A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America

by John J. Miller

In the 1970s, John M. Olin, one of the country's leading industrialists, decided to devote his fortune to saving American free enterprise. Over the next three decades, the John M. Olin Foundation funded the conservative movement as it emerged from the intellectual ghetto and occupied the halls of power. The foundation spent hundreds of millions of dollars fostering what its longtime president William E. Simon called the "counterintelligentsia" to offset liberal dominance of university faculties and the mainstream media and to make conservatism a significant cultural force. Among the counterintellectuals the foundation identified and supported at key stages of their careers were Charles Murray during his early work on welfare reform, Allan Bloom as he wrote THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, and Francis Fukuyama as he was developing his "End of History" thesis. Using exclusive access to the John M. Olin Foundation's leading personalities as well as its extensive archives, John J. Miller tells the story of an intriguing man and his unique philanthropic vision. He gives fascinating insights into the foundation's role in helping the CIA fund anti-Communist organizations during the Cold War and its extensive help to Irving Kristol and others as they moved from left to right to found the neoconservative movement. He tells of the foundation's early and critical role in building institutions such as the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which served to transform conservative ideas into national policies. A GIFT OF FREEDOM shows how John M. Olin's "venture capital fund for the conservative movement" helped develop one of the leading forces in American politics and culture.

200 pages, Hardcover

First published October 18, 2005

About the author

John J. Miller writes for National Review, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the author of The First Assassin, a historical thriller, plus several works of nonfiction. He is a contributing editor of Philanthropy magazine and a consultant to grantmaking foundations. The Chronicle of Higher Education has called him “one of the best literary journalists in the country.”

Reviews

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly useful as a sympathetic history of the organization, with a clearly outlined narrative of how it began, how its funding progressed, and how it intermingled with various individuals and institutions of the right, from AEI to the Federalist Society to Charles Murray to Dinesh D'Souza.

As with any hagiography, there's a tremendous lack of self-awareness. The chief motivating concerns of John Olin himself were (a) the furtherance of free enterprise, despite earning his fortune by selling gunpowder during the World Wars and thus enjoying wealth that was entirely the creation of the federal state and (b) crushing black activism that he perceived as radical, starting with the occupation of Cornell. Neither of these motives are interrogated much at all, even as fear of black activism courses through the foundation's history (at one point, Miller points to one of the few black conservatives funded by Olin as a failure because he had the audacity to accurately describe William Rehnquist as a white supremacist).

It's also a book that benefits from thirteen years of hindsight. D'Souza is described as one of the foundation's shining successes, the man who made "political correctness" a household phrase. The portion celebrating him could not be written in 2019. More befuddling still are the celebrations of the foundation's support for Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington. By the time of this book's publication, Fukuyama had *very publicly* repudiated neoconservatism in favor of standard left internationalism — he wrote a whole book about it! — and it was already clear that The End of History and Clash of Civilizations were '90s intellectual fads rather than ideas of much enduring consequence.

Nonetheless, there's value in a sympathetic history of conservative philanthropy, written clearly with a conservative audience in mind, and without much interest in censoring itself to look less embarrassing in front of the liberals.

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early in my doctoral study I encountered two foundations (the other being the Scaife) that had a profound influence in many areas of my thinking. They shared one characteristic - both of their donors chose to set a termination date on their generosity. Olin had a principle of advancing issues about the market economy. They did it by supporting a range of scholars and publications (both the Public Interest and the National Interest) and scholars and centers especially in the area of Law and Economics.

Contrast that with the history of the Ford Foundation who caused Henry Ford II to resign from the foundation created by the foundation created by his father. McGeorge Bundy - then the Executive Director brushed off Ford's resignation - suggesting that he did not have to follow the ideas of the donor. So Ford and a number of other major foundations went off the rails to support ideas and projects which were totally in opposition to their foundation's founding principles.

Miller does a good job explaining the history and the influence of this foundation and offers some good insights on how to keep foundations within the rails. But he also raises some principles to assure that donor intent is maintained. The author also reminded me of a quote from one of the Rockefellers - "Perpetuity is a very long time!"