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20 - ORGANIZATIONS/PRIVATE/Rockefeller Foundation.md
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@ -8,10 +8,28 @@ tags:
- PublicHealth
- ColdWar
- MKULTRA
summary: "The Rockefeller Foundation, endowed from the Standard Oil fortune in 1913, ran public-health and agricultural campaigns across Latin America that eased the social costs of American corporate expansion, supplied a pipeline of trustees into the State Department, and in 1943 funded the McGill psychiatric institute where CIA depatterning experiments were later conducted."
summary: "The Rockefeller Foundation, endowed from the Standard Oil fortune in 1913, ran Latin American public-health campaigns, supplied trustees to the State Department, and in 1943 funded the McGill psychiatric institute later tied to CIA experiments."
location: New York, NY
created: 2026-06-12
updated: 2026-06-12
updated: 2026-10-09
relations:
- type: funded
with: "[[New School for Social Research]]"
start: 1933
end: 1943
role: "co-funded University in Exile appointments and the Research Project on Totalitarian Communication"
fn: 8
- type: funded
with: "[[Max Ascoli]]"
start: 1931
role: "fellowship that brought him to the United States"
fn: 15
- type: funded
with: "[[Princeton Listening Center]]"
start: 1939-11
end: 1941-06
role: "foundation funding for the listening center, per the Princeton finding aid and Mercado"
fn: 19
---
The Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913 and endowed from the [[Standard Oil]] fortune, was the largest of the [[John D. Rockefeller Jr.|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.
@ -40,9 +58,27 @@ The Foundation's board functioned as a recruiting pool for US foreign policy. In
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 [[TSS|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.[^7]
### 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.[^8] 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.[^9]
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.[^10] 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."[^11] 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.[^12] 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.[^13]
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.[^14]
### 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]].[^15][^16] 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.[^17]
### Belém Virus Laboratory
In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from [[Belem|Belém]] toward [[Juscelino Kubitschek|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.[^8]
In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from [[Belem|Belém]] toward [[Juscelino Kubitschek|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.[^18]
### 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.[^19] [[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.[^20]
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.[^21]
### Footnotes
@ -53,4 +89,17 @@ In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served
[^5]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 9; Ch. 10.
[^6]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 12; Ch. 18; Ch. 23.
[^7]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 18.
[^8]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 22.
[^8]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of The New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), p. 86, p. 91 and p. 94.
[^9]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (University of Nebraska Press, 1960), pp. 366-367.
[^10]: Rockefeller Archive Center, "The Rockefeller Foundation's Refugee Scholar Program," REsource, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/the-rockefeller-foundations-refugee-scholar-program-world-war-ii-nazi-europe/ (Foundation officers worked closely with Alvin Johnson of the New School for Social Research, with whom they had been working since 1933; the Emergency Committee found permanent employment for scholars).
[^11]: Alvin Johnson, Pioneer's Progress (Viking Press, 1952; University of Nebraska Press, 1960), pp. 366 to 367; "Dr. Alvin Johnson Of New School Dies," The New York Times, June 9, 1971, p. 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/09/archives/dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school-dies-dr-alvin-johnson-of-new-school.html
[^12]: Rockefeller Archive Center, DIMES catalog, Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 1.1, Series 200, file groups "Refugee Scholars - New School for Social Research - (French Institute)," "New School for Social Research - Totalitarian Communication Studies," and "War and Peace Studies," https://dimes.rockarch.org.
[^13]: Rockefeller Archive Center, REsource story "The Rockefeller Foundation's Refugee Scholar Program" (letter from Marc Bloch to Alvin Johnson, July 31, 1941, RAC, RG 1.1, Series 200, Box 48, Folder 550).
[^14]: "Rockefeller Foundation Support for Communications Media in the 1930s and 1940s," Rockefeller Archive Center, RE:source, https://resource.rockarch.org/story/rockefeller-foundation-support-for-communications-media-in-the-1930s-and-1940s/
[^15]: Boston University, Bridge, "Connections," November 23, 2001, https://www.bu.edu/bridge/archive/2001/11-23/connections.htm. Also Isabelle Richet, review of Davide Grippa, Un antifascista tra Italia e Stati Uniti, Primo Levi Center, November 24, 2014, https://primolevicenter.org/printed-matter/an-antifascist-between-italy-and-the-united-states/.
[^16]: "The Reporter's Notes," The Reporter, September 23, 1954, pp. 2-6, https://archive.org/details/sim_reporter_1954-09-23_11_5.
[^17]: Peter M. Rutkoff and William B. Scott, New School: A History of the New School for Social Research (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 102 and 118.
[^18]: Colby and Dennett, Ch. 22.
[^19]: Princeton University Library, "Princeton Listening Center Records, 1939-1941" (AC015), finding aid. https://findingaids.princeton.edu/catalog/AC015. Stephen C. Mercado, "FBIS Against the Axis, 1941-1945," Studies in Intelligence 45, no. 5 (2001), on the Princeton Listening Center's launch in November 1939 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and on its absorption by FBIS in June. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol45no5/html/v45i5a04p.htm.
[^20]: Daniel Morris Bessner, "The Night Watchman: Hans Speier and the Making of the American National Security State" (PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2013), p. 138. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/items/19152946-8fbb-4b9b-9da0-faca0979e718.
[^21]: Roop, Part I, pp. 93-95, on the Baltimore Sun article of July 1941 and Graves's memo of 9 July 1941. https://archive.org/details/ForeignBroadcastInformationServiceHistoryPart11941-1947.