Funding the war of ideas - conservative foundations - Column

Christian Century, July 19, 1995 by Leon Howell

The Sarah Scaife Foundation was created by the granddaughter of Andrew Mellon. Under Scaife the foundation concentrated on supporting the arts, garden clubs and causes such as population planning. After her death in 1965 her son, Richard Mellon Scaife, plunged the foundation - as well as the Mellon-related Carthage Foundation - into public policy debates. Since then it's estimated that he has given $200 million to this cause.

The Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation is "devoted to strenothening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values which sustain and nurture it," according to its 1993 annual report. It became a major player in public affairs when its parent corporation, Allen-Bradley, was sold in 1985 for $1.5 billion and $275 million was plowed into the existing foundation. Olin's Michael Joyce was hired to make it a player in the world of ideas, and this he has done.

A 1986 article in Atlantic Monthly quoted Michael Horowitz, now at the Hudson Institute, as saying that "the transformation of conservative philosophy was really begun by just a handful of people." He mentioned Joyce, Richard Larry of Scaife and Carthage, and Leslie Lenkowsky, who at the time supervised Smith Richardson's grants. "They understand," said Horowitz, "that just by funding a few writers and a few chairs they could make a breakthrough."

Does it matter that the various organizations on the right are supported by a few conservative foundations? There is nothing illegal or immoral about it. The reliance of various organizations on the same funding sources does suggest, however, that some of the prominent actors in the culture wars may be more closely related than observers would otherwise assume. As Karen Rothmyer suggests in a 1982 report on Scaife in the Columbia Journalism Review: "By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give a friendly hearing, Scaife has helped to create an illusion of diversity where none e-mists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard from at all."

Michael Lind, writing in Dissent (Winter 1995), raises the question of how beholden these organizations are to their funding sources. "Every leading neoconservative publication or think tank over the past decade has come to depend on money from ... Olin, Smith Richardson, Bradley, Scaife." This, he thinks, has inevitably "promoted group think." Lind does not imagine a centralized conspiracy, but he suspects that editors tend to print "what they believe will confirm the prejudices of the [foundation's] program officers."

But grant receivers would hotly dispute the notion that taking money means selling out. They would argue that the grants enable them to say what they want to say, only more effectively. "Don't forget," says Weigel, "that the big ten foundations will not give EPPC money. I get it where I can. But nobody tells us what to do. All they can do is verify that we spend the money as we say we will."