Weaponized Philanthropy: The Reece Committee's Buried Warning to America

In 1954, a congressional committee did something the establishment hoped would never happen again.

Two years earlier, the Cox Committee had investigated America’s most powerful tax-exempt foundations. The Carnegie Endowment. The Rockefeller Foundation. The Ford Foundation. Organizations with billions in assets, operating beyond the reach of taxation, claiming to work for the public good.

The Cox Committee’s investigation had been brief and reassuring. Everything was fine. The foundations were doing exactly what they claimed to be doing. Nothing to see here.

But Congressman B. Carroll Reece of Tennessee wasn’t satisfied. He pushed for a second investigation, one that would actually examine what these foundations were doing with their money. Whether their activities justified their tax-exempt status. Whether they were using their enormous wealth to shape American society in ways that went far beyond charity.

This time, they dug deeper.

What they found was stunning.

René Wormser served as general counsel to that investigation. He was an estate planning attorney, a tax lawyer who understood how these organizations operated. He wasn’t a conspiracy theorist or a political radical. He was a professional who believed foundations should be held accountable for how they used their tax-exempt status.

And what he documented in the committee’s investigation changed how he understood American power.

The Reece Committee

The second investigation was formally known as the United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations. Chaired by Congressman B. Carroll Reece, it became known as the Reece Committee.

The committee’s director of research was Norman Dodd, a former banker who brought the same methodical approach to the investigation that he had used in finance. No assumptions. No preconceptions. Just follow the money and see where it leads.

What they found in the foundation archives would have shocked most Americans. If the findings had ever reached them.

The Carnegie Minutes

One of the most explosive discoveries came from examining Carnegie foundation records. Andrew Carnegie had established multiple foundations: the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1905, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 1910 with $10 million. The Reece Committee investigated both.

Dodd sent one of his researchers, a lawyer named Catherine Casey, to examine foundation minute books. She was skeptical going in. She didn’t believe that these prestigious philanthropic organizations, founded by America’s greatest industrialists, could be doing anything nefarious.

What she found in those handwritten minutes changed her life.

According to Dodd’s later testimony, given in a 1982 interview with G. Edward Griffin, Casey discovered minutes from 1908 discussing whether there was any means more effective than war to alter the life of an entire people. The trustees, Dodd reported, concluded that war was the most efficient way to change how Americans think.

The next year’s minutes, according to Dodd’s account, documented their question: How do we involve the United States in a war? The answer: gain control of the State Department.

These claims about the Carnegie minutes rest entirely on Dodd’s testimony. The Dictaphone recordings Casey made were heard by only three people: Dodd, his assistant, and Casey herself. They were never transcribed. They remain somewhere in congressional archives, if they still exist at all, inaccessible to independent verification.

The historical record shows the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wasn’t founded until December 1910, which means the 1908-1909 minutes Dodd referenced likely came from the earlier Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, established in 1905, or from preliminary planning meetings before the Endowment’s official founding. What’s documented is that Casey examined Carnegie foundation records and that the experience profoundly affected her.

Casey came back shaken. The experience affected her so deeply that she was never able to return to her law practice. Congressman Reece had to find her a position at the Federal Trade Commission because she couldn’t function in her old life after seeing what she had seen.

Whatever Casey found in those archives, it was powerful enough to derail her career and leave her, in Dodd’s words, having “lost her mind as a result of it.”

The Network Revealed

The investigation didn’t stop with Carnegie. What Dodd and Wormser discovered was a coordinated network.

The Carnegie Endowment, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation were working together. They had divided up the territory. Carnegie would handle international education. Rockefeller would handle domestic education. Ford would provide the muscle with its massive endowment.

Their goal, documented in their own records, was to control American education. To shape how history was taught, what values were promoted, what kind of citizens were produced by the school system.

Why education? Because as the Carnegie minutes stated, to prevent Americans from reverting to their old ways after the changes brought by war, you must control what the next generation believes. You must control the schools.

The foundations funded the writing of textbooks. They financed university departments. They created networks of scholars who all thought the same way. They established the American Historical Association and shaped how American history would be taught.

By 1934, a report published under the American Historical Association’s auspices concluded that the day of the individual in the United States had come to an end. That the future would inevitably be characterized by collectivism and an increase in state authority.

This wasn’t a prediction. It was a plan.

The Shutdown

The Reece Committee’s investigation ran into immediate opposition.

The foundations mobilized. The media attacked. The committee was accused of witch hunting, of seeing communists under every bed, of attacking philanthropy itself.

Democrat Wayne Hays, serving on the committee, worked actively to undermine the investigation from within. The White House sent liaisons to pressure committee members. The hearings, which had begun in May 1954, were effectively shut down within weeks.

The committee managed to produce a final report, but it received almost no attention. The report came out just as Senator Joseph McCarthy was being censured, and anything that looked like anti-communist investigation was immediately discredited. The foundations had waited out the storm, and now they could return to business as usual.

Wormser watched this happen. He saw how easily a documented investigation could be dismissed, how quickly uncomfortable truths could be buried under accusations of extremism.

The Book That Changed Nothing

In 1958, four years after the investigation ended, Wormser published his findings in a book titled Foundations: Their Power and Influence.

The book wasn’t speculation. It was a careful legal analysis of what the Reece Committee had discovered. Wormser presented the documented evidence: foundation minutes, grant records, organizational charts, testimony from foundation officials.

He wrote in measured legal language: “It is difficult for the public to understand that some of the great foundations which have done so much for us in some fields have acted tragically against the public interest in others, but the facts are there for the unprejudiced to recognize.”

The book documented how foundations had captured American education, promoted internationalism and moral relativism, and concentrated enormous power in the hands of a small, unelected, self-perpetuating elite. It showed how foundation trustees couldn’t possibly oversee what their organizations were actually doing. How a professional class of foundation administrators had emerged as an informal guild that controlled vast resources with minimal accountability, placing their people in government agencies and universities while shaping public policy from behind the scenes.

Wormser’s analysis was careful and precise. He distinguished between the foundations’ legitimate charitable work and their efforts at social engineering. He acknowledged the good they had done in medicine and science. But he insisted that these achievements didn’t excuse their attempts to reshape American society according to their own vision.

What Wormser documented in his 1958 book, based on the Reece Committee’s investigation, was not conspiracy theory but a carefully detailed legal analysis of how three foundations had systematically captured American institutions:

CARNEGIE CORPORATION / CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT

Ideological Capture of American Education: • Bankrolled the American Historical Association’s Commission on Social Studies to rewrite how American children would be taught • The 1934 Carnegie-funded report openly declared “the day of the individual in the United States had come to an end” • Proclaimed America was inevitably transitioning from individual liberty to “a new age of collectivism” • Used financial leverage to force colleges to abandon religious affiliations in exchange for Carnegie money

Shaping American Foreign Policy: • Funded the Institute of Pacific Relations, later exposed as a Communist infiltration vehicle • 1952 Senate investigation confirmed IPR was “used by Communists to orientate American Far Eastern policy toward Communist objectives” • Continued funding even as 46 IPR-connected individuals were identified as Communist Party members • IPR’s foundation-funded influence “permeated the State Department”ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

Sexual Revolution Engineering: • Bankrolled Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent sexuality research with massive annual grants • Deliberately funded research using skewed samples of prisoners, prostitutes, and sexual deviants to misrepresent American sexual behavior • Only stopped funding after Congressional investigation exposed the operation in 1954 • Helped launch the sexual revolution through foundation-funded pseudoscience

Funding Communist Infiltration: • Served as primary financier of the Institute of Pacific Relations with over $2 million across 25 years • Continued $90,000 grants to IPR in 1938 even after Communist infiltration was documented • Maintained funding after Senate investigators confirmed IPR was a Communist vehicle for policy manipulation

Parallel Government Operations: • Created the secret “War and Peace Studies” program during WWII, funded entirely by Rockefeller • Infiltrated the State Department by having their War and Peace Studies taken over wholesale, with Rockefeller personnel retained • Financed and controlled the Council on Foreign Relations, which “became virtually an agency of the government”FORD FOUNDATION

Behavioral Control Infrastructure: • Established vast Behavioral Sciences operation to study and manipulate human behavior • Created interlocking advisory boards populated by Carnegie, RAND Corporation, and other foundation operatives • Built the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences as a command center for social engineering

Deployment of Concentrated Wealth: • Wielded the largest endowment of the three, providing overwhelming financial force • Simultaneously controlled RAND Corporation through shared leadership with Ford Foundation president also chairing RAND while funneling it millions • In 1952 alone, transferred $1 million to the military-connected RAND Corporation

Dynastic Tax Evasion: • Ford family engineered the transfer of 90% of their holdings to the foundation specifically to avoid taxation • Maintained absolute voting control of Ford Motor Company while claiming tax-exempt status • Converted private wealth into tax-exempt institutional powerTHE COORDINATED MACHINE (ALL THREE)

Cartel Division of American Society: • Foundations carved up America’s future: Carnegie seized international education, Rockefeller captured domestic education, Ford deployed the money • Operated as a coordinated cartel, not independent charities • Systematically divided control over different sectors to avoid competition and maximize influence

The Interlocking Directorate: • Same elite operatives sat on multiple foundation boards, creating an interlocking power structure • Captured the Social Science Research Council, transforming it into “the greatest power in social-science research” • Controlled which academics could succeed by manipulating book reviews, journal publications, and grant funding • Created an “invisible hand” that could “advance or hamper any specialist’s career”

Infiltration of Democratic Government: • Systematically placed foundation-trained operatives into government positions • Rotated personnel between foundations, universities, and federal agencies to maintain control • The foundation-funded Council on Foreign Relations “became virtually an agency of the government when WWII broke out” • Foundation officials moved seamlessly between “charity work” and government power

Wormser’s warning captured the essence of the problem: “When they do harm, it can be immense harm, there is virtually no counter-force to oppose them.” These foundations operated as a “closely knit group of professional administrators,” an unelected, self-perpetuating elite. When Congress attempted investigation, the foundations used media control and political pressure to shut it down within weeks. They had achieved what Wormser called “a totality of power which presumes to place them beyond serious criticism and attack.”

The media didn’t review it. Universities didn’t assign it. The foundation world acted as if it didn’t exist. Wormser died in 1981, his warnings largely unheeded. Norman Dodd’s explosive 1982 testimony to G. Edward Griffin circulates in small corners of the internet but never breaks into mainstream discussion.

The foundations Wormser investigated have only grown more powerful. The tax-exempt foundation model has proliferated: the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Open Society Foundations. Billions in assets, minimal taxation, enormous influence over education, health policy, and social programs. A 2011 study by ETH Zurich researchers found that just 147 firms control 40% of global wealth. Many are the same institutions that appeared in Wormser’s investigation, or their direct descendants.

The Pattern Persists

The same pattern Wormser documented continues. Foundations fund the research, train the researchers, place their people in government, shape the policies, and then evaluate whether their own initiatives were successful. They operate as a parallel government, accountable to no one but their own trustees.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, foundation-funded organizations shaped the response. When education policy changes, foundation money drives the reforms. When health initiatives launch, foundation grants provide the fuel.

The playbook Wormser exposed in 1958 is still in use. Use tax-exempt status to accumulate power. Fund research that supports your agenda. Train the next generation of leaders to think the way you want them to think. Place your people in positions of influence. Shape policy from behind the scenes. And when anyone questions what you’re doing, accuse them of attacking philanthropy itself.

It worked in 1954 when they shut down the Reece Committee. It still works today.

The Legacy

The foundations have learned to be more subtle. They don’t write minutes discussing war as a tool for social change anymore. Or if they do, they don’t keep them where congressional investigators can find them.

But the power Wormser warned about hasn’t diminished. It’s grown. The network he exposed hasn’t disbanded. It’s expanded. The concentration of influence he documented hasn’t dissipated. It’s intensified.

Foundations: Their Power and Influence remains in print, waiting for the next generation to discover what René Wormser tried to tell the last one. That tax exemption without accountability is power without responsibility. That philanthropy can be a tool for social control. That the most dangerous tyranny is the kind that comes wrapped in the language of charity.

The Work Continues

Wormser documented the foundation network. Dodd traced the money. The Reece Committee exposed the coordination. Their work laid a foundation that researchers continue building on today.

Eric Daniel Buesing spent 22 years researching elite power structures, building on exactly this foundation. His book The Hidden Hand: Wealth, Power, and Control from Pharaohs to Corporations traces these patterns from ancient Sumerian temple economies through modern foundation networks. It’s the kind of comprehensive historical analysis that shows how the mechanisms Wormser exposed in 1954 are the same ones that have operated for five thousand years.

If Wormser showed you the foundation network and Dodd showed you the Carnegie minutes, Buesing shows you the timeless pattern. The tax-exempt foundation is just the modern iteration of an ancient technique: concentrate wealth beyond democratic reach, use it to shape society according to elite preferences, wrap it in the language of public benefit.

The book documents how the patterns Wormser found, foundations dividing territory to control education, placing their people in government, promoting collectivism, echo techniques used by Egyptian priesthoods, Roman patricians, and medieval church hierarchies. How crisis is systematically leveraged to justify consolidation. How the same families and institutions appear generation after generation in positions of power.

Pre-order now: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-hidden-hand-eric-daniel-buesing/1148336792

René Wormser’s “Foundations: Their Power and Influence” remains available in print. The Reece Committee’s findings are archived in congressional records. Norman Dodd’s 1982 interview with G. Edward Griffin is available online. The evidence is there for anyone willing to look.