Reece Committee Report from 1954 Shows Foundations Funded the Collectivist Capture of US Education

Norman Dodd (1899-1987) was the chief investigator for the Congressional Reece Committee in 1952-1954. He investigated the un-American activities of large endowment foundations and in particular the Carnegie, Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Ford Foundation.

Before he died, Dodd gave a revealing 1982 interview, shown at the end of this article, with G. Edward Griffin. In it he quotes a conversation he had with Rowan Gaither, the president of the Ford Foundation, who stated that they operated under directives to “use our grant-making power so to alter life in the United States so it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” Gaither came to Ford out of the OSS.

Dodd’s staff was also given access to the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This Foundation was chartered in 1906, by the Scottish born magnate Andrew Carnegie (1835 –1919). Carnegie’s early large fortune was made in munitions, railroad, and the war business during the American Civil War. He was a proponent of laissez-faire economics. That is with the exception of tariffs which benefited his industries. Carnegie believed that the concentration of capital into the hands of oligarchs was essential for societal progress, and should be encouraged.

Dodd sent a highly intelligent, capable lawyer by the name of Catherine Casey to examine the Carnegie minutes. Because of the sheer size of the documents, Dodd realized that Joseph Johnson (Carnegie COO) did not know what was in the records. Dodd sent Casey because she was skeptical of any wrong doing on the part of these multi million dollar tax exempt philanthropic organizations.

Casey’s mind was changed as she read the minutes starting in 1908 which discussed war as the best way to alter the lives and thinking of the American people. In 1909, it was discussed how to involve the U.S. in a war, deciding that control of the State Department was essential.

Later, after America entered WWI a message was dispatched to President Wilson to discourage an early end to the war. This could also explain Wilson’s interest in the UN (then the League of Nations), Federal Reserve, the income tax and his final statement:

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above a whisper in condemnation of it.”

After the War it was determined that the key was alteration in the teaching and narrative of American history. Noted and respected historians like Charles and Mary Beard were approached, but they rejected the foundation’s overtures.

The Guggenheim Foundation on the other hand agreed to supply fellowships to hand-picked historians who began to write history with a new slant and delusive perspective. The new texts and books were quickly picked up by schools who in turn received payoffs from the Guggenheim and Carnegie foundations.

The American Historical Association was captured by Foundation money and in 1934, a report was published under its auspices which concluded that the day of the individual in the United States had come to an end and that the future would be characterized, inevitably, by some form of collectivism and an increase in the authority of the State.

The Reece Report itself revealed, ‘the Committee shed light on the big foundations’ promotion of empiricism, centralized team research, big universities over small colleges, moral relativism, internationalism, and social engineering. [See Tax-Exempt Foundations: Hearings, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session, 1954 – links are now dead

With the arrival of the foundation’s hand picked puppet President Franklin Roosevelt, the years 1933-1936, marked a change which was so drastic as to constitute a “revolution”. The minutes reveal conclusively that the responsibility for the economic welfare of the American people had been transferred heavily to the Executive Branch of the Federal Government.

The most heavily funded schools were Columbia, Harvard, Univ. of Chicago, and Cal-Berkeley who were in turn stacked with Frankfurt School cultural Marxist foreign Jew emigrees and in time their students.

Objectives were to:

• Direct education in the United States toward an internationalist view-point and discrediting the traditions to which, it [formerly) had been dedicated.

• Transform education into an instrument for social change

• Training individuals and servicing agencies to render advice to the Executive branch of the Federal Government.

• Decreasing the dependency of education upon the resources of the local community and freeing it from many of the natural safeguards inherent in this American tradition .

• Changing both school and college curricula to the point where they sometimes denied the principles underlying the American way of life.

• Financing experiments designed to determine the most effective means by which education could be pressed into service of a political nature.

Later, incredibly, the Carnegie Foundation even went so far as to conduct a series of polls to gauge the extent of their capture of American higher education. By 1999 72% of professors were identified as liberals, four times the population as a whole.

This oligarchical collectivist system resulted in the development and operation of a network that provided the US with a national system of education under the tight control of organizations and persons, little known to the American public. The test of time has shown this scheme to be a dumbing down – and as we often say at Winter Watch by design. 

In his book Foundations: Their Power and Influence the general counsel to the Reese Committee, Rene A. Wormser, wrote,

As general counsel I was more interested in an emerging elite that has control of gigantic financial resources: ‘An unparalleled amount of power is concentrated increasingly in the hands of an interlocking and self-perpetuating group. Unlike the power of corporate management, it is unchecked by stockholders; unlike the power of government, it is unchecked by the people; unlike the power of churches, it is unchecked by any firmly established canons of value.’

Wormser went on to point out,

The interlocks between the trustees at RAND, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee, a congressional committee tasked with investigating the foundations, listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). In 1952 alone, when the chairman of the RAND Corporation was also the Ford Foundation president, Ford gave one million dollars to RAND.

“The Council on Foreign Relations, another member of the international complex, financed both by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, overwhelmingly propagandizes the globalist concept. This organization became virtually an agency of the government when WWII broke out. The Rockefeller Foundation had started and financed certain studies known as the War and Peace Studies, manned largely by associates of the Council [CFR]; the State Department, in due course, took these studies over, retaining the major personnel which the CFR had supplied”.pg 209

The Ford Foundation came into fray after WWII and pushed the same agenda on a worldwide basis. Foundation donations were liberally fed through to the following operatives (among others) to carry out its agendas: the Social Science Research Council, the National Research Council, the Progressive Education Association, the American Historical Association, the League for Industrial Democracy, the John Dewey Society and the Anti-Defamation League.