gat

called "the development of a fourth branch of government, one that effectively represented the
interests of American corporate wealth."
The corporate foundation is mainly a twentieth-century phenomenon, growing from twenty-one
specimens of the breed in 1900 to approximately fifty thousand by 1990. From the beginning,
foundations aimed squarely at educational policy formation. Rockefeller’s General Education
Board obtained an incorporating act from Congress in 1903 and immediately began to organize
schooling in the South, joining the older Slater cotton/woolen manufacturing interests and
Peabody banking interests in a coalition in which Rockefeller picked up many of the bills.
From the start, the GEB had a mission. A letter from John D. Rockefeller Sr. specified that his
gifts were to be used "to promote a comprehensive system." You might well ask what interests
the system was designed to promote, but you would be asking the wrong question. Frederick
Gates, the Baptist minister hired to disburse Rockefeller largesse, gave a terse explanation when
he said, "The key word is system." American life was too unsystematic to suit corporate genius.
Rockefeller’s foundation was about systematizing us.
In 1913, the Sixty-Second Congress created a commission to investigate the role of these new
foundations of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and of other corporate families. After a year of testimony it
concluded:
The domination of men in whose hands the final control of a large part of
American industry rests is not limited to their employees, but is being rapidly
extended to control the education and social services of the nation.
Foundation grants directly enhance the interests of the corporations sponsoring them, it found.
The conclusion of this congressional commission:
The giant foundation exercises enormous power through direct use of its
funds, free of any statutory entanglements so they can be directed precisely to
the levers of a situation; this power, however, is substantially increased by
building collateral alliances which insulate it from criticism and scrutiny.
Foundations automatically make friends among banks which hold their large deposits, in
investment houses which multiply their monies, in law firms which act as their counsels, and with
the many firms, institutions, and individuals with which they deal and whom they benefit. By
careful selection of trustees from the ranks of high editorial personnel and other media executives
and proprietors, they can assure themselves press support, and by engaging public relations
counselors can further create good publicity. As René Wormser, chief counsel for the second
congressional inquiry into foundation life (1958), put it:
All its connections and associations, plus the often sycophantic adulation of the
many institutions and individuals who receive largesse from the foundation,
give it an enormous aggregate of power and influence. This power extends
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