Forbidden Archeology_ The Full Unabridged Edition - Michael A. Cremo [375]
All this is quite remarkable, when one considers that John D. Rockefeller’s charity was initially directed toward Baptist churches and missions. Raymond D. Fosdick, an early president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said (1952, p. 2) that both Rockefeller and his chief financial adviser, Frederick T. Gates, were “inspired by deep religious conviction.” Rockefeller believed “a man should make all he can and give all he can” (Fosdick 1952, p. 6).
According to Fosdick (1952, p. 6), Rockefeller was at first “giving to a multiplicity of small causes mostly related to his church interests—schools, hospitals, and missions.” As a result, he was continually being approached by Baptist ministers. To relieve Rockefeller from personally having to handle individual requests, Gates organized a system whereby Rockefeller would give a lump sum to a mission board that would distribute the funds in an appropriate fashion.
Moving on to bigger things, Rockefeller and Gates gave 35 million dollars for building the University of Chicago, which, according to Fosdick (1952, p. 7), started out as “as an idea for a Baptist institution of higher learning, under Baptist auspices and control.” It is hard to imagine such a school promoting the idea that humans evolved from extinct apelike creatures. Gates, it may be noted, was formerly head of the American Baptist Education Society.
In 1913, the present Rockefeller Foundation was organized. The trustees included Frederick T. Gates; John D. Rockefeller, Jr.; Dr. Simon Flexner, head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Henry Pratt Judson, president of the University of Chicago; Charles William Eliot, former president of Harvard; and A. Barton Hepburn, president of the Chase National Bank.
At first, the Foundation concentrated its attention on public health, medicine, agriculture, and education, avoiding anything controversial. Thus the Rockefeller Foundation began to distance itself from religion, particularly the Baptist Church. Exactly why this happened is difficult to say. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Rockefeller was coming to realize that his fortune was founded on exploiting the advances of modern science and technology. Perhaps it was the increasing role that science was beginning to play in the objects of traditional charitable giving—such as medicine. But whatever the reason, Rockefeller began to staff his foundation with scientists, and the giving policies reflected this change.
Even Gates, the former Baptist educator, seemed to be changing his tune. He wanted to create a nonsectarian university in China. But he noted that the “missionary bodies at home and abroad were distinctly and openly, even threateningly hostile to it as tending to infidelity” (Fosdick 1952, p. 81). Furthermore, the Chinese government wanted control, an idea that the Foundation could not support.
President Eliot, who had overseen the Harvard Medical School in Shanghai, proposed a solution: a medical college, which would serve as an opening to the rest of Western science. Fosdick (1952, p. 81) wrote: “To President Eliot there was no better subject than medicine to introduce to China the inductive method of reasoning which lies at the basis of all modern science. He thought it would be the most significant contribution that the West could make to the East.” Here mechanistic science shows itself a quiet but militant ideology, skillfully, yet somewhat ruthlessly, promoted by the combined effort of scientists, educators, and wealthy industrialists, with a view towards establishing worldwide intellectual dominance.
The medical hospital strategy outlined by Eliot worked. The Chinese government approved establishment of the Peking Union Medical College under Foundation auspices. Meanwhile, Dr. Wallace Buttrick, director of Rockefeller’s newly created China Medical Board, negotiated with the Protestant mission hospitals already in China. He agreed to provide financial support