How the Carnegie
Corporation contributed to NC's shameful past
By William SchambraSeptember 19, 2011
North Carolina has been transfixed this past summer by
the gripping, tragic testimony of victims of its eugenics program, which forcibly
sterilized some 7,600 state residents from 1929 to 1974.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Carnegie
Corporation of New York, it might be instructive to recall that
foundation’s contribution to North Carolina’s shameful past.
Why bring up this unpleasant, happily obscure historical
footnote on the occasion of the Carnegie Corporation’s grand centenary? Because
philanthropy at last seems a bit weary of self-celebration and has begun to
realize that it will become more effective only if it is willing to learn from its
mistakes. Eugenics presents a serious opportunity to do so.
Eugenics was a pseudo-science popular in the early 20th
century, championing the notion that the human race could be biologically
enhanced by encouraging the “breeding” of “superior stocks” while discouraging,
even forcibly preventing, the propagation of “inferior stocks.”
In America, the mark of “inferiority” could be anything
from inherited physical or mental disabilities to being poor or a member of a
disfavored racial or ethnic group.
One of the most ill-defined but commonly targeted mental
deficiencies, “feeblemindedness,” was thought to be the genetic cause of crime,
prostitution, alcoholism, and other social ills.
A particularly popular measure for preventing propagation
of the “inferior” was compulsory sterilization, especially for those confined
in state institutions. Starting with Indiana in 1907, at least 27 states passed
such laws, ultimately ensnaring some 60,000 victims.
Among the most active states was North Carolina. Its sterilization
program lasted well into the ’70s, which is why several thousand of its victims
are still alive today.
Some of them testified this summer before a governor’s
task force pondering compensation for the outrages visited upon them by the
state.
The full details of the North Carolina program became
explosively public in a five-part series, “Against Their Will,”
run by the Winston-Salem Journal in 2002.
Among the revelations was the involvement of the Bowman
Gray (now the Wake Forest) School of Medicine in the program.
The medical school had long prided itself on hosting the
nation’s first-ever department of medical genetics, founded in 1941 by William
Allan. But it turns out that Dr. Allan was a devout eugenicist, determined to
reduce the supply of “defectives” by “eugenic measures systematically applied
by organized medicine.”
He and his successor, C. Nash Herndon, even provided
expert assistance to a North Carolina county’s “systematic effort to eliminate
certain genetically unfit strains from the local population.”
What went unmentioned in “Against Their Will” was the
central role the Carnegie Corporation of New York and one of its trustees,
Frederick Osborn, played in the establishment of the school’s medical genetics
program.
Like Dr. Allan and Dr. Herndon, Mr. Osborn was persuaded
that a genetics-trained medical profession could promote eugenics without the
taint of Nazi race purification.
That did not diminish his enthusiasm for state-sponsored
sterilization, however. Writing in A Preface to Eugenics in 1940, Mr.
Osborn noted approvingly that “the inexcusable process of allowing feebleminded
persons ... to reproduce their kind is on the way to being checked in a number of
states in which such persons may be sterilized.”
In his capacity as a Carnegie trustee, he secured several
grants from the Carnegie Corporation for the founding of the Bowman Gray
department of genetics, thereby furthering his goal of injecting eugenics into
the medical profession. Osborn was as well a director of the pro-eugenics
Pioneer Fund from 1937 to 1958, which also financed Dr. Herndon’s work.
As investigative reporter Edwin Black documents in War
Against the Weak, eugenics would not “have risen above ignorant rants
without the backing of corporate philanthropic largess.”
Mr. Black’s exhaustive and authoritative research turned
up mountains of evidence confirming the links between the eugenics movement and
our first major philanthropies, including the Carnegie Institution of
Washington, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Why did eugenics have such an appeal to our first major
modern philanthropists?
Because, as Carnegie famously argued, they believed that
most previous giving had been “indiscriminate charity ... spent as to encourage
the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy,” without addressing the underlying
circumstances that produced such conditions.
The new philanthropies, by contrast, were animated by “a
search for cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source,” according to the
words of John
D. Rockefeller.
The eugenics movement spoke directly to this yearning. Charles
Davenport, perhaps the most prominent American eugenicist, wondered
in 1910 why “tens of millions have been given to bolster up the weak and
alleviate the suffering of the sick,” while “no important means have been
provided to enable us to learn how the stream of weak and susceptible
protoplasm may be checked.”
This made eminent sense to the Carnegie Institution of
Washington. It paid for Mr. Davenport’s search for the protoplasm that caused
sloth, drunkenness, unworthiness, and other social ills from 1904 until 1939.
Frederick Osborn championed similar causes at the Carnegie Corporation for 26
years.
Philanthropy today still aspires to move beyond treating
mere symptoms of problems by getting to their causes.
As long as that is so, it should be haunted and humbled
by the recollection that this once drove it to treat American citizens as
nothing more than bundles of genetic deficiencies, demanding elimination by
science rather than “coddling” by charity.
The deep shame of eugenics should not be ignored by
philanthropy but rather embraced as its own “original sin.”
Just as does its Judeo-Christian prototype, it should
forever remind us that, for all our excellent intentions and formidable powers,
we are not imperious gods able to eradicate our flaws once and for all by some
grand, scientific intervention.
We are, rather, imperfect human beings called to
compassion and charitable care for other imperfect human beings.
But how do the Carnegie entities today view their
involvement in eugenics?
Asked if the Carnegie Corporation might wish to comment
on its support of the Bowman Gray medical-genetics program, a spokesman noted
that those grants were “an aberration” and a departure from better known,
manifestly beneficial programs reflecting “the dignity of each individual in a
democracy.” (Read the full response.)
But treating eugenics as a mere aberration mistakenly
suggests that it has nothing to teach contemporary foundations about the
dignity-denying potential of an extreme “root causes” approach.
I also contacted the Carnegie Institution, noting that I
could find no evidence of any official public apology over the years from
Carnegie for its eugenics support.
A spokesman responded: “Carnegie’s involvement with
eugenics was terminated in the late 1930s. We are not aware of what has been
said about it by Carnegie representatives in the intervening 70 years. We are
thus unable to confirm your assertion that there has never been an 'apology’ by
Carnegie. ...Eugenics was part of mainstream science at the time of Carnegie’s
involvement. We have never hidden our role. We also do not know whether
apologies were issued by any of the many other institutions that were involved
in this dark period in the history of science.” (Read the full response.)
A quick Google search would have shown that in fact many
apologies for eugenic involvement have been issued over the past few years,
especially by the governors of the states that were the most enthusiastic
sterilizers.
That includes the governor of North Carolina, who was
joined in public contrition in 2002 by the dean of the Wake Forest School of
Medicine and even the editors of the Winston-Salem Journal, which had
been an ardent backer of the North Carolina eugenics program in its day.
But apparently philanthropy means never having to say
you’re sorry, or even remembering whether you did or not.
While the Carnegie Corporation’s response is considerably
more sensitive to the issue than the Institution’s, neither suggests that Carnegie’s
philanthropies have come fully to
grips with the depth and significance of their involvement with eugenics.
Public apologies might in fact be in order, and perhaps
even contributions to the proposed compensation program for North Carolina’s
sterilization victims.
But above all, modern philanthropy should face directly
its complicity in eugenics, its own “original sin,” in order to insure that
enthusiasm for root-cause solutions never again pushes it into such hubristic
excess.
This article first appeared in the Chronicle
of Philanthropy under the title Uncovering a Foundation's
Central Role in a N.C. Medical School's Dark Chapter
David A. Hamburg
David A. Hamburg is the President
Emeritus at Carnegie Corporation of New York,
and his daughter Margaret Hamburg, is
a physician who has followed their footsteps into public service becoming
Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration
in 2009.
Vartan Gregorian
Vartan Gregorian is
the President, of the Carnegie Corporation of New York
He serves on several boards including the National
September 11 Memorial and Museum, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Michael Bloomberg
Bloomberg served as the 108th Mayor of New York City, holding office for three consecutive
terms, beginning with his first election in 2001. A Democrat before seeking elective office,
Bloomberg switched his party registration in 2001 to run for mayor as a Republican. He defeated opponent Mark Green in a
close election held just weeks after the September 11
terrorist attacks. He won a second term in 2005, and left the
Republican Party two years later. Bloomberg campaigned to change the city's
term limits law, and was elected to his third term in 2009 as an Independent candidate on the Republican ballot line. In 2018,
citing the need for Democrats to restore America's system of checks and
balances, Bloomberg re-registered as a Democrat.
Chairman Michael
R. Bloomberg
Michael R. Bloomberg
is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who served three terms as Mayor of New
York City, from 2002 through 2013.
Bloomberg was first elected in November 2001, less than
two months after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a time when many believed that
crime would return, businesses would flee, and New York would take decades to
recover. Instead, under Mayor Bloomberg’s leadership, the city – and lower
Manhattan – came back stronger and faster than anyone expected.
From his first day in office, when he spent time with the
men and women working at Ground Zero, Mayor Bloomberg made rebuilding lower
Manhattan – in ways that would honor all those killed that day – a top
priority. But by 2006, plans for building a memorial had stalled as its budget
soared, and concern grew that it would never be built. To avert a crisis in
public confidence, and to fulfill the city’s obligation to all those who lost
loved ones, Bloomberg took charge of the Memorial’s development and became the
Chairman of the National
September 11 Memorial & Museum.
American Academy
in Berlin
Henry A. Kissinger Prize
Since 2007 the Henry A. Kissinger Prize has been awarded annually to a
European or American who has made a lasting contribution to bettering the
transatlantic relationship. Previous recipients of the prize are former German
chancellor Helmut
Schmidt (2007); 41st President of the United States of America George H. W. Bush
(2008); former President of the Federal Republic of Germany Richard von Weizsäcker (2009); New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2010); and former German chancellor Helmut Kohl (2011).
The American Academy in
Berlin is a research and cultural
institution in Berlin whose stated
mission is to foster a greater understanding and dialogue between the people of
the United States and the people of Germany. The American Academy was founded
in September 1994 by a group of prominent Americans and Germans, among them Richard Holbrooke, Henry Kissinger, Richard von Weizsäcker, Fritz Stern, and Otto Graf Lambsdorff. It opened in 1998. The organization is
funded by private donations, with support coming from individuals as well as
corporations and foundations on both sides of the Atlantic. The German weekly
magazine Der Spiegel has
called the Academy “the world's most important center for American intellectual
life outside the US.
Henry Kissinger
Later roles
In November 2002, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to
chair the newly established National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to investigate the September 11
attacks.[109]
Kissinger stepped down as chairman on December 13, 2002, rather than reveal his
business client list, when queried about potential conflicts of interest.
"HENRY
KISSINGER'S PLAN OF DEPOPULATION Starts NOW!
melanated consciousnessdotcom
Published on Feb 16, 2017
In 1904 the Cold Spring Harbor Research facility was
started in the United Stated by eugenicist Charles Davenport with the funding
of prominent robber baron’s Carnegie, Rockefeller,
and Harriman.
Illuminati: The
Hidden Agenda for World Government
Ed Griffin interview with Norman Dodd in 1982
This is a very interesting video. "The man who tells
this story is none other than Mr. Norman Dodd, who in 1954 was the staff
director of the Congressional Special Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt
Foundations, sometimes referred to as the Reece Committee, in recognition of
its chairman, Congressman Carol Reece." He is here interviewed by Ed
Griffin back in 1982. Dodd is telling us about his research into the tax-exempt
organization and what they REALLY stand for. He shows us that the Carnegie Endowment, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim
Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation joined together to alter American history
and take over the whole education system in America, so the children can be
indoctrinated into accepting a World Government. Wes Penre.
We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie
Foundation began operations. In that year, the trustees, meeting for the first
time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance
of the year in a very learned fashion. The question is: “Is there any means known more effective
than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?”
And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to
humanity.
So then, in 1909, they raised the second question and
discussed it, namely: “How do we involve the United States in a war?”
Well, I doubt at that time if there was any subject more
removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country than its
involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt
very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. Then, finally, they
answered that question as follows: “We must control the State Department.” That very
naturally raises the question of how do we do that? And they answer it by
saying: “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this
country.” And, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective.
Then time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which
would be World War I. At that time they record on their minutes a shocking
report in which they dispatched to President Wilson a telegram, cautioning him
to see that the war does not end too quickly.
Finally, of course, the war is over. At that time their
interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the
United States to what it was prior to 1914 when World War I broke out. At that
point they came to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, “we must control
education in the United States.” They realize that that's a pretty
big task. It is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller
Foundation with the suggestion that that portion of education which could be
considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion
which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide
that the key to success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American
history.
So they approach four of the then-most prominent teachers
of American history in the country – people like Charles and Mary Byrd – and
their suggestion to them is: will they alter the manner in which they present
their subject? And they got turned down flat. So they then decide that it is
necessary for them to do as they say, “build our own stable of historians.”
Then they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which
specializes in fellowships, and say: “When we find young men in the process of
studying for doctorates in the field of American history and we feel that they
are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say-so?” And the
answer is yes. So, under that condition, eventually they assembled assemble
twenty, and they take this twenty potential teachers of American history to
London, and there they're briefed on what is expected of them when, as, and if
they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned.
That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American
Historical Association.
Toward the end of the 1920's, the Endowment grants to the
American Historical Association $400,000 for a study of our history in a manner
which points to what can this country look forward to in the future. That
culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in
essence a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last
volume is: The future of this country belongs to collectivism administered with
characteristic American efficiency. That's the story that ultimately grew out
of and, of course, was what could have been presented by the members of this
Congressional committee to the congress as a whole for just exactly what it
said. They never got to that point.
Norman Dodd On Tax
Exempt Foundations (Carnegie)
Kevin Gallagher
Published on Jun 12, 2008
Norman Dodd was interviewed in 1982 by G. Edward Griffin
regarding the time he spent as the head researcher for the Reece Committee.
John Kerry - Secretary
of State (2013–2017)
On December 15, 2012, several news outlets reported that
President Barack
Obama would nominate Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of
State,[136][137] after Susan Rice, widely
seen as Obama's preferred choice, withdrew her name from consideration citing a
politicized confirmation process following criticism of her response to the 2012 Benghazi attack.
Marriages and children
Kerry and his second wife--Mozambican-born businesswoman and philanthropist Teresa Heinz, the widow of Kerry's
late Pennsylvania Republican Senate colleague John Heinz—were
introduced to each other by Heinz at an Earth Day rally in
1990. Early the following year, Senator Heinz was killed in a plane crash near Lower Merion. Teresa has three sons from her
marriage to Heinz, Henry John IV, André, and Christopher.[192] Heinz
and Kerry were married on May 26, 1995, in Nantucket, Massachusetts.
Teresa Heinz is the chair of the Heinz Endowments
and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, disbursing money to various social and
environmental causes. She assists the City of Pittsburgh, where the Heinz
family has many financial and family connections. In recognition of her
philanthropy and activism, Heinz has received honorary doctoral degrees
from the following 12 institutions:
In 2003, Heinz was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Gold Medal
for Humanitarianism. She has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She
has been a Trustee of the St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire),
which Kerry attended.
Heinz is on the Board of Selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.
Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace in 2018
Civic and philanthropic activities
In February 2018, Pritzker was elected to succeed Harvey V. Fineberg as chairperson of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, taking effect May 2018.
Penny Sue Pritzker (born May 2, 1959) is an American billionaire
businesswoman, entrepreneur, and civic leader.[1] President Barack Obama
nominated Pritzker as United States Secretary of Commerce.
After being confirmed by a Senate vote of 97–1, she became the 38th person to
hold that position.
Pritzker spent her early career in business. She worked
her way up through the Pritzker
family business, eventually being appointed as one of three
successors to her uncle, Jay
Pritzker. She is the founder of PSP Capital Partners and Pritzker
Realty Group. She is also co-founder of Artemis Real Estate Partners. As of
October 2015, Forbes estimated
her net worth at $2.4 billion.[2] In 2009,
Forbes named Pritzker one of the 100 most powerful women in the world.
Before entering government service, Pritzker had been
involved in many Chicago
organizations, including the Chicago Board of Education, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and her
own foundation, the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation. Pritzker was an early
supporter of Obama's presidential candidacy, having been a friend of the Obama
family since their time in Chicago.
Alger Hiss –
President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from (1946–49)
Accusation of
espionage
On August 3,
1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist Party member, appeared
before the House Committee on Un-American Activities
(HUAC) to denounce Alger Hiss. A
senior editor at Time
magazine, Chambers had written a scathingly satirical editorial critical of the
Yalta
agreements.[29] Chambers
asserted that he had known Hiss as a member of "an underground
organization of the United States Communist Party" in the 1930s.[30] The
group, which Chambers called the "Ware Group,"
had been organized by agriculturalist Harold Ware, an American
communist intent on organizing black and white tenant farmers in the American
South against exploitation and debt peonage by the cotton industry (Ware had
died in 1935). According to Chambers, "the purpose of this group at that
time was not primarily espionage. Its original purpose was the Communist
infiltration of the American government. But espionage was certainly one of its
eventual objectives."[31] As
historian Tim Weiner points
out, "This was a crucial point. Infiltration and invisible political
influence were immoral, but arguably not illegal. Espionage was treason,
traditionally punishable by death. The distinction was not lost on the
cleverest member of HUAC, Congressman Richard Nixon.... He had been studying
the FBI's files for five months, courtesy of J. Edgar Hoover.
Nixon launched his political career in hot pursuit of Hiss and the alleged
secret Communists of the New Deal.
Career
Hiss was acting temporary secretary-general of
the San Francisco United Nations Conference on
International Organization (the United Nations Charter Conference),
which began on April 25, 1945. He subsequently became full Director of the State
Department's Office of Special
Political Affairs.[27]
According to Allen Weinstein, the Soviet delegate to the UN conference, Andrei Gromyko,
praised Hiss to his superior Stettinus for his "impartiality and
fairness".[28] In late
1946, Hiss left government service to become president of the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, where he served until May 5, 1949, when he was
forced to step down.
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966,
also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex
educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth
control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and
established organizations that evolved into the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America.
Eugenics
After World
War I, Sanger increasingly appealed to the societal need to limit
births by those least able to afford children. The affluent and educated
already limited their child-bearing, while the poor and uneducated lacked
access to contraception and information about birth control.[108] Here
she found an area of overlap with eugenicists.[108] She
believed that they both sought to "assist the race toward the elimination of
the unfit." They differed in that "eugenists imply or insist that a
woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her
duty to the state."[109] Sanger
was a proponent of negative eugenics, which aimed to improve human hereditary
traits through social intervention by reducing the reproduction of those who
were considered unfit.
Carnegie stages
In embryology,
Carnegie stages are a standardized system of 23 stages used to
provide a unified developmental chronology of the vertebrate embryo.
The stages are delineated through the development of
structures, not by size or the number of days of development, and so the
chronology can vary between species, and to a certain extent between embryos.
In the human being only
the first 60 days of development are covered; at that point the term embryo is usually
replaced with the term fetus.
It was based on work by Streeter (1942) and O'Rahilly and
Müller (1987). The name "Carnegie stages" comes from the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
While the Carnegie stages provide a universal system for
staging and comparing the embryonic development of most vertebrates, other
systems are occasionally used for the common model organisms in developmental biology, such as the Hamburger–Hamilton stages in the chick.
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