The Mellon Foundation’s Monumental Metamorphosis

2020 was an annus horribilis of disease, disruption, civil unrest, and acrimonious politics. It was also a year in which much of the charitable sector expanded its commitment to left-of-center ideological causes, specifically with respect to issues of race, ethnicity, and other immutable human characteristics. Often, this was couched in terms of a new (or renewed) organizational emphasis on one or more forms of “justice”—social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, etc. Big Philanthropy was certainly no exception to this trend, as illustrated by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its half-billion-dollar Monuments Project.

“A Major Strategic Evolution”

The Mellon Foundation exists among a rarefied Big Philanthropy peerage. In 2023, it paid out over $524.6 million worth of grants and reported net assets of over $7.3 billion. This made it a larger grantmaker that year than the Rockefeller Foundation ($275.4 million), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($285.8 million), the MacArthur Foundation ($320.7 million), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($401.8 million). It gave away nearly as much money as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ($543.5 million) and the Hewlett Foundation ($590.1 million), despite each of those boasting net assets in excess of $12 billion.

Named after business magnate, philanthropist, and conservative Republican Treasury Secretary (1921-1932) Andrew W. Mellon, the foundation was established by his children Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon in 1969. Ailsa died that same year, but Paul continued to shape the foundation’s grantmaking for decades. In his 2007 book The Foundation, Joel L. Fleishman likened Paul’s influence to “soft power,” noting that while he “imposed no explicit constraints on his foundation,” his interest in art, the humanities, and education strongly influenced the foundation’s priorities through “his moral authority and the passion of his convictions.” Today, the Mellon Foundation is the self-described “largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities” in the country.

While these are broadly uncontroversial and traditionally “charitable” philanthropic purposes, their implementation at Mellon has taken on a more divisive ideological character. Much of this can apparently be traced to its president Elizabeth Alexander, whom the foundation describes as “a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, the arts, and American society.” A former university professor who famously recited original poetry at Barack Obama’s 2009 presidential inauguration, Alexander previously directed the Ford Foundation’s creativity and free expression program, which in turn houses Ford’s substantial (and decidedly left-leaning) funding for documentary films. In 2023, the Mellon Foundation paid Alexander over $1.4 million in compensation, plus an additional $429,715 worth of other employee benefits.

Upon taking the helm at Mellon in 2018, Alexander surveyed the foundation’s grantmaking and decided that going forward it would work to ensure that “each grant, every penny, contribute[s] in some demonstrable way to a more fair and just society.” In June 2020, amidst the upheaval of the then-ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and riots, Mellon publicly announced that it had undergone “a major strategic evolution,” and would henceforth prioritize “social justice in all of its grantmaking.” In practice, this means applying an ideologically left-of-center sociopolitical lens to its philanthropy, with an overriding emphasis on human categorizations of race, ethnicity, and other immutable characteristics.

The Monuments Project

To illustrate this, it’s worth examining some of the Mellon Foundation’s major program priorities. The foundation’s grantmaking is divided into four general areas: arts and culture, higher learning, humanities in place, and public knowledge. It also operates three special “presidential initiatives,” through which it seeks to use funding for the arts and humanities to “move us closer to justice, lifting up historically underserved and overlooked communities.”

One such presidential initiative is a $50 million-plus program focused on Puerto Rico and the island’s diaspora. A second $125 million initiative called “Imagining Freedom” aims to counter what Mellon calls “the criminal legal system’s forces of dehumanization, isolation, and separation,” which it rather remarkably claims prevents prisoners “from leading full civic, creative, and intellectual lives and deprives the public of their voices and perspectives.” Indeed, Mellon is apparently opposed to the very idea of imprisoning convicted criminals. One $6 million grant to the University of California, Santa Cruz supported the school’s “Visualizing Abolition” project, the stated purpose of which is to use art to help build “a world without prisons.” Mellon also gave over $1.7 million to fund the “Movements Against Mass Incarceration” project at Columbia University, which blames America’s incarceration rate on “the persistent, systemic criminalization of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Queer, and low-income communities” and seeks “possible futures beyond the status-quo fixtures of prisons and policing.” A $3.65 million grant to UCLA was earmarked “to chronicle the many impacts of policing and mass incarceration in Los Angeles.”

The largest of the Mellon Foundation’s three presidential initiatives, however, is the one that has attracted the most attention: the Monuments Project. Launched in 2020 with a $250 million commitment, it was subsequently doubled to $500 million, making it the largest grantmaking initiative in the foundation’s history and one of president Elizabeth Alexander’s “signature initiatives.” A press release ambitiously declared that the Monuments Project would “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces” by funding new monuments and removing or “contextualizing” existing ones. The project’s stated goal was to “recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.”

On its website, Mellon lists 112 Monuments Project grants made through 2024, for a total of $215.1 million. Over 85 percent of recipients were American nonprofits (including universities), over 13 percent were American governmental entities (including tribal governments), and one recipient was a foreign entity located in South Africa. Virginia was the state in which grant recipients received the most money ($30.6 million), followed by the District of Columbia ($27.7 million) and California ($25.8 million).

Race, ethnicity, and other immutable group identities appear central to the Monuments Project’s funding criteria, and some of the largest grants concerned slavery. The biggest single award was a four-year $11 million grant to the city of Richmond, VA for “a cultural space located at the Shockoe Bottom train shed that memorializes and commemorates the history of slavery” in the city. The Montpelier Foundation—the charity responsible for curating James Madison’s famous home—received over $5.7 million to establish “a memorial to the individuals who were enslaved at Montpelier.” The Thomas Jefferson Foundation received $3.5 million for a similar project at Monticello.

Perhaps the most important Monuments Project grant recipient, however, is a little-known nonprofit called the Monument Lab. Previously a fiscally-sponsored project of a group called CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia, it now operates as an independent 501(c)(3) charity. Mellon has awarded the Monument Lab at least $12 million since 2020. From January 2022 through December 2023 the foundation disbursed $5 million to the group, while from July 2022 through June 2024 the Monument Lab reported $8.32 million total revenue from all sources. The Monument Lab was the Mellon Foundation’s very first Monuments Project grantee, and its iconoclastic left-wing worldview underpins the entire program.

The funding Mellon earmarked for the Monument Lab included money for a National Monument Audit, which was designed to inform future Monuments Project grants. The audit concluded that “the story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history,” specifically in that such monuments are “overwhelmingly white and male” and disproportionately depict “war and conquest.” In a forward she penned for the audit, Alexander wrote that “our commemorative landscape needs to change if we are to move towards a more just and equitable future.” A critic, of course, would say that Mellon and the Monument Lab simply wish to re-depict American history to suit their own ideological agenda.

That agenda is quite radical even by Big Philanthropy’s standards. One article featured on the Monument Lab’s website is summarized with a blurb declaring that “the gruesome monstrosity of whiteness undergirds America’s systems—haunting its public spaces, pedestals, and policies.” Another validates the vandalism and/or destruction of so-called “colonialist, imperialist, and racist monuments,” arguing that such acts demonstrate “the power of the revolutionary collective movement.” A post entitled “Christopher Columbus: We Never Wanted Him Here”—authored by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor—depicts what it calls “the twilight of Columbianism” through imagery of the explorer’s decapitated head. Customers at the Monument Lab’s online store could purchase shirts reading “Topple False Histories” and “The Future of Monuments is Radically Collective.” Given its status as a major funder, one can only assume the Mellon Foundation shares these sentiments.

Thoughts and Questions

As the Heritage Foundation’s Brenda Hafera wrote, the Monuments Project highlights a “fundamental disagreement over how we should view America. Is the ethos of America best represented by the equitable portrayal of identity characteristics? Or is it our unifying maxim enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which points to our common human dignity and capacity for self-government?” The Mellon Foundation, Hafera correctly observes, “seeks to displace the value of human equality with that of inclusivity. Such a project is fundamentally flawed, steeped in assumptions about power and the importance of identity characteristics.”

People are, quite simply, people. They should be evaluated and remembered as individuals. Decisionmaking that is rooted in the delineation of certain “kinds” of people has an exceptionally poor historical track record. In embracing a maximalist ideological worldview obsessed with categorizing and dividing Americans based group identities, the Mellon Foundation embraces a profoundly harmful narrative. Moreover, it also forfeits the opportunity for good-faith discussions over some very fair questions about how (for example) individuals associated with the Confederacy should be depicted in public memorials, and whether there are some worthy Americans who deserve more recognition for their achievements or connection to important historical events than they currently receive.

Finally, what does all of this say about the nature of the philanthropy that the American people are collectively incentivizing through the tax code? The Mellon Foundation has decided to use its multi-billion-dollar ancestral American fortune to change the way in which America remembers its ancestors. Would ordinary taxpayers see this as an act of charitable benevolence worthy of federal tax-exemption, or undemocratic and presumptuous elitism? Big Philanthropy has come under increasing public and political scrutiny from Americans who are rightly asking precisely such questions.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-mellon-foundations-monumental-metamorphosis/