Carnegie Corporation of New York

Under the presidencies of John W. Gardner (1955-1965) and Alan W. Pifer (1965-1982), the Carnegie Corporation dramatically expanded. Its most significant achievement was the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television (1965), which inspired the creation of the Corporation for Public Television. A second commission, the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting (1979; also known as “Carnegie II”) was far less effective.

During the presidency of Vartan Gregorian (2017-2023), the Carnegie Corporation was awarded substantial grants to left-of-center organizations including the Alliance for Justice, the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF). It also funded several prizes including the Carnegie Medals for Philanthropy, the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, and the Andrew Carnegie Fellows, a program similar to the MacArthur Foundation’s fellowship programs but limited to college professors.

In 2023, Dame Louise Richardson became the president of the Carnegie Corporation, a position she holds as of July 2024. ¹

Origins

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) retired from business in 1901, when he and his partners sold Carnegie Steel to U.S. Steel. He created many organizations with limited aims, including the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which conducts scientific research, the Carnegie Hero Fund², which gives medals to people who save others’ lives, and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, which funds educational research.

By 1906, notes Carnegie biographer Joseph Frazier Wall, “Carnegie was sick of the game” of philanthropy, and by 1910 “he was desperately sick of it.” “The final task dispensation of wealth preparing for the final exit,” Carnegie wrote to a friend, is “a heavy task…all sad.. You have no idea the strain I have been under.”³

When the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was created in 1910, Carnegie still had half of his fortune. Under the advice of Elihu Root, Secretary of State in the Theodore Roosevelt administration, Carnegie used $125 million to create the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. He imposed only one restriction on the corporation: It would provide pensions for Presidents of the United States and their widows.⁴

Three years later, Carnegie tried to change his mind. He tried to take $10 million from the Carnegie Corporation budget for a new organization to serve Great Britain. When Root advised that the endowment could not be reversed, Carnegie used money he had saved for his retirement to start the British organization. ⁵

Carnegie’s wishes were violated a second time during his lifetime when the Carnegie Corporation board voted to slow down and ultimately eliminate the program that funded libraries. Of the 1.419 libraries funded with Carnegie’s money, only six were approved after 1917, two years before Carnegie’s death, with the last opening in American Fork, Utah in 1919. Historian Theodore Jones notes that there is no evidence what Carnegie’s reaction was when the Carnegie Corporation board voted to terminate the library program.⁶

Eugenics

While the connections between philanthropy and eugenics encompass many groups besides the Carnegie Corporation, one of the most egregious examples lies squarely at the feet of former longtime board member Frederick H. Osborn. ⁷ Osborn, a staunch population-control enthusiast, authored Preface to Eugenics in 1940. He began the Population Council in 1952 alongside John D. Rockefeller III and wrote a chapter on population control in Rockefeller Foundation executive Warren Weaver’s volumes on American philanthropical action in 1967. ⁷

Specifically related to Carnegie Corporation funds is the Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina. In 2002, then-Governor Mike Easley issued an apology for the state’s history with eugenics and genetics testing. These state-integrated programs were funded by the Carnegie Corporation. ⁸

While the above can be attributed only to the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Carnegie Institute of Washington helped fund the eugenics movement. Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin opened the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 with the backing of the Carnegie Institute and the Rockefellers. ⁹ There, they compiled records of the “feebleminded” from the slums of New York and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Laughlin testified before Congress about his work and was later awarded an honorary degree in the “science of racial cleansing” from the University of Heidelberg in Nazi Germany. ⁹ The Second World War and the Nazis’ fascination with eugenics ended public interest in the United States and western Europe and the Eugenics Record Office was closed in 1939. ⁹

Carnegie Corporation in the 20^th Century

Until World War II, the Carnegie Corporation remained relatively small. Under the presidency of Henry S. Pritchett, the foundation largely funded other Carnegie charities.  Pritchett’s successor, Frederick S. Keppel, discarded old programs but created few new ones.  As a result, the Carnegie Corporation remained small until after World War II.¹⁰

After World War II, and the presidencies of John W. Gardner (1955-1965) and Alan Pifer (1965-1982), the foundation dramatically expanded. Under Pifer’s presidency, according to foundation observer Waldemar Nielsen, Carnegie became “the quintessential liberal, activist entrepreneurial foundation, more of a combat force than a traditional charity.”¹¹

Carnegie’s most significant achievement of the 1960s was funding the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television in 1965. The Commission issued a report, Public Television: A Program for Action, which said “we contemplate assistance to Public Television on a far larger scale than at present.”¹² All of the commission’s recommendations, including changing the name of educational television to “public television,” creating one quasi-governmental organization to run the stations and oversee content (the Public Broadcasting Service) and a second one (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) to fund the stations. The only proposal Congress rejected from the commission was a two-percent excise tax on the sale of television sets to pay for shows on public television.

In 1977, the Carnegie Corporation created a second commission to explore ways to fund public broadcasting. Unlike the first Carnegie Commission, the report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting, or “Carnegie II,” issued in 1979, published recommendations that were not implemented, including doubling the size of the public broadcasting budget and paying for it in part by taxing commercial stations’ broadcast licenses.¹³

In 1985, the Carnegie Corporation met with representatives of other nonprofits Carnegie created to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of Andrew Carnegie’s birth.  At the event Carnegie Corporation president David Hamburg told the Chronicle of Higher Education that Andrew Carnegie, were he alive, would appreciate “a continuing commitment to three themes that shaped his philanthropy: peace, education, and social justice.”¹⁴

The Vartan Gregorian Years

Vartan Gregorian became the Carnegie Corporation’s president in 1997, a position he held until 2023. Prior to becoming Carnegie Corporation president, he was president of Brown University and also served as an adviser to Walter Annenberg in his Annenberg Challenge, a $500 million series of grants to public schools that many consider a major philanthropic mistake. ^{15 1}

The Carnegie Corporation under Gregorian has funded numerous liberal groups. Among others, it has funded the Alliance for Justice, the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), and the Mexican American Legal and Defense Fund (MALDEF).¹⁶

The Carnegie Corporation has also funded a wide variety of prizes in recent years.  These include:

• The Carnegie Medals for Philanthropy, launched in 2001, awarded to eminent philanthropists. The most recent winners include H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest and Marguerite Lenfest of the Lenfest Foundation, Julian Robertson of the Robertson Foundation, and Jeff Skoll of the Skoll Foundation.¹⁷
• The Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, co-sponsored with the American Library Association. The winners in 2017 were Colson Whitehead for The Underground Railroad for best novel and Matthew Desmond for Evicted for best non-fiction book.¹⁸
• The Andrew Carnegie Fellows, launched in 2015, which give 35 professors two-year, $200,000 grants. These grants are similar to the MacArthur Fellowships, but are limited to professors.¹⁹
• The Academic Leadership Award, launched in 2015. In 2017 this prize was given to seven university presidents, including Georgia State University president Mark P. Becker, Georgetown University president John J. DeGioia, and Case Western Reserve University president Barbara J. Snyder. Schools whose presidents received these prizes got $500,000 grants.²⁰

Evaluations

In 2011, the Carnegie Corporation marked its centennial. President Vartan Gregorian gave an interview with Carnegie Corporation vice president Susan King in which he said his role was to be “a guardian of a tradition: a guardian of an important mission…We just have to keep Andrew Carnegie’s notion of spreading the gospel of wealth, and that’s what we are doing.”²¹

Indiana University philanthropy professor Leslie Lenkowsky noted in Philanthropy that “in important ways, the Corporation’s work has departed from its founder’s vision. Although it remains riveted on curing social and political inequalities, it has come to regard them less as the unfortunate by-product of an otherwise successful and worthy economic system and more as symptoms of fundamental flaws that require substantial changes to the system itself.”²²

The Economist noted that both IBM and the Carnegie Corporation had both been created in 1911. The magazine had concluded that IBM had done more good since 1961 because it continued to grow, while the Carnegie Corporation stagnated. IBM had sales of $200 billion and employed 427,000 people, while Carnegie barely made the list of America’s 20 largest foundations.

One reason why Carnegie was far smaller than IBM, The Economist noted, “may be that 100 years is too old for a philanthropic foundation. The absence of an existential threat have made it too comfortable…It is not clear what, if anything, keeps the people in charge of the Carnegie Corporation awake at night. The passage of time saps a foundation of the unique energy of its founder.”

“No wonder,” the magazine concluded, “many of today’s philanthropists aim, as Carnegie did, to give away all of their money by the time they die, or at least put a time limit on the lifespan of their foundation after their death.”²³

Activities

Voter Registration

In late 2000, the Carnegie Corporation invited left-leaning groups to a meeting in order to discuss coordinated voter registration efforts with funding from major liberal donors. Because the IRS prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits from engaging in partisan voter drives, the targeted demographics were referred to as “historically disenfranchised” communities. According to liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg in his 2012 book The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, “Major liberal donors got into the GOTV [get-out-the-vote] game: Project Vote organized urban areas, Rock the Vote targeted the young, the NAACP National Voter Fund focused on African-Americans.” ²⁴

Democracy

In January 2024, the Carnegie Corporation listed a series of grants to be sent out for several organizations intended to, “fortify our democracy by strengthening forces of social cohesion and reducing political polarization in American society.” ¹ They include several left-of-center advocacy groups and funding collaboratives including the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program and Press Forward. According to Inside Philanthropy, another recipient, Trust for Civic Life, is a grantmaking collaborative that has received funding from several left-of-center organizations including the Omidyar Network, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. ^{25 1}

During an interview with Inside Philanthropy in July 2024, Geri Mannion, the managing director of the Carnegie Corporation’s “Strengthening U.S. Democracy” program, mentioned several organizations that had received grants from the Corporation related to protecting voting rights, in particular those “ensuring election integrity” before the 2024 presidential elections. Several groups include United to Protect Democracy, the Campaign Legal Center, the Trusted Elections Fund, the State Infrastructure Fund (SIF), and the Brennan Center for Justice. ¹