Policies debated at the CFR almost always become US foreign policy. Very little is known about it; political scientists pay scant attention to it. Why? And does it matter that the CFR was created by the leaders of the eugenics movement?
The CFR: An introduction
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.
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