Thread by @DataRepublican

🧵🇺🇸 THE SHAPERS OF "DEMOCRACY" PT 1: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP)

Today we begin a daily deep dive into the historical U.S. nonprofits that claimed to “strengthen democracy” ... and the elite networks, foreign policy moves, and educational agendas behind them.

First up: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), founded in 1910.

Formed by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, its purpose was to "hasten the abolition of international war, the foulest blot upon our civilization."

Patience as I pull this thread together...

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) sold the Carnegie Steel Company to JP Morgan in 1901 which catapulted him ahead of the infamous John D. Rockefeller wealth-wise.

In 1899 he published the "Gospel of Wealth" which formed his moral foundation for his philanthropy.

Western history up to this point had been full of idealists claiming to have the solution to solving humanity, from French revolutionaries to British imperialists. All had failed.

Carnegie proposed that the new Industrial Revolution tycoons would solve humanity's problems.

In Carnegie's view, tycoons had the obligation to adopt a technocratic role: reshaping society for the sake of the poor people.

Carnegie did not like standard charity as an instrument of giving away wealth. He advocated for a much more technocratic approach as to prevent charity waste.

"Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity to-day, it is probable that nine hundred and fifty dollars is unwisely spent—so spent, indeed, as to produce the very evils which it hopes to mitigate or cure," he wrote.

And so in the 1910 CEIP founding, he assembled a group of trustees and gave them wide discretion to end global war. His original list was already full of influential academic and political officials and US foreign policy officials.

From the very beginning, CEIP already had deep government ties.

◦ United States Senator Elihu Root — representative of the United States at The Hague Tribunal
◦ Nicholas Murray Butler — president of Columbia University
◦ Henry S. Pritchett — president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
◦ Joseph H. Choate — former Ambassador to Great Britain
◦ Albert K. Smiley — educator and humanitarian
◦ Charles W. Eliot — president-emeritus of Harvard University
◦ James Brown Scott — solicitor for the State Department
◦ John W. Foster — ex-Secretary of State
◦ Andrew J. Montague — ex-governor of Virginia
◦ Congressman William M. Howard — Lexington, Ky.
◦ Congressman James L. Slayden — San Antonio, Tex.
◦ Judge Thomas Burke — Seattle, Wash.
◦ Andrew D. White — ex-Ambassador to Germany
◦ Robert S. Brookings — lawyer, Saint Louis, Mo.
◦ Samuel Mather — banker, Cleveland, Ohio
◦ J. G. Schmidlap — railroad man, Cincinnati, Ohio
◦ Arthur W. Foster — regent of the University of California
◦ Robert A. Franks — banker, Hoboken, N. J.
◦ Charlemagne Tower — ex-Ambassador to Germany and Russia
◦ Oscar S. Strauss — Ambassador to Turkey
◦ Austen G. Fox — lawyer, New York
◦ John Sharpe Williams — senator-elect from Mississippi
◦ Charles L. Taylor — chairman of the Carnegie Hero Commission
◦ John L. Cadwalader — lawyer, New York
◦ George W. Perkins — financier, New York
◦ Cleveland H. Dodge — philanthropist and financier
◦ Luke E. Wright — ex-Secretary of War
◦ Robert S. Woodward — president of the Carnegie Institution

In fact, CEIP's first President was Elihu Root, who had just served as Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State from 1905 to 1909, after serving as Secretary of War for McKinley from 1899 to 1904.

He served as CEIP President concurrently while he was serving as US Senator.

By 1911, the Trustees had established three divisions: (1) Intercourse and Education -- to inform and engage the public, (2) Economics and History -- to research war’s causes and impacts, and (3) International Law -- to develop legal frameworks for peace.

World War I hindered those programs, but did not slow down their mission. They reaffirmed that the best way to promote international peace was to prosecute the war against Imperial German government to "final victory for democracy."

This was simply the first of many pro-war pushes that CEIP would support in the following century-plus of their existence.

Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University and founding CEIP trustee, would go onto writing a "World in Ferment" detailing his analysis of war.

World War I, in his view, was an unprecedented opportunity to spread democracy.

His writings reflect the early thinkings of modern globalism and the thinking of CEIP: that interventionism to spread democracy was the way to bring on world peace.

When everyone's a democracy, then, finally, world peace can possibly be at hand.

And so CEIP placed itself at the service of the Woodrow Wilson administration. Their leaders joined the 1918 peace talks. Elihu Root would be involved with the founding of the League of Nations, and would be invited to draft the Statute of the Permanent Court of International Justice.

Despite this, Root was a more conservative trustee, skeptical of foreign interventions and opposing Wilson's controversial Article X.

When he retired in 1925 as CEIP's President, Butler took over the role. Under Butler's two-decade tenure, CEIP would greatly expand its role.

Butler's goal was to cultivate an 'International Mind' in America.

Between WWI and WWII, CEIP threw its resources behind educating American students on foreign affairs, targeting colleges and high schools.

1200 "International Relation Clubs" across the United States would spring up, supplemented by 4,000 'International Mind Alcolves.' CEIP distributed materials and books to these clubs, and sponsored many conferences.

In 1952, the unpublished Dodd Report would accuse the CEIP and Rockefeller Foundations as having together re-shaping the educational system in the 1930s to promote internationalism.

It's not a conspiracy theory when this was the explicit aim of CEIP.

During WWII, CEIP again saw an opportunity to reshape the world to get rid of war for once and all. They advised the State Department on what this "New World Order" would look like.

In 1945, delegates from 50 nations met in San Francisco to draft the UN Charter. CEIP’s long-time research director James T. Shotwell was appointed chairman of the semi-official Consultants to the U.S. delegation at the conference. In that capacity, Shotwell successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a Human Rights Commission in the UN’s structure - the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, which would become a subsidiary of ECOSOC.

Another CEIP figure involved in drafting the UN Charter was Alger Hiss - who acted as Secretary-General of the UN Conference.

He was also CEIP's third president after Butler retired. But Hiss resigned under duress when he was accused of espionage for the Soviet Union.

John Foster Dulles, the brother of the infamous CIA Director, Allen Dulles, succeeded Alger Hiss.

While tenured as chairman, Dulles served as US Envoy to negotiate and conclude the Treaty of San Francisco. He would go onto become Eisenhower's Secretary of State.

From day one, CEIP was the same machine as the US foreign policy establishment, sharing personnel, strategy, and purpose.

There was never a line between think tank and state. All the while, they primed the public and officials to accept a new creed: world peace would come waging war in democracy's name.

CEIP would go onto not only serve as a revolving door for the US government, but would also partner with USAID on development initiatives. And so what started as one tycoon's ambitions became a self-licking ice-cream cone funded by the US taxpayer.

CEIP and USAID would go onto have a close relationship.

Their influence still continues to today. Ironically, many of the greatest pro-war neocon voices have been affiliated with CEIP. Robert Kagan, the husband of Victoria Nuland and one of the biggest supporters of the Iraq invasion, was a senior associate with CEIP.

Per InfluenceWatch, CEIP not only receives substantial funding from US taxpayers, but from George Soros' Open Society Foundations as well among others.

Even today, CEIP is directing US foreign policy from behind the scenes.

Their 2023 annual report talks about how they helped organize talks about China with Biden administration officials. This in addition to many papers they circulated around the US State Department.

🇺🇸 THREAD WRAP-UP: THE SHAPERS OF "DEMOCRACY" - CEIP

From its founding, CEIP was a network of men who believed war, peace, education, and law could be engineered from above by the “capable.” They did not simply influence foreign policy. They were, and still are, foreign policy.

Its presidents were senators, secretaries of state, military administrators. Its trustees moved between the academy, the press, and the highest offices of government.

Even in its earliest years, the CEIP held a worldview that would define the century:

· Peace could be “secured” by prosecuting wars to the “right” conclusion.
· Law could be designed by a small elite achieve an international order.
· Education was a tool for aligning public sentiment with pre-determined ends.

CEIP is just the first layer of the rabbit hole. Follow me with it far enough, and we see where it ends: a world that is not a series of sovereign nation-state, but a supranational technocratic ruling class that believes that the ideal of global "democracy" is above any one country's law.

Stay tuned tomorrow for the next in the series, the Rockefeller Foundation.