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The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation and the Formulation of Public Policy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann
Ellen Condliffe Lagemann*
Affiliation:
Teachers College, Columbia University
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Extract

Thirty years ago, Merle Curti ventured that “philanthropy has been one of the major aspects of and keys to American social and cultural development.” It was an apt, challenging, and important observation that was not immediately heeded and has yet to be sufficiently pursued. With Curti's comment in mind, I should like to sketch the development of a politics that took shape in the United States in the early twentieth century, and then to explore a number of relationships between that politics and some of the early activities of one of the large, grant-making foundations established before the First World War—the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Although the argument I shall present derives from a close study of only one foundation, the history of the Carnegie Corporation crosses and even merges with the history of many other institutions, including other foundations, and is inseparable from ideas, national trends, and both national and international events that have touched American society generally. What is more, the size, the longevity, the broad scope, the effectiveness, and the concern for responsible philanthropy that have always characterized the Carnegie Corporation have made it a leader and even a model for many of its peers. To some degree at least, then, in considering relationships between Carnegie Corporation philanthropy and what I shall call the politics of knowledge, one is also considering the validity of Curti's “hypothetical” claim. One is asking, not only whether, but, more importantly, how philanthropic foundations have achieved the significance Curti attributed to them.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Summer 1987 , pp. 205 - 220
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1. Curti, Merle, “The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research,” American Historical Review 62 (Jan. 1957): 352.Google Scholar

2. Quoted in Wall, Joseph Frazier, Andrew Carnegie (New York, 1970), 884.Google Scholar

3. Pritchett, Henry S., “Fields of Activity Open to the Carnegie Corporation,” Trustee Memorandum, 15 Apr. 1916, p. 2, Carnegie Corporation files, New York, N.Y. Google Scholar

4. Pritchett, Henry S. to Carnegie, Andrew, 16 Nov. 1905, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching files, New York, N.Y. Pritchett's efforts to transform the Carnegie Foundation, which presaged the subsequent transformation of the Carnegie Corporation, as well as the policies that followed from that are fully discussed in Lagemann, Ellen Condliffe, Private Power for the Public Good: A History of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (Middletown, Conn., 1983).Google Scholar

5. The Pritchett phrase is from [Pritchett, Henry S.], “The Administration of the Carnegie Corporation,” Trustee Memorandum, [1918], p. 8, Carnegie Corporation files. Many studies pertain to the disdain for politics and preference for governance by “the best men” that Pritchett and Root expressed, including older works such as Sproat, John G., “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York, 1968), and newer ones, for example, Schiesl, Martin J., The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in America, 1800–1920 (Berkeley, Calif., 1977).Google Scholar

6. Arnold, Matthew, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Dover Wilson, J. (1869; London, 1960), 6.Google Scholar

7. Pritchett, , “Fields of Activity Open to the Carnegie Corporation,” 2.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 3–9.Google Scholar

9. Pritchett, , “The Administration of the Carnegie Corporation,” 2.Google Scholar

10. Carnegie, to Pritchett, , 14 Dec. 1905, Andrew Carnegie Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.Google Scholar

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12. The estimate of Carnegie Corporation contributions to SSRC income was developed by corporation staff in considering a proposal presented in Young, Donald to Josephs, Devereux, 13 Apr. 1946, Carnegie Corporation files.Google Scholar

13. Hale's description of Root is quoted in Wright, Helen, Explorer of the Universe: A Biography of George Ellery Hale (New York, 1966), 308. Among the many works that deal with the NAS and the NRC, those that are most relevant to the argument here, including Hale and Root's close relationship, are: Kevles, Daniel J., “George Ellery Hale, the First World War, and the Advancement of Science in America,” Isis 59 (1968): 427–37; and Tobey, Ronald C., The American Ideology of National Science, 1919–1930 (Pittsburgh, 1971).Google Scholar

14. Hale, George Ellery to Turner, H. H., 6 Mar. 1916, as quoted in Kevles, , “George Ellery Hale, the First World War, and the Advancement of Science in America,” 432.Google Scholar

15. Carnegie's comment is quoted in Wright, Explorer of the Universe, 309. The description of the NAS is in a letter from Hale to Carnegie, 8 May 1914, George Ellery Hale Papers, Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories, Pasadena, Calif.Google Scholar

15. Trustee Minutes, 12 Mar. 1918, Carnegie Corporation files.Google Scholar

17. Root, Elihu, “The Origin of the Restatement of the Law,” Oklahoma State Bar Journal 3 (Feb. 1933): 309. Unfortunately, there is no full secondary history of the ALI, but an account by its first director, Lewis, William Draper, “‘How We Did It’: History of the American Law Institute and the First Restatement of the Law,” in The Restatement in the Courts, permanent ed. (St. Paul, Minn., 1945), 1–42, gives much of the official story.Google Scholar

18. Beale, Joseph H., “The Necessity for a Study of Legal System,” American Association of Law Schools, Proceedings 14 (1914): 33—-34. The sentiments Beale expressed as well as other concerns important in the founding of the ALI are discussed in Auerbach, Jerold S., Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (New York, 1976); and Stevens, Robert Bocking, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983).Google Scholar

19. The “gatekeeper” conception was first developed in Coser, Lewis A., “Foundations as Gatekeepers of Contemporary Intellectual Life,” in Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View (New York, 1965), ch. 25.Google Scholar