting Corporation and government agencies. Foundation funding ended in 1943, and many of the researchers later held federal posts. John Foster Dulles, a Foundation trustee, urged the Foundation to continue work in this field after the war in order to counter Soviet propaganda in Europe.¹⁸

The Foundation's grants reached the Institute of World Affairs through its predecessor projects and through studies run by the Institute. Its grants for the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication were $15,960 in March 1941 and $19,000 in 1942.¹⁹ A study titled "Germany's Position in European Postwar Reconstruction," compiled by the Institute from 1944 to 1949, was funded by the Foundation "in order to study the results of post-World War I reconstruction in Germany, with an eye toward the practical implementation of these lessons following World War II."²⁰ The Social and Economic Controls in Germany and Russia project, formed in 1941, was financed by the Foundation and "focused largely on labor politics in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia."²¹ A folder for Joseph H. Willits for 1941 to 1952 concerns a Foundation grant for the project of Hans Neisser titled Domestic Determinants of International Trade.²² The Institute's historical note reports its funding for 1943 to 1951 at $630,000, with the Foundation among its donors.²³

Refugee Scholar Fellowships, 1931 to 1933

The Italian anti-fascist Max Ascoli came to the United States in 1931 on a Foundation fellowship; Ascoli wrote in 1954 that the offer was made in the spring of 1931 by the Foundation's representative in Italy, Luigi Einaudi.²⁴²⁵ In 1933 Johnson recruited Ascoli, with the Austrian scholar Erich Hula, as one of two additional Rockefeller scholars for the University in Exile, and Ascoli joined the Graduate Faculty in late 1933.²⁶

Belém Virus Laboratory

In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from Belém toward Kubitschek's new capital at Brasília, "shielded from the jungle's malarial counterattacks by mosquito control programs and scientists from the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Belém Virus Laboratory," the same road network that opened uncontacted indigenous territories to settlement and mining.²⁷

Princeton Listening Center and Wartime Monitoring

The Foundation's money reached American radio monitoring before the government had a monitoring service of its own. The Princeton Listening Center was launched in November 1939 at Princeton University with Foundation funding, and its finding aid states that it was financed by the Foundation and continued its work until June 1941, when the Federal Communications Commission took over; Stephen C. Mercado likewise gives the absorption by the Foreign Broadcast Intelligence Service as June.²⁸ Daniel Bessner writes that Washington organizations "used intermediaries at the Rockefeller Foundation to assign projects to Graduate Faculty members," some of whom could not work directly for the government because they remained foreign nationals.²⁹

A Baltimore Sun article described the service as a joint project of the FCC, Princeton and the Foundation. Harold N. Graves Jr. wrote a memo for Lloyd Free on July 9, 1941 about his "embarrassment" at inaccuracies in the article, among them its claim of a joint project.³⁰