John M. Olin Foundation

The foundation grew out of the Olin Corporation in 1953, when John Merrill Olin decided to promote American capitalism and fend off what he saw as encroaching socialism. He funneled foundation money to a variety of organizations, including those concerned with economics, the environment, education, law, religion, and civil rights. The Olin Foundation has also been a major contributor to think tanks, policy institutes, colleges, and universities around the nation. (1)

Olin ran the foundation until 1977, when he selected former treasury secretary William E. Simon to succeed him as president. Simon had been an aggressive Wall Street investor and lucrative fundraiser. He served under Presidents Nixon and Ford and later became president of the United States Olympic Committee, where he successfully led the boycott of the 1980 games in Moscow. He once declared as treasury secretary that he was the one “that caused the lines at the gas stations” during the 1973 oil embargo. Simon considered the United States a “nation of great energy wastrels” and encouraged conservation. (2)

Michael Joyce, for the past two decades one of the leading promoters of the U.S. right wing, succeeded Simon as Olin’s president and remained in that post until 1985, when he was tapped to run the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, another key conservative foundation. Joyce is a former chairman of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a position he held while at Bradley. Irving Kristol has dubbed him the “godfather of modern philanthropy.”

James Piereson has been Olin’s executive director for several decades. He is currently the secretary of the board of trustees. He is joined by Chairman Eugene F. Williams Jr., Chairman; President and Treasurer George J. Gillespie III, who has been in this role since Simon’s death in 2000; and members Peter M. Flanigan, Richard M. Furlaud, and Charles F. Knight. Piereson is also associated with the William E. Simon Foundation and sits on the boards of the Manhattan Institute, the Philanthropy Roundtable, and Hoover Institution. (2) (3) (7)

In a 1977 interview, John Olin stated that he created his foundation in an effort “to see free enterprise re-established in this country. Business and the public must be awakened to the creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained here since World War II.’’ His foundation grants were geared largely toward conservative organizations that had a free market perspective. (1)

William Simon, Olin’s successor, wrote in his 1979 book, Time for Truth:

Funds generated by business … must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty … to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers, and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty. [Business must] cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economy, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism. (6)

Simon is also credited with stating that media funding should be directed away from those that “serve as megaphones for anti-capitalist opinion” and instead be given to those with a “pro-freedom” and “pro-business” bent. In a 1997 report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Sally Covington wrote:

By the early 1980s, journalistic reports in the Washington Post, Esquire magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Columbia Journalism Review were highlighting the important role that the Koch, Olin, Smith Richardson, Sarah Scaife, and other foundations were playing in building the organizational base of the right. (6)

Since the 1970s, the foundation has been providing funding to law and economics programs in schools across the nation, and to legal organizations such as the Federalist Society. Over a six-year period between 1987 and 1993, Olin awarded $13 million to university law and economics programs. Piereson has stated that he “saw [law and economics programs] as a way into the law schools—I probably shouldn’t confess that … Economic analysis tends to have conservatizing effects.” (6) (7)

Journalist Jason DeParle argues that the Federalist Society would not exist if not for Olin. It began as a college society that brought in conservative speakers and now is 25,000 strong. Many of its members served or are serving in the Bush administration, including Michael Chertoff, Spencer Abraham, Gale Norton, John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson, and John Bolton. (4)

Funding has also gone to organizations which oppose affirmative action in higher education and to supporting the work of conservative authors to counteract the “liberal bias” in universities, including Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D’Souza. (7)

The movement to end affirmative action in colleges and universities is on the agenda of Linda Chavez’s Center for Equal Opportunity, the Independent Women’s Forum, and the American Civil Rights Institute, all Olin grant recipients. Over the years, they have received a combined total of $3.3 million from Olin ($1.6 million, $776,000, and $900,000, respectively). (7) (8)

Key conservative think tanks have also figured prominently as Olin grantees. The Heritage Foundation tops the list, having received over $8 million from Olin since 1985. Next in line are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hoover Institution, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hudson Institute. Funding to AEI was suspended in 1986 because of Olin’s perception that it had shifted to the political center (the Smith Richardson Foundation also acted accordingly). Olin resumed its funding the following year. (6) (9)

In her report for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, Covington writes:

Judging from AEI’s own statements, the institution has moved to assume a more aggressive and conservative public policy role, perhaps owing to conservative efforts to “defund” the think tank during the mid-1980s when some judged its research orientation to be too centrist. In 1986, the Olin and Smith Richardson foundations withdrew their support from AEI because of substantive disagreement with certain of its policies, causing Baroody to resign in the ensuing financial crisis. [William Baroody Jr. was AEI president between 1978 and 1986.] (6)

Olin has also funded philanthropic organizations as part of its “infrastructure” building. In addition to the Philanthropy Roundtable, funding has also gone to the Capital Research Center (CRC), which has targeted “liberal” foundations and has become part of the movement to invalidate global warming with its “GreenWatch” project. CRC’s national board of advisers has included Richard Allen, Linda Chavez, Midge Decter, Hudson’s Michael Horowitz, Philanthropy Roundtable’s Adam Meyerson, Michael Novak, and The National Review’s Kate O’Bierne. Current members include former Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. (6) (10) (11)

According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy’s March 2004 report, Axis of Ideology, the Olin Foundation ranks third among foundations for awarding public policy grants to conservative organizations, after Sarah Scaife and Bradley. This assessment was based on data collected between 1999 and 2001. According to data from Mediatransparency regarding funding through 2003, Olin is now the fourth largest conservative funder (having given a total of $305,353,463 since 1985), after Bradley, Scaife, and the Walton Family. (7) (8) (12)

Like much of conservative funding, Olin tends to give general use grants that enable recipients to spend the money as they see fit.