Below are excerpts from an article entited “Who’s Behind the Attack on Liberal Professors,” posted three years ago by George Mason U’s History News Network:
… In 1971 the National Chamber of Commerce circulated a memo by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell among business leaders which claimed that “the American economic system” of business and free markets was “under broad attack” by “Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic.” Powell argued that those engaged in this attack come from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”
According to the Powell memo, the key to solving this problem was to get business people to “confront this problem as a primary responsibility of corporate management” by building organizations that will use “careful long-range planning and implementation, in consistency of action over an indefinite period of years, in the scale of financing only available in joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.” It helped immeasurably, Powell noted, that the boards of trustees of universities “overwhelmingly are composed of men and women who are leaders in the system,” and that most of the media “are owned and theoretically controlled by corporations which depend upon profits, and the free enterprise system to survive.”
Powell wrote that these organizations should employ a “faculty of scholars” to publish in journals, write “books, paperbacks and pamphlets,” with speakers and a speaker’s bureau, as well as develop organizations to evaluate textbooks, and engage in a “long range effort” to correct the purported imbalances in campus faculties. “The television networks should be monitored in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” Powell said that this effort must also target the judicial system.
The “Four Sisters” [NB: Why right wing foundations established and run largely by men are called “The Four Sisters” is a very subsidiary but perplexing question.]
In 1973, in response to the Powell memo, Joseph Coors and Christian-right leader Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation. Coors told Lee Edwards, historian of the Heritage Foundation, that the Powell memo persuaded him that American business was “ignoring a crisis.” In response, Coors decided to help provide the seed funding for the creation of what was to become the Heritage Foundation, giving $250,000.(1)
Subsequently, the Olin Foundation, under the direction of its president, former Treasury Secretary William Simon (author of the influential 1979 book A Time for Truth), began funding similar organizations in concert with “the Four Sisters“–Richard Mellon Scaife’s various foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation–along with Coors’s foundations, foundations associated with the Koch oil family, and a group of large corporations. (In this article, I will refer to this group of funders as the “Four Sisters Funding Group” or FSFG.)
Following Powell’s long-term plan to “build a movement,” FSFG has funded and built a network of think tanks, advocacy organizations, and expanded into media, lobbying, and other areas. The work was slow but effective. As Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, told a group of conservative business people, “things take time. It takes at least 10 years for a radical new idea to emerge from obscurity.”
Creating “Conventional Wisdom”
Now, after 30 years of effort, this core FSFG has built a comprehensive ideological infrastructure. There are now over 500 organizations, with the Heritage Foundation at the hub, all funded by this core group. David Callahan’s 1999 study, $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s, found that just the top 20 of the organizations spent over $1 billion on this ideological effort in the 1990s.
The right-wing movement’s messages are orchestrated and amplified to sound like a mass “movement” consisting of many “voices.” Using “messaging”–communication techniques from the fields of marketing, public relations, and corporate image-management–the movement appeals to people’s deeper feelings and values. Messages are repeated until they become “conventional wisdom.” Examples include lines like “Social Security is going broke” and “public schools are failing.” Both statements are questionable, yet both have been firmly embedded in the “public mind” by purposeful repetition through multiple channels. This orchestration has been referred to as a “Mighty Wurlitzer, “ a CIA term that refers to propaganda that is repeated over and over again in numerous places until the public believes what it’s hearing must be true. …
… So how does all this relate to the attack on academic freedom which Foner and Gilmore complained about?
It turns out that many of the most important attacks are part of a campaign organized by conservative foundations, as a study by report by the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) found. In a section entitled, “Targeting the Academy” the report discusses right-wing attacks on academia, including “political correctness” campaigns, efforts to use alumni contributions to advance a conservative agenda, efforts to take over or de-fund the National Endowment for the Humanities and to de-fund the National Endowment for the Arts. These attacks follow the pattern outlined in the Powell memo — attack the patriotism of liberals and attempt to convince trustees of colleges and universities to remove them, replacing them with ideological “conservatives.”
The FSFG supports organizations like Accuracy in Academia, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the National Association of Scholars, the Madison Center for Educational Affairs (their “Collegiate Network” links over 70 student newspapers), the Institute for Educational Affairs and others. These organizations work to transform academia toward the right’s ideological agenda. …
