Think Tanks:

Where The Revolution Is Being Planned

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Gary Allen, a graduate of Stanford University and one of the nation’s top authorities on civil turmoil and the New Left, is author of Communist Revolution In The Streets – a highly praised and definitive volume on revolutionary tactics and strategies, published by Western Islands. Mr. Allen, a former instructor of both history and English, is active in anti-Communist and other humanitarian causes. Now a film writer, author, and journalist, he is a Contributing Editor to American Opinion. Gary Allen is also nationally celebrated as a lecturer.

OVER the past decade “Think Tanks” have been popping up like toadstools after a spring rainstorm, until the nation now boasts over four hundred of the things, all planning and scheming and plotting at one thing or another. Though most Americans could not name a single such institution, federal research grants to these brain factories now amount to more than $2 billion (or two thousand million dollars), providing ninety percent of their income. Yet nearly all are set up well outside the control of Congress. They are organized as foundations, “nonprofit” corporations, subsidiaries to large corporations, and even as extensions of universities.

Collectively, these Think Tanks disgorge a mountain of monographs, reports, books, papers, and surveys on subjects ranging from the need for a new bomber to the hooking up of the human brain to a computer. Their importance to the Establishment is of a magnitude so great it almost defies measure.

The Think Tanks are largely populated by carefully selected refugees from Academe who have been offered the opportunity to shed the rigors of dealing with beery sophomores for the headier wine of planning for the Brave New World. Theodore White, who quadrennially presents us with a new volume of his insomnia-curing series on The Making Of A President, writes in Life that the inhabitants of the Think Tanks are a ‘brotherhood.”¹ This “brotherhood of scholars,” he says, “has become the most provocative and propelling influence on all American government and politics.” According to White, these so-called “action-intellectuals” form a “new power-system in American life — and the new priesthood.”

The realm of the Priestly Planners knows no bounds. Theodore White assures us of these illumined ones: “Their ideas are the drivewheels of. . . Society; shaping our defenses, guiding our foreign policy, redesigning our cities, reorganizing our schools, deciding what our dollar is worth.” They are out to remake the world in their own image. And, as we shall learn, they see themselves as gods, untrammeled by conventions, morality, the Constitution, patriotism, or the individual rights of the private man. The American idea that problems are best solved in the marketplace is, of course, anethema to such planners. In his usual unbleached prose, White assures us that this is as it should be:

Governments must have solutions. They cannot let change simply happen; their duty is to place a discipline on events. Thus, with almost primitive faith, American government has turned to the priesthood of action-intellectuals — the men who believe they understand what change is doing, and who suggest that they can chart the future. For such intellectuals now is a Golden Age, and America is the place. Never have ideas been sought more hungrily …. From White House to city hall, scholars stalk the corridors of American power ….

This alliance between Establishment Insiders, the satraps and lever-pullers of the various Executive departments, and the learned planners in our Think Tanks is nothing new. Organizations like the National Planning Association, the National Municipal League, and the Brookings Institute have operated for decades preaching the Fabian gospel according to St. Marx. Some have been more powerful than others. The Think Tanks of the Council on Foreign Relations literally set American foreign policy for over thirty years before the C.F.R. even began to attract attention. Its satellites, such as the Institute for Pacific Relations, the various Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, and the Ford Foundation, have long worked together to subsidize scholars and polemicists working to create propaganda for merging American sovereignty into a World Government.²

But mere propaganda is mundane and routine when compared to the joys accorded prophets and planners in today’s more sophisticated Think Tanks. There, often at taxpayers’ expense, professors now inveigh their incantations against what they perceive as the dragon of free enterprise, offering statist plans and schemes and programs to bring on the Brave New World of the future. As nationally syndicated columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt, a confirmed Think Tank watcher, has noted:

In this framework, social scientists, historians, writers, educators, and scientists are not merely advisors to those in power but are becoming the power itself, acting as virtual diplomats and military planners. In these roles intellectuals have shown themselves as prejudiced and dogmatic, and as ruthless in their drive for power as any politician. The main difference is that their maneuvers tend to be disguised by ideology, usually involving some form of supposedly “scientific” regimentation, that boils down to some form of plain socialism.

In his book, The Political Illusion, French historian Jacques Ellul calls this just what it is:

If a government increases technology in society, steps up propaganda and public relations, mobilizes all resources for the purpose of productivity, resorts to planned economy and social life, burocratizes all activities, reduces the law to a technique of social control, and socializes daily life, then it is a totalitarian government.

The Think Tanks, in short, are planning centers for the new totalitarianism. As such, they are well worth our notice.

Probably the best known of the radical plot hatcheries is the notorious Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, located on the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara in central California. In the idyllic atmosphere of this still somewhat sleepy and peaceful area is located one of the most virulently and openly anti-American institutions in the United States. A top undercover investigator for a number of government agencies confided to me recently that his researches there have convinced him that the Center is, in fact, “the Brain Factory of the Revolution.” He says “Their main quarrels are over whether to use the Chinese strategy or the Russian.” This man is no extremist. A temperate, careful, professional investigator, he certainly knows what he is talking about.

Unlike most Think Tanks, the Center does not work directly for the government, but its reports are nonetheless subsidized by the taxpayers since it is permitted to operate as a tax-exempt foundation despite its direct involvement in political matters. The Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions is, you see, the operating arm of the Fund for the Republic. The Center Bulletin for November 1963, says the tax-free Fund “is an educational corporation, chartered under the laws of New York ‘to defend and advance the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.’ ” Which is purest balderdash!

Even that name is dripping with hypocrisy. A Republic is by definition a government of laws and not of men, where the central authority is limited by a constitution. The Fund and its Center have made no secret of the fact that they are working to promote a socialist World Government in which unrestrained powers are to be vested in elite planners like themselves. That this outfit could maintain that its purpose is “to defend and advance the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution” should quality it for the “War Is Peace” Award of 1984.

The Fund for the Republic is a love child of the Ford Foundation. In the anti-Communist days of the early Fifties the fledgling Ford Foundation was attempting to restrain some of the embarrassing radicalism of top Foundation executives Robert M. Hutchins and Paul Hoffman. Hutchins and his coterie of radicals, then operating out of New York City, had become the nightly target of network broadcaster Fulton Lewis Jr. And Fulton Lewis was jangling the bells of public opinion in a tune that was furrowing the brows of the learned elders of the Ford Foundation. The Ford trustees panicked, cut loose radicals Hutchins and Hoffman, and gave them a $15 million going-away present with which to launch the Fund for the Republic. The Fund and its Think Tank at Santa Barbara are thus a product of Ford generosity to two of the nation’s most committed radicals. One cannot begin to understand what has happened since without taking a close look at the background of both men.

Robert M. Hutchins is the very archetype of the super-arrogant “intellectual” who views un-illuminated mortals as stock to be improved by such philosopher kings as himself. He became the boy wonder of the academic world when he was made acting dean of the Yale Law School in 1927 at age twenty-eight. A year later he was elevated to the presidency of the Rockefeller-bankrolled University of Chicago where he served for fifteen years, subsequently being named chancellor for another seven.

During his tenure, that University became the Communists’ foremost academic stronghold. and Hutchins dealt with the problem with a haughty “So what!” He devoted himself to radical activity on and off the campus. In 1937 he was affiliated with the Moscow State University, which was carefully controlled by the Soviet Government. Hutchins taught a course in Leninism and Communism at the University of Chicago, joined Communist Fronts, and encouraged the hiring of Communists to teach at the University. On April 21, 1949, testifying before the Broyles Commission, Dr. Hutchins declared that in his mind it was not yet established that it was subversive to be a Communist. In a speech to the United World Federalists on December 19, 1959, he made it clear that he saw no danger in amalgamating our country with the Soviet Union in a World Government. He told his audience: “We are in no present danger from Communism.”

In the Report of the Fund for the Republic issued on May 31, 1955, Robert Hutchins gave this defense of the Communist Party:

A political party in this country has been identified with the “enemy.” Those associated with this party have therefore come under suspicion as an imminent danger to the state…. The treatment accorded suspected persons in Congressional investigations and administrative hearings has not always been that contemplated by the Sixth Amendment. A kind of continuous propaganda and social pressure has been kept up that has tended to suppress conscientious non-conformity.

What sort of man can see the well-documented Communist butcheries of some 60 million civilians over the last half century as nothing more than a kind of “conscientious non-conformity”? Whatever sort it takes to do that, Robert Hutchins is one of them. In September 1965, he reached into his Think Tank at the Santa Barbara Temple of Misunderstanding and offered the following plan for dealing with International Communism:

I propose that the President of the United States make the following statement at the next session of the General Assembly of the United Nations:

“I hereby declare that the cold war is over…. Millions of our fellow men are suffering from ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease …. To them two things are necessary. First – massive assistance to change in those parts of the world that need it; and, second – international police force and peace-keeping arrangements, designed not to prevent the revolutions that must take place but to help them take place without violence and loss of life.

“The United States is the richest and most powerful nation in the world, and is prepared to bear its full share – and more – of the cost of elevating and protecting mankind…. since our primary concern is the establishment of a just world order, we shall work exclusively through the United Nations or through regional organizations approved by it….

“As President of the United States. I shall especially invite the Premier of the Soviet Union to meet with me to join in proposing a plan to the nations of the world – a plan by which violence may be abolished in settling international arguments.”

Either Robert Hutchins is some kind of a Red or the Center he runs is one of those insane asylums where the keepers are as nutty as the inmates.

Dr. Hutchins’ co-director at the asylum is its Honorary Chairman, Paul G. Hoffman, Director of the United Nations Special Fund. He is a member of the Establishment Insiders’ Council on Foreign Relations and has been a trustee of its major propaganda arm.³ He is also a trustee of the Ford Foundation and a leading member of the American Committee on a United Europe and of Americans United for World Government. He was also a trustee of the Institute of Pacific Relations, cited by the Senate Judiciary Committee as “an instrument of Communist policy, propaganda and military intelligence.”

U.S. News & World Report for December 30, 1955, called Paul Hoffman “An influential, though unofficial, Presidential advisor” to President Eisenhower. After a business career in which he rose from used car salesman in Los Angeles to drive the Studebaker-Packard Corporation over a cliff into financial collapse, Hoffman had taken on the task of restructuring the Republican Party. How this was accomplished was described in an amazingly revealing article in Collier’s magazine for October 26, 1956. Entitled “How Ike Saved The Republican Party,” the piece tells how Paul Hoffman and a handful of Establishment colleagues took a lifelong Democrat named Eisenhower and obtained the Republican Presidential nomination for him. It details how he and a coterie of Insiders literally stole the nomination from Senator Robert Taft, and how Hoffman was leading a fight to purge conservatives from the Republican Party. As Paul Hoffman put it: “The GOP has finally rid itself of the Taft incubus, and our job now is to get rid of all the Taft adherents.”

Through all of this, Hoffman and Hutchins continued to operate in tandem to promote their Fund for the Republic and its radical Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Of course they had a lot of help. The board of directors and chief consultants of the Fund for the Republic include some of the Establishment’s leading radicals, among them pollster Elmo Roper, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas,⁴ historian Bruce Catton, wealthy radical Mrs. Marshall Field, former University of California president Clark Kerr, and the late magazine magnate Henry Luce. Others have included the Reverend Henry van Dusen, President Emeritus of the incredible Union Theological Seminary, and the late Marxist “theologian” Reinhold Niebuhr.

It is not surprising, then, that soon after its founding the Fund for the Republic began attacking Congressional investigations of Communism. In fact, according to René Wormser, general counsel to the Reece Committee investigation of tax-exempt foundations, “documents attending the creation of the Fund for the Republic convinced the Reece Committee that one of the Fund’s main purposes has been to investigate Congressional investigations.”

A major part of this attack has been to ridicule the very idea that Communism is any kind of threat to the United States – a job to which Robert Hutchins has devoted himself over a period of four decades. It is a job in which he has been powerfully supported by his colleagues of the Fund and its Center. In a Fund-financed television program broadcast May 4, 1958, as a contribution to “survival and freedom,” Establishment Insider Cyrus Eaton declared that there are no Communists in the United States “to speak of except in the mind of those on the payroll of the FBI.” Eaton is a longtime friend of the Soviet Union and its dictators and has been a recipient of the “cherished” Lenin Peace Prize.

Certainly the most famous attempt to discredit Congressional investigations of Communists was the Fund’s 1956 Report On Blacklisting, which ran to two volumes and cost over $100,000. This Think Tank propaganda claimed that innocent people were being deprived of an opportunity to make a living in movies, radio, and television because of vicious, unbacked rumors about their political beliefs. The Report was the work of one John Cogley. Working with Cogley to prepare the study was Michael Harrington, who that very year served as National Chairman of the Young Socialist League. Harrington later authored the book The Other America, pushing for a federal War on Poverty, a program which he helped to design. Mr. Harrington is now Chairman of the Socialist Party in the United States. Also working on the blacklisting project was Paul Jacobs, an “ex-Communist” who still regards himself as a Marxist more radical than the Communist Party. The third member of Cogley’s creative team was Elizabeth Poe, identified in sworn testimony by Scripps-Howard columnist Frederick Woltman as having been very active in a Communist group at Time magazine.

This “highly unbiased” Report contained such outrageous allegations against the American Legion and other patriotic groups, including the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that H.C.U.A. Chairman Francis Walter decided to hold Hearings on the charges. Under the spotlight of testimony given under oath the Report On Blacklisting melted like ice cubes in Hades. Cogley admitted on the witness stand that the unnamed mysterious expert who had provided much of the “secret” information for his Think Tank Report On Blacklisting was Arnold Forster, the radical Anti-Defamation League’s ludicrous Sherlock Holmesberg, keyhole peeker, and professional anti-anti-Communist.

Not only did the charges of blacklisting of innocents turn out to be manufactured hokum but Vincent Hartnett, a former F.B.I. agent who acted as security consultant for the networks, advertising agencies, and network sponsors, testified that only about five percent of the Communists and Communist sympathizers known to be operating in the radio and television industry had been exposed by the Congressional Committees. Hartnett maintained that the public was being brainwashed by radio and television through a process which he described as “parallelism” – the presentation of plays with propaganda themes parallel to the Communist Line, such as portraying the police as shooting an innocent teenager, or the courts as convicting an innocent radical.

After the Hearing concluded, thoroughly discrediting the Fund’s blacklisting fiasco. the Washington Daily News observed:

The report on blacklisting was exposed for what it was, a fraud conceived with pool-hall morality and executed with grossly questionable scholarship. Before the record is closed on this incident, we would like to point out again that the report cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars of tax-exempt money, which means that it was in part subsidized by every American who pays taxes. We wonder when the directors of the Fund for the Republic will become impatient with Mr. Robert Maynard Hutchins’ use of it to slay his private chocolate dragons. Under wise and honorable guidance, the Fund could be a powerful force for good in this nation.

And what happened to John Cogley, the master fabricator? He went on to a staff job with John F. Kennedy, later becoming “religion” editor at that prevaricators’ paradise, the New York Times. He is today editor of the most expensively produced radical journal in America – The Center Magazine, official publication of the Fund for the Republic’s Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Government loyalty and security programs have also been a major target of the Fund, which made a grant of $60,000 to one Adam Yarmolinsky to perform another of its hatchet jobs. A “Red diaper baby,” Yarmolinsky went to Harvard where he edited The Yardling and was regarded by fellow students as a spokesman for Stalin among the undergraduates. During a 1962 Senate investigation it was revealed that he had admitted to Army security investigators that he attended meetings of the Young Communist League and had raised money for it. Yarmolinsky was just the sort of “right thinking” young man the Hutchins Klan was looking for to discredit government security procedures.⁵ The Yarmolinsky study resulted in the book Case Studies in Personal Security, which sought to win sympathy for government employees accused of Communist activity by alleging abuses by government interrogators. It was a raw phony. Frank Kluckhohn describes Yarmolinsky’s Think Tank technique in his book Lyndon’s Legacy:

These were cases involving government employees charged with Communist activities or otherwise being security, or loyalty risks. The cases Yarmolinsky selected had been handled mainly by a small group of lawyers who often represent Communists. He interviewed these lawyers and the accused government employees to form the basis of his study on federal security.

The Fund’s job has been propaganda, and it has sometimes been less than sophisticated. For example, it granted $300,000 for a Think Tank study of the influence of Communism in contemporary American life. It then hired Earl Browder General Secretary of the Communist Party, to act as chief consultant on the project.

In March of 1958, in a letter to the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities enclosed these official findings of his Committee:

The program of the Fund [for the Republic] has been principally one of action and not of education. Among its chief targets have been Congressional investigation of Communism, government security procedures, loyalty oaths and regulation of immigration.

The Fund has spent several million dollars opposing the denial of employment to security risks in government and defense industries. It has financed attacks upon newspapers, magazines and individuals with which it disagrees. It has financed preparation and distribution of books, magazines and articles to influence legislation.

I am confident that an objective appraisal of the activities of the Fund will compel the conclusion – already made by experts in the Internal Revenue Service – that the Fund for the Republic’s tax-exempt status should be revoked.

But with Paul Hoffman, one of the Insiders who convinced Dwight Eisenhower to run for the Presidency, acting as co-director of the Fund, its tax-free status was safe from everything but a direct hit by an H-bomb. Succeeding Administrations, including the current one, have continued to turn their back on flagrant violations of our tax laws by the Fund and its corporate subsidiary, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

Meanwhile this tax-free Think Tank, which claims its purpose is to defend the principles of the Constitution, continues to promote the remaking of America into a Marxist State. Favorite theme of the Center is that “free enterprise” is obsolete and must be replaced by “planning.” a euphemism by which it admits it means “socialism” W.H. Ferry, who long served as vice-president of the Center presented the Center’s rationale in a study called Caught On The Horn Of Plenty. “The individualism of the 18th and 19th centuries is a casualty of technology,” Ferry declared from his Think Tank sanctuary, “as are old theories of private property. Government must intervene more and more in the nation’s industrial life.” Mr. Ferry argued that because other countries have substituted the economic philosophy of Karl Marx for that of Adam Smith, America ought to do the same. He puts it delicately:

Living in the world economic community, moreover, means living with state-controlled economies and with under-and semi-under developed nations, in all of which the state carries the main weight of industrial and social development. It is a bizarre proposition that this nation’s policies in such circumstances should be largely developed and explicated by private managers ….

Such Think Tank socialists maintain that America must have socialism because of our modern technology, while at the same time maintaining that backward or “emergent” countries must have socialism because they do not have modern technology. Those of a suspicious bent may conclude that these people are more interested in the propagation of socialism than in the state of a nation’s technological development.

But the Ferry Boat Serenade goes on and on. It includes a call for a guaranteed annual income. “We shall have to find means,” Ferry declared from the Center, “public or private, of paying people to do no work.” This Ferry tale is one on which the Center elaborated in a Think Tank monograph called “Cybernation: The Silent Conquest,” which predicted we would ail be out of work by yesterday due to mushrooming automation. Again the push was for a guaranteed annual income, the very bedrock of the socialist program. While considered wildly utopian when first proposed by the Center in the early Sixties. the guaranteed annual income is now the cornerstone of President Nixon’s “Welfare Reform” program.

Soviet-American relations are also a special concern of the Center. On this issue, too, Mr. Ferry captained the Center’s navy through the Red Sea. A letter from Ferry which appeared in the Santa Barbara News-Press for December 11, 1960, offered this argument for our unilateral disarmament even in the face of the Soviet buildup. You will recognize it as a parallel of the Communist Line we quoted earlier from Center potentate Robert Hutchins:

I believe that this country should lay down its arms, scrap its planes, missiles, and submarines, disband its troops, and leave itself only the organization and weapons needed for local police and for normal patrols of its borders.

I do not think unilateral disarmament would be pleasant, or painless, or easy for the country to bear. I think only that it is more practical and more moral than the alternative, thermonuclear war….

No one has yet said that he believed the Russians would bomb this country or any other from which our atomic arsenal and military apparatus had been withdrawn. The most drastic consequence seen by most is that the Reds would take over.

This is a fiercely disagreeable prospect. But by terms of the argument, I must accept that this will happen: Congress turned into a puppet, our governors replaced by Kremlin functionaries, Communism replacing democracy. I do not for an instant believe that this would be the outcome: far from it. But I must be willing to agree on the worst results that anyone can foresee. My opponents might, after all, be right.

This is the same Santa Barbara Ferry who, on August 6, 1962, spoke to a conference of the Democrat Party in Seattle and accused F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover of creating a false picture of Communism’s strength, branding that picture “sententious poppycock.” He termed Hoover’s warnings of Communist subversion “a mischief-making tapestry of legend and illusion, if there ever was one.” and referred to Director Hoover as “our official spy-swatter” and “the indubitable mandarin of anti-Communism in the United States.”

While the Center portrays the Communists as sincere reformers, the professors in its Think Tank point to the American military as the real threat to the world. In its monograph entitled “Community Of Fear” the Center warns:

If things continue the way they are going the possibility of a coup by the United States military is real. The general assumption that the American soldier is automatically responsible to his civilian masters might be rudely shaken were there a serious and clearly visible retreat on the world front by the American policy-makers.

The authors of this Think Tank report add that our “military elite” is wickedly dedicated to “a position of perpetual hostility” to the Soviet Union, and “were the State Department to negotiate successfully an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union, and were the armed services united in their opposition to the agreement, the agreement would almost certainly be defeated by the Senate.”

You see, it is beastly to have feelings of “hostility” toward the benevolent leaders of the Soviet Union. After forty years of Communist expansion, and the murder by Communists of 60 million human beings, the Center would have us believe that the Communists want only to be secure from our hostile intent.

This Think Tank is so far to the Left that it sits on the spectrum somewhere out beyond Aldebaran. While any representative of the Armed Forces of the United States is as welcome at the Center as Hugh Heffner at a Women’s Lib convention, it has gone so far as to roll out its pink carpet for Soviet military leaders. There is something about a bunch of Soviet generals pulling up in a black limousine that makes even Californians feel uncomfortable. The Los Angeles Times for October 5, 1969, noted “a little local flap” over the Center’s importation of “a group of genuine Russian generals and scientists….” Who says all Californians are kooks.

Not content with having an occasional Comrade from the workers’ paradise drop by for a chat, the Center added one to its staff as a “consultant.” His name is Nikolai N. Inozemtsev, and he is publicly listed as director of the Institute of World Economics and International Relations at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “Not publicly listed,” reports Human Events, “is that Comrade lnozemtsev is also deputy editor of the Kremlin mouthpiece Pravda.” Such Think Tanks, you see, are very important to the international order of things.

A conference entitled the International Convocation to Examine the Requirements of Peace was sponsored by the Center in New York City on February 18-20, 1965. The purpose of the meeting was to scrutinize Pacem In Terris, an encyclical of Pope John XXIII, and determine ways to use it for the Left. Addresses were given by former A.D.A. Chairman Hubert Humphrey, Marxist U.N. Secretary General U Thant, Chief Justice Earl Warren, Communist Willy Brandt of West Germany, historian Arnold Toynbee, and scientist radical Linus Pauling. Representatives from the Soviet Union and from Soviet bloc countries were also in attendance.

Among those invited to take part in panel debates were James Farmer of C.O.R.E.; Dagmar Wilson, founder of the Vietnik Women Strike for Peace, then under indictment for contempt of Congress; James G. Patton, pro-Communist president of the radical National Farmers Union; H. Stuart Hughes, radical professor and ‘peace” candidate for Congress; the ludicrously “Liberal” Representative William Fitts Ryan; Norman Cousins of SANE; Bayard Rustin, executive secretary of the War Resisters League and swish organizer of the 1963 March on Washington; and, A.J. Muste of the notorious Fellowship of Reconciliation.

The Communist Worker trumpeted that the Center also invited Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A., “and others prominent in the American left.” Among the “others” invited was Arnold Johnson of the Party’s National Committee, who also covered the convocation for Political Affairs, official theoretical journal of the Communist Party, U.S.A. He informed fellow Communists that the Center’s soiree was “the most significant peace assembly, under private auspices. in this Country since World War II.” It was, he said, “truly a major event in moving our Country toward a policy of peaceful coexistence.”

Comrade Johnson dwelt with obvious relish on the many speeches supporting Communist objectives in Vietnam. He attributed to the tax-free Center’s convocation the subsequent upsurge in demonstrations, teach-ins, and petitions of protest in support of the Vietcong.

Two years later, the Center held a follow-up conference Pacem In Terris II, in Geneva. In preparation for this anti-American propaganda show the Center’s president, Harry Ashmore, made several trips to North Vietnam and chronicled his “findings” in a book, Mission To Hanoi, which was sent to all members of the Center. Ashmore was glowing in his praise for Ho chi Minh, one of history’s more prolific mass murderers. Even as American soldiers were dying in the field and South Vietnamese were being terrorized and murdered by Ho’s forces, Ashmore purred:

I believe historically he [Ho chi Minh] will rank with Gandhi, and it occurs to me there is nobody else around in the world today in any country who seems to provide a similar blend of spiritual and political power.

The tax-free Center’s president then declared:

Our visit to Hanoi and the possibility that the [Communist] Vietnamese will participate in our Geneva Convocation vindicate the faith that we have had at the Center in this undertaking which, on its surface, seems a ridiculous attempt by a group of private people, without any government sanction or government backing, to do what governments ought to tee doing and ultimately will have to do. We are in the rather absurd position of running what amounts to a privately financed, understaffed. and wholly unaccredited foreign service.

As Ashmore well knows, the Center is financed by tax-free donations and is therefore not private. But let that go. The point is that there are federal statutes prohibiting all but representatives of the United States Government from acting as an American “foreign service.” The Center, however, seems to lead a charmed life.

While the Vietcong and Ho chi Minh were invited to Pacem In Terris II, no representative of our government was invited until severe protests were lodged. The South Vietnamese never were invited. Among the four hundred private participants were Senators Joseph S. Clark, Albert Gore, and William Fulbright: and professors John Kenneth Galbraith, Jerome Wiesner, and Hans Morganthau – all of the Be Kind To The Cong corps.

Of course the Center is also operated as an important Think Tank in support of what has been called the homemade revolution. It is a place for activists. the Los Angeles Times remarks, where one finds “battered VWs with peace-type bumper stickers parked next to elegant Mercedes Limousines.” In the Center’s monograph called “Students And Society,” one Devereaux Kennedy, then president of the student body at George Washington University, spelled out the sort of activist line which has found favor with the Center:

I’m going to say loudly and explicitly what I mean by revolution. What I mean by revolution is overthrowing the American government and American imperialism and installing some sort of decentralized power in this country.

As steps to accomplish this purpose Center think-tanker Kennedy proposed “starting up fifty Vietnams in Third World countries, . . . acts of terrorism and sabotage outside the ghetto…. l mean completely demoralizing and castrating America…. “

There has also been an interlocking directorate between the staff of the Center and the New Left’s National Conference for New Politics, which was launched in Santa Barbara at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Center officials W.H. Ferry, Hallock Hoffman (son of Paul Hoffman), and consultant Irving Laucks are all members of the national council of the National Conference for New Politics. They are Founding Fathers of this group, which is dedicated to organizing and fomenting a grass-roots revolution in the United States among students, the poor, and Negroes. As Barron’s comments: “Just exactly how the New Leftists on the executive staff of the Fund for the Republic’s Center reconcile their NCNP activities with ‘peace’ in their role as members of a private foreign service is not explained.”

It is far too obvious that the Center’s opposition to anti-Communism and its promotion of Marxist economics, disarmament. and the homemade revolution are but segments of a grander design! This has been clear from the beginning. The fact is that creation of a World Government has long been Center Chairman Robert Hutchins’ great dream. As early as 1945, while still chancellor of the University of Chicago, he assembled a small group of professors into a committee to write a World Constitution. Professor Mortimer Adler expressed the group’s goal: “We must do everything we can to abolish the United States.” Adler also went on record as declaring: “Not only must we abolish national sovereignties . . . we must abolish reactionary capitalism . . . we must have a genuine socialism before we can have genuine peace.”

Hutchins and his fellow “scholars” labored mightily for two full years to produce their World Constitution. Then 350 copyrighted copies were distributed confidentially to top “leaders and experts” for comment. Chicago Tribune reporter Frank Hughes was one of the few outsiders to see what these titmice had rolled down from Olympus. He commented:

The “bill of rights” of this draft was crammed with such Rooseveltian phrases as “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” [to be guaranteed by the World Government] and contained a thinly veiled paraphrase of Karl Marx’s “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

This World Constitution prescribes formal abolition of the right to own and hold private property anywhere in the world. It declares that what we usually call private property is “the property of all mankind and must be subordinated to the common good.” And who is to determine what is the common good? The new priesthood, of course, the planners in our Think Tanks.

A world in which individuals cannot own and control property and the fruits of their labor is, by definition, a Communist world. Hutchins knows that. He has anticipated it for two decades. Twelve years after it was written, and after it was approved by unnamed “leaders and experts,” the Center openly published Robert Hutchins’ World Constitution. That, at least, is a matter of public record.

Of course, Chairman Hutchins is not unaware that before the World Commonwealth which his constitution envisions can become reality, our own Constitution must be replaced. First the United States and then the world! Hutchins is on record as proclaiming: “We must revive and reconstruct the political community of the United States because the task before us is nothing less than the organization of the world political community.”

Center boss Hutchins assigned the task of preparing a transitory American constitution to aging New Deal Braintruster Rexford Guy Tugwell and a staff of “experts.” Tugwell is now Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. A former college professor turned planner, he was the guiding hand behind the polemics of the early New Deal. Professor Tugwell is described by Ernest K. Lindley, sympathetic author of The Roosevelt Revolution, as the “philosopher, the sociologist, and the prophet of the Roosevelt Revolution, as well as one of its boldest practitioners: he has provided the movement with much of its rationale.”

Early in June of 1933, the Baltimore Sun reported: “Dr. Tugwell is an irrevocable part of the New Deal …. He is the prime planner . . . with the most farsighted schemes …. ” At the same time even Walter Lippmann wrote: “There is a group, among whom Professor Tugwell is the most conspicuous, who may, I suppose, fairly be called collectivist.” The New York Herald Tribune of June 5, 1933, commented: “Professor Tugwell’s leverage for action lies not in the rank of his official position, but in his subtle and powerful mind. It lies also in the closeness of his association with President Roosevelt.”

A devotee of Russia’s “great experiment” and a disciple of the British dandy and economist J.M. Keynes, Tugwell has been treated by most Establishment his. torians as the primary Braintruster forging F.D.R.’s New Deal. Few ever knew that Professor Tugwell served in 1929 on the Socialist Party Campaign for Norman Thomas at a time when Thomas had the support of the Communists.⁶ He was. in fact, so dedicated a Marxist that he was a member of the staff of the First American Trade Union delegation to Soviet Russia – a Front so obvious that it was denounced by the American Federation of Labor as a Communist operation. Tugwell returned to co-author with Communist Robert Dunn and fellow traveler Stuart Chase a pro-Soviet rhapsody of their tramp through the workers’ paradise. It was the most transparent sort of propaganda, sold in Communist Party bookstores throughout the country.

If they can help it, Establishment historians will little note nor long remember a speech given by Rexford Tugwell before the American Economic Association in December 1931. Entitled “The Principles of Planning and the Institution of Laissez-Faire,” it laid out the future for the “planned” economy whose fruition we are now witnessing. And Presidential Advisor Tugwell made no secret of the fact that he meant “Planning” on the Soviet model:

The interest of the liberals among us in the institutions of the new Russia of the Soviets, spreading gradually among puzzled businessmen, has created wide popular interest in planning as a possible refuge from persistent insecurity ….

The institutions of laissez-faire have become so much a part of the fabric of modem life that the untangling and removing of their tissues will be almost like dispensing with civilization itself . . .

There is no private business, if we mean by that one of no consequence to anyone but its proprietors; and so none exempt from compulsion to serve a planned public interest …. Planning will necessarily become a function of the federal government; either that or the planning agency will supersede that government….

It has already been suggested that business will logically be required to disappear. This is not an overstatement for the sake of emphasis; it is literally meant…. To take away from business its freedom of venture and expansion, and to limit the profits it may acquire, to destroy it as business and to make of it something else. . . a kind of civil service loyalty and fervor will need to grow gradually into acceptance.

There is no denying that the contemporary situation in the United States has explosive possibilities. The future is becoming visible in Russia.

In his speech, this important Presidential Advisor went on to damn laissez-faire for “its irrational allotments of individual liberty.” The cure for all of this irrational allotment of freedom, he said, is “planning” by a powerful government body: “A central group of experts charged with the duty of planning the country’s economic life, but existing as a suggestive or consultative body only, without power, has been advocated by numerous persons and organizations. It is quite impossible to visualize a genuine Gosplan [a five-year plan on the Russian model] without power….”

But such an advisory body – according to this “number one Braintruster” who was the “prime planner” of the New Deal – would pave the way for total socialization: “In spite of its innocuous nature, the day on which it [the advisory body] comes into existence will be a dangerous one for business, just as the founding day of the League of Nations was a dangerous one for nationalism. There may be a long and lingering death, but it must be regarded as inevitable.”

Tugwell’s speech, which would have done credit to Lenin or Stalin, was read aloud to the Senate when it was debating his appointment to the official post of Under Secretary of Agriculture. So cowed was Congress by the Roosevelt landslide, however, that Professor Tugwell’s appointment was approved anyway. As the New York Tribune said at the time:

The significance of Tugwell ‘s confirmation by the Senate will lie in the fact – assuming it happens – that one of America’s two great historic parties. acting through its representatives in the Senate, knowing Professor Tugwell to be a collectivist, con firmed his appointment to a high public office in which he would have opportunity to push forward his doctrines.

It is important to note that even in this early speech Tugwell stressed the need for a new constitution to pave the way for his proposed World Communist State:

The first series of changes will have to do with statutes, with constitutions, and with government …. It will require the laying of rough, unholy hands on many a sacred precedent, doubtless calling for an enlarged and nationalized police power for enforcement.

Then, of course, one had to train a corps of planners. While in the Agriculture Department. Tugwell was served by a staff that grew in that Administration to include such notables as Harold Ware, John Abt, Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, Alger Hiss, Henry H. Collins Jr., Victor Perlo, Adlai Stevenson, and Nelson Rockefeller. All but the last two, so far as we now know, were secret Communists serving the Soviet Union. And between them they produced some fascinating plans. In his capacity as official guru to the occult-minded Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, Tugwell and his crew helped write the orders to plough under crops and kill pigs in a attempt to conjure up abundance by creating false scarcity. One might as well have pitched screaming virgins into a fiery volcano in order to upgrade morality. But of course the Comrades in the Department of Agriculture weren’t in charge of morality.

Tugwell, the humanitarian planner, also sat on the Housing Board, the Surplus Relief Administration, the Public Works Board, and the President’s Commercial Policy Committee. And, he assisted in the preparation of the National Recovery Act, declared un-Constitutional by a then honorable Supreme Court. The N.RA. conferred powers on the Chief Executive that made Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin pink with envy.

Professor Tugwell had his fingers in all the New Deal pies, but he was apparently too radical even for those radical times. The New Dealers, evidently afraid that by moving too fast they would blow the duke and provoke a reaction, refused to let Tugwell abolish the profit system overnight. In 1941, he was hustled off to Puerto Rico where he served as Governor for five years, providing a haven for top Communists from throughout the Hemisphere. In December 1942, the Chicago Tribune ran a series of articles on Tugwell’s tenure of office in Puerto Rico. The first began with these observations:

In the last 15 months this verdant, tropical island has become a laboratory for socialistic government experiments such as were unknown to the continental United States even in the early days of the New Deal.

Under Governor Rexford Guy Tugwell of the 1933 brain trust, more than 30 new bureaus, authorities, and offices have sprung up like jungle undergrowth. Government costs have jumped almost $5,000, 000 in a year ….

Puerto Rico’s government has become the most expensive under the American flag. Taxes are the highest in its history. Dollars by the hundreds of thousand have been appropriated for long range social and economic schemes while famine threatens the island and while half its 1,900,000 population receives food and other assistance at public cost.

It was Tugwell’s attempt to become the first Castro of the Caribbean that triggered the mass exodus of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the War.

In 1948 Professor Tugwell was asked to take a chair in economics at the University of Chicago. The invitation came from his old comrade Robert Hutchins, who also asked him to join the Committee to Frame a World Constitution. Tugwell was delighted. That same year he became campaign manager for his old boss, Henry A. Wallace, who was running for President with the support of the Communist Party, U.S.A. Mr. Wallace endorsed the Adler-Hutchins-Tugwell World Constitution as part of his platform.

Wallace became a national joke and Tugwell went off for a year of teaching at the Fabian Socialists’ London School of Economics, returning to teach at the University of Chicago. It was only natural that Hutchins would remember his faithful Marxist companion after he had taken off for Santa Barbara to set up his new “meditation establishment.” Public relations men hired to clean up the image of the Fund for the Republic had insisted that the operation move lock, stock, and Communist Manifesto out of New York City and away from the withering gaze of Fulton Lewis Jr. It was equally natural that as soon as it could be arranged, Hutchins would assign Tugwell the task of writing a new constitution to be promoted by the Center. Of course, such things take a while. In fact, on Labor Day 1970, Professor Rexford Guy Tugwell, Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, released Public Draft No. XXXVII of his still unfinished constitution.

Tugwell’s Opus 37 might be considered a product of the Ford Foundation millions, although there is no longer any official connection between Ford’s Folly and the Center. After all, Tugwell began his efforts while the Ford Foundation’s $15 million was still bankrolling the Hutchins playground. Today that $15 million has been spent, but the inventor of the Xerox process died conveniently and left the Center another bundle of millions. Certainly Ford Foundation President McGeorge Bundy, a former Special Advisor to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. has supported Tugwell’s efforts. “It is not unthinkable,” he says, “that this country may need a new constitution.”

These people are dead serious. Among the reasons given by Robert Hutchins for the need for scrapping the Constitution of the United States is that it “does not mention technology, ecology, bureaucracy, education, cities, planning, civil disobedience, political parties, corporations, labor unions, or the organization of the world.” One can only cringe!

Professor Tugwell’s Think Tank constitution is simply fantastic. It even proposes abandonment of states. Instead of the United States of America, Tugwell would substitute the name United Republics of America, proposing: “There shall be Republics, each numbering no less than five percent of the whole people, with such exceptions as the boundary commission shall make.”

So we would have twenty “Republics” instead of fifty states. But these “Republics” are to have no sovereignty. They are merely handy administrative branches for the convenience of an all-powerful Central Government, just as are the “Republics” in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which Tugwell has so long admired.

The checks and balance system so carefully instituted by the Founding Fathers to keep any one branch of government from becoming all-powerful would also be abolished by Tugwell’s proposal. Which is, of course, the whole idea of creating a new constitution – to substitute an all-powerful federal government run by Planner Commissars for the delicately balanced system of limited government established by our forefathers.

Thomas Jefferson implored us not to put our faith in men but to “bind them down with the chains of the Constitution.” Tugwell’s treatise does just the opposite. It unchains the government and puts its faith in the benevolence of the Insiders and planners who would run it. Jefferson knew that if the people did not enslave their government, their government would enslave them. And that is just what the arrogant Planner Commissars have in mind.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reserves to the states and to the people all powers not expressly granted to the federal government. The Tugwell constitution takes the opposite course and specifically grants total power to the federal government except for those few powers or rights specifically decreed to the “Republics” or to the people. Professor Tugwell’s plan is not for a nation of free people but for a nation of slaves subject to the whim of despotic Insiders.

Only a child would believe that you could give a government such unlimited powers and expect it not to use them simply because the planners are “nice guys.” A benevolent man would not want such powers. Only radical planners seeking to do what the majority of the people do not want done would even consider such a mechanism. Certainly the philosopher kings at the Center, and at the other Think Tanks, have made it perfectly clear what they would do with the power granted by Rexford Guy Tugwell’s proposed constitution.

Instead of having three branches of government (Legislative, Executive, and Judicial) as provided in our present “outworn” Constitution, Tugwell’s No. XXXVII, as in the Center’s World Constitution, calls for new branches. These are the Electoral, the Planning, the Presidency, the Legislative, the Regulatory, and the Judicial branch.

Article II applies to the Electoral branch and provides for an “Overseer of electoral procedures.” Sounds like the Great Plantation, doesn’t it? The “Overseer” is chosen by the Senate for a seven-year term and is the “Political Commissar” heading all political Parties in the country. Article II states:

He shall see to the organization of the national and district parties, arrange for discussion among them, and provide for the nomination and election of candidates for public office.

The “Overseer” is to arrange for the election of three hundred members of the House of Representatives every three years and is to arrange a national convention every nine years, at which candidates for President and Vice President are to be chosen. Very clearly, the “Overseer” could quickly turn the country into one big Cook County, where rigging an election is as simple and foolproof as finding female companionship in Tijuana. And to whom would a cheated candidate complain? Big Brother’s election commissar perhaps.

One quickly sees why our Founding Fathers made elections state business. Certainly dishonesty can and does exist in local elections, but local citizens are more than capable of dealing with it. How does one deal with elections fixed at the national level?

It gets worse. In Tugwellia, all costs of elections are paid out of tax funds and no private contributions are permitted. We don’t want irate citizens banding together to throw the rascals out, with millions of citizens challenging the Insiders by contributing one to ten dollars as in the Goldwater campaign. Big Brother Tugwell would have the federal government distribute campaign funds according to the results of the last election, so that a Party which had once successfully bought itself into power by promising everybody everything would be nearly impossible to dislodge. Soon there would be only one political Party.

And there’s more! In Tugwell’s United Republics of America the President would appoint the eleven members of the Planning branch. The purpose of this outfit would be to prepare “six and twelve year development plans.” Such plans, which would cover almost every field of national, international, personal, and economic endeavor, are said to be clearly superior to the Soviet “plans” which run for only five years.

Since the Planning Commissars in U.R.A. would have jurisdiction over foreign as well as domestic affairs, it is clear that this branch would be the true seat of power. Which is not surprising, since the Tugwell constitution is not the product of statesmen, as was our original Constitution, but of the very Think Tank planners who are seeking to bring on a World Government with themselves as chief architects.

The President of U.R.A. would be elected for a nine-year term and would have two Vice Presidents and an “Intendant.” The Vice President for General Affairs would be in charge of “Chancellors of Foreign, Financial, Military and Legal Affairs”; while the Vice President of Internal Affairs would be in charge of other Chancellors (Cabinet Secretaries). The office of “Intendant” sounds suspiciously like a Gestapo or K.G.B. operation. Section 14 of Article IV states:

There shall be an Intendant responsible to the President. He shall supervise an Office for Intelligence and investigation. He shall also supervise an Office of Emergency Organization with the duty of providing plans and procedures for such contingencies as may be expected.

This is indeed interesting coming from a Think Tank which has so vigorously opposed the efforts of J. Edgar Hoover and the F.B.I. to maintain our internal security.

And, instead of a Bill of Rights to protect citizens against the government suspending their civil liberties, the Think Tank constitution provides:

The President may cause information to be withheld from disclosure if it be judged by him to be harmful to any individual or to the public interest.

Of course the President decides just what the “public interest” is, and whether withheld information might harm, say, himself. This clause would be used to hide Police State activities from the public. In a government with an all-powerful Executive, to whom would you complain?

Again, remember that this idea emanates from a group which was granted tax-exemption on the claim that it would exist to further the principles of the Constitution we have, and which has always claimed that its chief concerns are civil rights and civil liberties. Now it proposes to establish a government in which civil rights and civil liberties would be totally abandoned.

Very clearly, the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions has only been interested in the civil rights and liberties of revolutionaries trying to overthrow our present government. When that government is abolished, the Think Tank boys would move in with their Tugwellian constitution to abolish minority rights. It’s all rather transparent.

Note that while the Tugwellians are proposing a national police force, a must for any dictatorship, they are also scrapping the Supreme Court and creating a system whereby a Principal Justice with a lifetime appointment would appoint all judges. But get this. According to the New York Times of September 9, 1970, the Judiciary section of Tugwell XXXVII was drawn up in consultation with Center Fellow Warren Burger before he became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. It was Burger who persuaded the group to omit from the proposed constitution a guarantee of an adversary trial, and of a trial by jury, on the ground that the former does not necessarily produce justice and that jury trials slow the judicial process.

Putting it all together- federal control of elections, all-powerful planners, a secret federal police, and a judicial system controlled solely by a federal appointee with no guarantee of trial by jury – it spells dictatorship. Yet the mass media have treated the Tugwell constitution as a serious proposal from an important institution. It has been given feature space, without providing specifics, in nearly every major publication in the land. This while identifying Tugwell only as a New Deal Braintruster, which carries a positive connotation to most people, and neglecting to mention his long record of devotion to the Soviet Union and the system for which it stands.

But how do the planners at the Center expect to get from Constitution A, the current one, to Constitution B, the new one? Tugwell lays out a scenario as an informal introduction to his constitution, He says that a President may be running for reelection in a time of great turmoil over “obstructionism” by Congress (you know, the kind President Nixon claims we have now) and “might decide that new institutions are necessary to fulfill their reasonable expectations of progress.”

“Conceivably,” says Tugwell, it might happen like this:

A President, approaching the end of his term, provoked by his inability to move the Congress, determined to check the government’s hardening into bureaucratic stolidity, fearful of the accumulating consequences of obsolescence, and conscious of his inability to carry all his responsibilities, concludes that he must appeal for a new constitution …

It seems to the President that some new effort. . . must be made. If it must be made in unorthodox fashion, it still could have the consent of the ultimate authority in a democracy – the people. If they demand a new constitution, who could say that the demand ought to be denied? He decides to give them that opportunity and he announces what he intends.

There is the expected uproar from those who fear the loss of privileges. But there is louder commendation from those who agree with him, and he is able to persuade a hundred concerned citizens of acknowledged prominence to join in the new reconsideration. They, undertake to draft a new constitution. By the time he has to campaign for reelection, something like the following document has been produced and agreed to by eighty of the hundred. The President makes it the single issue of his appeal. He is satisfied, he says, that the draft constitution incorporates the principles of freedom under law; that it would assist in adaptation to the circumstances imposed by nature and by the need for tolerance among nations; and that it would encourage initiative and productivity while offering economic security.

The President assumes, he says, that since he is wholly identified with it, his election by a considerable majority would signal approval of the new constitution. They are engaged, he tells the voters, in a referendum of sovereign persons who stand above all the institutions of the government created by their ancestors and too little changed since that time. He puts the ratifying majority at sixty percent of those voting….

He pledges that if his proposal is approved, he will proceed by interim arrangement until the new constitution can be implemented; then he will retire to become a member of the new Senate provided for in the constitution.

Thus the issue is joined.

Naturally, all of this is thoroughly unconstitutional, but c’est la revolution.

It all sounds vaguely reminiscent of Colonel Edward Mandel House, the Henry Kissinger of the Wilson Administration, and his opus Phillip Dru, Administrator. House said he also wanted a Marxist dictatorship established in the United States in preparation for amalgamating it into a World Government. And that is apparently what the Center’s new constitution, prepared by this old-time admirer of the Soviet system, is all about. Beyond that? Well, as we have seen, the World Constitution already proposed by Tugwell, Hutchins, and their Think Tank cohorts, is a constitution for a World Communist State.

Control of World Government under the Center’s previously published World Constitution is to be taken away from the people, and removed from the ballot box. The people of the world vote directly only once. They elect a group of delegates which sits for thirty days each three years and elects the World President and the world legislators. All other rulers of the world – judges, planners, bureaucrats – are picked by planning Insiders and not by the people. The government is thereafter self-perpetuating and the people will have lost their voice. They will have become slaves of a world bureaucracy operated by and for the Insiders.

Again, this may seem strange coming from the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. But the word “Democracy” is strictly bait, a public relations fraud. And the Center even admits it. In May of 1963 it released a study entitled “The Elite and the Electorate.” It was written by two “ultra-liberal” Senators, J. William Fulbright and Joseph Clark.⁷ The question posed by this monograph was a simple one: Is government by the people possible? To which Senator Fulbright answered, literally: “Government by the people is possible, but highly improbable.”

One would assume that other “Liberals” who worship daily at the shrine of the demigod “Democracy” would have fallen into fits at such an utterance. But Senator Fulbright and the Center are still in the good graces of the self-acclaimed humanitarians.

Senator Clark, of course, seconded Senator Fulbright’s notion and said that “democratic government” tends to break down. Both Fulbright and Clark agreed that America needs more government by Executive authority with less interference from the people. That’s what “Democracy” means to the Insiders and their Think Tanks.

The Center (which boasts a supporting public membership of more than 50,000) is one of the few Think Tanks that does not now work directly for the government. It has, nonetheless, had an enormous effect on American life. Many of the nation’s financial, political, and intellectual elite have participated in Center activities which have in turn been the source of voluminous published materials.⁸ These publications have gone out by the millions to schools, universities, libraries. prominent individuals, and politicians. Over the past two decades the works of the Fund and its subsidiary Center have been both given and highly recommended to students by literally thousands of college professors. These students, in turn, have gone on to work in the political system, taking the ideas of the Center with them.

And students do get a heavy dose of such ideas. Consider. for example, that the Center is now in control of revisions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Britannica films for the classroom. Specifically, consider the following paragraph from a Center report, which we admit brought us up short:

In October, 1960, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., wishing to become a more effective instrument of understanding the contemporary world, asked the Center for guidance and cooperation. Since Britannica proposes for future revisions of its volumes the same aim as the Fund for the Republic – the clarification of the basic issues – the board of directors acted favorably, on Britannica’s request…. The association with Britannica has not changed the purposes or procedures of the Center. The work being done for Britannica is what the Center would be doing anyway. Some estimates of the potential influence of the Center through the medium may be gained from the world-wide sales of Encyclopedia Britannica.

The Center’s president, Harry Ashmore, was made editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia, heading a staff con. ducting a thorough revision of reference materials. The chairman of Britannica’s Editorial Board is also chairman of the Center-he is Robert M. Hutchins. The opportunity thus created for assigning historical truth to the “Memory Hole” is simply enormous.

But, as influential as the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions is, there are still more important and more frightening Think Tanks preparing a world for us to make Orwell’s 1984 seem tame and restrained by comparison. Having provided a hard look at the Center as a first case in point, we propose to deal with a number of the others in next month’s issue of American Opinion.

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