Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
Givers, Doers, and Thinkers introduces listeners to the fascinating people and important ideas at the heart of American civil society. We speak with philanthropists, foundation leaders, reformers, social entrepreneurs, nonprofit executives, religious believers, historians, sociologists, philosophers, journalists, and anyone else who will help us understand contemporary civil society’s achievements and failures. We also sprinkle in practical advice for nonprofit leaders and fundraisers. This is the podcast for anyone interested in that vital space where philanthropy and civil society intersect.
Givers, Doers, & Thinkers—A Podcast on Philanthropy and Civil Society
James Piereson & the impact of conservative philanthropy
This week on Givers, Doers, & Thinkers, Jeremy is joined by political scientist and philanthropic leader James Piereson, who discusses his time at the helm of the Olin Foundation and William E. Simon Foundation. They also discuss the impact of conservative philanthropy since Reagan, the successes and missteps of conservative philanthropy during that time, what the future holds for the conservative movement, and what Trump’s ultimate influence will be.
Sponsored by AmPhil, helping nonprofits advance their missions and raise more money: https://amphil.com/.
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Center for Civil Society's YouTube Channel
This week on Givers, doers and Thinkers.
Speaker 1:I talk to political scientist and philanthropic leader, james Pearson about his time at the helm of the Olin and William E Simon Foundations. We also talk about the impact of conservative philanthropy since Reagan, the successes and missteps of conservative philanthropy during that time, what the future holds for the conservative movement and what the ultimate influence of Trump will be. Let's go. Welcome to Givers, doers and Thinkers. A podcast on philanthropy and civil society. I'm Jeremy Beer. Great to have you with us. Today is March 21, 2025, and I am very happy to have as our guest James Pearson, former president and trustee of the William E Simon Foundation, among many other things, as we'll hear about, and prolific author on topics related to American politics and philanthropy.
Speaker 1:James Pearson took his bachelor and doctoral degrees from Michigan State University. He is from Michigan, originally Rockford Michigan, just north of Grand Rapids. It may be fortunate that we're recording this now, because Michigan State plays tonight in the NCAA men's basketball tournament and that may be of some interest to Jim. He then taught at several schools, including Indiana University and the University of Pennsylvania, before going into philanthropy. As we shall see, jim's books include Camelot and the Cultural Revolution how the Assassination of John F Kennedy, shattered Liberalism, the Inequality Hoax and Shattered Consensus the Rise and Decline of America's Post-War Political Order.
Speaker 1:Jim serves on numerous boards and committees. I won't go through all of them, but I'll note the boards of the Thomas W Smith Foundation, the Philanthropy Roundtable and the New Criterion. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute as well, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes here today, for the last 40 years or so, jim led two of the most conservative foundations in the country most important conservative foundations in the country, I should say. First the John M Olin Foundation from 1985 to 2005, and then the Simon Foundation, which he led until, I think, it made his last grant in 2023. So, with that, how are you today, jim?
Speaker 2:Excellent, thank you. Glad to be with you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for doing this. We appreciate it. So we'll start a little bit at the beginning. After you got your PhD at Michigan State, you launched into an academic career in political science and you were teaching at Penn, I believe, when you got derailed into the world of philanthropy. What happened?
Speaker 2:Well, I had embarked on a teaching career. My first job was at Iowa State. I then moved to Indiana and then I moved to the University of Pennsylvania. We're now talking about the mid to late 1970s, actually around the time of the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1976. And it's a good question why I decided to leave.
Speaker 2:I didn't like the future I saw as an academic for a couple of reasons. One, I had become somewhat disquieted with the idea of doing technical disciplinary research which kind of had to do with advanced and academia. I was interested in broader subjects constitution, for example. Contemporary politics and political science was increasingly a quantitative field. We had some people interested in philosophy, some people interested in history, but a minority. So I had become a little bit discontent with the academic world. And at the University of Pennsylvania I got very interested in the Founding Fathers because I lived next, very near Independence Hall, and I would stop by there often on my way over to classes. Of course I taught the founding fathers in my classes, I read them and I got more interested.
Speaker 2:In those years I was at Penn and I left Penn in 1981, 82, to go to the Olin Foundation. Someone on the faculty at Penn told me they were looking for someone who knew something about academia and it was a conservative foundation. And would I go up and talk to them, which I did? One thing led to another and they offered me a job. I didn't know if I really wanted to take it. I went on leave from Penn, took the job for a year and after I spent a year there I decided I didn't want to go back to Penn. So I stayed.
Speaker 2:Because we're now talking about early 1980s, ronald Reagan as the president. When I went, I knew very little about charitable foundations and not a lot about the conservative movement, even though I myself myself was something of a conservative, was one of the reasons I left academia because of the direction I was headed. But my conservatism was a kind of founding fathers' conservatism, kind of a traditional conservatism. And, of course, as I went to the Olin Foundation, I learned there are various stripes. There are the free market conservatives, there are the national security conservatives, the National Review conservatives, there are the neoconservatives, there's the old right, there is the new rights. There are a lot of different stripes to it, which I learned during the years I was there. I was hired by a man by the name of Michael Joyce, who was then the executive director, and the president was William Simon, and after about two years there Mike Joyce left to go to the Bradley Foundation as president of the Bradley Foundation, which at that time was a new foundation.
Speaker 2:Right right, we're now talking about 1984, 85. And when Mike left, I was promoted to be executive director and he left Milwaukee and then, like a year later, I was put on the board of trustees. So it was a very interesting opportunity at that time. Ronald Reagan as president, and the conservative movement so-called was then in the process of expanding, partly because of Ronald Reagan, partly because of the backwash in the 1960s. There are a lot of fairly distinguished scholars and thinkers who had become disappointed and unhappy with what was happening on the campus as a result of the warriors from the 1960s coming onto the campus.
Speaker 2:As faculty members you had identity politics coming in big time. You had government grants coming in big time with the government federal government exercising a lot of leverage over the college campus. Then, of course, you had all the trashing of business, the Constitution, free markets and that sort of thing. So we developed a lot of opportunities at that time where people were starting to come to us for help. A lot of them some of them were conservatives, a lot of them were what you'd call anti-left.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We don't like what's happening on the left side and we are going to be prepared to join with the conservative and over time they may have changed, but I think of the neoconservatives were a little bit like that. We helped a lot of the neoconservatives. Irving Kristol was an advisor to the foundation. We worked closely with Bill Buckley, who was a different kind of conservative, and Russell Burt and we worked very closely with the so-called Straussian. One of our really big grants was to Alan Bloom at the University of Chicago, who at that time was a little-known professor but we knew of him. He was a very popular teacher. A couple years later he wrote this international bestselling book and became very famous. We didn't know that was going to happen, but I would say that I did learn that in this world a lot of things happen by serendipity.
Speaker 2:If you're going to give money to good people, they will do things that might surprise you, as Alan Bloom did.
Speaker 1:Was that already the strategy when you got there? That, hey, we're going to fund scholars mainly here. That's going to be a primary emphasis of our grant making.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean yes. So I came up there because I knew something about academia and I was at an Ivy League school, even though I came from Michigan State, right, but I did know something about academia and I knew a lot of where the bodies were buried, so to speak, in academia and how to work with. But we were an East Coast foundation. Our trustees were all Ivy League graduates Harvard, princeton, yale, cornell. John Olin went to Cornell. He was still alive when I went there. He died shortly thereafter. John Olin was also on the board of Johns Hopkins University and had given a lot of money to universities in that period, 50s and 60s. There are a lot of libraries around the country named after John Olin. He paid for them.
Speaker 1:How did he make his money? Where did John come from?
Speaker 2:Olin Industries. The company made its money originally by selling black powder to the United States government in World War I. Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:It owned Remington and Winchester rifles. It made fertilizers. It was a large conglomerate you don't hear about much anymore. They made skis and John Olin was a trustee at cornell. When the trouble started in cornell in 1969, some radical students took over the student union brandishing machine guns. You may have heard about that. And uh, john olin decided at some point in the 70s that he would like to use his money to bolster the free enterprise system in America and fight against the radicals that he saw taking over the college and that was the origin of the foundation. Okay, mike Joyce went there and that was one of the reasons I wound up there. So, yes, in a sense we were an East Coast foundation, so we were oriented a lot to the elite university, so we did a fair amount at. You know the Eastern universities and you know the think tanks on the East Coast. When we ventured outside the Northeast it was often at University of Chicago or Stanford or some such place.
Speaker 1:Was there anybody else doing anything like this at the time? Certainly on the right, but were you mimicking something you'd seen on the left or just kind of inventing this as you went along?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I'd say two things. One the Ford Foundation had been very active on the left. One the Ford Foundation had been very active on the left, ceding money for advocacy groups and college programs on gender and race. Many of the advocacy groups that were active in that period, some of them still active, were ceded by the Ford Foundation. They also created these litigation groups. So they were this is under McGeorge Bundy, who came to Ford in the mid-1960s, so they were kind of off and running on this strategy.
Speaker 2:So there was a thought that we needed something on our side to counteract this, maybe even to mimic on our side some of the things they did. So we did fund litigation groups, public interest groups, as they did. We did try to fund academic programs. We did fund books, think tanks and that sort of thing. So there was that. In terms of conservative funders, there were some, but not exactly like us.
Speaker 2:Scaife was very active at the time. They had a strong national security focus and a free market focus. We had a little bit different focus in the sense we were ordered a lot to these universities but there was some overlap. And then the Bradley Foundation came along and they overlapped to some degree also. But they also had a state and local focus Milwaukee and Wisconsin. So we were a little bit different in the sense that we didn't have any of those things and we were in New York City and we would kind of get lost in New York and we saw a lot of people in New York. So we set off to build a program. John Olin wanted the foundation to sunset. He said roughly 25 years after my death, but in any case during the working lifetime of his trustees he died in 1982.
Speaker 2:Then we closed in 2005. So he came pretty close. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We were able to spend a lot of money because when I got there it was right at the time when the bull market started in 1982. Yeah, in 1982. Yep, so John Olin left initially 60 or 70 million dollars to the foundation when he died and for the first couple of years before I took over, we were only spending two, three, four million dollars a year. I came in and looked at the assets they were in excess of 100 million dollars. I came in and looked at the assets they were in excess of $100 million and I said we can spend a fair amount of money here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Especially if we're thinking of closing eventually. So I said we can easily go from $3 or $4 million a year to $10 or $15 million a year to 10 or $15 million a year.
Speaker 1:It's a big jump.
Speaker 2:Yes, the good part of it was nobody knew it. Yeah, in other words. I could. I could pick and choose where we're spending it. If you announced it to the world, you'd be inundated with proposals.
Speaker 1:Yeah, what were the first? Some of the first big ideas you had on how to spend that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, federalist Society was in there pretty early. The Collegiate Network was in there pretty early. Alan Bloom at Chicago was in there pretty early. A lot of economics programs we did at various universities were in there pretty early. At various universities we're in there pretty early. We, I remember making some large grants to the public interest, irving Crystal's magazine. You know we were pretty generous with the Heritage Foundation and you know, and so we went from, I don't know that, $3 or $4 million in 1984 to probably $15 million by 1988, 1989.
Speaker 2:Yeah, john Olin left another $100 or so million to his widow, and when she died in 1993, that money came into the foundation. Wow, so we began to spend that as well. And when she died in 1993, that money came into the foundation. Wow, so we began to spend that as well. So at about the time we had spent down John Olin's corpus, we had that fund coming in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow. So you know we were pretty active. I would say that when we started the conservative movement was pretty small, that when we started the conservative movement was pretty small. In retrospect I see that I didn't realize it at the time because I didn't know that much about it.
Speaker 2:There are some giant people around. There's Bill Buckley and Bill Friedman and Irving Kristol and a few others who are around, but the ranks are pretty thin. We didn't have much on the college campus and you know we didn't have much that would be a presence in the intellectual debates around the country. And I would say that one of the things we did and other donors helped in that 20, 25 years was that we kind of built up, helped to build up, the conservative movement to a fairly large enterprise, which was the case by the time we closed in 2005.
Speaker 2:Many think tanks, many college programs not all of them supported by us, Autonomous things. Other donors came in the stock market, created a lot of donors through our causes, a lot of donors to other causes too. So that was a period where the conservative movement grew and expanded quite substantially through the donations of a few foundations. Now, the left always had way more money than we had. I think I calculated once that if you threw in the seven or eight or ten liberal foundations and the three or four or five conservative foundations, they outspent us every year 20 or 30 to one. So we didn't have a lot of money.
Speaker 1:That's not counting the university Resources as well. Yeah, I mean they had.
Speaker 2:A lot going for them. Plus, you know they had the New York Times and the Washington Post and the networks. This was before cable TV and before the internet. So I got up Every day and I read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and I read regularly commentary in the New Republic and National Review and a handful of other magazines. That's how I informed myself and that's where the debates took place. Kind of on those pages it's all different now. Right.
Speaker 2:But that was how it was then and that was kind of the world we dealt with. So, uh, I think we spent probably close to 400 million dollars in that 25 years, almost all of it on conservative causes. We didn't waste a lot of it on other things a lot of foundations get diverted because the trustees are interested in this or that other charity. But there's very little of that. With the Olin Foundation I had a splendid board of trustees. Bill Simon was there. Bill Simon was a hard guy to get along with.
Speaker 1:Talk about Bill Simon for people who don't know who he was.
Speaker 2:Bill Simon. For people who don't know who he was yeah, Bill Simon was a legendary bond salesman in New York City in the 50s and 60s and he had a great interest in politics. He was very much involved in buying and selling treasury securities in that period. Then he got to know George Shultz, who was Nixon's Treasury Secretary at the time.
Speaker 2:And Schultz recruited him to go on to the Nixon administration in 1971, and he was the second energy czar. So in a period when there were gas lines and oil embargoes, simon became the energy czar and there was a lot of rascity to gasoline. You could only buy certain amounts of it and the prices were very high. And so, you know, simon, with the advice of some economists, said just let the market go and let the market settle this and the prices will settle and the supplies will settle, because what was happening is that people are driving around with three quarters of the tanks filled. Every time they saw a gas station they pull in to fill it up because they didn't know if they could get any more right. So if you kind of get rid of that problem, you would stabilize it. He did in the middle of watergate. George schultz said I want to get out of here, I want to retire and go back to Chicago or eventually to the Hoover Institution. And Simon replaced him as Treasury Secretary in 1974.
Speaker 2:And he became popular because he went around the country talking about free markets and how horrible Washington was and how terrible the Congress was and how they're wasting taxpayers' money and so on, and he wrote a best-selling book when he came out All the Time for Truth. But he was a notoriously difficult man, highly impatient. He was doing a hundred different things at once. He didn't like to waste his time. If you didn't get straight to the point, you'd hang up the phone on your teller, kick you out of the block, and so you know you had to learn to be pretty precise and get right to the point and get to the facts so he could make a decision on it. But you know, generally he backed us up once he trusted us and you know we all learned to get along with him all the staff and so on. There are plenty of laughs along those lines Because he was very eccentric in that way. But he did protect us from the outside world In other words.
Speaker 2:you had a man of his stature treasury secretary, bestselling author sitting on top of the organization. People are going to think twice before they mess with it. They know he can come at them pretty hard and that was something that was a benefit to all of us.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:At the time and he did that. Whenever there was a controversy he ran out and defended us and he held up the side and he usually gave more than he got. And you know people took a lesson from that. That you know you ought to think twice before you tank with this group. And that was a good thing to run. Simon died in the year 2000 at the age of 73, so we'd been active for a long time and when he died we decided that we'd spend the foundation out in five years by 2005,. Which is what we did. And you know, in the latter years we kind of spent the money on our favorite programs Law and economics was one, some of our think tanks, heritage was one, manhattan Institute was one, so kind of. You know, at the end, as we assessed what we did, we could see that we played a big, large role in building up the conservative movement, helping to create a lot of institutions, young people who came along into the movement, and some real phenomena, like you pointed out, in terms of books and ideas and intellectuals.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear more about Alan Bloom and Closing the American Mind sort of how that came about. But also, I think, francis Fukuyama, and the end of history was something that you all were involved with somehow and Samuel Huntington as well and his work on the clash of civilizations. I mean, those would be three of the biggest books to hit in the last quarter or so of the 20th century.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, I think you're right about that. So you know they wrote these books after we didn't fund the books. They've kind of been outstanding authors and thinkers and they wrote the books later. So Arnell and Bloom you know we're aware of the Straussians and Bloom was a legendary teacher at Chicago and many people studied with them and I don't know. One thing led to another Mike Joyce uh, there's some people at Chicago and Alan Bloom came to us with this project and Alan Bloom came to us with this project and the idea was to run seminars where students would read these great books and then you would bring in policymakers and talk to them to find out, you know, what did you learn from the books and what can we learn from the policymakers? And so on.
Speaker 2:And he had some terrific people in that program at Chicago Edwin Schills, lester Kalakowski there's a whole list of outstanding people who participated in that program. Some of Bloom's students did go on become policymakers, like Paul Wolfowitz. I think, Wolfowitz came back and worked in the seminar, so Bloom then wrote a long essay for National Review in the late 80s. What's the problem with universities? And the problem with the university, simply put, was that liberalism had become so pervasive that nobody could think outside of the boundaries of the left-wing liberals anymore.
Speaker 2:It was a kind of closing of the American mind. But luckily, one said, liberals are always eager to hear other ideas until they actually hear one and they're not so interested in it Right. So Bloom turned that article into this book called the Closing of the American Mind. Yeah, and one of our friends, roger Kimball, gave a good review of it in the New York Times. It became a bestseller. Yeah, Bloom became famous and it became rich and he went around the country lecturing and he was a fantastic talker. There's no question about it.
Speaker 1:What was he like in person? What was Alan Bloom like in person?
Speaker 2:Well, you know, he had 10 ideas every second. Okay, I mean, you could hardly keep up with the ideas that he said, okay, and you know they would come spilling out of him, and it was just a fascinating guy, interesting. I can see why the students kind of came and listened to him, um, because it wasn't a performance and uh, you know, uh, he was friends with, um, the novelist at chicago, saul bello, saul Bellow. Yeah, and Bellow wrote a novel several years later called Ravelstein and it was based on Alan Bloom and you know his best-selling book and that sort of thing. Interesting yeah.
Speaker 2:But he had a great influence at Chicago and there are many students who read that book, who wanted to go study with Bloom. You know I talked to a lot of them and I wasn't eager to encourage them down that path because I was aware how difficult it was to make your way as an academic. Right.
Speaker 2:I mean, if you wanted to do that for the love of ideas, fine, I wouldn't recommend that as a career. So you know, I think some of these young guys did go off and become lawyers and that sort of thing. So no, ben Bloom died in 1992. So like four years, five years after this book was done Frank Fukuyama it was kind of.
Speaker 2:It's a different thing we started a magazine called the National Interest. Irving Kristol had the Public Interest, so this is going to be a magazine about foreign affairs Based on. You know, let's look at foreign affairs through the lens of the American national interest, a little bit like Trump is doing now. And so a man named Owen Har Harris was recruited to be the editor, and he had been at the Heritage Foundation, he was Australian and he'd written some stuff about how bad the United Nations was in regard to America. So he edited that magazine and he would go around to conferences, and the one conference at the university of chicago that bloom was putting on he encountered this paper called the, the. What was it called? The end of history the end of history?
Speaker 2:I believe yeah and he took the paper, edited it, put, put it on the cover of the magazine and it was, you know, one of these sensations. Yeah. And it turned into a book. Now, fukuyama said everything you had to say in the article. You did not much more to say in the book. That was the best-selling book. So, again, that was not anything we did. We created the magazine and so on, but you funded the platform. You know that that was not anything we did. We created the magazine and so on.
Speaker 1:You funded the platform that made that possible.
Speaker 2:And then Sam Huntington. Because I had been in political science, I knew who Sam Huntington was. He was a well-known national security analyst at Harvard. He had been president of the American Political Science Association. I was aware of that too, so I went up to see him at one point in the late 80s and we agreed we'd set up this thing called the John M Mullen Center for National Security Study, and we funded it, and Huntington had a bunch of fellows who went on to teach, and Hunnyden had a bunch of fellows who went on to teach, many of them, you know, late in their careers.
Speaker 2:Now here we are, 35 years later, and you know he'd bring them into Harvard to speak. I went up there a lot to listen to them and then he wrote this book called the Clash of Civilization, which I believe may have originated as an article in Foreign Affair, and then he turned it into a book and it was a big discussion. So that's true, all these things were done. You know we weren't in any way responsible for them, but you're right, we helped to pay for the platforms that somewhat allowed them to be written.
Speaker 2:Sure but that was somewhat the point of the whole thing. Right, we couldn't orchestrate everything, but we could provide the funds to create the platform. Right, and honestly, I didn't know enough to do all this sort of thing. I couldn't have written any of those books and suggested them or anything like that, but you know, I suppose we didn't know enough to send the money to people who could do something with it, and a lot of them did.
Speaker 1:It was a real investment in ideas and intellectuals thinkers, Do you think, even as big as it is now in many ways. Do you think the sort of center-right sort of funders invest enough in ideas and thinkers, intellectuals today, or should they be doing more of that kind of work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a very good question. You know, our thinking was that. Our general thinking was that the American people were roughly on our side but they didn't have people articulating the ideas in influential places. They weren't with the Ford Foundation, in other words, they weren't with us, but they needed to have some people articulating the ideas in places of influence and communicating them to policymakers. So they would have, you know, the ideas and the framework to start telling the voters about. But if you don't have that, you know you're kind of lost, and I think in the 1960s and 70s we didn't really have that and we did help to build it up. Now I think you could ask the question do ideas play a similar role in our lives today as they did in the 1980s and 90s, before the internet age?
Speaker 2:we all read the papers. We're all reading magazines. Ideas really didn't matter. If there were good ideas, you can get them into the discourse. Or ideas really didn't matter. If they were good ideas, you can get them into the discourse.
Speaker 3:They matter as much today, when everything changes day by day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and things seem a little bit more sober. Are people really buying and reading books anymore, especially books of ideas?
Speaker 1:Yeah, but who you influence, right? Someone like jd vance, uh clearly shaped, would have gone in a totally different direction had he not encountered certain ideas and books uh out of the conservative political uh tradition, the catholic um intellectual tradition, and now he has is in position of extraordinary influence, right?
Speaker 2:so yeah's true, and he is a thinker. Yeah, I don't think Donald Trump is.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean.
Speaker 2:I realize there are different types here that we're talking about. So of course he had a bestselling book about his background. Yeah, I just don't know if the and of course we're kind of shut out of the universities.
Speaker 1:Yeah, did you think Olin could actually keep that from happening? Are you surprised at how refractive the universities have been? We tried, we tried, we couldn't stop it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know. If you ask me today, could you start an Allen Bloom Center or a Sam Hynes? Center or any of those things today? Well, I think it would be difficult. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not as close to it now as I used to be, but I'm not sure you have the people in place to do that. Yeah, now, you know, in terms of the university, we did a lot of stuff to try to stop it, but the race and gender stuff was too powerful. We were aware of it, we fought against it and they just kept building up strength and so now, to some extent, they're paying the price for that. You look at Columbia.
Speaker 2:Yeah, now to some extent they're paying the price for that. You look at Columbia. Yeah, that is the colleges have built up these way left-wing faculties and they're to some degree stuck with them. So at Columbia the president tries to enforce the rules and arrest all these people, which last year they did but the left-wing faculty revolts and says we don't want you to do that. You've got to let them all go and we're going to fire the president. That's the faculty they have.
Speaker 2:Columbia would be a much stronger institution if 20% or 25% of the faculty were moderates or conservative. But they're not and that's because they drove the law out. I mean, if you look at, you know some of the curriculum they have at Columbia, they're generally insane. The women's studies program is absolutely clinically insane. Yeah, if you look at the courses they teach and you know if they had moderate or conservative people, you know it might not have happened. But in any case they're stuck with the system they built.
Speaker 2:They're out of favor in Washington. Washington is coming down hard on them, pulling out their funds and so on. It is interesting in the sense that they built up the diversity industry using federal muscle. If you don't fire our people, our diversity people, we'll pull our money out of the university. Now they were pushing against an open door because they're happy to do that. Donald Trump is now coming along and saying wait a second, all this diversity stuff violates the Civil Rights Act and if you keep doing it, we're going to pull out our federal money. And now you're upside, and so they do have a crisis. But back to your large question do ideas matter that much anymore than they used to? I generally think not. Okay, I don't have a firm view on that. I haven't thought it through. I think you know there's so much out there. There are so many people who write now because of the internet. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And every day it changes A new set of writers out there and they're out there.
Speaker 1:no gatekeepers anymore in that way so if you wanted to invest in something today, if you were back, if olin were still around and you're trying to make the smart investments, um, what would you invest in if not ideas? Would you invest in particular platforms or more popular thinkers, or podcasts or sub stacks? Actually, I'm still in the business because I'm inviting the time Right Too enough yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're not large. Maybe we spend $10 million a year. You know, we do try to spend a lot of it on people who write stuff which we think is influential Heather McDonald's a fellow, for example. John Yoo at Berkeley someone we support. Steve Moore writes stuff in the free market, someone. We support George Mason University and some of their programs. We support Christopher Ruffo.
Speaker 1:Right we support. There's a good example of someone who's sort of operating at the intersection of ideas and media.
Speaker 2:That is an interesting phenomenon, the Christopher Ruffo phenomenon, yeah, in other words, someone who is both familiar with the thinking. He wrote a pretty good book actually a couple of years ago, the Roots of Wokeism, I think it was called A good book. But he's an activist as well. He's advising Trump on how to close the education department, how to get rid of DEI, so he's both an activist and a thinker. You know, we haven't had really people like that quite so much, so that's the kind of thing that I would like to kind of see more of. That's interesting.
Speaker 2:And he's a young guy. So you know he's not, I think, our old guys interested in ideas. They're debating ideas with people. You know he's got these ideas and he wants to take them straight to government. Now it is interesting because Trump is also a different kind of figure than the Republican presidents. We've had To say the least yes, so that you know, if you wanted to close the education department with George HW Bush, I don't think you could get in the door. We can't close the education department with George HW Bush. I don't think you could get in the door.
Speaker 2:We can't close the education department. Or if you wanted to kill affirmative action and diversity, you couldn't get in the door because there'd be people telling Bush no, this is a good thing, we got to keep it, and so on. So Trump, when he hears something he likes, he's ready to go out and run with it. And that's new. We've never had a president like that. So I think I'm not sure if it was Rufo, or maybe it was Larry Ard at Hillsdale who, when Trump was president, the first time they came out, the New York Times came out with the 1619 Project and Larry Arndt or somebody came out with the 1776 Project to counter it.
Speaker 2:Well, Trump saw it on Fox News and said I'm going to create a commission, Larry Arndt running it. George Bush would have never done that. Now Fox News didn't exist at the time either, so it's a different kind of circumstance. Did I ever think that we could get rid of DEI? I never thought we could get rid of it.
Speaker 2:Trump comes along and I think he's going to get rid of it Because one he's put the weight of the government behind this and it always thrived because government was behind it. Democrats mostly, we're going to take your money away if you don't do it. So it also. They can't wait him out. You know he's going to be there for four more years.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the first time around they kept him so much on the defensive he wasn't able to do anything. And in past years they would say whenever they make Bush or Reagan or whatever made feints against them, gingrich, they would tenaciously say they'll be gone before too long and we can go on as before. But I don't think Trump's going to let him get away with that, so I think he may wind up really killing DEI and turning it into a very unfavorable idea and because of the federal funding, all these schools are going to have to go along with it.
Speaker 1:And the school. Speaking of schools, that is something just to pivot quickly here at the end of our conversation to the William E Simon Foundation. K-12 education is one of the areas I believe you guys invested in heavily at the Simon Foundation.
Speaker 2:A lot of scholarships, school bonds, charter schools.
Speaker 1:That was a big area for us. Yeah, what did you? What was most promising about what did you find?
Speaker 2:most promising in terms of the grant making you did there On the education side. Well, I mean, I think we and we got into the that that movement at Olin to some degree in the 1990s because it was being up, but it wasn't a big factor At Simon it was a much larger factor. We were focused mostly on New York and we did do some national thinking about charter schools and school choice, supporting those programs. But if you want to reform the educational system, public school is a pretty hard thing to attack because they're run by the unions. Right.
Speaker 2:And it's pretty hard to penetrate them. You kind of have to try to do it and run around them. So that led to charter schools and vouchers. You know we did do some curricular stuff. Cultures you know we did do some curricular stuff. And the standards we did support some of the standards but that didn't work very well in the public schools because one, they could always find ways to take the curriculum because they're. Two, in the teaching they can manipulate the curriculum. I mean, it's kind of interesting because a lot of state legislatures have told colleges they have to teach courses in American government.
Speaker 1:Correct yeah.
Speaker 2:But what good does it do if you have a left-winger teaching the course?
Speaker 1:Personnel is policy right.
Speaker 2:You know, we kind of had that problem. So charter schools had a pretty big success, I would say In New York City. They tried to cap them and close them down but there are a number of good networks. Success Academy is a terrific network in New York City. The KIPP Academies have been very good.
Speaker 2:Programs like this are bubbling up all over the country, partly by parental demand, and a lot of parents are disappointed with the kind of teaching and curriculum. That it got worse in the last five years. Now you have these other issues that are coming in, like transgenderism. A lot of parents look at that kind of thing and say you know, we don't want our son or daughter coming home and wanting to change genders and that sort of thing. Right, and maybe we ought to reconsider the schools. So I think those have been a large factor. So you know, school choice. Looking around the country, a lot of states are signing on to school choice in one way or another, an option for parents, because the public schools have gotten so bad in many areas. Probably not true. So much of the suburban, some of the suburban schools where the parents are active and where the parents move there from schools.
Speaker 2:But look, the unions are pervasive in many states. The unions are pervasive in many states and so it's not clear to me why and I'd have to have somebody explain to me why the unions want to water down the standards and why they want to introduce all of these novel concepts into education. Not clear to me why they're wedded to those things. I get the union collective bargaining right, right, not that yeah, but why?
Speaker 2:why all these newfangled ideas that don't necessarily work, which turn off periods? Why? Why have they done that? Is that due to the alliance with the education schools? I don't know. I've never had a good answer to why they have to do that.
Speaker 2:It's a good question well, why does the democratic party have to do it? Yeah, it makes even less sense for them because they want to cobble together a majority of voters, but but nonetheless they do it too. Yeah, and my answer to the latter is because of the influence of their groups. Their groups seem to be able to punish people who stray off their reservation. Sure, and you know, voters only go to the polls every two or four years. The groups are there every day.
Speaker 2:That's right, and you know, the same is a little bit true of professors at the colleges. If they wander off the reservation and say some critical things about the groups, the diversity groups, the gender groups, the race groups, they will be denouncing them in the student newspaper the next day or they'll be marching around their office the next day.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And of course nobody wants that. Pretty big disincentive yeah so that's a large consequence of the politicization of the schools and higher education.
Speaker 1:We. I'm going to wrap this up here. I'll ask you one last question. I guess. What are you? What would you say are the biggest two-part question, biggest mistakes conservative funders or philanthropists have made in the post-Cold War era and the biggest successes If you have one in each category, maybe whatever you want to say I don't know if I could answer that.
Speaker 2:I mean, I can, you know, think of a fair number of successes that Olin and others were involved in. I'm trying to think of some missteps that we made, and there were missteps. I don't know if they were some missteps that we made, um, and there were missteps, I don't know they were strategic missteps. You know, we were funding a lot of student newspapers and they were. Some of the students would write things they shouldn't have written. We weren't responsible for it necessarily, but then we got tagged with it.
Speaker 2:So we had to find a way out of that, which eventually we did, because you know we didn't want to be responsible for everything. A student newspaper wrote Right, and you know I'd have to think on that question. I mean, you know we made grants that didn't work, but you know those that was for more individuals, yeah, of course.
Speaker 1:Everybody makes grants that don't work.
Speaker 2:I think I don't know if it's a problem with the conservative foundations. A lot of business people invested too much in business schools. I would say.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's an interesting answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we did a little bit about that. And you know, one of the problems there is, the business schools are kind of under the general influence of the university and they go along with a lot of things the university did. So there's some of that. I don't know if that was a mistake.
Speaker 1:It's a learning at least.
Speaker 2:But it's a good question. What mistakes were made Now? I mean, if you go back to the early part of the conservative movement, some people, like Bill Buckley, would say that getting behind Senator McCarthy, joseph McCarthy, was a problem. Sure that, you know. There's nothing wrong with anti-communism, but the tactics that you used there turn people off and defeat the purpose. You know, was there something like that that we got involved in? Turn people off and defeat the purpose? Yeah, I, you know, was there something that we got involved in? I think. I think that in handling the race and gender and diversity issues, it required some delicacy and a degree of you know, sophistication as to how to handle those you can't right. It wasn't. If you make the analogy to McCarthy, you just couldn't come out there and denounce the idea. Yeah, because you know you could look bad and it was not easy to oppose.
Speaker 2:So you know we did have some people who got out there on that and got on the wrong side of it and were. You know we did have some people who got out there on that and got on the wrong side of it and were you know, somewhat embarrassed by some of the things they wrote and said yeah, I don't want to mention any names there.
Speaker 2:So, you know, as that movement went on one of the things it kind of became more and more aggressive until more recently, when they adopted the DEI business, it became extremely radical.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it became much easier to target actually, Right.
Speaker 2:And because they went so far off to the left, it made it easier for us to attack. But before that, when they were just saying we want to expand opportunity now, they were doing more than that, just saying we want to expand opportunity now, they were doing more than that. They did have. They did have an agenda and it was a left-wing agenda, but they did cover it by saying we just wanted to be an opportunity for groups that haven't had opportunity.
Speaker 2:So I'm not sure we necessarily, and we got into trouble a little bit somewhat, somewhat, on those issues and you know there were parts of conversations about how to handle it. The biggest successes I would say that we had was we just built the platforms for the conservative movement. We built the think tanks, the college programs, the magazines, got those ideas out there into the world. You know, you've got the Federalist Society, you've got the student newspapers, you have the whole infrastructure of the conservative movement that is just now very mature. I mean, the Federalist Society is very interesting.
Speaker 2:I remember when they came to our office in 1982, and these were kids, students, law school students, not kids and they had just put on a conference, I think, at Yale. They were Chicago, yale and Harvard law students and we wanted to create this society, federalist society, and I thought, okay, it'll be a campus movement of law school students at these three schools, maybe some more. And they said we want to create a national office and we want to hire somebody. Our response was why do you want to create a national office? You're a student. So we gave them somebody to do it and they hired Gene Meyer and they created a national office and they were off and running and they did things over a period of time and they became more influential as time passed. It probably took them 20 years to develop a full head of steam.
Speaker 1:The lesson there too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they finally really come into role when they start picking Trump's judges. Yeah, while federalists decide, judges will go on the federal banks of the US Supreme Court. Now, did we anticipate that we started 30, 40 years ago? No, the one thing we did know is this we don't have anything in the judicial area. The liberals own the whole Constitution. We don't have anything there. We've got to start something. This is as good as anything else. So let's see what we can do, and that was our attitude with a lot of things. Give them some money and see what they can do. If they can do it, give more money.
Speaker 2:If they can't put the money elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Pretty simple strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I didn't pick and choose among the various groups the neoconservatives, the free market people. I didn't pick and choose among the various groups the neoconservatives, the free market people. I didn't know enough, and that was a good thing. Yeah, one of our virtues was we were aware we didn't know everything, so don't pick and choose. Get the money out to people who can do something with it and then watch it. Right.
Speaker 2:And kind of let it go. That's kind of what we did. It was successful, I think, but we didn't really know what we were doing as we were doing it. Right. Maybe it's a little bit like a business that starts out with the small and builds on itself and eventually has something worthwhile. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right. So you know we had a great staff, all friends about six of us small staff are these people? I look at some of these philanthropies with a hundred people on the staff. Yeah, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. A lot of turnover. So we had a staff that was pretty stable for 25 years at Olin. The same thing in Sunday was pretty much the same and that helped. So you know it's an interesting history. John Miller has written a book about the Olin Foundation, which I should point out, is right behind me here called.
Speaker 1:A Gift of Freedom for people who want to look it up by.
Speaker 2:John A Miller. It's on Amazon and he's written some shorter pamphlets and there have been newspaper articles about all the things we did. And you know, occasionally in situations like this I get to kind of look back and talk about it. But 20 years ago the Olin Foundation closed, yeah, 2005. So I'm quite a bit older and that's kind of receded in the history.
Speaker 1:But it's a very important piece, though, of um american philanthropic history, uh, I think and that's why I wanted to have you on this podcast to discuss it because it's uh played a huge role in things like Federalist Society and in very important books like Alan Bloom's, and in creating a counter structure of funding for America's sort of center-right thinkers.
Speaker 2:I think we did show how it could be done. I would say this we haven't had a lot of people who've tried to emulate us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is surprising to me, interesting yeah.
Speaker 2:Now I'm kind of doing that with the Thomas W Smith Foundation.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we do have Bradley out there doing good things and the Scape out there a bit. You know, the Bradley Foundation. People came around to talk to us in 1985. Because they knew about us, they were just starting the Bradley Foundation. People came around to talk to us in 1985 because they knew about us, they were just starting the Bradley Foundation what are you doing and how are you doing? And they met us and so on, and they kind of started out in somewhat the same way. I'd be hard-pressed to name any other group that tried to do anything like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why name any other group that tried to do anything like that. Yeah, yeah, why? Well, I have a few thoughts about that, which is that when people want to give their money away, they want to give it away in a manner that will make people pat them on the back.
Speaker 2:You're doing good work, you're doing good work, you're a good person, et cetera. Conservative ideas people either like you or they really dislike you. Controversial yeah, that's what we had at Olin. We had a lot of people who thought we liked us. On the other side, we had a lot of people who really disliked us. New York Times wrote any number of negative and hostile articles about us over the years and you know, when people want to give their money away, do they really want to get into that? Do they want to see their name blasted over the front page of the New York Times saying you're doing this, that and the other thing? Right.
Speaker 2:And when we had controversies that were on the cover of the New York Times, it did cause trouble, because we have trustees. The trustees have families, yeah, they have children in school. They have neighbors. They belong to clubs. I say clubs, yeah, yeah. I say clubs, yeah, right, yeah away to maybe the local school or the local charities or the Red Cross. Good things like that will be applauded. So I would say that is a factor in the whole thing, I think you're right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it didn't bother John Olin because he'd been through it and he was older. It didn't bother the Bradley people either, but a lot of people it bothers. But you know the Bradley thing has been controversial in Milwaukee. It's not been an easy road for them either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because of teachers' unions, among other things, teachers' unions and other people, so why don't you spend all this money locally?
Speaker 2:they would say you know that's been a tough thing too, for them. Yeah and although they've done it very well, so that would be one answer, maybe the main answer People are going to the charitable world to be attacked.
Speaker 1:Well, let's consider this an invitation for someone to do that Set up the next 20, 25 years of something like the Olin Foundation.
Speaker 2:I think Tom Smith wants to do it. Okay, and he's doing it. Yep, and you know we have other friends. I didn't mention the Searle Freedom Trust.
Speaker 1:Yeah, also spending down.
Speaker 2:Yes, and you know they've been active in this world as well. Dan Searle did this 25 years or so ago, so you know there is some of it, but there were definitely not as much as I thought there might be, you know, five years ago.
Speaker 1:Well, James Pearson, thanks so much for spending some time with us and talking about this history and sharing your thoughts. Really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Actually, Jeremy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, thank you. And, as I said before one more time, if you want to read a little bit about this history, A Gift of Freedom by John J Miller is very much worth getting. So thanks, and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, hey. Thanks for joining us for today's podcast. If you enjoyed it, we invite you to subscribe and or rate and or review us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to our podcasts. Thanks a lot.