Freedom’s Mr. Moneybags

A Gift of Freedom - How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America
By John J. Miller

From a 2005 National Review interview with John J. Miller, author of "Gift of Freedom", some interesting tidbits about John M. Olin, the famed conservative Mecena. The interview is titled Freedom’s Mr. Moneybags.

"... I’ll suggest that without the John M. Olin Foundation, Allan Bloom might not have written The Closing of the American Mind, the best-selling book that deeply influenced the way people think about the entrenchment of cultural relativism in the modern academy. As it happened, the foundation gave Bloom a small grant that allowed him to write an article for National Review, which was published in 1982. Bloom’s friend Saul Bellow encouraged him to turn the article into a book, which became this amazing runaway success, both critically and commercially. Throughout it all, the John M. Olin Foundation provided Bloom with steady financial support.

"Another example might be Francis Fukuyama, best known for his “End of History” thesis. It was first delivered as a lecture at the Olin Center at the University of Chicago, and then it was published as an article in The National Interest, a foreign-policy journal that was created with Olin dollars. Frank is one of the smartest guys around, and he’d probably be successful no matter what, but the John M. Olin Foundation certainly played a key role in creating the conditions for this particular success. Incidentally, one of Fukuyama’s most prominent critics, Samuel Huntington, ran his own John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. It’s interesting to observe that the most provocative and fascinating debate on foreign policy after the Cold War — Fukuyama vs. Huntington — didn’t occur between Left and Right, but between two men who may reasonably be described as conservatives, and both of them beneficiaries of the John M. Olin Foundation."

From the same interview, a nicely fitting quote from Oscar Wilde: "Philanthropy seems to have become simply the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures."