All important fields of activity" from the breeding of bees to the administration of an empire, call for an understanding of the spirit and technique of modern science" Science is the method of knowledge. It is the key to such dominion as man may ever exercise over his physical environment. Appreciation of its spirit and technique, moreover, determines the mental attitude of a people, affects the entire system of education, and carried with it the shaping of a civilization.[43]
In the 1920s, the Rockefeller interventions in the social sciences were almost exclusively undertaken by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), named after John D. Rockefeller's wife after her death. The Rockefeller Foundation, following the public exposures of the Walsh Commission, primarily maintained itself to funding medicine and public health. Beardsley Ruml, who became director of the LSRM in 1922, was largely responsible for the Rockefeller move into the social sciences, as the LSRM had been primarily concerned with social welfare prior to Ruml's directorship. On top of the social sciences, Ruml directed the LSRM into funding public administration, and Ruml felt that, "the route to advancing human welfare was through scientific social research," and thus, "means had to be devised to bring the social scientist into intimate contact with social phenomena." The main idea was that the social sciences should elevate to establish an equal relationship with that of the natural sciences by making them more "scientific," and thus, more efficient and able to handle social problems.[44]
Two general scientific objectives were established for organizing the social sciences, the first of which was, "to increase for the scientist and scholar the possibilities of immediate personal observation of the social problems or social phenomena which were under investigation," and the second objective was to promote inter-disciplinary research. To undertake this, Ruml set out two specific programs of action:
First, the creation of institutional centers in various parts of the world that would with Rockefeller money embody scientific teaching and research. Collaborative research was to be encouraged through the specific research grants to these institutions. These centers would therefore not only be creative institutions but would also serve as a model for the development of the social sciences generally. Second, Ruml began an extensive fellowship program which was designed to complement the training provided by the institutional centers and increase the number of able people working in the field.[45]
Ruml also saw the need to strengthen existing institutions, notably, the elite American universities, which would become "institutional centers of social research." Edmund E. Day, director of the Rockefeller Foundation's Social Sciences program from 1928-1937, explained in 1930 that the plan was to develop "within each country of any importance some center which would fructify the local situation and influence other institutions within the same sphere of scientific influence, then within the larger regional centers." Focusing on the United States and Europe, the LSRM stated in 1926 that its main policy was directed at establishing 12 or 15 centers of social science research around the world, one specific center in each major European country, (University of Stockholm, Deutsche Hochscule fà ¼r in Berlin, and the London School of Economics), and several in the United States. The LSRM was merged into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929, which adopted the same agenda established by Ruml in seeking to cultivate through such institutions "a scientific approach to social problems."[46]
Through the fellowship program, established at the LSRM by Ruml in 1923, students in Europe and Australia were often brought to study in the United States, with the favoured subject within the social sciences being economics, considering it was the closest to establishing itself along the lines of the physical sciences. As the Rockefeller Foundation prepared to incorporate the LSRM into its institutional structure, Edmund E. Day took over as director of the Social Sciences from Ruml in 1928, with the new Social Science division becoming a "formal organization," just as the Foundation's other major divisions of medicine, natural science, and the humanities. In 1930, Day wrote that, "what we have to do is to establish in the social sciences the scientific tradition and the scientific habit of mind," and thus, the Foundation should work to strengthen "certain types of interest and certain habits of thought." Naturally, this would be "thought" which would be in the "interest" of the Foundation, itself. The aim in doing this was to "coordinate the scientific attack upon social problems," as education professor, Donald Fisher, wrote in Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism. Edmund Day saw the potential for the social sciences to engage in "human engineering," and stated quite bluntly: "the validation of the findings of social science must be through effective social control."[47]
In 1932, the Foundation put emphasis on the support for creating a field of "International Relations," within Political Science, as well as "the planning and control of economic structures and economic process." In the area of "International Relations," the Rockefeller Foundation hoped to "promote understanding among nations and to reduce the friction which may lead to warfare," which, combined with the program of "Economic Control" was hoped to prevent any future "crisis of capitalism." A 1934 Rockefeller Foundation committee of trustees produced a report on the Social Sciences Division, explaining, "we now have the opportunity to see whether we cannot assist in applying to concrete problems of our social, political and industrial life some of the ideas and data which research all over the world is rapidly developing."[48]
In 1932-33, as the Board was considering the proposals of reform in education, all the programs were subject to the ultimate approval of the Board of Trustees of the GEB, which at the time included 15 individuals, all of whom were white, male protestants, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and his 27 year old son, John D. Rockefeller, III, and most of whom had been educated at Ivy League schools or the University of Chicago, which had been founded by John D. Rockefeller. Nine of the fifteen trustees were also academics, and seven of them had been senior administrators at major educational institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, N.Y.U, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Other members of the trustees included Owen Young, Chairman of the Board of General Electric, as well as banker Arthur Woods, and Raymond Fosdick, a Wall Street lawyer who would later become President of the Rockefeller Foundation. By 1931, the GEB's survey of education emphasized three major fields of concentration:
1) the study of the learning process and the mental, physical, and moral development of the individual; 2) the problem of "preparing the individual for vocations and leisure"; and 3) the means for relating education to an evolving society, that is education which would "insure the active adaptation of the individual to the changes which may come in his social, physical and aesthetic environments."[49]
It was Edmund E. Day, the new director of the Social Science Division, who assumed the greatest leadership in coordinating national reform of education, having previously been an economics professor at Dartmouth, Harvard, and was Dean of the School of Business Administration at the University of Michigan, when he subsequently led the social sciences division at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial until its incorporation into the Rockefeller Foundation between 1928 and 1930, at which time he assumed his role as director of the Social Sciences Division within both the Rockefeller Foundation and the General Education Board. Day was responsible for articulating and selling the ideas of educational reform to the Board of Trustees, which he did in 1932 in a memorandum entitled, "Cultural Adjustment to a Changing World." In regards to the social upheavals of the early Depression years, Day wrote in 1933 that, "Industrialism and urbanism" are new forces of tremendous power, neither of which has been brought under sensible control. The way out is not yet evident, and a prolonged period of readjustment is presumably unavoidable." Day acknowledged that "prevailing social ideas and ideals in the United States were seriously out of accord with current social forms and forces," however, he argued, the answer did not lie in reforming the social world to meet the needs of the individual, but in adjusting the individual to the social world. As Day wrote, "we must look chiefly to the school for the major efforts toward cultural adjustment of the individual, since the school is a social instrumentality with a uniquely flexible adaptability and with a primary responsibility to meet this need." Thus, the school could "set the individual in satisfactory general relation to the world in which he lived."[50]
Between 1919 and 1940, the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and other major philanthropies provided roughly $3.2 million of support for the social sciences in British universities, and a further $1.7 million for "independent organizations which were closely tied to the universities." The two major Rockefeller philanthropies at the time, the LSRM and the RF, provided roughly 95% of these expenditures. Thus, it was American philanthropy, and principally the Rockefeller foundations which were directly responsible for the development of British social sciences in this period. Only in the late 1930s did British philanthropy pick up the slack from the Rockefeller foundations.[51]
Rockefeller money was also pivotal in the establishment of the London School of Economics (LSE), which "had become an important world centre of the social sciences," in large part due to the involvement of Rockefeller philanthropies. The Rockefeller foundations selected the LSE specifically for support because in the early 1920s, it was the most advanced center of social sciences in Britain, and could thus serve as a model for the rest of British institutions. Further, the director of the LSE, Lord William Beveridge (also a member of the British Eugenics Society), "shared with Rockefeller philanthropy the same conception of the way in which the social sciences should develop," specifically in terms of utilizing the "natural scientific approach" to social problems. Also important to note as to why the LSE was chosen, was its strategic location in London, at the heart of the world's most powerful and globally expanded empire at the time.[52]
Between 1923 and 1939, the LSRM and the Rockefeller Foundation provided the LSE with over $2 million, during which time the school expanded rapidly, becoming "the leading centre of research in the Social Sciences" in the British Empire. Building expansions, the establishment of the leading research library in Britain, acquisition of land, equipment, and a dramatic increase in full-time teachers from 26 in 1923 to 76 by 1937, was largely due to Rockefeller support. Rockefeller money in particular ensured the development of anthropology, international relations, and social biology, and student enrollment also dramatically increased with large grants from Rockefeller philanthropies for postgraduate research and teaching. Thus, by the end of the 1930s, the LSE had "become an international centre training many foreign students." Grants also contributed to expanding and supporting publications by LSE faculty, with an enormous amount of books and articles emerging as a result of this support, and supported the creation of journals run out of the school as well.[53]
Rockefeller money also flowed into developing the social sciences at Oxford, funding research lecturers for Human Geography, African Sociology, Colonial Administration, Public Administration, and Public Finance, with more money flowing into forming a training program for the social sciences as well as research groups in the area of Economics, Colonial Administration, and Studies of Native Populations, subjects explicitly related to maintaining Britain's imperial status. Rockefeller foundations also expanded a fellowship program into every university in Britain, granting a total of 108 fellowships in the social sciences to British citizens between 1924 and 1940, and "by far the largest number were awarded to economists," with Political Science following behind, and subsequently sociology and history, and only 8 anthropology fellowships.[54]
In 1946, a British government report surveying the state of British universities concluded that the social sciences, which had received no prior support from government sources, presented as many possibilities of generating applicable knowledge as did the natural sciences, and were thus worth of government support in order to advance the social sciences in the "national interest." A committee was subsequently established to handle government subsidies of the social sciences, and in the 1950s, the British social sciences experienced a major "boom," advancing what was begun with Rockefeller money so that it became state sanctioned, and, in effect, a new socially constructed reality of higher education in Britain: "the social sciences had become a recognized part of the university curriculum."[55] As professor of education Donald Fisher wrote:
Indeed Rockefeller philanthropy prepared the way for the post-World War II developments in Britain not only in terms of the increased spending by government but also with respect to what was regarded as important in the social sciences. Rockefeller philanthropy had determined which subjects should be studied, which research questions should be answered, and which methods should be utilized to answer these questions.[56]
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