Rockefeller Foundation

The Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913 and endowed from the Standard Oil fortune, was the largest of the 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.

Origins in the Standard Oil Fortune

The Foundation grew out of an apparatus the family had built in the United States before turning abroad. Rockefeller adviser Frederick T. Gates streamlined the family's giving, and the General Education Board, formed to promote "a comprehensive system of higher education in the United States," established farm demonstrations across the South between 1904 and 1914 that extolled machinery, fertilizers, and crop rotation, the same social formula that brought agribusiness to America at the expense of small farming, advanced during a period when Rockefeller money was invested in International Harvester and fertilizer companies. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission's campaign to eradicate hookworm, the South's "germ of laziness," swept away opposition "armed with science and the Standard Oil fortune."¹

By the 1920s the Foundation owned stock in thirteen oil companies and nine pipelines in the United States, along with thirty-five railroads and thirty-five other corporations in steel, gas, banking, and real estate, many already doing substantial business in Latin America and the Far East. Charles Evans Hughes, Standard Oil counsel and a Foundation trustee, became President Warren G. Harding's secretary of state, prompting a British Foreign Office complaint that "Washington officials begin to think, talk, and write like Standard Oil officials."²

International Health Board in Latin America

Under Raymond Fosdick, whom Colby and Dennett describe as having the Foundation "at the vanguard of turning Latin America into [an] open field," the International Health Board (IHB) carried the model abroad. Guatemala was at the center of attention: Standard Oil had begun exploratory drilling, and the IHB, enlisting the commander of Guatemalan border troops, succeeded in getting revolutionary Mexico quarantined on yellow fever grounds. The resulting cordón sanitario allowed martial law to be imposed on the restless towns and on the sugar and coffee plantations along the route of the United Fruit Company's International Railways. A hookworm campaign in Guatemala examined more than 227,000 people and treated 132,000 for $165,000, which the family regarded as a bargain in goodwill and a foothold in the region.³

The general Jorge Ubico, later Guatemala's dictator, got his first political break in 1918 as military overseer of the Rockefeller anti-yellow-fever campaign, during which he subjected Indians to extreme eradication measures including burning their homes "as the only way out." George Vincent, a president of the Foundation through the 1920s, personally signaled the family fortune's reorientation "toward the Third World" during the period when Nelson Rockefeller was forming his own Latin American ambitions. The Foundation's projects in sanitation and medicine, in Colby and Dennett's account, "attacked these symptoms, but not their social causes," serving "the businessman's concern for productivity" by producing healthy workers for the export economy.⁴

Agricultural and Linguistic Surveys

The Foundation's survey programs doubled as intelligence-gathering. The Harvard botanist Richard Evans Schultes toured Mexico for the Rockefeller Foundation's Agricultural Survey and gathered seven tons of rubber seeds in the Putumayo and Vaupés regions of southern Colombia while passing on intelligence about the political sympathies of his Colombian colleagues. The anthropologist Sol Tax, named head of the Foundation's Yucatán Linguistics Surveys on the strength of his claim that language was the last barrier to Indian assimilation, led the first expedition of the CIAA-funded National Indian Institute's anthropology committee, an intellectual lineage that anticipated the Summer Institute of Linguistics's later pacification work.⁵

State Department Pipeline

The Foundation's board functioned as a recruiting pool for US foreign policy. In 1952, as John Foster Dulles prepared to become Eisenhower's secretary of state, he turned over the chair of the Foundation to John D. Rockefeller 3rd and tapped his friend Dean Rusk for the presidency. When John F. Kennedy formed his cabinet in December 1960, Robert Lovett, a Foundation trustee, declined State, Defense, and Treasury and instead recommended Rusk, then the Foundation's president, who took the call from the president-elect while attending a board meeting and became secretary of state; trustee Chester Bowles joined him as undersecretary. Earlier figures linking the Foundation to the foreign-policy establishment included UN undersecretary-general Ralph Bunche (a former grantee and trustee), Council on Foreign Relations guiding light Fosdick, Union Theological Seminary president Henry Pitney Van Dusen, and Colombia's Alberto Lleras Camargo, who collaborated with Nelson Rockefeller and became a Foundation trustee.⁶

Mind-Control Research Funding

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 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

Belém Virus Laboratory

In the Brazilian Amazon the Foundation's medical infrastructure directly served the development drive. The BR-010 highway pushed south from Belém toward 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