In 1977 political scientist Thomas Dye delivered his presidential address to the Southern Political Science Association at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His topic: the role of allegedly ‘private’ policy-making organizations in determining US policy. His address was then published in 1978 as a research paper in The Journal of Politics, and much space was devoted to the importance of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in the making of United States foreign policy.[1] All around, this was a rare event that helped correct a failing identified by sociologist G. William Domhoff in his 1970 book, The Higher Circles: The Governing Class in America: “there never has been any research paper on [the CFR] in any scholarly journal indexed in the Social Science and Humanities Index.”[2]

Many political scientists, apparently, thought this was a proper state of affairs and wanted matters to remain thus, because Dye wrote in the first page: “I appreciate the assistance of G. William Domhoff, University of California, Santa Cruz. I apologize to those eminent political scientists who told me that [studying] the activities of private policymakers was not ‘political science.’ ”[3]

It is noteworthy that “eminent political scientists” should be opposed to research on the Council on Foreign Relations and other supposedly ‘private’ policy organizations. Why are they? To answer this question is to open a panoramic window into the structure of the US system. But, as usual, that requires doing some historical research. This is the task before us.

The first order of business is to get a sense for what the CFR is and give some context to evaluate Dye’s use of the phrase “private policymakers” in reference to this and similar organizations. In his paper, Thomas Dye writes:

“Political scientist Lester Milbraith observes that the influence of [the] CFR throughout the government is so pervasive that it is difficult to distinguish CFR from government programs: ‘The Council on Foreign Relations, while not financed by government, works so closely with it that it is difficult to distinguish Council actions stimulated by government from autonomous actions.’”[4]

You could say it in the reverse direction, as well: it is difficult to distinguish government actions stimulated by the Council from autonomous government action. Dye gave a list of quite major US foreign policy initiatives which the CFR had led, “including both the initial decision to intervene militarily in Vietnam and the later decision to withdraw.”

Further, Dye pointed out that many important members of the CFR were simultaneously top government officeholders. For example, “Council members in the Kennedy-Johnson Administration included Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge P. Bundy, CIA Director John McCone, and Under-Secretary of State George Ball.”[5] A list of important figures in the CFR over the years up to 1978, which Dye also provided, showed that many were former top officials in the United States Government.[6]

But the CFR is not merely where present and former officeholders meet; it is also an incubator for future officeholders. As William Domhoff observed:

“Douglass Cater, a journalist from Exeter and Harvard who served on the staff of President Lyndon B. Johnson, has noted that ‘a diligent scholar would do well to delve into the role of the purely unofficial Council on Foreign Relations in the care and breeding of an incipient American Establishment.’ ...Turning to the all-important question of government involvement… the point is made most authoritatively by John J. McCloy… director of CFR and a government appointee in a variety of roles since the early 1940s: ‘Whenever we needed a man,’ said McCloy in explaining the presence of CFR members in the modern defense establishment that fought World War II, ‘we thumbed through the roll of council members and put through a call to New York.’”[7]

In what sense, then, can we say that the CFR is private? Only in this narrow, technical sense: the money to support the CFR comes from private foundations and corporations.

It is obvious, now, why “[the] CFR was called by [Washington journalist Joseph] Kraft a ‘school for statesmen [which] comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite -- a group of men, similar in interest and outlook, shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes.’ ”[8] The financial backers of the CFR get to turn their views into policy without the scrutiny that would accompany running for office, under the cover of a supposedly ‘private’ organization.

The penumbra in which the CFR operates obscures not only the process of foreign policy-making in the United States, but in the Western world as a whole. Thomas Dye writes:

“A discussion of the CFR would be incomplete without some reference to its multi-national arm -- the Trilateral Commission. The Trilateral Commission was established by CFR board Chairman David Rockefeller in 1972, with the backing of the Council and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Trilateral Commission is a small group of top officials of multi-national corporations and governmental leaders of industrialized nations, who meet periodically to coordinate policy among the United States, Western Union, and Japan.”[9]

Given all this, it seems important, the better to understand what the CFR is and what it’s for, to shine some light on the shadows in which it quietly sits. I will explain who finances the CFR, and what their ideological views appear to be.

Who is behind the CFR?

In their book on the Rockefeller family, Peter Collier and David Horowitz write:

“In 1921, the Council on Foreign Relations was formed by leaders of finance and industry, men like Thomas W. Lamont, [Woodrow] Wilson’s financial advisor and senior partner in the House of Morgan, and John W. Davis, a Morgan lawyer, standard-bearer for the Democratic party in [the presidential election of] 1924, and a trustee of the Rockefeller foundation. [John D. Rockefeller] Junior and the Rockefeller philanthropies were also drawn into the early funding of the council, whose charter members included not only Rockefeller’s business and social friends but Fosdick and Jerome Greene from his inner circle of advisors.”[10]

It is a mistake for Collier & Horowitz to write that “the Rockefeller philanthropies were also drawn into the early funding of the council.” In fact, the Rockefeller Foundation has continued to be involved with the funding.

And this foundation is not alone. In 1970 William Domhoff wrote that “As to the foundations, the major contributors over the years have been the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, with the Ford Foundation joining in with a large grant in the 1950s. According to [Joseph] Kraft, a $2.5 million grant in the early 1950s from the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations made the Council ‘the most important single private agency conducting research in foreign affairs.’ In 1960-61, foundation money accounted for 25% of CFR income.”[11] (The rest comes from corporations and from sales of Foreign Affairs.)

We have seen above Thomas Dye explaining that the Rockefeller Foundation backed financially the creation of the CFR’s Trilateral Commission in 1972, and David Rockefeller himself spearheaded the effort. David Rockefeller had become chairman of the Council in 1970 and he retained the post until 1985. The Rockefellers and their foundations have remained very much involved in the CFR.

We see, then, that the Council on Foreign Relations was formed by people from the circles of Woodrow Wilson, J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefellers. The Council has been funded by money from the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, and then also by the Ford Foundation. The question we may pose, then, is: Do these various interests have anything dramatic and telling in common? The answer is yes: they were all backers of the eugenics movement.

The eugenics ideology of CFR leaders

I used to do the following experiment with my college students at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school: I would ask them to raise their hand if they had heard of the eugenics movement. Nothing moved. These were among the best educated students anywhere in the country, and yet they were like most of their fellow US citizens: they knew nothing, or next to nothing, about eugenics.

The cause of this is not exactly a mystery: discussion of eugenics is almost entirely absent from high school and university curricula in the United States, and the scarce mentions of it are denuded of the most important content. And yet the eugenics movement achieved great prominence and influence especially in the United States. The silence on it is therefore shocking. And politically relevant.

American eugenics—now almost unknown—was easily the most important social and political movement of the first half of the 20th c. Why? Because American eugenics was responsible for the German Nazi movement, and therefore for World War II and the Holocaust. You read correctly.

The eugenics ideology has the following main components:

1)    it claims that Germanic stock—the so called ‘white Aryan’ or ‘Nordic race’—is biologically superior

2)    it proposes that Germans ought to rule the world as a ‘master race’; and

3)    it wishes to curtail the political liberties and reproduction of ‘inferiors,’ ‘defectives,’ and ‘degenerates’; at the limit, it seeks to exterminate them.

In his detailed study of the American eugenics movement, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (published in 2003), historian Edwin Black writes:

“In 1916, [American eugenicist] Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race declared that the white Nordic race was destined to rule the world, and confirmed the Aryan people’s role in it. German nationalists were heartened by America’s recognition of Nordic and Ayran racial superiority. Reviews of the book inspired a spectrum of German scientists and nationalists to think eugenically even before the work was translated into German.

…[American eugenics leader] Harry Laughlin prepared a detailed pro-German speech for the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Eugenics Research Association, held at [the Carnegie Institution’s complex at] Cold Spring Harbor [New York] in June of 1920. …Declaring that ‘modern civilization itself depended on Germanic and Teutonic conquest, Laughlin closed by assuring his colleagues, ‘From what the world knows of Germanic traits, we logically concede that she [Germany] will live up to her instincts of race conservation…’ …[The Carnegie Institution’s] Eugenical News published it in their next issue, as did a subsequent edition of the official British organ, Eugenics Review.”[12]

The other great Carnegie administrator and leader of the American eugenics movement, Charles Davenport, had similar views:

“Davenport saw ethnic groups as biologically different beings -- not just physically, but in terms of their character, nature, and quality. Most of the non-Nordic types, in Davenport’s view, swam at the bottom of the hereditary pool, each featuring its own distinct and indelible adverse genetic features. Italians were predisposed to personal violence. The Irish had ‘considerable mental defectiveness,’ while Germans were ‘thrifty, intelligent, and honest.’”[13]

The leaders of American eugenics claimed that the working classes in the West were ‘Mediterranean’—as opposed to ‘Germanic’—and therefore had bad genes that made them stupid, unfit for reproduction (for they would pollute ‘society’ with their bad genes), and undeserving of democratic rights. The upper classes, by contrast, were Germanic: of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Frankish, Scandinavian, Visigothic, etc., origin.

To understand this view, one must know that when the Latin Roman Empire’s political structure collapsed, Western Europe was conquered by Germanic military aristocracies that, in alliance with the Vatican, recreated the Roman Empire as the Germanic Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, the king of the Germanic tribe of the Franks, and the man who had conquered almost all of Western Europe, ‘Holy Roman Emperor’ in the year 800. Charlemagne then proceeded to distribute lands to his aristocratic accomplices all over his dominions, creating the European nobility.[14]

The eugenics movement became a tremendous phenomenon in the self-consciously Anglo-Saxon US ruling class, and the main financiers of the movement, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller (both father and son), spent millions creating a eugenic pseudoscientific infrastructure in the United States through the millions dispensed by the Carnegie Institution and the various Rockefeller foundations, in alliance with other top American corporate leaders. What this money achieved was a transformation of US universities and a takeover of government institutions by the forces of eugenics.

“Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: to create a superior Nordic race.

To perpetrate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological rationales for persecution. …Specious [i.e. fraudulent] intelligence tests, colloquially known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a group called ‘feebleminded.’ …Mandatory sterilization laws were enacted in some twenty-seven states to prevent targeted individuals from reproducing more of their kind. Marriage prohibition laws proliferated throughout the country to stop race mixing. Collusive [i.e. fraudulent] litigation was taken to the US Supreme Court, which sanctified eugenics and its tactics.”[15]

Carnegie and Rockefeller spent also millions upon millions doing the same all over the West, but especially in Germany, where their efforts would prepare the ground for the German Nazi movement, whose ideology was almost entirely borrowed from American eugenics, as documented also by Edwin Black.

The point of the eugenics movement was to defeat movements to improve the rights of the poor that were becoming more and more powerful in the West. And also to defeat the Jewish people. Why them? In my view, because the Law of Moses, around which Jewish civilization is organized, was born, according to tradition (Exodus), in a slave revolt, and in consequence it is exquisitely designed to protect the disadvantaged from the abuses of the powerful. Repressive elements in the Western power elites have always understood that danger to them in the freedom and equality preached by Jewish ideology, and in consequence they have always persecuted the Jews.[15a]

Here follows a bit of context on Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Wilson, and Ford, the powers behind the creation and financing of the Council on Foreign Relations.
 

The Rockefellers
_________________

John D. Rockefeller Sr., the creator of the Standard Oil empire, was running, with his son, a system that the journalists of the day called “industrial absolutism” and also the “new feudalism.” They could also have called it “company totalitarianism.”

In Colorado Fuel & Iron (CF&I), for example, a Rockefeller concern that was one of the biggest companies in the world, workers were paid a daily wage equivalent to $1.68, with a 12-hour work day, which comes to just 14 c. an hour. But they were not paid in actual dollars. They were paid in company scrip that could only be redeemed in company stores that charged extortion prices, and they lived in miserable company shacks that charged extortion rents. In this way, they became perennially indebted to the company and could not leave.

These workers were dependent in other ways. They worshipped in company churches where company-hired pastors officiated the services. They could only read books from the company libraries that were carefully screened so as to purge anything ‘subversive.’ Their children went to company schools. When they voted, it was the company that voted. Lamont Montgomery Bowers, chairman of the board of directors,

“boasted that when he arrived in Denver, the company registered and voted every man and woman in its employ, including the 70 percent who were not even naturalized citizens, and that ‘even their mules… were registered if they were fortunate enough to possess names.’ This political power helped the operators make sure that even the primitive mine safety standards of the time were not enforced; the result was, predictably, an epidemic of accidental deaths and injuries to the workers. The miners had no placed to go to complain. County courthouses, it was commonly said, were like branch offices of CF&I, and local sheriffs enjoyed a status similar to mine superintendents.”[16]

If the workers tried to organize to demand better conditions, the company was ready: “More than 20,000 a year was spent by the company to maintain a force of detectives, mine guards, and spies whose job it was to keep the camps quarantined from the virulence of unionism.” The workers organized anyway, so “the operators in Colorado hired the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency to spearhead their war against the UMW [United Mine Workers]. Made up of drifters and former gunmen left over from the closing of the West [i.e. from the extermination of the Native American populations], the Baldwin-Felts detectives were more detested than even the strike-breakers that Pinkerton’s had sent into the West.” These ‘detectives’ opened fire on the workers and a massacre resulted that produced a scandal.[17]

The eugenics movement, which sold itself as supposed ‘science,’ and which allowed the US ruling elite to incarcerate anybody it wanted under pretext of ‘social hygiene’ to improve society (one of Rockefeller’s organizations was called the Bureau of Social Hygiene), promised a more effective method for controlling the unruly workers.

The Rockefellers spent millions upon millions to create a pseudoscientific eugenic infrastructure permeating all major US institutions. He did the same in Europe, especially in Germany.[17a]

“As early as 1922, despite the American political animosity against Germany that remained from World War I, the Rockefeller Foundation, through its Paris office, began funneling exorbitant sums to a committee in Germany headed by a leading eugenicist, Heinrich Poll, who was an adviser to the Prussian Ministry of Health and a lecturer on hereditary traits and feeble-mindedness.”[17b]
 

Andrew Carnegie
_________________

Rockefeller seems to have taken his cue about how to deal with the workers from how Andrew Carnegie dealt with his.

In an article about exploitation in the United States, sociologist Charles Perrow cites a statistic from historian Herbert G. Gutman: “Nearly 25% of the recent immigrants employed at the Carnegie South Works were injured or killed each year between 1907 and 1910, 3,723 in all.”[18]

Carnegie also paid almost nothing to his workers, and reduced their salaries and added hours to their working day whenever he could get away with it, meanwhile making untold millions of dollars in profits.

“The Carnegie Steel Company was making net profits of 17.2 percent in 1891 when it proposed a severe reduction in wages and sustained a strike. The strike in 1892 reduced its profits to only 16 percent for that year. Wages continued to go down after the strike, and in some mills, in order to keep the same wage, those working only 8 hours had to work 12 hours. In 1907, a year of ‘unexampled prosperity’ in the industry, one plant that was surveyed showed 71 percent of the workers receiving $2.50 a day or less. (It was generally agreed that a family of four needed nearly twice that much to survive.) After Carnegie broke the union in 1892, he ‘thereafter began to introduce the 12-hour day wherever possible.’”[19]

The way Carnegie “broke the union” in the Homestead Mill in 1892 was by shooting at his workers. They had been asking for better salaries, and the union was willing to negotiate. But Henry Clay Frick, Carnegie’s partner and enforcer, following his orders, closed the mill and left 3,800 men outside. In reaction, the workers took the mill in order to prevent strikebreakers to enter. So Frick brought Pinkerton Agency mercenaries and a bloody battle raged that lasted several hours. The National Guard of the State of Pennsylvania was sent to assist Carnegie against his workers, and the union was broken.[20]

“When he heard that Frick had ordered strikers at Carnegie’s Homestead steelworks shot down, John D. [Rockefeller] had immediately fired off a telegram of support to the coke magnate.”[21]

For Carnegie, as for Rockefeller, the pseudo-scientific eugenics platform became attractive as a way to put troublesome workers in jail without the nasty public relations consequences of armed combat. In 1901 he sold his steel interests to J.P. Morgan for $400 million and thereafter used his fabulous fortune to propel the eugenics movement through the Carnegie Institution, an “entity so wealthy that in 1904, Washington agreed to reincorporate the charity by special act of Congress, chartering the new name ‘Carnegie Institution of Washington.’ This made the Carnegie Institution a joint incarnation of the steel man’s money and the United States government’s cachet.”[22]

Under biologist Charles Davenport’s directorship, “on January 19, 1904, the Carnegie Institution inaugurated what it called the Station for Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution at Cold Spring Harbor [New York].”[23] It is from here that Davenport and his right-hand man Harry Laughlin would throw their weight, with Carnegie’s millions, to transform the landscape of the United States in the image of their eugenic vision.

Edwin Black points out that, “from the start, the trustees of the Carnegie Institution understood that Davenport’s plan was a turning-point plan for racial breeding.”[24] One of those trustees was Elihu Root, then Secretary of War.[25] Elihu Root would also be one of the early leaders of the Council on Foreign Relations.[26]
 

Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan
___________________________

Henry Ford was one of several big US industrialists to adopt the managing methods propounded by Charles Bedaux, who would later become a notorious Nazi collaborator. These were “brutal methods of production that brought about frequent strikes in the 1930s.”[27] So Ford’s philosophy, as in the cases of Carnegie and Rockefeller, was anti-worker.

“Shortly after the Great War [WWI] began in Europe,” writes Edwin Black in a different work, “[Henry] Ford claimed he had discovered ‘proof’ that the Jews were behind the world’s troubles.” His special mission would be to communicate this to the entire world. “In 1918 Ford purchased the weekly Dearborn Independent and soon thereafter changed its editorial thrust to virulent anti-Semitism.” In a series that bore the title, The International Jew, this weekly soon promoted and reproduced The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.[28]

This was the ‘proof’ that Henry Ford had found, and with it he fed a new wave of anti-Jewish hysteria in the Western world.

The Protocols was a fraud created by the Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana, that pretended to be the minutes of a secret group of super-powerful Jews who clandestinely had control over everything: the banks, the media, the unions, the capitalist industries, and the governments of the West.[29] (If this sounds familiar that’s because antisemitic propaganda has not changed and because The Protocols—even after millions of Jews were easily murdered by the Nazis with hardly anybody to defend them—continues to be believed, and its slanders have become institutionalized in our culture. Even people who have never heard of The Protocols, for example, will confidently state that ‘the Jews control the media,’ something that is perfectly false.)

The Russian government used this propaganda to motivate pogroms: massive, violent attacks against the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire, with the collusion of the authorities. This origin of The Protocols helps explain why “a frequent contributor [to Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent] was a fanatical White [i.e. Tsarist] Russian, Boris Brasol, who boasted in one piece: ‘I have done the Jews more injury than would have been done in ten pogroms.’ Brasol was successively an agent of the Tsar, and of the US Army Intelligence; later he became a Nazi spy.”[30]

Before the 1920s the dominant banking concern in the United States, by far, had been the House of Morgan. But during that decade much competition emerged in investment banking, and some of the new tough competitors were Jewish. Historian Thomas Ferguson writes that, in reaction, “J. P. Morgan Jr. quietly encouraged Henry Ford’s circulation of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 1920s, and later his bank forbade Morgan-Harjes, the firm's Paris partner, to honor letters of credit from Manufacturers Trust, a commercial bank with strong ties to Goldman, Sachs and Lehman Brothers [a Jewish-owned bank].”[31]

In hoaxing the The Protocols, the Okhrana had done little more than cut and paste from works of fiction, but especially from Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu.[32] This book, by the French political philosopher Maurice Joly, had been originally written to attack the authoritarian government of Napoleon III, and had absolutely nothing to do with Jews, one way or another. In 1921 Phillip Graves from the London Times published a series of very detailed articles, quoting Dialogues and The Protocols side by side so that readers could see that the second text had been copied from the first.[33] This demonstration did not affect Henry Ford’s campaign, nor did alter its effectiveness, much, especially with Europeans.

According to Ford, a Jewish conspiracy stood behind World War I (never mind, then, how the antisemitic Hohenzollern Reich had armed itself to the teeth and instigated that war). His Dearborn Independent, moreover, accused ‘the Jews’ of practically anything—everything—that he didn’t like.

“These accusations were not just the ramblings of the Dearborn Independent. They were in fact a product of the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford listed his name at the top of every front page. Ford motorcar dealers were compelled to buy and sell subscriptions. Dealers who filled their subscriptions quotas received Ford cars as prizes. …Many reluctant dealers received threatening legalistic letters insisting that they sell the tabloid. Reprints were bound into booklets and distributed to libraries and YMCA’s throughout the nation. …[Henry Ford] was the hero of antisemites the world over. In Germany, thousands of copies of Ford’s teachings were published under the title The Eternal Jew, by Heinrich Ford. Ford’s book quickly became the bible of German antisemites, including Adolf Hitler -- this, at least two years before Mein Kampf was written. Hitler… hung a large portrait of Ford beside his desk and spoke of him incessantly.”[34]

After Hitler took power in Germany, “millions of Ford’s books were circulated to every school and party office in the nation, many featuring the names Hitler and Ford side by side on the cover.”[35]

The cultural impact of Ford in Germany was made clear by Baldur von Schirach, whose Hitler Youth movement poisoned the minds of an entire generation of Germans. Schirach said that Ford’s book had converted him to antisemitism.[36] In his war crimes trial in Nuremberg he exclaimed: “You have no idea what a great influence this book had on the thinking of German youth.” He was talking about The International Jew, better known in Germany as The Eternal Jew, and none other than The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “The younger generation looked with envy to symbols of success and prosperity like Henry Ford, and if he said the Jews were to blame, why naturally we believed him.”[37]

My colleague the anthropologist Joseph Henrich and I have made a careful review of the mountain of evidence in the social sciences supporting the view that the ideas of people with prestige—regardless of content—tend to propagate with greater ease, due to certain important psychological biases that affect social-learning processes.[38] Ford’s prestige was stratospheric: “Henry Ford was once ranked in popular polls as the third greatest man in history: just below Napoleon and Jesus Christ.”[39] He used this enormous prestige to propagate anti-Jewish hatred everywhere, but especially in the United States and Germany.

In fact, much of Hitler’s inspiration came directly from Henry Ford, and the führer was so taken with the automobile industrialist that in 1931, shortly before he was to come to power, he told the Detroit News: “I consider Henry Ford my inspiration.” This was literally true, because not only had The International Jew been written before Hitler’s own Mein Kampf, but in fact “many of the ramblings in Mein Kampf were identical to passages in The International Jew.” And that’s not all. The systems of mass production that Hitler transformed into systems of mass murder had been first innovated by Henry Ford, the hero of German industrialists who in fact proclaimed themselves ‘Fordists.’[40]

In the United States, Ford’s antisemitic campaign led to a boycott against his company that finally forced him to desist in that country and to offer a public act of contrition in 1927. But this ‘contrition’ didn’t stop him from accepting the highest decoration that the Nazi state gave to foreigners in 1938, and neither did it soften the effect that Ford had had on the Western masses (they simply interpreted this as the ‘powerful Jews’ forcing the industrialist to back down).
 

Woodrow Wilson
_________________

Most people ‘remember’ US President Woodrow Wilson as a great liberal, because his apologists have represented him this way. For example, the Encyclopedia Britannica, custodian of mainstream opinion, writes that Wilson is “remembered for… his ethical idealism.”[41] And Wilson’s main biographer, Arthur S. Link, states in an article that Wilson supposedly was not a racist, which he says right after telling us that Joseph Wilson, the father, was “an ardent defender of slavery”—so much so that he had allied with the Southern Confederacy that fought to preserve slavery even though he was not from there. The son, however, according to Link, had pro black ideas far in advance of the average racist in the US Southern aristocracy in which he grew up.[41a]

And yet Woodrow’s racist policies aren’t exactly a secret. “As president of Princeton, he had turned away black applicants, regarding their desire for education to be ‘unwarranted.’”[42] When he became Governor of New Jersey in 1910, Woodrow Wilson became one of the most radical leaders of the eugenics movement, with great political consequences. Later Link would admit frankly to an Afro-American journal that his protagonist was indeed a racist.[43]

As Governor of New Jersey, Wilson pioneered one of the first eugenics state laws that Charles Davenport was calling for in his book. They were draconian. “Chapter 190 of its statutory code created a special three-man ‘Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives.’”[44] The category “Other Defectives” was deliberately an open one because this gave him the greatest repressive latitude.

The man who drafted the New Jersey eugenics law for Wilson was Dr. Katzen-Ellenbogen, who would later become a notorious killer doctor in Adolf Hitler's Buchenwald concentration camp.[45]

In Woodrow Wilson’s eugenic New Jersey,

“The administrative hearing was held within the institution itself [orphanages, state asylums, etc.], not in a courtroom under a judge’s gavel. Moreover, the court-designated counsel for the patient was given only five days before the sterilization decision was sealed. Thus the process would be swift, certainly beyond the grasp of the confused children dwelling within state shelters.”[46]

There is no question that the eugenicists were hypocrites. As a boy Wilson didn’t manage to learn how to read until age 11; his own New Jersey system would have declared him ‘feebleminded.’ But Wilson didn’t rush to be interned into one of his state institutions.[47]

Once inaugurated as US president in 1913, Wilson made a “push to institutionalize [the system] of [racial] segregation within the federal civil service.” Soon the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of the various government departments had been segregated. Many black federal officers were fired, and the Washington police and fire departments ceased hiring blacks. (The man in charge of segregating for Wilson the restrooms in the buildings of the Departments of State, War, and the Navy was his protégé, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Undersecretary of the Navy.)[48]

“[Woodrow Wilson] embraced the poisonous message of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation,” which celebrated the Ku Klux Klan, a violent and racist anti-black organization. “The movie was based primarily on The Clansman, a novel written by Thomas Dixon in 1905. Not only was Dixon a personal friend of Wilson’s, he had been pushing for a Wilson presidency for years, and Wilson regarded himself as being in Dixon’s debt. Wilson discharged that debt by helping Dixon and Griffith publicize their movie.”[48a]

Now, what does this help us explain?

Once the eugenic ideology of those who got the Council on Foreign Relations going is understood, it is pertinent to ask whether this helps us solve any apparent incongruities that would otherwise embarrass a historical analysis. The answer is that it does.
 

US foreign policy in the years after the creation
of the CFR
__________

The people around Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who made him president, were from the same circles that created the CFR. They had the same ideology.

Originally belonging to J.P. Morgan, Chase National Bank had merged with the Rockefeller’s Equitable Trust in 1929, and by the end of 1932 it was firmly under Rockefeller control. Winthrop Aldrich—Rockefeller Jr.’s brother-in-law—became the president. The people at the top of Chase—shortly to become the biggest bank in the United States—had a close relationship with Roosevelt and supported his candidacy.

Aldrich’s best friend was Gordon Auchincloss, from one of the most aristocratic families in the United States. Auchincloss was also a member of the Chase board and married to Colonel Edward M. House’s daughter. House had been eugenicist Woodrow Wilson’s main advisor in foreign policy. “During the campaign and transition period, House and Vincent Astor, Roosevelt’s cousin and also a member of the reorganized Chase board, passed messages between Roosevelt and Chase.”[49]

With Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt, also cousins of FDR, Vincent Astor had founded The Rooom, FDR’s private espionage group, which included Chase president Winthrop Aldrich.[50] As if being at the top of the Rockefeller empire were not enough, Theodore and Kermit had grown up hearing the ideological views of their father, President Theodore Roosevelt: “A strong supporter of the growing eugenics movement in the United States, Roosevelt called for ‘racial purity’ and warned against interracial marriage as a form of ‘race suicide.’”[51] In 1913 Theodore Roosevelt had actually sent Charles Davenport, leader of the American eugenics movement, a letter expressing the close agreement between his ideas and Davenport’s.[52]

On the other side of the Atlantic, Nancy Astor, married to Vincent’s cousin William Waldorf Astor, led the aristocratic Cliveden set, which was widely held to be a pro-Nazi group with great influence in British government circles. David Efron, writing in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1939, called the Cliveden set a Nazi “Trojan Horse.”[53] Here too, there was a relationship. To gauge it, consider that, immediately before Roosevelt’s inauguration of January 1933, William Waldorf Astor and his wife Nancy traveled to the United States and stayed in the president-elect’s own residence.[54]

Another important Roosevelt supporter was William Randolph Hearst, owner of about half of all the press in the United States, and Lord over Hollywood, was called by his contemporaries “the most influential American fascist... the keystone of American fascism.”[55]

Hearst was an intimate friend of the German millionaire Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was nothing less than Adolf Hitler’s financial backer and press secretary.[56] Consistent with all that, Hearst attended the famous Nuremberg rallies with the hysterically adoring crowds that Leni Riefenstahl immortalized in her famous Nazi propaganda films, staying in the same hotel with all the top Nazis. Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda ministry went out of its way to report the gushing reactions of Hearst’s son George. There were accusations at the time—deserved ones, it appears—that Hearst had made an agreement with Hitler to give him good press in the United States.[57]

Hearst’s views on foreign policy during the 1930s—published as editorials in all his variegated newspapers—were as follows:

1)    the Treaty of Versailles (imposed on Germany after WWI, was unfair);

2)    Nazism was an important bulwark against communism;

3)    the US should not threaten Germany or make any movement to support the Treaty of Versailles;

4)    the Popular Front government in France—a parliamentary socialist government—was a Soviet satellite;

5)    the Nazi demands for revisions of borders were legitimate;

6)    the Nazis were right to reoccupy the Rhineland;

7)    even if the Nazis attacked US Navy shipping, this should be tolerated if they apologized sincerely (!);

8)    Chamberlain was right in giving Czechoslovakia to Hitler;

9)    Franco in Spain was preferable to the parliamentary, leftist alternative.

Hearst’s criticisms of the Nazis for the way they attacked all sorts of innocent people in Germany were quite mild, and they don’t refute the hypothesis of a pro-Nazi orientation; on the contrary, what they suggest is that, within the limits of what his political position allowed in the United States, he came as close as he could to a public approbation of the Nazi movement. Meanwhile, he repeatedly attacked Great Britain and France for supposedly not being true democracies![58]

Then there is the afore-mentioned Colonel House.

“Colonel Edward House[, who] had been a longtime adviser to [radical eugenicist] Woodrow Wilson… [now] helped chart Roosevelt’s early path. …Making overtures to William Randolph Hearst and other like-minded businessmen, Roosevelt repudiated his earlier strong support for the League of Nations.”[59]

This means that Roosevelt repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, which the Nazis were also doing.

It was with Hearst’s support that Roosevelt became president. What followed was the famous policy of so-called ‘appeasement,’ which is usually blamed especially on the French and British, and in particular on British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. This policy, however, was equally Roosevelt’s policy, though in public he postured differently from what he was doing behind the scenes.[60]

This policy of ‘appeasement,’ so convenient to Hitler, and so puzzling to historians, makes sense when we consider that the same eugenicist and pro-Nazi powers behind the Council on Foreign Relations were also responsible for placing Roosevelt in the White House.

The same historical analysis makes sense of Allied policy toward the Holocaust.

It is commonly claimed that the leaders of US and Britain were indifferent to the Holocaust, but this is not true. They barred entry to the desperate Jewish refugees, trapping them in Europe, and they even deployed vigorous diplomacy to prevent other countries from taking them. Despite repeated pleas, they refused to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz, or the death camp itself.

Not content with that, with Roosevelt’s approval, Undersecretary of State Breckenridge Long developed an immigration policy designed to trap the European Jews where Hitler would find them: instead of denying visas outright, consular offices were told to “postpone, postpone, postpone...”—that is, to tell Jews who requested visas that there were temporary obstacles, but never to grant them. In this way, the desperate Jewish refugees, believing this was just a temporary delay, did not seek refuge elsewhere.[60a]

These policies are not consistent with disinterest, but rather with a strong interest in the death of the European Jews.

Something else this analysis explains is what historian Charles Higham documented with great detail in the following work:

Higham, C. 1995[1983]. Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949. New York: Barnes & Noble.

Notice the dates. What Higham showed, with a mountain of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, is that even after the US declaration of war against the Axis Powers, the leading eugenicist businessmen in the United States, led by the Rockefellers, financed Hitler’s war effort (and sabotaged the supply of key war materials to the US forces). They did this with Roosevelt’s protection, even as US workers were dressed up as soldiers and blown up to bits on the various fronts.

It also helps us explain what historian Christopher Simpson documented, also with a mountain of documents declassified under the FOA:

Simpson, C. 1988. Blowback: America's recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

After the war, the US government created US Intelligence by recruiting tens of thousands of former Nazis.[60b]


So why don’t political scientists investigate the CFR?
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We began with the observation that very little academic work exists on the CFR, and that political scientists who interest themselves in this organization are told by their colleagues that this is not really ‘political science.’ Why might that be? It may have something to do with the influence wielded across modern Academia by the eugenicists who created the CFR.

The industrial bosses began investing heavily in higher education in the late 19th century, and soon they could make life quite difficult for any academic who talked too much about workers’ rights.[65a] In 1903, Rockefeller incorporated the General Education Board (GEB) and invited Carnegie to join. The objective, according to Frederick Gates, chief administrator of Rockefeller ‘philanthropy,’ was “ ‘to reduce our higher education to something like an orderly and comprehensive system.’ ”[65b] The Council on Foreign Relations was created as a key component of that system, where domesticated academics could be brought together to craft policies to the liking of these eugenicist industrial sponsors.

“[John D. Rockefeller] Junior’s zeal in footing the bill for the work of eugenicists would be felt around the world. By 1922, he had a personal fortune of half a billion dollars, and ‘a key role to play in a whole set of major philanthropic organizations, a growing circle of trusted and talented advisers, and goals and interests ...both overseas and at home, on a wide-ranging scale never before seen and never since equaled.’ In 1921, he helped organize the Council on Foreign Relations, with Elihu Root and AES-member Jerome Greene.”

But the CFR was just one component. The “comprehensive system” was much larger:

“Junior made significant contributions to the League of Nations and spent $28 million to establish the International Education Board, which sought to ‘identify scientists and institutions of great quality’ to be ‘centers of inspiration and training’ for an ‘international migration of select students.’ The IEB funded new biology laboratories at a dozen European universities. In the U.S., Junior ensured his influence in academia by spending $41 million between 1922 and 1928 in grants to 25 universities for social-science programs. Five institutions—the University of Chicago, Columbia, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard, along with England’s London School of Economics—received more than half of the money. Others that received ‘substantial sums’ were Yale, Minnesota, Iowa State, Vanderbilt, North Carolina, California, Stanford, and Texas.”[66]

In 1923, just two years after the creation of the CFR, an agency was created to coordinate the social sciences: the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). This organ was founded by Charles Merriam, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Merriam was quite important, “and through his students he became the architect of American political science as it developed after World War II.” It is probably relevant, then, that Merriam “applauded all that was being done in the name of eugenics.”[61]

Merriam’s main allies in the creation of the SSRC were Beardsley Ruml and Wesley Clair Mitchell.[62] Ruml, since 1917, was the director of one of the Rockefeller foundations: the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM). Mitchell had created the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an organ that, like the CFR, almost literally fused itself with the US government, and whose “main source of funds was the Carnegie Corporation. Among foundations the Commonwealth Fund and the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial were also important backers.”[63]

While Ruml poured Rockefeller resources into the SSRC, Michell connected the new organization to the NBER. In the first 10 years, the SSRC granted $4 million for social science research, becoming a major force with the power to reward the kind of work that its powerful sponsors wanted.[64] The money of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Russell Sage “provided the organization with a solid footing through the end of World War II.”[65]

After the war, in the 1950s, the Congressional Reece Committee produced a sharp controversy when it investigated and denounced the dangers inherent in “the promotion of political ends, favored perhaps by foundation managers, …disguised as charitable or educational activity.” There was now a veritable “ ‘network or cartel’ in the social sciences,’ ” crushingly dominated by the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations—the “big three.” These “big three,” the Reece Committee complained, had destroyed the free market in knowledge production. But nothing happened, because “there was powerful opposition to any investigation of these multi-billion-dollar public trusts.”[66a]

Of course, journalists might peek in areas neglected by academics. But the eugenicist bosses had a strategy there too: they created the science of ‘communication research,’ and, in a period of five years, in the immediate postwar, seeded the university system with ‘communication’ departments that henceforth trained virtually the entire population of journalists.

In conclusion, given that the eugenicist Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller networks spent a fortune creating a social science cartel, and given that within that “comprehensive system” they also created the Council on Foreign Relations, it makes sense that academics should be reluctant to do research on the CFR itself. Particularly political scientists, heirs to one Charles Merriam, eugenicist, who became the father of modern American political science. And especially considering that Foreign Affairs, perhaps the most important vehicle of prestige in political science and international relations, is published by the CFR.
 

A note about the stability of institutional ideology
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An institution is a network of organized relationships between people whose individual roles are defined by their kind of membership. These individuals will all die, and they may leave the institution even before passing away, but the institution survives because new people are always being recruited to the vacancies. An institution is potentially eternal. The Catholic Church, for example, is 2000 years old. Now, the question for us is this: if an institution is created around a strong ideology, then, as certain members die or leave, what happens to this ideology? Does it change or does it remain stable?

Many people, I have found, hold the following folk theory about institutions: the passage of time will alter their ideology. As members die or leave and are replaced with others, the institution will change because people have all kinds of different ideologies. Accordingly, the burden of proof is on whoever claims that, after X number of years, the founding ideology of an institution will remain the same. I think this is backwards: the burden of proof, in my view, is on whoever affirms that the ideology of an institution has changed.

Imagine institution V, created to promote vegetarianism, and run, naturally, by vegetarians. There are 10 people in the executive board. One day, at time = t, one of the board members dies. What kind of a person will the remaining 9 members look for? Another vegetarian. A meat-eater might be recruited to fill relatively low positions that are strongly utilitarian: for example, an expert in marketing might be hired even if he eats meat, because he is a mercenary who will do his contract job. But it would be remarkable for this institution to hire meat eaters to the governing board, where policy decisions are made. Given that at time = t vacancies were filled, and especially in the upper echelons, with vegetarians, the vacancies at time t+1 will also be filled with vegetarians, because once again those doing the selecting are surviving vegetarians. And so forth. There is no reason to expect that the passage of time will turn this vegetarianism-promoting institution into an institution that celebrates meat. The ideology of the institution creates a selection pressure in the recruiting process that works to keep the ideology stable.
 

What does the future hold for Israel?
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As per the above argument, there is every reason to expect that, since the powerful people who created the CFR had a eugenic ideology, they will have recruited like-minded people to fill any vacancies, and so on and so forth. So the CFR in the postwar years, and more generally the US foreign policy establishment, will have maintained a stable eugenic ideology. If so, this would certainly explain why, contrary to popular belief, US foreign policy throughout the second half of the 20th c.., and into the 21st, has been consistently anti-Israel.

What does the future hold for Israel?

Even diehard defenders of the view that US foreign policy is pro-Israel have been having trouble with that hypothesis in light of recent US behavior, which has become quite extreme. So it matters that John McCain, who claims to be pro-Israel and anti-Iran, has been a member of the CFR since 1997.[67] Politicians represent themselves in public in whichever way that is convenient, so McCain's membership in the CFR suggests that his policy as president would be anti-Israel, regardless of what he now says.

It appears that Hillary Clinton is not a member of the CFR. However, husband Bill Clinton has been a member since 1989,[68] and Hillary gives speeches at the CFR and clearly approves of the institution.[69]

A lot of people seem to think that Barack Obama’s wife is on the board of directors of the Chicago CFR. Technically, she is. Except that the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which now calls itself the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, is not affiliated with the CFR (at least they claim not to be).[70] But given past history, there is no reason to believe that Barack Obama's administration, if elected, would not fill many of the top foreign policy positions with CFR members, or with protégés of the same.

One can expect that, regardless of who wins, US foreign policy will continue to be remarkably consistent, and decided at the CFR.