← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big with James Piereson: How Bold Philanthropy Helped Build a Movement and Reshaped America
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- [00:01]
Kevin Gentry
Plantas plantas y mas plantas and country, farm and garden a key mismo in Yakima and la venida Washington des de los pimientos mas picantes del mundo asa las flores mace hermosas lot tenemos todo calatisado, jalapeno Roma y super chile en existencia todo los dias un paquete de cuatro vegetales cuesta solo tres dolores, conventin, nueves and tabos bena country farm and garden para todo tus vegetales, tomates, sebollas, pimientos y pepinos siempren existencia and country farm and garden and avanede watchen and Yakima.
- [00:30]
Dr. James Pearson
Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your Privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online, at home, and especially on public wi fi. Get IPVanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer@ipvanish.com audio I'm always optimistic. Well, optimistic may not be the right word. I'm cheerful and I'm hopeful, and you have to be realistic. But when I wrote that book in 2015, 2016, the Fourth Revolution and the Shattered Consensus, and basically what I said was that the kind of the ideas that had held the post war Cold War era together were fraying. Communism had fallen. We had failed in some of these wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, all the rest. Those had not come out well, and American voters were looking for something else. And then there was the backwash to the 2008 financial crisis, which is there as well. So I forecast, you know, a kind of a political revolution. I thought it would be a conservative revolution. Now maybe it is, or will be. I did not foresee Donald Trump coming along.
- [02:06]
Kevin Gentry
Welcome to the Going Big Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Gentry, and this is the place where we celebrate bold moves and big ideas. Each week I sit down with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs and change makers who are making a significant impact in their careers and in their communities. Whether you're looking to level up your leadership, pursue your passion, or just get inspired to take your next big leap, this is where those stories come to life. Now, if you're listening on iTunes, YouTube, or anywhere else you tune into podcasts, be sure to hit that subscribe button so you'll never miss an episode. Now let's dive in to what it means to truly go big. Well, ladies and gentlemen, today I'm joined in the Going big podcast with Dr. James Pearson. And Jim Pearson is a well known political scientist, prolific writer, author, but perhaps best known as having been the longtime president of the John M. Olin foundation roughly from 1985 to 2005, when it deliberately shut its doors, part of a sunsetting provision that the donor had asked for from the start. And during the period of Jim's leadership, he oversaw some really striking grant making. More than $370 million was distributed to different think tanks and universities and scholars and programs, which ended up really changing so much of the American political debate and public discourse in the late 20th century. It's an astonishing story and it's just perfect for the Going Big podcast. Jim, we are so appreciative of your leadership. And of course, you continued going to the William E. Simon foundation as a trustee and president there. You're still active at the Manhattan Institute for Public Policy Research, and you're still involved in philanthropy. I want to tap so much of your knowledge and experience for this conversation today, but I want to do it. I want to start in the context of the moment. You know, we're on the verge right now of celebrating the Fourth of July, Independence Day in the United States. And next year we'll be celebrating the 250th anniversary of the country. Fifty years ago when we were celebrating the American Bicentennial, you were a political scientist. You were a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an elite, prestigious university in Philadelphia. You were not far from Independence Hall. You were there when a lot of the important celebration then was going on. If you would kick us off, how did that moment then affect your view of the world and your own political beliefs and principles?
- [05:03]
Dr. James Pearson
Well, thank you, Kevin. Yes. Looking back on that moment in 1976, the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, that was an important moment for me, certainly, I think for the country as well. We were going through a tough time. The Vietnam War did not turn out as we would have wanted it to. The aftermath was pretty bitter. We had gone through Watergate. We were living through a period of inflation, unrest. The Soviet Union looked like it might win the Cold War at that time.
- [05:41]
Kevin Gentry
Which, by the way, it's hard to believe that now. A lot of people don't even remember or weren't around to know. But the 70s were a bleak time.
- [05:52]
Dr. James Pearson
It was definitely a rough time. And it all had an impression on me at that Time I was a young PhD. I just got my PhD, and I had started my career teaching, thinking I would probably have a career as an academic, perhaps. And I was a young assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and I happened to live near Independence hall, two blocks from Independence hall, where it all happened in 1776 and then again in 1787 with the Constitution. And I walked by it every day and began to stop and take some tours and visit and read and study to learn about what happened there. Of course, I'd been, in general, aware of a lot of that because I had studied for many years as a graduate student, but I hadn't gone into it very deeply, and my studies didn't take me into any of that kind of thing very deeply. I don't know if that's true of students today. It might be true of students today as well. If so, it's too bad. And so I began to teach Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, in my courses, began to write a little bit about it. And I began to think about that as a kind of an antidote to many of the things that were going on on the campus. There was at that time a great deal of disparagement toward the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It was a fraud, people said. And U.S. history in general, the. The 1960s had kind of turned a lot of young academics against America, and we're beginning to see the consequences of that. So I thought that by pushing that, what they accomplished, what it meant, that it might bring some reason onto the campus in relation to what was happening in history, identity politics, attacks on business and free markets. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. I didn't really succeed. I believe I may have influenced some of the students in my courses to think a little bit differently about things. Some of them said that later, but they did appreciate it. And I did have some students who went through that, those courses who later became kind of prominent in American politics. And they often said that they appreciated what they learned in those courses from that. Frank Luntz was one of those students.
- [08:37]
Kevin Gentry
Oh, you're kidding. I never knew that.
- [08:39]
Dr. James Pearson
Someone that you. You may have known Frank. I've lost track of Frank a little bit. I got her. He's not in good health. Someone said, I hope he's better. But he was a, you know, bright young student in that period for me. So that was where I started. And, you know, after a few years at Penn, I decided maybe I can't make any progress in academia as someone who's kind of conservative. And I began to look elsewhere. And by chance, by conversation with some friends, I talked to the people at John a.m. allan Foundation. This is 1980, the year of Ronald Reagan's election. They were looking to hire someone who knew something about academia because they wanted to make grants in that field.
- [09:29]
Kevin Gentry
Fascinating. Well, Jim, you were obviously affecting students in the classroom, and you mentioned Frank Lentz, others who went on to big things. But you can only influence so many in that setting. Your influence through the leadership in philanthropy, in helping build the conservative movement, and really through the John M. Olin foundation in particular, is very consequential. That's really one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation today. But before we we get a little bit more into that, if you wouldn't mind, for the benefit of those listening, when you say you are a conservative at that point, and I don't know whether the Founding Fathers helped kind of give you that view, but when you say conservative or in the context of 1976, 1978, 1980, what in your mind is a conservative? Was it then, maybe. What is it today? What is it you seek to conserve?
- [10:29]
Dr. James Pearson
Yes, that's always a very good question to ask a conservative. What are you trying to conserve? And I think conservatives may have different answers. Might be national strength, it might be the free market, it might be individual liberty. All those things are important to conservatives. For me, I began, I developed an appreciation for the Constitution and the constitutional order. That was where I kind of came in, as I just described. And that was one of the ways in which the bicentennial had a big influence on me. I also read a fair amount about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. And of course, one of Lincoln's contributions was to elevate the Declaration of Independence to a centerpiece of the American system, which I had not really been aware of until I started reading in this period. So I would say that I became a conservative because I became something of a constitutionalist. The constitutional order and the principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence became very important to me. And I thought those were things that we really needed to conserve. And these things were being disparaged on the college campus. There was not a great appreciation for the Constitution, nor the Declaration of Independence. And the principles engraved in the Declaration and the Constitution, I think they are different expressions of the same thing. Individual liberty is clearly a centerpiece of the Declaration. I mean, the Declaration of independence said two big things. First it said, were these 13 states are now independent of Great Britain. They could have stopped there. Jefferson could have stopped there. And then he listed all the things that the King and the Parliament had done to violate the rights of Americans. He didn't stop there. He went on to say, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, are in a die by their Creator with inalienable rights, which among them are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that becomes a kind of a standard for America. And I began to believe that those who were disparaging those ideas were disparaging the very idea of liberty. And so that is how I entered as a conservative now. I then began to develop an appreciation for free markets as a reflection of liberty. National strength became important. But that is, that is the entry, my entryway into the conservative movement.
- [13:14]
Kevin Gentry
Well, if we have time, I'd love to talk a little bit more about that in the context of 2025. And you know, it's. It's complicated. Conservative is a confusing term to people who are not immersed in it a lot. We have the great Austrian economist, the free market economist, Friedrich Hayek, who wrote why I'm Not a Conservative. And so it's a little confusing. I'll get into that later when we talk more about Reagan and his consequential role in really reshaping the country and public discourse and again, how that matched up with the Olin Foundation's work. But one more kind of table setting question, and that is about philanthropy and foundations. For those listening, what is a private foundation? Why did John M. Olin start a foundation? How could he start a foundation in America? What about our law allows that? What was he trying to do through that action?
- [14:15]
Dr. James Pearson
You know, a good question, Kevin. We have a very vibrant charitable sector, as they call it in America, probably.
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Kevin Gentry
The most vibrant in the world, you.
- [14:27]
Dr. James Pearson
Might argue, very much, very unique in the world because other countries don't have our traditions or our laws. There are two kinds of charitable institutions operated in America, really more. But two basic. One is what you might call a public foundation or a public charity. The Red Cross, Harvard University, the Heritage Foundation. These are public foundations, public charities. Why? Because they're supported by the public. In other words, they have many donors, not just one donor, many donors. And they raise money from the public. A private foundation is an institution that has just one donor, typically. And they are set up to make gifts, grants to basically to these public foundations which I just described. So the John M. Olin foundation, the ford foundation, the MacArthur foundation, all the hundreds or thousands of foundations in America are set up to make these grants. Harvard University, Yale University, even the smallest colleges live off these donations. Now, of course, we have discovered that Harvard depends heavily on government grants as well, which is a phenomenon that developed in the 1960s. So what happened is that the charitable deduction began in World War I. So when the United States goes to war against Germany on the side of the Allies In World War I, Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats increase the highest marginal tax rate to 77%. Mind you, the income tax was new. It was only five years old. @ this time. We never had an income tax. The income tax amendment was only approved in 1912 or 13. So wealthy people came to Roosevelt and also college heads, medical heads, and said, we won't get any donations from wealthy people if you have that tax of 77%. So there should be an exemption for giving to charitable institutions so they won't have to pay taxes on that. They can make these gifts and write it off, their taxes. And so that was built into the tax system in 1917, 1918. And charitable organizations were defined as religious institutions, schools and colleges, and medical research. Those definitions have expanded over the years, but particularly since the 1960s to include all sorts of advocacy organizations and think tanks and all sorts of things that were not imagined in 1917.
- [17:21]
Kevin Gentry
Well, Jim, if I could. I never really knew that, and it makes a lot of sense now. So John M. Olin, if you could tell us a little bit about more about who he was, but he had a particular vision for either his philanthropy or maybe the future of the country formed by experiences or his beliefs. And he wanted to engage in philanthropy somehow related to that, and ultimately hired staff to help him do that. And that was part of your role. Could you. Could you explain that? Because I think there. There probably are people listening today. And I want to address this question before we conclude. How can I make a difference in the world? Can I do it through contributions that I could make through the accumulation of wealth I've done in my lifetime, or can I go to work for an organization, a public foundation, that's doing some of this work, receiving contributions to solve big problems? But anyway, take us back to John M. Olin. What was he trying to do, and what were you trying to do for him?
- [18:26]
Dr. James Pearson
So wealthy individuals, when they look at their tax situation, many of them have chosen to create charitable foundations to make gifts after they pass away. Often they usually set these up later in life, which is true of John Olin. When I came into this, there were not that many foundations around. There were, I don't know, eight or ten prominent foundations. There were more than that, but there weren't many. And at that time they're all set up mostly by industrialists, entrepreneurs of one kind or another. Rockefellers did oil. The Ford foundation came from the auto industry, the Sloan foundation from General Motors and a few others. Those are the big foundations.
- [19:16]
Kevin Gentry
And that was a pretty good reflection of the country at the time and the economy. It was an industrial bank.
- [19:22]
Dr. James Pearson
Yeah, absolutely. That's how people made a lot of money. And there weren't many of them and there weren't many foundations. And John Olin was one of them. He built up something called the Olin Corporation, which was a conglomerate at that time. They owned Winchester rifles, Colt pistols, they made ammunition, they made black powder in World War I. By the time I came into it, they were making skis. So it was a diversified manufacturing company. John Olin at this time in the 19 mid-1970s was into his 1980s and into his 80s. An older man. He had semi retired from the Olin Corporation but was still on the board. He was a board member of several universities, including Johns Hopkins and of course Cornell, where he had gone to school. And he watched in the late 60s and early 1970s as Cornell was convulsed by student demonstrators. There was an occasion where some student radicals took over the student union brandishing machine guns in 1969. And this had an effect on on John Olin. And he saw that the universities, because of the culture of the 1960s was moving leftward and had little appreciation for the free market system. Many were socialists and didn't believe in profit and thought it was driven by greed and that sort of. So he decided late in life to create a foundation. And he basically left his estate to the John M. Olin foundation with a direction that it support individuals and institutions seeking to preserve the American heritage of liberty and limited government. That was the mission that he gave to the foundation while he was alive. He was making grants in the late 70s. Henry Manning and the law and economics movement received money directly from John Olin. He also gave some money to some of the think tanks, the Hoover Institution and aei. His gifts were not large at that time. He appointed his labor lawyer from the Olin Corporation to be his first executive director. Frank o' Connell was his name. Wonderful gentleman, you know, brilliant thinker. Although his background was a labor lawyer, he retired after a couple of years because at that time was in his late 60s. And that was kind of where I came into the situation in the early 1980s. At that time the foundation was spending about $2 million a year. John Olin died in 1982 and left the bulk of his estate to the foundation. That represented something like maybe $120 million. Not large by foundation standards. The Ford foundation at that time was maybe 3 or 4 billion dollars in 1981 or 82. Ford is now about 12 or 15 billion. So he passed away. It left that charter. Importantly, he chose his neighbor from East Hampton, William E. Simon, to be the president of the foundation. Did you know using your browser in incognito mode doesn't actually protect your privacy? Take back your privacy with IPVanish VPN. Just one tap and all your data, passwords, communications, browsing history and more will be instantly protected. IPVanish makes you virtually invisible online. Use IPVanish on all your devices, anytime you go online, at home, and especially on public WI fi. Get ipvanish now for 70% off a yearly plan with this exclusive offer@ipvanish.com audio Simon had just finished a stint as Treasury Secretary under Nixon and Ford and had written this best selling book called the Time for Truth. And when she disparaged all the things that were going on in Washington, the forward to that book was written by Milton Friedman and it was a best selling book.
- [24:00]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah, before talk radio and before cable news personalities and so many others, Bill Simon was a prominent voice for free market economic issues, as was certainly Milton Friedman and William F. Buckley Jr. Both of them who really mastered television pretty well to convey their ideas. But yeah, Bill Simon, that was a big name.
- [24:24]
Dr. James Pearson
Yes, I remember reading that book before I went to the Olin Foundation. I said, you know, this is pretty good. And it was very influential. And of course, Ronald Reagan was on that lecture circuit too. General Electric was sending him around. And so all those people, Simon, Buckley, Friedman, and of course Friedman was doing Free to Choose at that time in the late 1970s, the public television series on free markets and Adam Smith and that sort of thing. So there was a lot of stuff bubbling around at that time to go along with all the difficulties that we were encountering. People were saying the United States are like a banana republic and inflation, the dollar wasn't worth anything, Congress is out of control. And so that was kind of where Simon, Reagan, Friedman, Buckley and others came into it and where the John M. Olin foundation fit in when I went up there. And so as I say, there was a lot, a lot of stuff percolating at that time. As I say, I didn't know much about the conservative movement, even though I was something of a conservative. I didn't know the Heritage foundation, for example. I didn't know what the American Enterprise Institute did or the Hoover Institution, what did they do? What was the role of a charitable foundation? I didn't know any of that. But, you know, I figured it out pretty quickly. It wasn't that complicated. And of course, I didn't know who the personalities were. Who's Ed Fullner. I did know who Buckley was because I did a lot of reading. So here we are in 1981 or so. There's a lot of ferment. Reagan has just been elected, and I've now gone to the Olin foundation to start to do this. So there was not.
- [26:16]
Kevin Gentry
Jim, let me jump in there, because this is where it really gets really interesting, I think. And we can bring it also, before we conclude up to the current situation, political situation. There's some parallels, but. But the conservative movement was in its early, early, early days, and you just didn't have things the way you see the world today. And you say you were affected by the college experience, affected by what you saw in Philadelphia. That sort of drew you to that in a way that John M. Olin was affected by what had happened at Cornell, and in many ways, Buckley, Friedman, Reagan, others were affected by the growing size and scope of government, the debt, the changes in the culture, the many, many things that affected them. And you know, I was in college in the early 80s, during the Reagan years, in the early days, the campuses, it was pretty brutal. The, the left was very well organized, as they, as they still are, perhaps even more so. And you all were quickly getting involved in things. The Collegiate Network. I, you know, there were those independent alternative newspapers to the campus newspapers like the Dartmouth Review that you all were helping support at the Olin foundation, the Federal Society, when it's in its very early days, getting established at law schools. And then you had these scholars like Alan Bloom that you were supporting tell it, how did this happen? Because, I mean, the path you took is you had not been planning this for decades or anything. Johnny Mullen had something of a vision rooted in his principles, and I'm not even really beginning to convey at all the truly consequential nature of the Olins Foundation's leadership in philanthropy. So how did it happen that you started funding these things that end up being so important?
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Dr. James Pearson
Well, Kevin, there wasn't, as you said, there wasn't much to the conservative movement when I went into it, 1980 and 1980, 1981, few think tanks, a few magazines, National Review, the American Spectator, a few academic programs, mostly free market programs, but not much. And the liberals were on the march, because they created all these institutions in the 1960s that they were now building out, not only the welfare state programs, but civil rights exploded from addressing problems in the American south to all sorts of minority groups and hiring, and the whole thing expanded greatly in that period. So they were kind of on a march, except that the country was doing badly, liberals were doing well, country was doing badly. And so that was kind of where we began to build that out. Ed Fullner, who was then at the Heritage foundation, which is pretty new. Paul Weyrich, our friend, late friend, was one of the founders of Heritage in 1975, I think it was interesting. Paul Weyrich tells a story that when he was an assistant to a senator, a Republican senator, he would see that when any. A piece of legislation was discussed in Congress, the liberals would have talking points in research papers on their desk, and members of Congress could read it and view it and make those arguments. Conservatives had nothing of the kind. And so Weirich and Fullner said, we. We need to do this on our side. And that was the beginnings of the Heritage foundation and in the mid-1970s. And the heritage foundation became extremely influential in that period, in the 1980s and 90s, counseling Ronald Reagan. So when you say, how did. Now. Did we do it now? That period, I think looking back the 1980s and 1990s, was a very important time for the conservative movement because it really built itself out in that period and became a mature movement with, you know, many leaders, followers too, people who could take jobs in government, who could take jobs and think tanks. There was a big literature out there. There are meetings, conferences. This is by, like, the year 2000. This thing had been built out. But then you say, well, how did it happen? You know, we had no plan. We had no idea this could happen. And we kind of took it step by step. So, you know, we didn't think that we were going to build anything. As significant is this. We were besieged by the liberals. We. We didn't really know where to go. And if we saw an opportunity, we generally took it. So I do recall when these young students from the Federalist Society came to see us in 1982, they had just had a student conference. There are three of them. I remember them, and I think Spence Abraham might have been one of them. Lee Lieberman was one, maybe Dave McIntosh. There were students at Yale and Chicago and Harvard. And, okay, we were prepared to help them more. But they had this important conference at Yale. They said, we want to create a national organization, and we have somebody we want to hire as president. I said, interesting, but you're a student movement. Why do you want to create an office in Washington? Why don't you keep doing your student work? Well, we were a little skeptical, but we gave them the money. They went and hired Gene Meyer in 1982, and it did take them many years to hit their stride. But of course, we know what happened over the period of years of the Federalist Society. But there's a kind of a lesson in that, in the sense that the. They brought the idea to us. We didn't do the work. We did put money behind them. We did do that, but they were the ones who conceived of it and brought it to us and said, we need funding for this operation. And I remember saying at the time, we don't have anything in this judicial area. We're getting killed in the law schools and with the judges. We need to have something. I don't know if this will work or be any good or not, but it's something. And something is better than nothing. Now, I think there is a lesson right there.
- [33:12]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah. No, no, no.
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Dr. James Pearson
That's. Many people would say, this is not perfect. This is not going to change the world. This is. This is. There's no point in doing this because they're not going anywhere. And look, it did take 10 or 20 years for them to hit their stride, but doing something was better than doing nothing and trying to find something that was perfect.
- [33:33]
Kevin Gentry
Well, these are the insights that are really valuable, I think, to folks that are listening. And Jim, you know, it's funny. I think there's often this crazy conspiracy that the donors kind of get together and hatch up these big schemes and strategies and plans. And the truth of the matter is just as you illustrated, it's. It's congressional staffers like Ed Fulner and Paul Weyrich who say, we've got to have something like the left has. We need to build a think tank. And let's put something together called the Heritage foundation and ask Olin and Joe Coors and some others to give us some seed capital or the Federal Society or what have you. So it's. It's amazing. But here. Here's something that you hit on that I think is really important, too, and that is the sort of philanthropic risk taking. I don't know whether you were viewing it as risk taking. You know, a lot of. A lot of donors will say, well, I don't want to give until they're established.
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Dr. James Pearson
I don't.
- [34:25]
Kevin Gentry
These kids, they may do something kind of crazy and. And how do I know this is going to work? And we also know that a lot of philanthropies, philanthropic organizations, giving institutions, kind of get big and bloated and bureaucratic, and it can take years to process a gift request. But you all were small and nimble. And how important do you think that was? Or was it just that the stars happened to be aligned in the early days of the Reagan administration?
- [34:56]
Dr. James Pearson
Well, I think you did have the stars being aligned to some extent in that period. But as I said, we didn't have much and we had to do something. And I kind of remember thinking to myself that our job is to get this money out to people who could do some good with it. It's not going to be do any good with us sitting on top of it. What are we saving it for? We didn't be like the librarian who wouldn't loan out any books, so we wanted to make grants. And the. We didn't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. If something seemed like it might work, okay, let's give it a try. If it doesn't work, we can put our money elsewhere. If it does, we can stay with them. But I think this is the important point. It's that it's the entrepreneurs who did the hard work. If you're talking about conspiracies, it's not the funders, it's the Ed Fulners. So Ed Fulner and Paul Weyrich start the Heritage Foundation. Paul Weyrich went on to do other things. They are the ones who went to Bradley and Olin and Scaife and other donors. Can you give us some money to do this? It wasn't me calling Scaife or Bradley. Ed Fullmer did the work to bring us together. The youngsters, the youngsters at the Heritage, at the Federalist Society, they did the work to get the foundations together. And that is typically how it works.
- [36:26]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah. No, that's great. I think Morton Blackwell uses the term organizational entrepreneur, but the entrepreneur is going to go look for that investment capital with the vision and the business plan that these put together and find a market for it. Well, let me ask you another. So. So I remember a very important formulative conference that I attended, I think around 1986 or 87 or so. It was called the Second Thoughts Conference. It was organized, I think, by Jim Denton, who was Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton's son, but it was really organized. David Horowitz, Peter Collier brought together all of these sort of lefties of the sixties who were rejecting a Lot of the radicalism and coming around to a lot of the policies and views of the Reagan administration. And you mentioned, you know, you didn't grow up as a dyed in the wool conservative. You kind of came to these views. I think Olin was a funder of the Second Thoughts conference. Maybe you were even at this conference. It was amazing for me talk about that too, about what was going on in the conservative movement. Because as you said, you had the Buckley conservatives, you had the free market conservatives, you had the national security conservatives, but you had these new conservatives.
- [37:38]
Dr. James Pearson
Yes, a lot of people were coming into our movement because they didn't like what they were seeing coming out of the left. And David Horowitz and Peter Collier were leaders of that Second Thoughts movement. These were radicals from the 1960s who had decided that the left was a losing cause and they wanted to join our side. They rejected Soviet communism, they rejected a lot of what they were seeing in the civil rights movement, a lot of the violence that they saw coming out of the left. And they decided to join our side. And that was where the Second Thoughts movement came in. We're going to have Second thoughts throughout the 1960s. Now, David Horowitz, I remember in college reading his books, Left wing books.
- [38:27]
Kevin Gentry
He was mathematical.
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Dr. James Pearson
I mean, astro books. Yes, indeed. Peter Collier was an editor of Ramparts magazine, which is a far left magazine in that period. And many of the, many of the people who wrote for that remain on the left. But Collier and Horowitz defected and they became very influential. David Horowitz just passed away last month, I think, and he became a stalwart of our movement, David Horowitz did, and influenced a lot of young people. And, you know, there's. This was very common. If you think about the neoconservatives. This would be Irving Kristol and the people around the Public Interest magazine. That would be James Q. Wilson, Gene Kirkpatrick, Nathan Glaser, a whole host of writers, and then of course, Norman Pot, Horace at Commentary magazine. These were all liberals of the 50s and 60s. And in the 1970s, they began to move toward our side. They were having second thoughts too. And they became conservatives. Neoconservatives, they called themselves. They were former liberals who believed that the, the current liberal movement had abandoned their principles. So Bill, Bill Buckley, to his everlasting credit, welcomed those people into the movement. Bill Buckley did not say, you weren't with us in 1964, so we don't want anything to do with you. Bill Buckley said, the more the merrier. Come on in. You can help us. And Irving and Norman Pot. Horace did. I remember getting advice from Irving about this, that and everything. Irving Crystal advised us to fund Charles Murray's book on welfare. Very influential critique of the welfare system that Charles Murray published in 1986 or something like that. Irving said, that's going to be an important book. You should give Charles Murray some money to help him do it. Which we did.
- [40:34]
Kevin Gentry
Wow. Okay. Well, okay, this is just amazing. But now I want to take it back now to the donor. And for those listening, can a donor still make a difference through their philanthropy today? And just a few words of advice you might have about honoring donor intent. It was unusual that Olin had wanted to sunset the Olin Foundation. And maybe that helped you focus the impact, I don't know. Comment on all of that.
- [41:06]
Dr. James Pearson
It did. I'd say several things about that. So in 1977, when John Olen was setting up the foundation, Henry Ford II wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal saying that he's resigning from the board of the Ford foundation. Because he said, I may. I've complained about this and spoken up at board meetings, but I can find nothing in the Ford foundation that honors the free market system that made all this wealth possible. They have total disdain for the market system and capitalism. And so he quit the board of the Ford Foundation. When John Olin read that, he said, that's it. You've got to sunset this foundation. So those people who got control of the Ford foundation never get control of my foundation. And that is where the sunsetting idea came from with John Olin. Now, yes, I do believe it focused our activities. So we were able to spend, you said, $380 million in that 20, 25 year period. If we had decided to become a perpetual foundation and spend 5% of our assets per year, which many foundations do, that hope to be perpetual, we would have spent maybe a third or a quarter of that amount. We'd still be going, but I think we would have had less influence on the period in which we live, which would be 1980 to 2005. There's no question the conservative foundations, Olen, Scaife, Bradley Earhart, Koch, a few others, had an enormous influence in building up the conservative movement in that 20 or 25 year period and making it extremely influential far beyond our wildest dreams. Because by the time we closed the olin foundation in 2005, I couldn't keep track of it anymore. There was so much activity going on, which was a good thing. It had outgrown me in a certain sense. So you say, what can a donor do? Well, we didn't know what we were going to do when we started. We did have a belief that in ourselves and what we needed to do. But we did do it step by step and the people came to us also. We did a little bit of searching things out and suggesting things. I remember calling up Fuller or Irving Crystal or Bill Buckley and suggesting things would this work? Some of that happened, but occasionally. So we didn't have a big plan. And we tried not to be know it alls. We tried not to take the view that we know everything. And I think that's important. So we were kind of, we were kind of feeling our way just like the people who came to us for support.
- [44:14]
Kevin Gentry
And you know, this is really, it's so, so interesting. And here I've, I've gone on this premise about the going big podc, about the value of casting a big bold vision. Maybe it was the principles of the conservative movement that were the big bold vision. But it's amazing how you just went into this and had this consequential effect. So here's a related question. Many of these fortunes, by the way, philanthropy has changed a lot from 50 years ago where you had these great industrial manufacturing fortunes. Today it's technology or finance. It's just very, very different in a lot of ways. But still, people come from the for profit world where, you know, you can measure profit, you can, you have price signals. You don't have a lot of that in the nonprofit space. It takes a long time for change to occur. So if a donor wants to have an impact, how do they measure progress? Do you, what advice do you give? I know you still advise a lot of very important, influential, prominent philanthropists today. What do you advise in that vein?
- [45:24]
Dr. James Pearson
You know, I don't have a lot of great advice to offer based on my experience. As I say, we felt our way and we came, we came into the situation at a propitious moment for the conservative movement when it was starting to grow. And we were there with the movement growing with it. And so that was important. Things are different today. There are many more foundations, as you say. So in 1982, I think just at the time I came to Olin, the stock market hit bottom and turned around and started to go north. It's been good. The bull market has been basically growing ever since 1982. In 1982, the Dow was around 750. If you control for inflation. It was basically where it was in 1929. In other words, the stock Market, aside from dividends, had done Nothing in over 50 years since the Great Depression. No, there's war, war in there. There's inflation in there and you know, there's, there are great companies. The stock market hit hit 1000 on the Dow in 1966 and 16 years later was at 750. So that's a reflection of how bad the late 60s and 70s were that there is nothing going on in the stock market. So things took off. Ronald Reagan did this. We were, we were riding along. Inflation was curbed. Paul Volcker is important. Interest rates came down and the stock market took off. It has not stopped growing since. So all the fortunes that have been built since the 1980s, as you point out, are in finance and technology. And those are a lot of the new foundations. Yes. One of the problems in this field is that business people come in and they say they're, they can measure things by profit and loss and where the stock is. There's no such measurement in our sector. How can you tell if we're succeeding or not? There's no real measurement. We could tell after 25 years looking back that we made a difference. But if we look back from 1985 to 1980, I'm not sure that we would have been able to measure that. But over the long run we're able to say that we made a difference. So you could say somebody might have said, why are you making a grant to Alan Bloom at the University of Chicago? He's just a professor teaching his courses and he might be a brilliant man, but so what? Well, you know, he has influential students and they go on to things. But then it turned out he wrote an internationally best selling book. We didn't know he was going to do that. We had no idea he was going to do that. But he did do that. And you know, there was a fair amount of that, that kind of thing going on and we couldn't take credit for that. We didn't know what was going to happen. And we're fortunate in that respect that, that a fair amount of that kind of thing happened in that period as the conservative movement was being built out. And I feel fortunate to have participated in it. And I don't know realize how fortunate I was until it was all done. But yes, there are a lot of donors out there. I don't think you can emulate what the Olin foundation did or what the Bradley foundation did in that period. Bihar, it's a different time.
- [49:08]
Kevin Gentry
They're still committed donors who are interested in supporting the ideas.
- [49:13]
Dr. James Pearson
Yeah, I'M on the board of the Sorrel Freedom Trust. Kim Dennis is the director there. Unfortunately, that's closing this year. They're sunset in, just like John Olin wanted a sunset. And they had a great deal of influence. But, you know, there, there are other donors out there. Many of them have made their money on Wall street and, you know, I don't have a good sense of what they're doing. Some of them have chosen to focus on some narrower things like, say, school choice and charter schools. There are donors who are exclusively focused on that kind of thing. We were more broad gauged. We were interested in ideas in a broad sense. Some donors are interested in activism, like how do we mobilize voters and grassroots kinds of things. Well, we never did that. I wouldn't have known how to do it. There are some people who know how to do it. And, you know, I think that's great. There are some folks in North Carolina who've done a good job of mobilizing voters with tax exempt organizations. That's something I wouldn't know how to do. So, yes, there are a lot of things to be done. You know, as I've said, we solved a lot of problems in America. You know, communism, that kind of thing. And crime rates went down and welfare dependency went down. But new problems emerge. The universities got worse, the public schools have gotten worse, the teachers unions are probably worse. And we have $37 trillion in debt that we somehow have to address.
- [50:57]
Kevin Gentry
Well, how about, let's Fast forward then 50 years from when you started. 50 years. Well, it's 50 years from the American Bicentennial and the bleakness of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan comes in. You have 40 years of consequential effects of the policies that changed, certainly with respect to prosperity, unleashing just the power of innovation and so much enormous positive change. You cited also some of the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. But here we are. And you've written, I remember you wrote, there was a piece and New Criterion that you wrote maybe at least 10 years ago about a fourth revolution, you know, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal, and what, what are we going to do about all the debt and all of the consequences of government growth? And here we are, it's even worse. And as you say, our education system is, is in, in terrible shape. Higher education is, is really in bad shape. And this debt could just teeter us over any moment to a, to a bad spot. And how do you see the world going forward? Jim Pearson, are you optimistic? Are you still optimistic?
- [52:16]
Dr. James Pearson
I'm always optimistic. Well, optimistic may not be the right word. I'm cheerful and I'm hopeful, and you have to be realistic. But when I wrote that book in 2015, 2016, the Fourth Revolution and the Shattered Consensus, and basically what I said was that the kind of the ideas that had held the post war Cold War era together were fraying. Communism had fallen. We had failed in some of these wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, all the rest. Those had not come out well. And American voters were looking for something else. And then there was the backwash that the 2008 financial crisis, which is there as well. So I forecast, you know, a kind of a political revolution. I thought it'd be a conservative revolution. Now maybe it is or will be. I did not foresee Donald Trump coming along. I don't know if anybody.
- [53:21]
Kevin Gentry
Not many of us did.
- [53:23]
Dr. James Pearson
Yes. I didn't. I didn't really see that coming. Some have taken that to be vindication. Trump is vindication of what I was forecasting, but I didn't necessarily see that. But I did see that. You know, America has gone through periods where we have these realigning elections where the voters come forward and say we need to go in a different direction, and they empower a leader or a party to take us there. So Jefferson did that in 1800. Jackson did that in the 1830s. Lincoln did that in the 1860s. FDR did that in the 1930s. Reagan did it to some degree in the 1980s. I thought it would happen again, and I. I think it may be happening again. The interesting thing is that, of course, the parties are basically, even in terms of popular vote, they have difficulty cracking 50%. So we don't have the FDR 160 in 1932. Johnson won 60% in 1964. Nixon won 60% in 1972. Reagan won 58% in 1984. We haven't had an election like that in a long time. We basically had squeakers. So the American people are obviously divided on where we should be going. And this period in which we live now, the historians will refer to it as the age of Trump, just like we think back to the age of Jackson or the age of Roosevelt. This is the age of Trump. We don't exactly know how it's going to end. Is Trump a conservative? No, I don't think he is really a conservative. He says and thinks and does many things that conservatives would agree with. His criticism of Washington, his defense of the American nation, his wish to control Immigration, and those are all things that conservatives have supported. Peace through strength is something that conservatives always supported. On the other hand, you know, he wants to maintain all of these entitlement programs intact without cutting them. And he's talking about putting tariff barriers up around the U. S. Economy, which is something conservatives have not supported in the past. At least in the recent past. Going back before the Great Depression, conservatives did support tariffs. So, you know, Donald Trump is probably better described as a nationalist, an American nationalist. People have compared him to Andrew Jackson rather than as a conservative. And there's some overlap there, probably a fair amount of overlap. I would say, kind of speaking very broadly, that the national project America as a nation has been fraying and has been weakening over the last many decades. That is, what do we mean by a nation state? We mean a people represented by their government with a jurisdiction and boundaries with a kind of an interest. It has been somewhat displaced by the international idea. That is, America is a kind of an international state that has to help everybody around the world. We have to solve poverty everywhere. We have to come to the defense of everybody. And we don't have any borders, and anybody can come in here and become an American. They don't have to be assimilated to America. This is a kind of an idea that Americans have not had in the past. But conservatives definitely feel that way, and Donald Trump feels that way. In that sense, they are on. On the same page. So, thinking about the bicentennial, I would hope that this celebration might restore a little bit the idea of the American nation, that this is a national enterprise we're defending. It's not a universal state with universal responsibilities. It's a nation state with responsibilities to the people who live here. We do have obligations to the outside world, but we have to represent our citizens first. And so I think that's where a lot of conservatives are, not all of them. I'm kind of there. So, you know, one of the consequences of that big idea of the United States representing the whole world is that $37 trillion debt. If we have to solve every problem in the world, it's going to be very expensive and we're probably not going to be able to afford it. So I would say that in that, that general point about the bicentennial, well.
- [58:30]
Kevin Gentry
You know, the bicentennial in 1976 is credited with breaking the country together to some degree. So maybe it will have that effect next year as well. Jim, I have two closing questions I like to ask. The first one is thinking of a younger version of yourself. What would you tell that younger version of yourself to do any differently, perhaps, than you actually did?
- [58:57]
Dr. James Pearson
Well, you know, I think back on my career, I was very lucky, as I say, to kind of landed where I did. I left academia. Many people leave academia and never find anything that they really like. I was able to do that. You know, I'm not sure. It depends what people want to do. There are plenty of opportunities in the conservative movement now. There weren't when I came along. You know, there are think tanks, their publications, podcasts. I didn't know what a podcast was until a few years ago. And so we, we have all these opportunities. I sometimes tell young people who've worked for me something Bill Casey once said. You may not remember Bill Casey, but.
- [59:42]
Kevin Gentry
Of course, of course he ended up being the Reagan campaign manager in 1980 when John Pierce was fired.
- [59:47]
Dr. James Pearson
Head of the CIA, died in the late 80s. He was one of the. He was the founder of Manhattan Institute. I did not know that. Yes, he's one of the founders of the Manhattan Institute and started some think tanks. And you're right, he advised Ronald Reagan and his campaign, became head of the CIA. He may have been in the office of Special Services of World War II as well. Casey had a very interesting background. But Bill Casey said this. He said, life is like a $500 a plate dinner. You need the $500 to get in. So sometimes I have told people, you know, why don't you go out and make some money to care for yourself and your family, and after 20 years of doing it, you might have enough money to start donating to some of these causes that you're aware of. I remember giving that advice to one young man who worked for me. He wound up going to Stanford Business School. He started a business 25 years ago. He sold it a couple years ago for $100 million. I said, maybe you'll start up a foundation. So I don't have any advice. That's one piece of advice from Bill Casey. Got it.
- [61:03]
Kevin Gentry
Well, it was Sir Anthony Fisher, right. Who Milton Friedman was it or Hayek told to go out and make some money rather than run for office. And then he helped launch the Manhattan Institute.
- [61:13]
Dr. James Pearson
And yeah, Hayek told him to don't run for office. Start a think tank. It's ide are where it is. Start a think tank. And he started a chain of think tanks, and the Manhattan Institute was one. And you know, there are dozens of them around the Atlas network supports like 5 or 600 think tanks around the world.
- [61:37]
Kevin Gentry
Around the world? Yeah. It's Amazing. Well, by the way, you mentioned just how the conservative movement has changed. We know the story of Kim Dennis, who came to work for you at the Olin foundation, is now running the Searle Freedom Trust, as you referenced. Help found the Philanthropy Roundtable with you, and she was a social worker in Maine who followed a classified ad to come work for you as an administrative assistant, which is amazing.
- [62:07]
Dr. James Pearson
Well, there are a lot of happenstance stories of that kind. Kim turned out to be, you know, very gifted at this and has had a great career. Definitely a good friend. Now, you mentioned Hayek, of course, in 1976, I believe it was, Hayek did win the Nobel Prize, right? I think it was. I think it was 1976. That was a very propitious moment for Hayek. Milton Friedman would win it either before or after that. Probably after that. It was pretty shocking that they gave it to Hayek at that time. Now, you said Hayek did write an article saying why I'm not a conservative, and that is true. He said, conservatives too much attracted to supporting the status quo, and you've got to somehow overturn and challenge the status quo. But Hayek also said that conservatives in America are more like liberals in Europe. The conservatives in Europe are status quo party and aristocratic party, but the conservatives in America tend to be free market people, much more like the liberals in Europe and much more like the liberals that Hayek is talking about, which was true. I mean, Milton Friedman is a classical liberal, notwithstanding the fact that someone has just written a biography of Milton Friedman titled the Last Conservative, which I think is wrong.
- [63:31]
Kevin Gentry
Well, thanks for making a number of clarifications there. And speaking of prizes, it was really nice to see you awarded the Bradley Prize, and it's so amazing in many ways. Michael Joyce, who had been head of the Olin foundation, left to go in the early days to help start the Bradley Foundation. He's long passed away, but the successors there saw fit to give you that award, a beautiful capstone for your tremendous career in philanthropic leadership and for these ideas. Jim, here's what I'd like you to do in closing, because this is the Going Big podcast, and I really intend with this to inspire people to think big, to have consequential actions. And that's why I keep interviewing all these people like you who've led big, big things, just so we might learn from it. What closing advice would you give to anyone listening around the world about how they might think about advancing these important ideas more effectively?
- [64:31]
Dr. James Pearson
Now, when you say Going Big, you know, when I Went to Olin as a kind of an inexperienced person. We did have big ideas. We do have big ideas. We wanted to restore free markets. We wanted to restore limited government. We wanted to cut Washington down to size.
- [64:48]
Kevin Gentry
And by the way, the founders ideas were big ideas. Look at the most important ideas of the last 2000 years.
- [64:54]
Dr. James Pearson
Yes, indeed, the Declaration of Independence on the Constitution hold up beautifully after 250 years. Not many ideas can do that. So we had big ideas. There was no question about that. And we kind of. Those ideas kind of gave us a kind of a guidepost as to where we needed to go. And. But in order to do that, you know, we had to kind of start on the ground, and we couldn't jump there immediately. And so, you know, we had to start with things that worked. It's probably like starting a business. I see that Fred Smith just passed away. We know where he got the idea for Federal Express and a term paper he wrote in college and didn't do very well.
- [65:48]
Kevin Gentry
Didn't he fail? The term paper was not great.
- [65:50]
Dr. James Pearson
I think he said he got a C on the term paper. The professor said, it'll never work, never work. So he went out and started it. It took him a while, but, you know, he. He did succeed. And that's probably true of every. Every business. You can have a big idea, but you have to chart a path there step by step. So I guess that would be one thing. Don't get ahead of yourself. You know, you kind of have a path, you know where you're headed, but you got to get there one step at a time. And if you think you can get there too fast, you're probably going to make some mistakes there. You're probably going to overlook some things. So we probably made some mistakes and overlooked some things, but, you know, that's just part of, you know, taking gambles, taking risks, making decisions. You're going to miss some.
- [66:43]
Kevin Gentry
Well, you may have made some mistakes, but you got a pretty high batting average.
- [66:47]
Dr. James Pearson
Now, this is the Bradley Foundation. I'm very grateful they gave me that prize. There's a long roster very distinguished people who won that prize, and I am delighted that they chose to include me in that list.
- [67:00]
Kevin Gentry
Well, Jim, it's always a pleasure being with you. Really appreciate all that you do, and look forward to a lot more good stuff to come for a long time. Thank you.
- [67:08]
Dr. James Pearson
Appreciate it. Kevin, thank you.
- [67:10]
Kevin Gentry
Thanks for tuning in to the Going Big podcast. I hope today's conversation left you feeling energized and ready to tackle your biggest goals. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review on iTunes, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps spread the word and it gets these inspiring stories out to more people. You can also find more content, resources and updates at our website, goingbigpodcast.com Remember, the only limits are the ones you don't challenge, the limits that you impose on yourself. Keep pushing, keep growing, and above all, keep Going big. See you next time on the Going Big Podcast.