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Goals Reached, Donor on Right Closes Up Shop
By Jason DeParle
The New York Times
Sunday 29 May 2005
Washington - Without it, the Federalist Society might not exist, nor
its network of 35,000 conservative lawyers. Economic analysis might hold less
sway in American courts. The premier idea factories of the right, from the Hoover
Institution to the Heritage Foundation, would have lost millions of dollars
in core support. And some classics of the conservative canon would have lost
their financier, including Allan Bloom's lament of academic decline and Charles
Murray's attacks on welfare.
Part Medici, part venture capitalist, the John M. Olin Foundation has spent
three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right and exciting the
envy of the left. Now the foundation is closing its doors. In telling the organization
to spend his money within a generation, John M. Olin, a Midwestern ammunition
and chemical magnate, sought to maximize his fortune's influence and keep it
from falling into hostile - that is, liberal - hands.
In the budget offices of the right, the loss of Olin, though long anticipated,
is bringing a stab of anxiety, as total annual giving of up to $20 million disappears
from policy organizations, journals and academic aeries. Yet it is a measure
of the foundation's success that the anxiety has not been greater. While a generation
ago just three or four major foundations operated on the right, today's conservatism
has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.
At a recent farewell dinner in New York that drew a crowd of prominent thinkers
and doers, James Piereson, the longtime director of Olin, recounted the 1970's
threats that the foundation set out to address: economic decline, urban disorder
and Soviet expansionism. By contrast, Mr. Piereson said, critics now say "the
United States is too powerful" and its people "too proud."
"This," Mr. Piereson added wryly, "is an exchange that John
Olin would have gladly accepted."
Feeling outmatched in the war of ideas, liberal groups have spent years studying
conservative foundations the way Pepsi studies Coke, searching for trade secrets.
They say that Olin and its allies have pushed an agenda that spread wealth at
the top and insecurity below, and that left market excesses unchecked - and
that they have done so with estimable skill.
"The right has done a marvelous job," said Rob Stein, a former official
in the Clinton administration who has formed an organization, the Democracy
Alliance, to develop rival machinery on the left. "They are strategic,
coordinated, disciplined and well financed. And they're well within their rights
in a democracy to have done what they've done."
Mr. Piereson says that one Olin secret is plain to see: its interest in abstract
ideas, removed from day-to-day politics. With conservatives in power, he worries
that foundations and donors will focus too heavily on "public policy sorts
of things," like school choice or anti-tax campaigns; by contrast, Mr.
Piereson spent millions on the Olin Center for Inquiry Into the Theory and Practice
of Democracy at the University of Chicago, where a typical conference examined
the legacy of Rousseau.
As a result, Mr. Piereson is spending his last months in office promoting a
route to political influence - intellectual armament - as unlikely as it has
been effective. "The ideas have to be tended to," Mr. Piereson said.
"Only after that can you tend to the policies."
John M. Olin knew the value of ammunition. In 1892, the year he was born, his
father started a mining explosives company in East Alton, Ill., that soon began
making bullets. Together, they built a manufacturing behemoth that sold 15 billion
rounds during World War II and went on to make cellophane, metals, rocket fuel,
paper, pharmaceuticals and sporting goods. An avid sportsman, Mr. Olin bred
horses, hunted and fished; according to a biography to be published by Encounter
this fall, "A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed
America" by John J. Miller, he sent boxes of salmon to a favorite politician,
Richard M. Nixon.
In 1969 when armed students took over a building at his alma mater, Cornell
University, Mr. Olin was shaken. Four years later, past his 80th birthday, he
began pouring time and money into the small foundation he created 20 years earlier,
saying he wanted to preserve the free enterprise system that had made his own
wealth possible.
Mr. Olin and his wife, Evelyn, gave the foundation about $145 million; riding
two bull markets since his death in 1982, it has given out about $380 million.
About $6 million is left and will be awarded before the doors of its office
in New York close in November.
With William E. Simon, a former Treasury secretary, as its first president,
the foundation quickly focused on intellectual elites. "The basic instincts
of the American people were conservative, but the intellectuals are moving in
an opposite direction," said Mr. Piereson, who joined the foundation in
1981 and became its director four years later. "Our job was to show the
American people why they were right."
Over time, Olin gave more than $9 million each to the Heritage Foundation and
the American Enterprise Institute, Washington institutions that fight for causes
like lower taxes and less government regulation. Yet it also financed more esoteric
pursuits like The New Criterion, a literary journal where typical fare is a
long attack on the Modern Language Association, a society of English professors.
"We weren't just trying to defend capitalism," Mr. Piereson said,
but to defend a broader free society "along lines that included religion,
history, literature and the arts."
Mr. Piereson said he had few specific expectations when he helped a little-known
political theorist, Allan Bloom, create the democracy center in Chicago. But
after a few years of high-brow seminars, Mr. Bloom wrote "The Closing of
the American Mind," which topped best-seller lists in 1987 and inspired
the continuing assault on campus liberalism.
The foundation's staff was similarly surprised when a $25,000 grant to an obscure
social scientist, Charles Murray, helped revolutionize the welfare debate. Conservatives
had long attacked poor people as abusing welfare programs. Mr. Murray's 1984
book, "Losing Ground," attacked the programs as abusing the poor by
diverting them from work and marriage. By equating cutting with caring, Mr.
Murray helped conservatives lay claim to the mantle of compassion as they pushed
tough new welfare laws.
Much of Olin's giving has centered on law schools, reflecting Mr. Piereson's
belief that they disproportionately shape public life. A $20,000 grant in 1982
helped law students organize a conference, and one of the most influential legal
groups of the 20th century emerged, the Federalist Society.
The society now has chapters at almost every law school, and a swarm of alumni
in the Bush administration dedicated to what the group calls limited government
and judicial restraint. "It's not clear whether we would have existed without
Olin's support," said Eugene Meyer, the society's president.
Even more influential has been Olin's support of the law and economics movement,
which has transformed legal thinking. Its supporters say that economic tools,
like cost-benefit analysis, bring rationality to the law, while critics warn
that the focus on economics can cheat notions like fairness that defy quantification.
Olin has spent $68 million on law and economics programs, including those at
Harvard, Yale, Stanford and the University of Chicago. "I saw it as a way
into the law schools - I probably shouldn't confess that," Mr. Piereson
said. "Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects."
The foundation has had its disappointments. Olin spent more than $500,000 each
at Duke and the University of Pennsylvania for programs in law and economics
that it discontinued, saying they had failed to have a sufficient impact. And
not every donation has gone toward erudition.
A $5,000 grant helped the journalist David Brock write his 1993 book, "The
Real Anita Hill," in which he elaborated on his incendiary charges that
impugned the character of Ms. Hill, the critic of Justice Clarence Thomas. Breaking
with the right, Mr. Brock later apologized.
Yet even Olin's ideological critics envy the foundation's record. "Their
grant-making strategy has been much more intelligent and effective than what
we typically see on the left," said Jeff Krehely of the National Committee
for Responsive Philanthropy, a liberal group that monitors charitable spending.
One of Olin's distinctive qualities is its steadfastness; it has financed favored
groups like the Federalist Society for more than 20 years. "They don't
follow fads," Mr. Krehely said. "It shows they have clear goals."
Other major conservative donors include the Sarah Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh,
the Smith Richardson Foundation in Westport, Conn., and the Lynde and Harry
Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Comparing them with an equal number of liberal
foundations, including Ford and MacArthur, Mr. Piereson found that the right
spent $100 million a year to the left's $1.2 billion. "You don't have to
have a lot of money to drive the intellectual debate," Mr. Piereson said.
Although Olin is bowing out, the conservative movement is growing. There are
conservative policy research organizations operating in 42 states; grass-roots
organizers working on issues like tort reform and tax relief; and groups monitoring
liberal journalists, professors, politicians and clerics.
"The great achievements of conservative philanthropy are just beginning,"
said Adam Meyerson, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a Washington group
(and Olin grant recipient) that advises conservative donors.
Yet no group is poised to fill Olin's niche as a benefactor of big ideas. Hoping
to encourage one, Mr. Meyerson organized the dinner in New York to celebrate
Olin's achievements, prompting coverage in National Review, The New York Sun
and The New York Observer. In the last year, Mr. Piereson has published essays
in The Wall Street Journal and Commentary magazine, summoning donors to the
"battle of ideas."
But ideas can be a tough sell. "It can take 20 years to have a serious
impact," Mr. Meyerson said, and many donors want quicker success.
As for ideas, Mr. Piereson has a new one. He is hoping to start an initiative
to counter liberal influence in academia. Liberal academics "don't like
American capitalism, American culture, and they don't like American history
- they see it as a history of oppression," he said. "There are some
people who are prepared to spend large sums of money to address this problem."
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