The Reece Committee was formed on November 1, 1953 and the final report released 6 months later after efforts by some democrats to frustrate and end the investigation were somewhat successful. The Reece Committee was a Congressional investigation of major tax-exempt foundations linked to the international money cartel and centered on the Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, and Guggenheim foundations. The committee was unable to attract any attention from the media – controlled by the same cartel. Among those secondary foundations investigated were the National Education Association, the John Dewey Society, the United Nations Association and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Rockefeller Foundation was financing Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s studies on sexual behavior through the National Research Council to produce a series of untrue and unscientific reports promoting sexual freedom (promiscuity). The hearings were held for two weeks. Then, without warning, the committee stopped them.
The committee’s senior researcher, Norman Dodd, went public about his findings almost immediately after the committee shut down the hearings. I knew him in the mid-1960s. He was still trying to get the message out. His interviews are posted all over the Web. Here is an example: a 1980 interview. G. Edward Griffin did an interview in 1982. It is posted here:
Background
Following the Senate’s IPR investigation, Representative Eugene E. Cox (D-Ga.) succeeded in establishing a special committee in the House of Representatives to investigate the tax-exempt foundations. The committee heard voluminous damning testimony from former top American Communist Party officials who had defected, such as Maurice Malkin, Louis Budenz, and Manning Johnson, as well as Soviet defector Igor Bogolepov. All told of their knowledge of the tax-exempt foundations’ funding of Moscow’s efforts to subvert our country. However, before the committee could finish its work, Chairman Cox died unexpectedly. Although the Cox Committee hearings took over 800 pages of testimony and evidence, the final report, a mere 15 pages, was essentially a whitewash that unjustifiably concluded the foundations had overwhelmingly conducted themselves in line with their obligations as public trusts. However, at least one member of the committee, Representative B. Carroll Reece (R-Tenn.), was determined to set the record straight.
The following year, Representative Reece headed up the newly formed House Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, which became known as the Reece Committee.
Sabbotage
Immediately, the CFR-laden Eisenhower administration joined the CFR-controlled press in moves to scuttle the investigation. Bob Humphreys of the Republican National Committee virtually ordered the inquiry stopped. Chairman Reece and his top investigator, Norman Dodd, received very disturbing death threats. When these efforts failed to stop them, Major General Wilton B. Persons was sent by President Eisenhower (a CFR member) to urge Representative Wayne Hays (D-Ohio), a member of the committee, to monkey-wrench the hearings, which Hays did not hesitate to do. Among other things, Hays repeatedly interrupted witnesses and committee proceedings with rude, insulting, berating remarks and inane questions. He interrupted witness Aaron Sargent, for example, 246 times during Sargent’s 185 minutes of testimony.
(William H. McIlhany’s 1980 book The Tax-exempt Foundations provides the most detailed account of the congressional efforts to expose and oppose the revolutionary foundations — and the horrendous attacks that were unleashed upon the investigative committees.) John D. Rockefeller the 3rd himself responded to the findings of the Committee, flatly denying that the Rockefeller foundation or any of the organizations that it has given money to has ever advocated world government. Rockefeller states,
“If the expression “one-world theories of government” means anything, it means world government. No shred of evidence is presented in the report to show that the Rockefeller Foundation or any of the organizations to which it has made grants has advocated world government.” (p. 1104)
With the advantage of historical hindsight, this claim from Rockefeller is easily debunked. In reality, the Rockefeller family has – from a very early date – promoted globalism and world government, which today is almost a reality. The following are a few examples of Rockefeller influence over the past several decades. Programs of social engineering designed to acclimate the people to globalist policy and goals, combined with pushes for global governance have been pushed on the American people for almost 100 years.
Norman Dodd, Staff Director of the Reece Committee in and interview with G. Edward Griffin:
NORMAN DODD: “We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie Foundation began operations. In that year, the trustees, meeting for the first time, raised a specific question, which they discussed throughout the balance of the year in a very learned fashion. The question is: “Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people?” And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.
So then, in 1909, they raised the second question and discussed it, namely: “How do we involve the United States in a war?”
Well, I doubt at that time if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. Then, finally, they answered that question as follows: “We must control the State Department.” That very naturally raises the question of how do we do that? And they answer it by saying: “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.” And, finally, they resolve to aim at that as an objective.
Then time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would be World War I. At that time they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatched to President Wilson a telegram, cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly.
Finally, of course, the war is over. At that time their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914 when World War I broke out. At that point they came to the conclusion that, to prevent a reversion, “we must control education in the United States.” They realize that that’s a pretty big task. It is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that that portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the Endowment. They then decide that the key to success of these two operations lay in the alteration of the teaching of American history.
So they approach four of the then-most prominent teachers of American history in the country – people like Charles and Mary Byrd – and their suggestion to them is: will they alter the manner in which they present their subject? And they got turned down flat. So they then decide that it is necessary for them to do as they say, “build our own stable of historians.”
Then they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say: “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say-so?” And the answer is yes. So, under that condition, eventually they assembled assemble twenty, and they take this twenty potential teachers of American history to London, and there they’re briefed on what is expected of them when, as, and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. That group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association.
Toward the end of the 1920’s, the Endowment grants to the American Historical Association $400,000 for a study of our history in a manner which points to what can this country look forward to in the future. That culminates in a seven-volume study, the last volume of which is, of course, in essence a summary of the contents of the other six. The essence of the last volume is: The future of this country belongs to collectivism administered with characteristic American efficiency. That’s the story that ultimately grew out of and, of course, was what could have been presented by the members of this Congressional committee to the congress as a whole for just exactly what it said. They never got to that point.”
ED GRIFFIN: How do you see that the purpose and direction of the major foundations has changed over the years to the present? What is it today?
NORMAN DODD: Oh, it’s a hundred percent behind meeting the cost of education such as it is presented through the schools and colleges of the United States on the subject of our history as proving our original ideas to be no longer practicable. The future belongs to collectivistic concepts, and there’s just no disagreement on that.
Thanks to the heroic persistence of Norman Dodd, the Reece Committee was not totally intimidated and silenced. However, owing to the incredible obstructionism of Representative Wayne Hays, the censorship and vituperation of the media, the blackmail of Chairman Reece, and the subterfuge by the committee’s own counsel, Rene Wormser, the committee’s potential impact was greatly attenuated. Regarding Reece, Dodd subsequently learned that the chairman had been arrested for homosexuality in a public washroom shortly after he was first elected to Congress. The threat of public exposure of this secret had been held over him, which explained why Reece had inexplicably failed to rein in Hays and rule him out of order for his numerous outbursts and disruptive behavior. With regard to Wormser, Dodd stated in an interview with author William McIlhany that “Wormser was in cahoots with the very side that was to be investigated.” Wormser’s odd behavior, his sympathy toward the foundations, and his hostility toward publication of the committee’s report are difficult to understand in any other light. Immediately before one crucial hearing, Wormser destroyed the copies of testimony that were to be given to committee members. He crumpled up Dodd’s copy and tossed it at him, so that Dodd was forced to read to the packed hearing from a dirty, crumpled report.
According to general counsel for the Reece Committee, Rene A. Wormser’s account in Foundations: Their Power and Influence (Devin-Adair: New York, 1958, p. 341), “[Hays] was frank enough to tell us that he had been put on the committee by Mr. [Sam] Rayburn, the Democratic Leader in the House, as the equivalent of a watchdog. Just what he was to ‘watch’ was not made clear until it became apparent that Mr. Hays was making it his business to frustrate the investigation to the greatest extent possible.”
This was the only period until 2005 when the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Yet a Democrat on the committee, Wayne Hays — whose career ended in a sexual scandal in 1976, while I was a Capitol Hill staffer — was able to persuade other committee members to pull the plug.
Committee Findings
Nevertheless, in spite of huge obstacles, the Reece Committee did shine some light on the dark dealings of foundations in its 2,086-page report, issued in 1954. “In the international field,” the committee’s findings stated, “foundations, and an interlock among some of them and certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon our foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisers to government and by controlling much research in this area through the power of the purse. The net result of these combined efforts has been to promote ‘internationalism’ in a particular sense — a form directed toward ‘world government’ and a derogation of American ‘nationalism.’”
The Reece Report also observed that major foundations “have actively supported attacks upon our social and government system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas.” The committee further declared that the private CFR had become “in essence, an agency of the United States Government,” and that its “productions are not objective but are directed overwhelmingly at promoting the globalist concept.”
One of the most astounding revelations to come out of the Reece Committee investigation came from Ford Foundation President H. Rowan Gaither (a Council on Foreign Relations member), who admitted, in a private meeting with committee investigator Norman Dodd, that he and others inside and outside of government were working “to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.” When the shocked Norman Dodd asked if he would repeat that statement in public testimony, Gaither replied, “This, we would not think of doing.”
The Committee’s findings were summarized by the committee’s counsel, Rene Wormser. His book, Foundations (1958), has become a vital document in understanding the leftward drift of America’s elite. Fortunately, it is still in print. The hearings revealed that since 1908, robber baron oligarchs have been using a network of private organizations to hijack foreign diplomacy, localities, and public education, under the disguise of “charitable organizations” or “foundations”. This is not a “conspiracy theory”, rather it is a fact – as determined in congressional hearings in 1953. Congressman B. Carroll Reece (R., Tenn.), assisted by staff member René Wormser and consultant George de Huszar, looked into the grant-making policies of the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. In the end, the effort ran aground on accusations of intellectual McCarthyism and the disruptive antics of Congressman Wayne Hays (D., Ohio). Nonetheless, ‘the Committee shed light on the big foundations’ promotion of empiricism, centralized team research, big universities over small colleges, moral relativism, internationalism, and social engineering.
“In the international field, foundations, and an interlock among some of them and certain intermediary organizations, have exercised a strong effect upon our foreign policy and upon public education in things international. This has been accomplished by vast propaganda, by supplying executives and advisors to government, and by controlling much research in this area through the power of the purse. The net result of these combined efforts has been to promote ‘internationalism’ in a particular sense – a form directed toward ‘world government’ and a derogation of American ‘nationalism.’
“They observed that the major foundations ‘have actively supported attacks upon our social and government system and financed the promotion of socialism and collectivist ideas.‘ The Reece Committee clearly declared that the CFR was ‘in essence an agency of the United States Government’ and that its ‘productions are not objective but are directed overwhelmingly at promoting a globalist concept.’”
“In speed of transportation and communication and in economic interdependence, the nations of the globe are already one world; the task is to secure recognition and acceptance of this oneness in the thinking of the people, as that the concept of one world may be realized psychologically, socially and in good time politically.
It is this task in particular that challenges our scholars and teachers to lead the way toward a new way of thinking. There is an urgent need for a program for world citizenship that can be made a part of every person’s general education.
It will take social science and social engineering to solve the problems of human relations. Our people must learn to respect the need for special knowledge and technical training in this field as they have come to defer to the expert in physics, chemistry, medicine, and other sciences.” [emphasis added] (p. 483)
“Conspicuously absent from The Reece Committee report were the links between the Foundations to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). In his book A THOUSAND DAYS (1965), CFR member Arthur Schlesinger, Jr, provides the link. Schlesinger writes ‘the American Establishment,’ whose ‘household deities were Henry L. Stimson and Elihu Root; its present leaders [1965], Robert A. Lovett and John J. McCloy; its front organizations, the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations and the Council on Foreign Relations; its organs, the New York Times and Foreign Affairs….'”
The report specifically targeted Kinsey’s research funded by the Rockefeller Endowment. The report claimed that these foundations were attempting to undermine the government through the kind of educational research they funded.
According to the Dodd Report:
IN THESE FIELDS THE SPECIALISTS, MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, SEEM TO HAVE BEEN CONCERNED WITH THE PRODUCTION OF EMPIRICAL DATA AND WITH ITS APPLICATION. PRINCIPLES AND THEIR TRUTH OR FALSITY SEEM TO HAVE CONCERNED THEM VERY LITTLE.
As if this absence of concern for the truth was not enough of a threat, the Dodd Report went on to state that:
“THE SOCIAL SCIENTIST IS GRADUALLY BECOMING DIGNIFIED BY THE TITLE “SOCIAL ENGINEER.” THIS TITLE IMPLIES THAT THE OBJECTIVE VIEWPOINT OF THE PURE SCIENTIST IS ABOUT TO BECOME OBSOLETE IN FAVOR OF TECHNIQUES OF CONTROL. IT ALSO SUGGESTS THAT OUR TRADITIONAL CONCEPT OF FREEDOM AS A FUNCTION OF NATURAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL LAW HAS BEEN ABANDONED.”
The Reece Committee concluded that Kinsey was a dangerous social engineer whose work needed to be stopped. And the best way to stop him was to pressure the foundation that backed him. The need to keep minds under strict control, never to be challenged by independent research, drove the committee to guarantee that Kinsey – and those like him – could never conduct independent research again.
Kinsey infuriated anti-Communist activists for many reasons. But one reason in particular truly incensed them. Kinsey argued that homosexuality lay in the normal range of human sexuality and that it should be decriminalized everywhere. At exactly this moment, however, Congress and President Eisenhower decreed that homosexuality had become central to the Communist plot to take over America. On April 27, 1953, Executive Order 10450 — Security Requirements for Government Employment was enacted which included a clause stating that “Any criminal, infamous, dishonest, immoral, or notoriously disgraceful conduct, habitual use of intoxicants to excess, drug addiction, sexual perversion” was reason to be excluded from government employment.
–https://archive.org/details/DoddReportToTheReeceCommitteeOnFoundations-1954-RobberBaron
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