Fake philanthropy news

-- BombThrowers: The 2016 book Dark Money is dishonest in multiple ways. First, it is deeply exaggerated. Author Jane Mayer may work at one of America’s snootiest magazines, the New Yorker, but she has the scruples of a National Enquirer headline writer. Her sensationalism begins right on the cover with her subtitle: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. As my CRC colleague Martin Morse Wooster, a leading historian of philanthropy, has pointed out, “the history she describes is not hidden, and the people she writes about are not radicals.” Indeed, much of Mayer’s information comes from books produced by the same donors she claims are hiding their deeds. For instance, when sketching the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, she describes how the family business was veering toward bankruptcy before government contracts for World War I saved it. How did Mayer unearth this? By reading a history that the Bradley Foundation commissioned and published in 1992. Similarly, she relies heavily on the authorized history of the John M. Olin Foundation produced by John Miller. For her history of the Scaife family, she uses a memoir by Richard Mellon Scaife that was privately published years ago. Far from being kept secret, it was handed out to everyone who attended the man’s memorial service in 2014. Mayer’s book is an extended exercise in scandalmongering, reaching its apex in her attempt to tie the libertarian Koch family to Hitler, because the family business built an oil refinery in Germany in 1933. But many multinational companies did business in Germany in the 1930s. Mayer doesn’t pretend that the Koch family, ardent champions of the free market, ever felt a serious attraction to the principles of National Socialism, but she casts dark aspersions. If Mayer had wanted to expose philanthropic scandals from that era, she should have described how non-conservative philanthropies like the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation were leading supporters of eugenics projects in the United States and Nazi Germany, with Rockefeller funding Germans through 1939. But that line of inquiry wouldn’t fit her agenda.

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