Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives from World War I to the Cold War (review)

The Rockefeller Foundation spent $1 billion on good works at home and abroad between the end of World War I and the height of the Cold War. Time was when historians interested in that swatch of the American experience thought such expenditures translated into genuine social clout. The blurb for an earlier Indiana University Press volume on the big foundations—Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller—described them as "powerful institutions" the "corrosive influence" of which on foreign and domestic affairs was both undeniable and easily explained: They "buy talent, promote causes, and, in effect, establish an agenda of what merits society's attention."¹

Times change, however, and $1 billion now seems like small change. As Schneider notes in his introduction, it amounts to under 1 percent of the average annual gross domestic product in 1920s America. Nor does the Rockefeller Foundation that he and his collaborators portray appear to be particularly adept at setting agendas, promoting causes, or even buying talent, at least not in the countries that they survey: Ireland, Hungary, France, the Soviet Union, China, Italy, and Germany. To be sure, their inquiries have turned up several short-term successes, as well as various programs that seem to have been near misses, and the latter-day triumphs of the biomedical sciences lend a pleasantly retrospective glow to the whole enterprise. But Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine is mainly a record of 1920s and 1930s undertakings that either never left the ground for want of local subscribers, stalled when carefully assembled coalitions of the willing refused to stay bought, or were undone by events—the rise of Fascism in Italy and Stalinism in Russia, Japan's invasion of China, and the outbreak of World War II—that no foundation could control.

Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine comes with a publisher's blurb too. It promises "important lessons regarding the situations in which international philanthropy is likely to be most effective." But those morals are nowhere articulated; nor are lessons about situations of the other kind thick on the ground. The dust jacket gives the impression that much will be made of "local cultural and political imperatives that reshaped or weakened" Rockefeller's programs. With the conspicuous exceptions of the pieces on the Soviet Union and Germany, however, the book provides little information about the imperatives in question, only slightly more about the foundation's understanding of them, and nothing resembling a discussion of either that rises above the particular cases on offer.

What's missing is partly a reflection of Rockefeller's operating style: Its agents—whose reports from the field underpin every section of the book—rarely commented on developments outside their scientific and medical purviews. Their knowledge about the wider political and cultural allegiances of their beneficiaries and supplicants remains a mystery. As for lessons about local situations and the making of philanthropic successes and failures, it appears that a book covering a half-century dominated by world wars and other political plagues does not have much to teach internationally minded foundations other than the obvious: Stay out of countries that are soon to become major military battlefields, avoid nations run by truly unsavory characters, and beware of the proverbial "good German."

As it happens, Rockefeller took the third of those three points to heart, but only after the foundation's trustees, who wanted to help prepare Germany for the Cold War, bowed to the objections of its officers, who recoiled at the thought of giving aid and comfort to academic medical stalwarts whose pasts were suspect at best and odious at worst. The quarrel and its resolution in favor of not consorting with former Nazi sympathizers are examined to good effect in the next to last (and by far the best) chapter in the book—Paul Weindling's "'Out of the Ghetto': The Rockefeller Foundation and German Medicine after the Second World War." As Weindling...