Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

In fact, amazingly, in 2016 the Kochs’ private network of political groups had a bigger payroll than the Republican National Committee. The Koch network had 1,600 paid staffers in thirty-five states and boasted that its operation covered 80 percent of the population. This marked a huge escalation from just a few years earlier. As recently as 2012, the Kochs’ primary political advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, had a paid staff of only 450.

In the 1960s, Charles Koch had funded the all-white private Freedom School in Colorado, whose head had told the New York Times that the admittance of black students might present housing problems because some students were segregationists.

In short, during the Obama years, the Kochs radicalized and organized an unruly movement of malcontents, over which by 2016 they had lost control. “We are partly responsible,” one former employee in the Kochs’ political operation admitted to Politico a month before Trump was elected. “We invested a lot in training and arming a grassroots army that was not controllable.”

No fewer than eighteen billionaires would be among the “doers” joining the Kochs’ clandestine opposition movement during the first term of Obama’s presidency. Ignoring the mere millionaires in attendance, many of whose fortunes were estimated to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, the combined fortunes of the eighteen known billionaire participants alone as of 2015 topped $214 billion. In fact more billionaires participated anonymously in the Koch planning sessions during the first term of the Obama presidency than existed in 1982, when Forbes began listing the four hundred richest Americans.

The term “oligarchy” was provocative and might have seemed an exaggeration to those accustomed to thinking of oligarchs as despotic rulers who were incompatible with democracies like the United States. But Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University specializing in the comparative study of oligarchies, was one of a growing number of voices who were beginning to argue that America was a “civil oligarchy” in which a tiny and extremely wealthy slice of the population was able to use its vastly superior economic position to promote a brand of politics that served first and foremost itself. The oligarchs in America didn’t rule directly, he argued, but instead used their fortunes to produce political results that favored their interests.

Thomas Piketty, an economist at the Paris School of Economics, warned in his zeitgeist-shifting book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, that without aggressive government intervention economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere was likely to rise inexorably, to the point where the small portion of the population that currently held a growing slice of the world’s wealth would in the foreseeable future own not just a quarter, or a third, but perhaps half of the globe’s wealth, or more.

During the 1930s, Fred Koch traveled frequently to Germany on oil business. Archival records document that in 1934 Winkler-Koch Engineering of Wichita, Kansas, as Fred’s firm was then known, provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg. The refinery was a highly unusual venture for Koch to get involved with at that moment in Germany. Its top executive was a notorious American Nazi sympathizer named William Rhodes Davis whose extensive business dealings with Hitler would eventually end in accusations by a federal prosecutor that he was an “agent of influence” for the Nazi regime.

With the capacity to process a thousand tons of crude oil a day, the third-largest refinery in the Third Reich was created by the collaboration between Davis and Koch.

“Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he wrote in a letter to a friend. Koch added, “The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.”

Dressed in a starched white uniform and pointed nurse’s hat, she arrived with a stash of gruesome German children’s books, including the Victorian classic Der Struwwelpeter, that featured sadistic consequences for misbehavior ranging from cutting off one child’s thumbs to burning another to death. The acquaintance recalled that the nurse had a commensurately harsh and dictatorial approach to child rearing. She enforced a rigid toilet-training regimen requiring the boys to produce morning bowel movements precisely on schedule or be force-fed castor oil and subjected to enemas.

Fred Koch’s political views were apparently shaped by his traumatic exposure to the Soviet Union. Over time, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet acquaintances, giving him a firsthand glimpse into the murderous nature of the Communist regime. Koch was also apparently shaken by a steely government minder assigned to him while he worked in the Soviet Union, who threatened that the Communists would soon conquer the United States. Koch was deeply affected by the experience and later, after his business deals were completed, said he regretted his collaboration.

In a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet.

In 1968, Fred Koch went further right still. Before the emergence of George Wallace, he called for the Birch Society member Ezra Taft Benson to run for the presidency with the South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond on a platform calling for racial segregation and the abolition of all income taxes.

As Angus Burgin describes in The Great Persuasion, many reactionary Americans knew only the distorted translation of Hayek’s work that had appeared in Reader’s Digest. The conservative publication omitted Hayek’s politically inconvenient support for a minimum standard of living for the poor, environmental and workplace safety regulations, and price controls to prevent monopolies from taking undue profits.

He would act on this belief in years to come by funneling millions of dollars into educational indoctrination, with free-market curricula and even video games promoting his ideology pitched to prospects as young as grade school.

As Coppin summarized Pearson’s arguments, “It would be necessary to use ambiguous and misleading names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal the means of control. This is the method that Charles Koch would soon practice in his charitable giving, and later in his political actions.”

The Libertarians also opposed all income and corporate taxes, including capital gains taxes, and called for an end to the prosecution of tax evaders. Their platform called for the abolition too of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the FBI, and the CIA, among other government agencies. It demanded the abolition of “any laws” impeding employment—by which it meant minimum wage and child labor laws. And it targeted public schools for abolition too, along with what it termed the “compulsory” education of children. The Libertarians also wanted to get rid of the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, seat belt laws, and all forms of welfare for the poor. The platform was, in short, an effort to repeal virtually every major political reform passed during the twentieth century. In the view of the Kochs and other members of the Libertarian Party, government should be reduced to a skeletal function: the protection of individual and property rights.

Cumulatively, the many-tentacled ideological machine they built came to be known as the Kochtopus.

For decades, Scaife was described as a recluse, mysterious even to the recipients of his largesse. Over a fifty-year period, he personally spent what he estimated to be upward of $1 billion from his family fortune on philanthropy, once the sum was adjusted for inflation. Most of it, some $620 million, he reckoned, was aimed at influencing American public affairs. In 1999, The Washington Post called him “the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century.” When he died on July 4, 2014, The New York Times carried a lengthy obituary, along with his photograph. Yet he gave almost no interviews or speeches on his motives and aims. He rarely spoke with those who ran the institutions he funded and was estranged from many former friends and family members, including two former wives and his two grown children. When Karen Rothmyer, a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review, tried to ambush him into an interview in 1981, he warned her, “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here!” In 2009, however, five years before he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, Scaife penned a previously private, still-unpublished memoir, “A Richly Conservative Life,” that serves as a secret tell-all about the building of the modern conservative movement.

Before Congress instituted the federal income tax in 1913, following the passage of the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, America’s tax burden fell disproportionately on the poor. High taxes were levied on widely consumed products such as alcohol and tobacco. Urban property was taxed at a higher rate than farms and estates. “From top to bottom, American society before the income tax was a picture of inequality, and taxes made it worse,” writes Isaac William Martin, a professor of sociology at the University of California in San Diego.

By the time he was sent off to Deerfield Academy at the age of fourteen (the same prep school attended eight years later by David Koch), Scaife was already a drinker. Caught drinking off campus with some local girls in his senior year, in violation of Deerfield’s rules, he almost didn’t graduate. Scaife recalls that his parents hastily donated funds for a new dormitory for the school in order to assure his diploma. Years later, he would nonetheless help fund the social critic Charles Murray, a leading proponent of the theory that a superior work ethic and moral codes account for much of the success among the affluent. Despite having barely squeaked through prep school, Scaife was accepted at his father’s college, Yale, from which he was soon expelled following several drunken benders. A reputation as a frat boy bully was cemented by an episode in which an empty beer keg was rolled down a flight of stairs, injuring a classmate. (Scaife writes that he was falsely accused of launching the keg, which was actually jettisoned by his friends.) After getting arrested off campus in another drunken escapade, he belittled the dean who was adjudicating his case, hastening his expulsion. Nonetheless, the following year, Scaife was given the chance to repeat his freshman year at Yale. But after spending time at the movies rather than in class, he soon flunked out, this time for good. Yet with the help of his father, who was chairman of the board, he graduated from the University of Pitt...

A consequence, however, was that the tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector. In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role. In the instance of both the Kochs and the Scaifes, the tax law ended up spurring the funding of the modern conservative movement. Motivated in part by tax concerns, Scaife’s role as a philanthropist grew. An immediate question, however, was how to disburse the constantly accumulating piles of interest from the trusts, which needed to be distributed to charity in order to satisfy the tax laws. One attractive solution for enormously wealthy families like the Scaifes and the Kochs was to donate to their own private philanthropic foundations. By doing so, they could get the tax deductions and still keep control of how the charitable funds were spent.

Because of all these advantages, private philanthropic foundations proliferated among the ultra-wealthy during the last century. Today, they are commonplace, and rarely controversial, but Americans across the political spectrum once regarded the whole idea of private foundations with enormous suspicion. These aggregations of private wealth, intruding into the public arena, were seen as a form of unelected and unaccountable plutocratic power. The practice began in the Gilded Age with John D. Rockefeller, whose philanthropic adviser Rev. Frederick Gates warned him with alarm, “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows!” In response, in 1909 Rockefeller sought legal permission from Congress to obtain a federal charter to set up a general-purpose private foundation whose broad mission was to prevent and relieve suffering and promote knowledge and progress. Critics, including the former president Theodore Roosevelt, assailed the idea, declaring, “No amount of charity in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them.” At the time, a parade of notable Americans testified in Congress against the creation of private foundations, including the Reverend John Haynes Holmes, who denounced them as “repugnant to the whole idea of a democratic society.” Frank Walsh, chairman of the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations, in 1915, suggested that “huge philanthropic...

In 2013, there were over a hundred thousand private foundations in the United States with assets of over $800 billion. These peculiarly American organizations, run with little transparency or accountability to either voters or consumers yet publicly subsidized by tax breaks, have grown into 800-billion-pound Goliaths in the public policy realm. Richard Posner, the iconoclastic libertarian legal scholar, has called perpetual charitable foundations a “completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody,” and suggested that “the puzzle in economics is why these foundations are not total scandals.”

As scientists linked smoking to cancer, the tobacco industry was under particularly pointed attack, which might have heightened Powell’s alarmism. As a director at Philip Morris from 1964 until he joined the Supreme Court, Powell was an unabashed defender of tobacco, signing off on a series of annual reports lashing out at critics. The company’s 1967 annual report, for instance, declared, “We deplore the lack of objectivity in so important a controversy…Unfortunately the positive benefits of smoking which are so widely acknowledged are largely ignored by many reports linking cigarettes and health, and little attention is paid to the scientific reports which are favorable to smoking.” Powell took umbrage at the refusal by the Federal Communications Commission to grant the tobacco companies “equal time” to respond to their critics on television and argued that the companies’ First Amendment rights were being infringed. Powell’s legal argument failed in the courts, increasing his sense of corporate embattlement. Jeffrey Clements, in Corporations Are Not People, suggests Powell’s defense of the tobacco companies was a harbinger of the corporate rights movement and a big part of what led him to push in his memo for conservatives to empower more pro-business courts.

A number of activists on the right issued similar calls to arms, including Irving Kristol, the godfather of neo-conservatism. A former Trotskyite, Kristol had become a columnist on the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where he counseled business leaders to be more wily about public relations, arguing that they needed to downplay their “single-minded pursuit of self-interest” and instead tout moral values like family and faith. The Nixon White House aide Patrick Buchanan similarly argued in 1973 that in order to become a permanent political majority, conservatives needed to persuade corporate America and pro-Republican foundations to fund a think tank that would act as a “tax-exempt refuge,” a “talent bank,” and a “communications center.” But it was Powell’s memo that electrified the Right, prompting a new breed of wealthy ultraconservatives to weaponize their philanthropic giving in order to fight a multifront war of influence over American political thought.

Think tanks, in particular, became what Piereson called “the artillery” in the conservative movement’s war of ideas. In his memoir, Scaife estimates that he helped bankroll at least 133 of the conservative movement’s 300 most important institutions.

In 1975, the Scaife Family Charitable Trust donated $195,000 to a new conservative think tank in Washington, the Heritage Foundation. For the next ten years, Scaife became its largest backer, donating $10 million more. By 1998, these donations had reached a total of some $23 million, which meant that Scaife accounted for a vastly disproportionate share of the think tank’s overall funding. Previously, Scaife had been the largest donor to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the older, rival conservative think tank in Washington, but Heritage had a new model that won him over. In contrast to the research centers of the past, it was purposefully political, priding itself on creating, selling, and injecting deeply conservative ideas into the American mainstream.

In the 1970s, with funding from a handful of hugely wealthy donors like Scaife, as well as some major corporate support, a whole new form of “think tank” emerged that was more engaged in selling predetermined ideology to politicians and the public than undertaking scholarly research. Eric Wanner, the former president of the Russell Sage Foundation, summed it up, saying, “The AEIs and the Heritages of the world represent the inversion of the progressive faith that social science should shape social policy.”

But in the 1970s, such concerns became outmoded. Powell and others in the newly aggressive corporate vanguard inverted from a negative into a positive the accusation that conservative organizations were slanted by successfully redefining existing establishment organizations like Brookings and The New York Times as equally biased but on the liberal side. They argued that a “market” of ideas was necessary that would give equal balance to all views. In effect, they reduced the older organizations that prided themselves on their above-the-fray public-service-oriented neutrality to mere combatants in a polarized war. Disoriented, Brookings and the Times rushed to add conservatives to their ranks in hopes of demonstrating their nonpartisanship. Brookings hurriedly made a Republican its president, while the Times in 1973 added Nixon’s former speechwriter Bill Safire to its op-ed page as a columnist. In 1976, after the Scaife-funded Institute for Contemporary Studies issued a report accusing the media of liberal bias, the Times forced out the editorial page editor John Oakes for having an antibusiness tone. The Ford Foundation, meanwhile, which had funded much of the early bipartisan environmental movement, as well as the public interest law movement, donated the first installment of $300,000 in grants to AEI in 1972 in an attempt to fight criticism that it was liberal. “That was quite the heist you pulled on the Ford Foundation, congratulations!” a friend exclaimed in a note to a...

Some insiders, like Steve Clemons, a political analyst who worked for the Nixon Center among other think tanks, described the new think tanks as “a Faustian bargain.” He worried that the money corrupted the research. “Funders increasingly expect policy achievements that contribute to their bottom line,” he admitted in a confessional essay. “We’ve become money launderers for monies that have real specific policy agendas behind them. No one is willing to say anything about it; it’s one of the big taboo subjects.”

David Brock, a conservative apostate who became a liberal activist, described the Heritage Foundation, where he was a young fellow, as almost completely under the thumb of its wealthy sponsors. In his tell-all book Blinded by the Right, he writes, “I saw how right-wing ideology was manufactured and controlled by a small group of powerful foundations” like Smith Richardson, Adolph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and John M. Olin. Scaife in his estimation was “by far the most important”; indeed, Brock describes him as “the most important single figure in building the modern conservative movement and spreading its ideas into the political realm.”

The recipients of Scaife’s largesse, such as David Abshire, head of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s former attorney general and a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, invariably praised his acumen. It was Meese who described Scaife as “the unseen hand” who brought “balance and sound principles back to the public arena” and “quietly helped to lay the brick and mortar for an entire movement.” Yet one former aide to Scaife, James Shuman, told The Washington Post that had Scaife not inherited a huge fortune, “I don’t think he had the intellectual capacity to do very much.”

Scaife’s rambling remarks were made in the same year that he returned to drinking after a life in and out of rehab programs. In 1987, his second wife, Margaret “Ritchie” Battle, took him with her to the Betty Ford Center. He stayed sober, associates said, for several years. His life, however, remained flamboyantly turbulent. After he met Ritchie—who was married, as was he—in 1979, the couple carried on a soap-opera-worthy affair. Scaife claimed he consummated it after Ritchie, a glamorous and memorably feisty southerner, appeared in his office in an irresistible white angora sweater. “We did what comes naturally,” he told Vanity Fair. She retorted, “Never owned an angora sweater. I’m allergic to things like that!” While they were courting, Ritchie reportedly kicked Scaife in the testicles so hard he had to be taken to a hospital emergency room. Meanwhile, he and his first wife wrangled for almost ten years over the divorce settlement as he fought to keep her from taking a share of some Gulf Oil stock he’d belatedly come into. At one point, in order to evade a subpoena, Ritchie was carried out of Scaife’s house rolled in a carpet, like Cleopatra, by his servants. His family life was in tatters. According to Scaife’s son, David, Ritchie and Scaife visited him during this period at prep school—Deerfield again—bringing alcohol and marijuana, which Scaife smoked with his son. In 1991, he married Ritchie, who continued to live in her own house around the corner. Their wedding re...

Scaife’s extraordinary self-financed and largely tax-deductible vendetta against Clinton demonstrated the impact that a single wealthy extremist could have on national affairs, and served as something of a dress rehearsal for the Kochs’ later war against Obama. Presidents might surround themselves with Secret Service agents and phalanxes of lawyers and operatives, but Scaife proved how hard it was to defend against unlimited, untraceable spending by an opponent hiding behind nonprofit front groups.

Then, in a stunning turnaround in 2008, Scaife met with Hillary Clinton, who had fingered him as the ringleader of what she called a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to torment the Clintons. Conservative political pundit Byron York declared, “Hell has officially frozen over.” After a pleasant editorial board chat, Scaife came out and wrote an opinion piece in his own paper declaring that his view of her as a Democratic presidential contender had changed and was now “very favorable indeed.” The rapprochement testified both to Hillary Clinton’s political skills and to Scaife’s almost childlike impressionability. Repeatedly in his memoir, he changes his political views after meeting antagonists in person, whether the liberal Kennedy family member Sargent Shriver or the Democratic congressman Jack Murtha. “Like many billionaires, he lived in a bubble,” concluded his friend Ruddy (whose relations with the Clintons also thawed). Contrary information rarely penetrated it. Instead, Scaife’s family fortune enabled him to build a political bulwark reinforcing his ideology and imposing it on the rest of the country.

By the early 1980s, a list of the Heritage Foundation’s sponsors found in the private papers of one of its early supporters, Clare Boothe Luce, is crammed with Fortune 500 companies. Amoco, Amway, Boeing, Chase Manhattan Bank, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Mesa Petroleum, Mobil Oil, Pfizer, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, R. J. Reynolds, Searle, Sears, Roebuck, SmithKline Beckman, Union Carbide, and Union Pacific were all by then paying the think tank’s bills—while the think tank was promoting their agendas.

Weyrich, with Scaife’s financial backing, launched several other ingenious political organizations during this period. One was the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group aimed at waging conservative fights in every state legislature in the country. From 1973 until 1983, the Scaife and Mellon family trusts donated half a million dollars to ALEC, constituting most of its budget. “ALEC is well on its way to fulfilling the dream of those who started the organization,” a Weyrich aide wrote to Scaife’s top adviser in 1976, “thanks wholly to your confidence and the tremendous generosity of the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts.” When one ALEC administrator complained that Scaife’s foundation had too much influence over the organization’s agenda, a Scaife employee retorted that they operated on “the Golden Rule—whoever has the gold rules.”

The new conservative nonprofits were thriving, too. By 1985, the Heritage Foundation’s budget equaled that of Brookings and AEI combined. Scaife, who by then had donated $10 million to the think tank, was contributing at a rate of $1 million a year. He had gone far to turn Lewis Powell’s dream into a reality. But one key part of Powell’s agenda remained unfinished. Conservative foundations might have financed a parallel intellectual establishment of their own, but the League to Save Carthage still hadn’t conquered America’s colleges and universities. The Ivy League was no more hospitable to Scaife and his ilk than it had been the day he was expelled.

“They all knew the dangers back then. They had some really good scientists and chemists. But you didn’t have the regulations,” says Harry Haynes, who runs a small history museum in Saltville and whose father used to work at the Olin plant. “We all played with the mercury as children,” he recalls. “Daddy brought it home from the chemical plant. You’d drop it on the floor, and it would explode into a zillion little bits, and then sweep it together and it would clump back together again.” The company issued gas masks to workers because of the pervasive chemical vapors, but, another resident recalled, “no one wore them.”

In 1972, however, the world recoiled at photographs of birth defects resulting from severe mercury contamination at Minamata Bay in Japan. Scientists definitively linked the birth defects—as well as other health horrors including cerebral palsy, mental retardation, blindness, deafness, coma, and death—to consumption of seafood that had been contaminated by mercury waste in local fishing areas. After having been dumped in the water, the mercury had broken down into a soluble form toxic to aquatic life and to those ingesting it. The nightmare at Minamata drew concern about the effects of mercury pollution elsewhere, including at the Olin plant in Saltville. Testing conducted by the state soon revealed high levels of mercury in the sediment in the North Fork of the Holston River, which ran from Saltville on down to Tennessee, where it flowed into the Cherokee Lake recreation area, a favorite fishing destination. Dangerous levels of mercury were discovered in the fish for eighty miles south of the Olin plant, according to one report.

George Pearson, who was running the Charles G. Koch Foundation at that point, guided O’Connell, assigning him a free-market reading list that included Hayek’s essay “The Intellectuals and Socialism.” Hayek’s point was emphatic: to conquer politics, one must first conquer the intellectuals. O’Connell recalled, “It was like a home-study course.”

On top of these programs, the foundation doled out $8 million to more than a hundred John M. Olin faculty fellows. These funds enabled scores of young academics to take the time needed to research and write in order to further their careers. The roster of recipients includes John Yoo, the legal scholar who went on to become the author of the George W. Bush administration’s controversial “torture memo” legalizing the American government’s brutalization of terror suspects.

Without the rigorous peer-reviewed standards required by prestigious academic publications, the Olin Foundation was able to inject into the mainstream a number of works whose scholarship was debatable at best. For example, Olin Foundation funds enabled John R. Lott Jr., then an Olin fellow at the University of Chicago, to write his influential book More Guns, Less Crime. In the work, Lott argued that more guns actually reduce crime and that the legalization of concealed weapons would make citizens safer. Politicians advocating weaker gun control laws frequently cited Lott’s findings. But according to Adam Winkler, the author of Gunfight, Lott’s scholarship was suspect. Winkler wrote that “Lott’s claimed source for this information was ‘national surveys,’ ” which under questioning he revised to just one survey that he and research assistants had conducted. When asked to provide the data, Winkler recounts, Lott said he had lost it in a computer crash. Asked for any evidence of the survey, writes Winkler, “Lott said he had no such evidence.” (Proving that the recipients of Olin funds weren’t ideologically monolithic, Winkler, too, had received funds from the foundation.)

He added, “If the conservative intellectual movement were a NASCAR race, and if the scholars and organizations who compose it were drivers zipping around a race track, virtually all of their vehicles would sport an Olin bumper sticker.”

Losing Ground, which was written in a tone of sorrow rather than anger, blamed government programs for creating a culture of dependence among the poor. Critics said it overlooked macroeconomic issues over which the poor had no control, and academics and journalists were split, with several challenging Murray’s scholarship. Nonetheless, with ample funding from Olin and other conservative foundations, Murray succeeded in shifting the debate over America’s poor from society’s shortcomings to their own. Despite Reagan’s professed antipathy toward big government, his administration steered cautiously away from Murray’s controversial libertarianism, preferring to criticize welfare cheaters rather than the whole idea of government-run antipoverty programs. But to the dismay of liberals, Bill Clinton, a “New Democrat,” later embraced his ideas, calling Murray’s analysis “essentially right” and incorporating many of his prescriptions, including work requirements and the end to aid as an entitlement, in his 1996 welfare reform bill. “It took ten years,” Murray has said, “for Losing Ground to go from being controversial to conventional wisdom.”

When Joyce took over the Bradley Foundation, he continued to fund many of the same academic organizations he had at Olin, including half of the same colleges and universities. “Typically, it was not just the same university but the same department, and in some cases, the same scholar,” Bruce Murphy wrote in Milwaukee Magazine, charging that this led to a kind of “intellectual cronyism.” The anointed scholars were good ideological warriors but “rarely great scholars,” he wrote. For instance, Joyce stuck with Murray in the face of growing controversy over his 1994 book, The Bell Curve, which correlated race and low IQ scores to argue that blacks were less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite,” and was loudly and convincingly discredited. The Manhattan Institute fired Murray over the controversial project. “They didn’t want the grief,” says Murray. But Joyce reportedly kept an estimated $1 million in grants flowing to Murray, who decamped to the American Enterprise Institute. “I knew from Mike Joyce my fellowship was portable,” Murray says. But the controversy stirred by the book clouded the Bradley Foundation’s reputation. Joyce, who was accused of racism, said he received death threats. He felt so threatened he demanded enhanced security. The book, he acknowledged, left “an indelible imprint on us.” Joyce stepped down from Bradley in 2001 amid rumors of alcoholism and erratic and self-destructive behavior. “Demons were rumored,” recalls a friend. According to one...

Even more than the Olin Corporation, Allen-Bradley sponsored an amazing array of generous if paternalistic fringe benefits for its workers, including its own jazz orchestra, led by a full-time music director, which serenaded lunch crowds. There were badminton courts on its roof deck, overseen by an athletic director, and an employee reading room, too. The Bradley brothers, who erected an iconic four-faced, Florentine-style clock tower that soared seventeen stories above the plant on the South Side of Milwaukee, regarded themselves as benevolent civic leaders, overseeing a family of employees. They were therefore bitterly wounded when their employees, who saw the situation differently, unionized and then went out on strike in 1939.

Bradley also was a devoted follower of Dr. Frederick Schwarz, a melodramatically anti-Communist physician from Australia who had converted to Christianity from Judaism, and who stumped across the heartland for his Christian Anti-Communism Crusade preaching that “Karl Marx was a Jew,” and “like most Jews he was short and ugly and lazy and slovenly and had no desire to go out and work for a living” but also possessed “a superior, evil intelligence like most Jews.” Schwarz, too, was a regular visitor to the company and a favorite among Bradley’s causes. Bradley was also a keen supporter of the Manion Forum, whose followers believed that social spending in America was part of a secret Russian plot to bankrupt the United States. Despite the lifesaving financial boost that federal spending had provided to his own company, Bradley reportedly regarded the growing federal government in America and world Communism as “the two major threats” to human “freedom.”

The Bradley brothers had hoped to keep the company in the private hands of the family, and the jobs in the community, in perpetuity. Their will was explicit about this. Their heirs, however, with the help of the Milwaukee law firm Foley & Lardner, managed to sell the company to Rockwell nonetheless, cashing in handsomely. One of the law firm’s partners, Michael Grebe, subsequently became chairman and CEO of the newly enriched foundation.