From the Arts and Humanities to Social Justice
- Hijacking Mellon’s Mission
By Claudia Henneberry
December 2024
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Mellon Series
- Part 1
- Part 2
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Andrew W. Mellon was an American businessman and statesman who served as Secretary of the Treasury under three Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He wrote the book, Taxation: The People’s Business, on reducing debt, lowering business and income taxes, and cutting government spending. Mellon’s bold capitalist ideas were encapsulated in the Revenue Act of 1926 which resulted in the economic boom of the 1920s.
Mellon made his fortune as a banker and an attorney, and helped finance some of the largest and longest-lasting corporations in America. During his lifetime, he donated to the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mellon’s children, Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, established the Mellon Foundation in 1969 continuing the family’s commitment to higher education and humanistic scholarship.
Leftward drift - so typical of philanthropic foundations - soon followed. For example, one of Mellon’s past presidents, John E. Sawyer, oversaw an almost doubling of the Foundation’s total annual grantmaking. In addition to continuing the Foundation's support of humanistic scholarship and institutions of higher education, Sawyer “promoted the improvement and modernization of the nation's research libraries and provided key leadership in the fields of population studies and ecology.”
The sixth president of the Foundation, Dr. Earl Lewis, was a noted social historian and Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University, whose leadership promoted diversity in higher education.
A few years later, in the summer of 2020 - following the death of George Floyd - violence, police persecution, property destruction, desecration of historic American monuments, and looting enveloped the nation. It did not take long for the Mellon Foundation to announce a “major strategic evolution” that put social justice front and center, under the auspices of its president, Elizabeth Alexander.
The Foundation’s new identity - their “new strategic direction” – is one that articulates a “new approach in our institutional thinking, and a new assessment of both our grantmaking and our operations through the lens of social justice.”
And as the violent mobs tore through America, Mellon’s Monument Lab tore through America’s monuments.
Mellon’s Monument Lab projects illustrate Mellon’s change in focus from one of supporting higher learning and the arts and humanities to one “driven by anti-racist, de-colonial, feminist, queer, working class, climate-conscious, and disability justice perspectives, and knows all forms of oppression must be dismantled for us to truly get free.”
Tragically, the legacies of Andrew W. Mellon and other “industry titans now flow to the coffers of Marxist scholars who cite racial, gender, or environmental reasons for dismantling our system of free enterprise,” as told by James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley at the City Journal.
Our next article in this series will expose other leftist causes sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.
- Hijacking Mellon’s Mission
By Claudia Henneberry
December 2024
---
Mellon Series
- Part 1
- Part 2
---
Andrew W. Mellon was an American businessman and statesman who served as Secretary of the Treasury under three Republican presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. He wrote the book, Taxation: The People’s Business, on reducing debt, lowering business and income taxes, and cutting government spending. Mellon’s bold capitalist ideas were encapsulated in the Revenue Act of 1926 which resulted in the economic boom of the 1920s.
Mellon made his fortune as a banker and an attorney, and helped finance some of the largest and longest-lasting corporations in America. During his lifetime, he donated to the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Art, and Carnegie Mellon University. Mellon’s children, Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon, established the Mellon Foundation in 1969 continuing the family’s commitment to higher education and humanistic scholarship.
Leftward drift - so typical of philanthropic foundations - soon followed. For example, one of Mellon’s past presidents, John E. Sawyer, oversaw an almost doubling of the Foundation’s total annual grantmaking. In addition to continuing the Foundation's support of humanistic scholarship and institutions of higher education, Sawyer “promoted the improvement and modernization of the nation's research libraries and provided key leadership in the fields of population studies and ecology.”
The sixth president of the Foundation, Dr. Earl Lewis, was a noted social historian and Professor of History and African American Studies at Emory University, whose leadership promoted diversity in higher education.
A few years later, in the summer of 2020 - following the death of George Floyd - violence, police persecution, property destruction, desecration of historic American monuments, and looting enveloped the nation. It did not take long for the Mellon Foundation to announce a “major strategic evolution” that put social justice front and center, under the auspices of its president, Elizabeth Alexander.
The Foundation’s new identity - their “new strategic direction” – is one that articulates a “new approach in our institutional thinking, and a new assessment of both our grantmaking and our operations through the lens of social justice.”
And as the violent mobs tore through America, Mellon’s Monument Lab tore through America’s monuments.
Mellon’s Monument Lab projects illustrate Mellon’s change in focus from one of supporting higher learning and the arts and humanities to one “driven by anti-racist, de-colonial, feminist, queer, working class, climate-conscious, and disability justice perspectives, and knows all forms of oppression must be dismantled for us to truly get free.”
Tragically, the legacies of Andrew W. Mellon and other “industry titans now flow to the coffers of Marxist scholars who cite racial, gender, or environmental reasons for dismantling our system of free enterprise,” as told by James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley at the City Journal.
Our next article in this series will expose other leftist causes sponsored by the Mellon Foundation.