Joe Waters: This is a topic that has been of interest to us since at least April of 2019. The topic is the renewal of philanthropy with justice at the center. The first paper that Capita actually ever published was a white paper in 2019 entitled, ‘Tomorrow is Now: New Directions for Children’s Philanthropy’, so I’m delighted to return to this important topic.
A historian of U.S. philanthropy, the social sciences, and racial equality, Maribel Morey is the founding Executive Director of the Miami Institute for Social Sciences, a nonprofit organization centering work of global majority scholars in the social sciences as a means both for improving the integrity and rigor of these fields and for building more inclusive national and international political economies. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants, for example, from the Andrew Carnegie Scholars Program at the Chronicle Corporation of New York (a little bit of an irony there), the William Flora Hewlett Foundation, The Fulbright Program, and the American Scandinavian Foundation. Maribel’s peer-reviewed work has appeared in humanity, law, culture, and humanities, and reviews in American History. Her public scholarship has appeared on HistPhil, a blog that she co-founded and co-edits which explores the history of philanthropy, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She received her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University, a law degree from NYU, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame.
Your book tells the story of one philanthropy’s investment in one sociological study, but it is a story that is much larger than that and generalizable to how much Anglo-American philanthropy has operated to underwrite white domination both here in the United States and around the world, particularly in Africa. Why is the Carnegie Corporation’s funding of An American Dilemma a good representation of how philanthropy as a field has historically underwritten white domination globally?
Maribel Morey: That’s a hard question for a historian. I do subscribe to the idea that to know one foundation is to know one foundation, so I do not like to make generalizations about philanthropy or foundations from the study of one organization. In the book, I described the Carnegie Corporation’s funding patterns in the first half of the 20th century in the cooperative social sciences, specifically in the three major studies it financed. I detail its own relationships to other foundations such as Rockefeller Foundation and also Rockefeller’s Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, The General Education Board, and the Phelps Stokes Fund. Each organization is its own organism; they’re made up of human beings who have different personalities and also have different relationships with each other. A board can change very much the moment that, as I explained in the book, three-lifetime members pass away. That changes the dynamics. Understanding it for me takes so much time, really because you need to consider a combination of people to really understand the dynamics between leadership, not just the president of the organization, but also his relationship to the board, their advisors, how those dialogues take place, and understanding who has a more dominant opinion on certain topics or others, which takes years in the archives. That’s just to understand one organization in one period of time on a particular topic.
I think that’s really important to appreciate how we even talk about philanthropy today. What is philanthropy? Perhaps these foundations should not be equated with philanthropy. Philanthropy is a love of mankind or love for others. There are a lot of people who do that in their day-to-day lives with a lot less money, possibly with no money, but rather with their time or with their intentions. Disentangling philanthropy from foundations is important and then when we’re talking about foundations, understanding how they are different combinations of people over time and space and that that requires a lot of analysis.
Joe Waters: Very interesting. Let’s talk first about leadership if we could. Tell us about the figures of Andrew Carnegie and Frederick Keppel, in particular, who figure prominently in the narrative of your book and who certainly figure prominently in the history at least of foundations, if not philanthropy, in the early part of the 20th century in the United States. Why are they important?
Maribel Morey: Frederick Keppel was president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York from the 1920s to the early 1940s and he oversees the funding of An American Dilemma. Before that, he also oversaw the funding of the Poor White Study in South Africa, published in 1932, and An African Survey through Chatham House in London which was published in 1938. He’s a central figure. I just wrote a piece for HistPhil on the methodology behind this project and once I did a quick process (probably a year and a half) of understanding the documents of a Carnegie Corporation related to its direct funding of An American Dilemma, I backtracked and said let me go with a bird’s eye view of the organization from its founding in the night in 1911 up until the 1940s to understand its framework. As much as Frederick Keppel was the president overseeing the funding of An American Dilemma, he came into an organization with its own culture and its own expectations. I was trying to understand what that space was like. That meant looking through first the annual reports and the board minutes, then after that really understanding the networks of people, including Keppel and his advisors, and understanding the space around him – part of that space was Andrew Carnegie.
In today’s parliaments, we talk about the ‘dead hands’, the donor’s intent in foundation words. Carnegie did play a central role in the understanding of donor’s intent in the 1910s and 20s, much as other founders still do in their foundations long after their death. For Keppel, he was trying to understand what this organization that he was inheriting was. At the time, the organization’s geographic scope was limited to the U.S., Canada, and the British colonies. While taking over this organization, the central question was, “How do we define the U.S.?” Did it include the Philippines? What are the British colonies? You could go to a team of lawyers who would go through different legal documents and make sense of these geographic spaces and give advice.
Another figure who played a prominent role, at least in understanding what the British colonies meant, was James Bertram. He was a personal secretary of Andrew Carnegie who became a lifetime trustee of Carnegie Corporation. Before Andrew Carnegie established Carnegie Corporation, he did a lot of philanthropy too, aside from the organizations he established. Before that though, again in scope, Carnegie Corporation was the largest in wealth. Bertram played a central role in fielding a lot of the requests that were coming to Andrew Carnegie for philanthropic giving, specifically with the definition of the British colony. He had a high opinion about what Andrew Carnegie had intended with that term and he specifically advised, repeatedly, that Andrew Carnegie had intended communities of white people. We were not to follow what the British government might be saying is a colony, a commonwealth, or a dominion, but really to analyze where white communities could be dominant in different parts of the British Empire. He said this would mean that we cannot and will not fund in West Africa. We will fund in East Africa, we will fund in South Africa, even though it’s a dominion, also New Zealand, and never India. These are the dynamics at play. The book is about understanding the role of Andrew Carnegie and shaping the geographic scope and substantive mission of the organization that Keppel inherited and then to what extent within that framework Kepple introduced his own preferences.
Keppel starts introducing his own preferences for funding the social sciences. He had been Dean of Columbia College, he had worked in the war department during the first world war, and started seeing the value of data collection. Inheriting an organization that was really about privileging the needs of white people in the Anglo-American world, he started seeing a role for himself in spearheading these projects of funding cooperative social science studies targeted toward white policymakers.
Joe Waters: Before we go on to talk about An American Dilemma, in particular, I’m curious – were these the attitudes of Andrew Carnegie’s colleagues, the others who established large significant foundations like this? How typical was it among these early foundations in the 20th century to be so explicit in funding communities of white people?
Maribel Morey: I don’t think he was so uncommon. Perhaps more than other founders, definitely more than John D. Rockefeller. Carnegie liked to write down his ideas about the philanthropy gospel of wealth in the triumph of democracy. He had big ideas about the international order, the role of wealth redistribution, and ‘philanthropy’ as an alternative to socialism. Perhaps more than others in his peer group he liked to tease it out in prose. There’s more of a formal paper trail in many ways. As I explained in the book, the idea of an Anglo-American union was not so unique. It’s at the heart of the founding of Chatham House in London and the Council of Foreign Relations in New York. It’s in the heart of even today how many people assume that international order requires white Anglo-American unity between London and DC.
Joe Waters: I think one thing that’s striking about the book is not only the influence of a particular foundation, here the Carnegie Corporation, in financing a particular body of sociological research that has enormous influence not only on as you describe this notion of white domination, but it has an enormous influence in public policy, generally speaking. You mentioned Chatham House, you mentioned the Council of Foreign Relations. In addition to how explicit, as you just described, he was around this notion of communities of white people, how explicit was he in thinking of how the foundation might influence public policy and politics?
Maribel Morey: That’s at the heart of the game of foundations. There’s a tension of not wanting to seem interested in shaping legislation but wanting to be impactful. A very clear way of showing the impact is through the influence of public policy and hopefully a little bit amorphous so that you don’t seem like you’re trying to be political, but sharp enough and clear enough that you can show your board.
In many ways, it’s interesting – being in dialogue with people in my own life who are in philanthropy thinking that this vision of strategic philanthropy where you’re trying to prove the impact of grant-making decisions is something very modern, very new, but we see it from the start of these organizations in the early 20th century. It might not be in graphs or clear documents, but they do want to see that their money goes towards some sort of change or to solve some sort of problem.
I would say that Keppel was very clear that he wanted these studies to have some policy effect and how I would say that – that’s in my conclusion – some of the data behind that would be in the selection of advisors. One of his main inspirations for going to British Africa was his interactions with an individual called J.H. Oldham, who becomes his main advisor on the continent, based in London. He said in 1925 that he wanted more funding for research on the continent – he’s speaking on behalf of the British Colonial Office and wants some of the U.S. dollars. They have to convince these people sitting in New York City that it’s worth their time and money to channel money across the Atlantic. He explains that there’s a rising racial consciousness amongst Africans and that’s going to affect Keppel too; any growth in transatlantic racial consciousness amongst black people could really threaten international order. From the start, a lot of these projects are seen as a way to address a societal problem that they perceive to be really imminent. The advisors are people who are thinking through how to apply this research to a problem they see.
In South Africa, the problem they see is poverty amongst white people, specifically Afrikaners. These advisors see that as destabilizing white domination in the region and that, for them, is key to international peace… that’s a jump. It’s like saying if there’s instability in white domination there would be instability in peace. Why? Because it’s assumed in many ways that white people will react with violence. The same with the Chatham House recommendation for An African Survey – the problem being the fear of losing control of the continent. Learning from each other’s imperial experiences across the continent could help solidify and continue the white presence on the continent. The advisors the Carnegie Corporation corporation has in these networks are trying to solve a public problem – a perceived one.
Joe Waters: Let’s talk about An American Dilemma, in particular. This was the sociological survey by Gunner Myrdal that was financed by the Carnegie Corporation. It really is at the heart of your book and at the heart of your claims about how the work that was happening then and there was underwriting white domination. Tell us about the book, tell us about Myrdal. How did it get started that Carnegie Corporation funded this? Then we’ll start to talk about the implications.
Maribel Morey: With An American Dilemma, usually the way it’s historically been told is that there was a board member, Newton Baker, who suggested the project. That’s how many scholars have told the story and actually Keppel himself, in the preface to the book, amplifies Baker’s role. I’ve had the good fortune of being able to spend countless amounts of wasteless time in the archives going through documents, years and years of going through uncatalogued boxes, etc.
Another thing that scholars in that same spirit would do is undermine Keppel’s vision as a leader. He’s been characterized as someone who went with the flow and just funded things as they came. But, as I described him, he did have a vision. He was in dialogue with his grantees and his advisors, but there was a vision. Some of the people closest to him during the funding of An American Dilemma, including Donald Young, a sociologist, and others, would say that Keppel was known for attributing ideas to other people and that this project was his baby. The direct quotes are in the book, White Philanthropy. This was part of his leadership style. By the time he was funding An American Dilemma, this trustee and this board member [Newton Baker] had passed away, so he could use him as he wished. It became a useful tool for him too because it was a risky project in the U.S. for the reason that nobody actually commissioned it, and no advisor asked for this project – in South Africa, the Poor White Study was requested by advisors and in Chatham House, An African Survey was requested by advisors, though he was in dialogue and helped shape the concept. This one: nobody. In spirit, he [Keppel] was the one who drove it. They rented an office for Myrdal within walking distance from the corporation and he oversaw the day-to-day handling of it directly from the office of the president, so there was a lot at stake. It was a risky project at the end of his presidency, so it was helpful for him to have a deceased trustee who had been secretary of war, highly respected across the U.S. to whom he could really attribute some of the heat.
This also became helpful when he was writing the preface that Baker was Southern. One of his anxieties, the one tension that he had with Myrdal in this project was that while they both agreed that white Americans should remain the main audience for the book, Myrdal came to the conclusion that he didn’t really have to appeal to white Southerners. From his perspective, they were less affluent, less powerful, and divided. He could write a whole book shaping a national policy program around black Americans that appealed to the more powerful white Americans i.e white Northerners and New Dealers. That got Keppel nervous, because he assumed, like in the South African study, you had to bring in Afrikaners and British settlers together, much like you here have to bring white people across regions together for something like a policy program to work. So, he really highlights in the foreword that Baker was a Southern man so if you’re a white, Southern reader, one of your own really wanted this project to come about, so you should really read this with the best intentions. If you see anything in this book that’s critical of the white South, just so you know, this is not Myrdal’s first language, so forgive him.
Many people would remember the project, but in the book itself, Myrdal says, “The American dilemma is a moral dilemma in the hearts and minds of white Americans. It’s a dilemma between the anti-black discriminatory practices and the American ideals.” The way to solve this is to correct these discriminatory practices and meet these ideals. He offers what he calls a ‘white man’s rank order’ – discriminations tailored to the sensibilities of white Americans to tackle first the things that they’re not as tied to in forms of white supremacy that he themes and then dealing with the ones that they are most tied to, such as intermarriage and especially anything that has to do with white women. He gives a whole order and he says if you follow this, you will meet up to your ideals. As he explains, this is critically important during the second world war, because the U.S. needs to present itself as a particularly moral country on the world stage.
When you start penetrating this project though, as I explained in the quotations in the book, his vision of assimilation is about assimilating blackness and making it disappear into whiteness, to make the U.S. and the spirit one of the strongest white nations in the world. One of the quotes here is, “Americans also recognize that America has to take world leadership. The coming difficult decades will be America’s turn in the endless sequence of main actors on the world stage. America then will have a major responsibility for the manner in which humanity approaches the long era during which the white people will have to adjust to shrinkage while the colored are bound to expand in numbers in the level of industrial civilization and political power. For perhaps several decades the whites will still hold the lead and America will be the most powerful white nation.”
Joe Waters: What is the enduring influence of this text in American policy and in American philanthropy from after the 1940s straight through to the present?
Maribel Morey: Famously, An American Dilemma was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. More deeply, it’s penetrated just how many Americans talk about racial equality. There’s a big equation in the U.S. between racial equality and racial assimilation – the erasure of non-white groups into a white nation, a wide-angle American nation. Those two assumptions are there. That’s a critical read of it. On a more forgiving read, it’s also a text that allows BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) groups to speak about the moral obligations of a dominant white Anglo-American group, to treat BIPOC groups better. It serves as a useful tool for a dialectic on what it means to be moral, even if the definition itself is lacking.
Joe Waters: As I was reading the book, I was thinking, ‘What is today’s version of An American Dilemma in philanthropy?’ Has there been something similar published in the last decade or two, underwritten by large philanthropic organizations, that is having a similar effect in terms of intentionally or unintentionally continuing to perpetuate white domination and white supremacy?
Maribel Morey: Something that you see in the book is just the subtle ways that networks of advisors come to be. I’m putting myself in the position of a program officer or someone on the board – why do I think that certain people are authoritative in this topic? What audience am I seeking to impact? They were still trying to impact policymakers, arguably in the Global North. We’re still in the echoes of An American Dilemma or this earlier 20th-century history of maintaining a white audience. So, that’s one: who are your advisors, how are they shaping authority, and why do you think they’re authoritative?
Then, two: how are they defining the problems to be solved? Are they in fact problems? Was rising racial consciousness really a problem? I would say, no. How are problems being defined and relatedly, why are we experiencing fear? Because these earlier actors feared this rising racial consciousness and they expressed it as a threat to international order. Did it have to be a threat to international order if one was willing to all come together in shared dignity and respect?
I tell a very specific history, because being a historian I’m gonna have to root myself in a lot of footnotes and documents. At the same time, we can also see ourselves in this story. This is not just a story about Carnegie Corporation, An American Dilemma, the Poor White Study and An African Survey, it’s a history and a present about philanthropy, why they fund certain projects, the role that they expect these projects to play, the ripple effects in our lives, how we think about equality. More specifically for scholars, it’s about who gets funded and who doesn’t, depending on their demographic makeup, how they imagine the role of the social sciences play in society. Are we establishing knowledge so that dominant groups can dominate better, or is there a deeper public purpose to knowledge creation in the social sciences that’s more public-oriented?
Joe Waters: One question that we received from those who registered for this event is around transparency and what is perceived as the enduring lack of transparency in large philanthropy, in particular, but maybe even more so in small philanthropy – family foundations who funded a particular community and they get together the day after Thanksgiving and they make the decisions about what they’re going to fund in their small town or wherever the case may be. Based on your historical investigation and the investigations of others, how are foundations reckoning with the question that you have identified: who are the advisors, and who defines the problem? How do we make the answers to those questions, wrestling with those questions more transparent and responsive to the people who are experiencing the problem that perhaps isn’t actually a problem to them?
Maribel Morey: Transparency can go from the level of, ‘should MacKenzie Scott feel an obligation to say why she’s selecting certain groups over others or is a two-paragraph, medium post sufficient?’ I would argue that when you can shape civil society and whole social movements in the U.S., to a certain degree you’re threatening vibrant democratic life, there’s a higher obligation to be more transparent on why you’re choosing certain groups and how these groups fit into your vision for the future of society and how you hope for it to change. Transparency to many of us who care about democratic life is essential to empower members of our society to understand how public goods and public spaces are being shaped, spaces and goods that they should have a voice in shaping.
There are also questions about how organizations themselves, aside from individual philanthropists and how much impact they’re having, how much transparency they owe the public. As far as organizations that have some obligation for transparency as a 501(c)(3) or something, I still think they should amplify and go beyond that 501(c)(3) obligation for similar reasons. One thing at the heart of it, that I think we have to remember is that it cannot just simply be platitudes to say that the purpose of your organization is to serve the public. Honestly, if you are an organization that’s serving the public, whether you’re a university, a foundation, or a non-profit, you have an obligation to remain in dialogue with the public. Otherwise, you’re just being paternalistic and assuming that you know what they want and you don’t need to talk to them about it and you never need to tell them anything. A foundation should be in dialogue and explaining to the public they’re serving around the world, so not just the U.S. public, but any public they’re penetrating – how and why they’re making their decisions, who is influencing their decisions, what they expect from that funding conclusion, and how they see their impacts playing out. That’s informing the very public, that’s actually respecting the public that you say you’re serving.
In a similar way, if I had to go into knowledge production in the Academy we really, as many other people have been saying for a long time, question the privatization of knowledge production, having a lot more that’s open access. What’s the role of knowledge production if not for the public?
Joe Waters: I want to go back to what you said about MacKenzie Scott because she has made tremendous investments in, for example, HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), which I think are very well-intentioned in terms of promoting justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, but as you pointed out, not transparent at all. How do we reconcile that tension? I may be very concerned about the organizations that are benefiting from her philanthropy while also having some real concerns about how it’s being done. I think a lot of people maybe don’t want to raise the concern about transparency or dialogue with the public, because frankly, they support the end, even if they don’t necessarily support the means.
Maribel Morey: That’s something when I was in law school that you have to confront pretty early on. You can’t just be a fan of the Supreme Court when it’s in your favor and say you should have a heavy Supreme Court and a disabled congress or legislative branch, for example. I think at some level our integrity as thinkers requires us to think beyond just that the ends justify the means and think about what kind of democratic society is most democratic, whether or not that particular segment of it is on our team. Whether or not a very affluent giver is on our team, we have to think about what role they are playing in a democracy, ultimately. They can be benevolent today, but as we know, the Supreme Court can change and they’re no longer on your side. Ultimately, what is a democracy, and what institutions further that? Sometimes you can’t reconcile and it’s okay to own two or multiple truths. Even going back to An American Dilemma, I can understand and appreciate An American Dilemma, the text, as a tool and also understand its roots in white supremacy. Those two things can coexist as a tool for dialogue and equality while it’s still rooted in white supremacy.
In a similar way, one can acknowledge and honor the fact that certain groups that you might like seeing getting funding are getting funding while also saying, ‘I’m not sure about the lack of transparency,’ not only as a democratic obligation but also the anxiety that it brings to the nonprofit world and civil society. It’s not the most empowered civil society if it’s at the beck and call of the whims of one person, where you’re willing to put aside its principles of the role that everyday people should be playing in civil society in order to get the next big check.
Joe Waters: That’s really helpful. Maribel, I want to give you an opportunity to reflect on the experience of writing this book, in part, because as I read in the acknowledgments, you did so as a Carnegie fellow, I believe. You had some funding from Carnegie. You note in the acknowledgments that irony or perhaps that tension was not lost on you in the writing of the book. Could you reflect on your own experience of benefiting from a philanthropic investment to do this sort of investigatory work?
Maribel Morey: That’s a tricky one. I got this big award, in fact, I was nine months pregnant with my daughter when I was selected by the University to be the junior member to apply for this grant and it escaped my mind… There I am with a five-month-old baby and I got this grant. It’s two years of sabbatical from my teaching to write. I got this grant from Carnegie Corporation, which feels nice, it’s prestigious, it’s cool, but then I have this grant as a non-black Latina to write two studies (there’s a second book in the making) on the lived experience of black Americans and philanthropy. I couldn’t separate it from my mind that I was writing a book on a white Swede in America and the whole network of white Anglo-Americans and approximate other ethnic groups, in shaping knowledge on black people across the Atlantic. What role was I playing in the Academy? If I get this award, I use it to get a higher position or something, then who am I, ethically in the story I’m living and researching? I think it definitely really got me thinking about the role I wanted to play in the Academy and to what extent I wanted to do something about the inequities of knowledge production.
One of the reviewers really led me into that process of writing, which clarified my writing of this book. I had to let go of the expectation of getting into a more prestigious, white Anglo-American space in the Academy. That made it harder to publish this book, for obvious reasons. In turn, it starts the beginning of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences, which we founded as a space to bring together global majority scholars across the Global South and North to learn from each other, something that we don’t generally do, because we’re so focused on responding to the problems shaped by leading wide-angle Americans in the Academy, trying to please these different, dominant groups that shape gatekeeping, from peer review to tenure. We are creating a space for meeting each other and for talking about how we think about knowledge production in the Academy inequities. Ultimately, I see that as really key for international peace if we had to say something – an honest forum with inclusive dialogues by academics thinking about how to think about each other, which is at the groundwork of community building. There’s a lot of internal analysis and transformation in the process of writing this book.
Joe Waters: I do want to just take a few more minutes here and invite you to read a passage of the book of your selection so that we can hear the tone of it.
Maribel Morey: “In presenting this colonial African history to An American Dilemma, White Philanthropy furthermore introduces to scholars of African Studies, Transnational Studies, Global History, World Systems, Imperial History, etc. who long have analyzed the making of a wide-angle American world order and black resistance to the making of global white supremacy, how An American Dilemma was linked to the Poor White Problem in South Africa and An African Survey as part of Carnegie Corporation’s plan in the first half of the 20th century to further solidify white Anglo-American rule and black subjection across the Atlantic. And yet, as much as I intend to contribute to scholarly conversations on An American Dilemma, I have not written this book simply for this purpose. I also have written it to disrupt contemporary public conversations about racial equality and white supremacy in the U.S. today, because we Americans need to acknowledge that our national conversations about racial equality, still so shaped by An American Dilemma, continue to be intrinsically connected to a project among white funders, policymakers and their advisors in the social sciences and education during the early 20th century to create a world order led by white Anglo-Americans. I thus propose that when we Americans talk about ways to create a future free of racial domination within and beyond the United States, we should realize which intellectual sources on racial equality, such as An American Dilemma, are tying us down to continued white domination and non-white subjugation. For a more egalitarian future in the intrinsically connected national and international levels, let us find inspiration not in such texts, such as An American Dilemma, which are only thinly disguised efforts to continue wide-angle American rule, but rather in those individuals described in the following pages who resisted the making of this white world order.”
Joe Waters: Thank you for your time, for joining us today, and for helping us to think not only about this particular episode in the history of philanthropy which you describe in the book but also in the conversation today, thinking about things like who defines what a problem is that funders are trying to solve? Who are the network of advisors that shape the problem and the potential solutions to that problem? And, how can all of us in civil society, but funders especially, be more in dialogue with the publics that they seek to serve?
Watch the video recording of this interview here.