The Reece Committee Hearings (1954): How Leftist Non-Profit Foundations Undermined the Constitution
For a very brief period of time, the Republican Party controlled the House of Representatives under Eisenhower. This happened only during his first term, 1953-55. The House went to the Democrats in 1954 and they retained control until 1995.
Congressman Carroll Reece investigated non-profit foundations in 1954. His findings were clear: they were run by Leftists. They were committed to the creation of a one-world government.
Reece was a true maverick. He was a Republican who was re-elected term after term from Tennessee. He was elected to the House more often than any other representative in Tennessee history. He was a major player in the Republican Party. Here is Wikipedia's account.
In 1920, Reece won the Republican nomination for Tennessee's 1st Congressional District, based in the Tri-Cities region in the northeastern part of the state. The region had voted not to secede at the state convention in 1861. This region was heavily Republican—in fact, Republicans had represented this district for all but four years since 1859, and was one of the few regions in the former Confederacy where Republicans won on a regular basis. He won handily in November and was reelected four more times before being defeated for renomination in 1930 by Oscar Lovette. However, he defeated Lovette in 1932 and returned to Congress, serving until 1947, when he stepped down to devote his full energies to serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee, a position he had held since 1946.A member of the conservative "Old Guard" faction of the Republican Party, Reece was a strong supporter of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, the leader of the GOP's conservative wing. In 1948 and 1952 Reece was a leading supporter of Taft's candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination; however, Taft lost the nomination both times to moderate Republicans from New York. . . .
In 1950, Reece ran against the man who succeeded him in the House, Dayton Phillips, and defeated him in the Republican primary. This all but assured him of a return to Congress in the heavily Republican district. He was reelected five more times.
When the Republicans gained control of the House after the 1952 elections, Reece served as chairman of the Special Committee on Tax Exempt Foundations, losing this post after the Democrats regained control in 1955. During his time in Congress, he was a social and fiscal conservative who supported isolationism and civil rights legislation. He was a rarity in politics at the time—a truly senior Republican congressman from a former Confederate state. . . .
Reece led the House Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations which investigated the use of funds by tax-exempt non-profit organizations, and in particular foundations, to determine if they were using their funds to support communism in educational institutions. Reece selected attorney Norman Dodd to lead the investigation, which lasted eighteen months. Reece would later declare that "The evidence that has been gathered by the staff pointed to one simple underlying situation, namely that the major foundations, by subsidizing collectivistic-minded educators, had financed a socialist trend in American government."
A tiny handful of conservatives in the 1950's knew about the hearings. By the early 1960's, the committee and its hearings were forgotten. Norman Dodd continued to promote the story of the committee for the rest of his life. I personally knew him. I spent about two hours with him in the mid-1960's. His story was the same as the one that has been posted on YouTube. It was produced by G. Edward Griffin, who introduced it. Griffin is the author of The Creature from Jekyll Island, an excellent book on the Federal Reserve System.
Dodd describes the hidden agenda of these large foundations. This agenda collapsed along with the Soviet Union on Christmas day, 1991. It was the most spectacular institutional failure in modern history. The largest and most powerful empire since the Mongols shut down peacefully. In doing so, it shut down the agendas of these foundations and related multinational corporations. They had to re-organize their agenda completely.
The West did virtually nothing to achieve this extraordinary victory. It was done behind the Iron Curtain by dedicated members of decentralized resistance movements. The looming collapse went unnoticed almost until the end, sometime around 1988 and 1989. It caught the West by surprise. Neither the internationalists nor the professional anti-Communists saw it coming.
It would be a serious mistake to imagine that this agenda still exists. It was shot in the head and buried in a self-dug grave, Communist style, in 1991. There is still internationalism, but there is no more Communism outside of North Korea and the Chinese oligarchy. China abandoned Marxist economics in 1979. There is no more Marxism today. The assumption of the Marxists and the fellow travelers who ran the nonprofit foundations in 1954 were smashed on the shoals of history. Marx was wrong. The Leftist internationalists were wrong in betting that Marx was right.
Having said this, there is still no doubt in my mind that Dodd's story needs to be told to each generation. It is the story of ideological betrayal by highly paid bureaucrats who ran the multimillion dollar foundations that were set up by rich men who were committed to domestic and international humanism. In the days when the Reece Committee operated, there were no influential Right-wing nonprofit foundations. There was the invisible and marginal William Volker Fund in California. There was the struggling Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, which in 1954 did not yet publish its monthly magazine, The Freeman.
Because of the World Wide Web, it is now possible to read the full hearings of the Reece Committee. They are posted on this site: www.AmericanDeception.com. Go here. Search for Reece. You will be taken to the full set of the hearings. Download them.
[Oct. 10, 2020: the site is empty.]
Several years ago, I purchased the CD-ROM produced by the organization. It is one of the most amazing collection of primary source documents I have ever seen. It would be possible for a professional historian to spend 10 years going through these documents, making notations, putting them in some kind of searchable database, and writing up the findings. These materials are virtually unknown within the conservative movement.
The memory hole now has a bucket on a digital rope. What we need now is a hundred WordPress blogs devoted to dredging up the data and putting the multiple stories into coherent but decentralized formats. It can be done for virtually no money. All it takes is dedication, a lot of time, the ability to read widely and intelligently, the ability to synthesize, the ability to tell a story, and the ability to write clearly.
Maybe you are such a person.
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Update, November 29, 2019
The 1952 hearings are here. Democrats had a majority of the committee.
The 1954 hearings are here. Republicans had a majority.
The Dodd Report is here. If this page dies, go here.