The “Foundation” that isn’t: The Century Foundation

The Century Foundation commands $56 million in net assets to advance left-of-center policy. With a name like “Century Foundation,” a prominent progressive businessman as its founder, a sizable endowment, and millions in annual revenue from investment income, one would think that the group is a grantmaker, yet another cog in the private-foundation infrastructure that supports the broad left and is the envy of conservative activists.

But the Century Foundation is not a grantmaker like some of its fellow foundations. The organization is instead one of the less-known liberal-progressive-leftist think tanks, existing in the shadow of better-known policy shops such as the Center for American Progress and more militant activism outlets like the Center for Popular Democracy.

Conservatives should not let Century’s lower profile fool them. The think tank has taken on numerous former Biden administration officials as scholars. This includes former National Labor Relations Board Chair Lauren McFerran and acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, a sign the group wants to raise its profile, especially as an advocate for the interests of Big Labor. The Biden administration often praised itself for its loyalty to organized labor’s interests.

History and Background

Filene was also a member of the League to Enforce Peace. The group campaigned for the creation of the inter-war League of Nations . . .

The Century Foundation is today more than a century old. As my late Capital Research Center colleague Martin Wooster wrote in a 2006 profile of the group, what is today known as the Century Foundation was founded in 1919 by Edward Filene, a prominent Boston businessman deeply involved in progressive movements.

His father, William Filene, had created the Filene’s department store chain and passed it down to Edward and his brother, Lincoln. In business, Filene’s was most notable for creating the original “bargain basement,” which sold unsold fashions at mark-down prices from 1909 until the store was sold for redevelopment early in the 21st century. Filene’s was also notable for its progressive employee-relations model: The store conducted collective bargaining with an employer-sponsored labor organization and offered its workers a profit-sharing program.

Edward was deeply involved in the progressive movements of the early 20th century in addition to following liberal business-management practices.

In 1909, he helped develop and campaign for the Massachusetts Credit Union Act, the first state law defining the organization of and regulating credit unions. Early 20th-century progressives favored the creation of credit unions, which made (and still make) loans and perform consumer banking for members of designated workplaces, geographic locations, or trades, as a way to strengthen workers’ organizations and enable workers to obtain credit. Before his death in 1937, Filene campaigned for a federal credit-union law. The 1934 Federal Credit Union Act was Filene’s advocacy capstone, and the industry credits Filene as “father of the American credit union system.”

Filene was also a member of the League to Enforce Peace. The group campaigned for the creation of the inter-war League of Nations and unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the U.S. Senate to join the League.

By 1919, as Wooster wrote, Edward Filene and two other liberal industrialists had created the Co-Operative League to advocate co-operative labor-management relations. But it achieved little. In 1922, the group was renamed the Twentieth Century Fund and committed to what Wooster quoted an unpublished biography of Filene as calling “an attempt, however vain, to salvage the vestiges of a flagging liberalism” in the wake of the Jazz Age Republicans’ domination of federal electoral politics.

The Twentieth Century Fund initially functioned as a traditional grantmaking foundation, but by the 1930s it was already taking shape as a think tank. After the 1929 Wall Street crash and the rise to office of President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal liberals, the Twentieth Century Fund played a key role in developing a core piece of liberal regulatory legislation that persists to this day. Wooster writes:

In 1934, the fund created a Labor Committee to study U.S. labor law. The Fund paid the salary of William Hammatt Davis, who was then a legislative assistant to Sen. Robert Wagner (D—New York). While on the fund’s payroll, Davis wrote memos to Wagner’s staff on labor reform, helped organize congressional testimony on labor issues, and worked closely with Wagner’s chief adviser, Leon Keyserling, on drafting the National Labor Relations Act, which, when passed by Congress in 1935, gave American unions the right to organize and established the National Labor Relations Board to mediate between unions and employers. While Davis was working for the fund and Sen. Wagner, the fund published a hefty report calling for reforms in U.S. labor law. Meanwhile, Edward Filene lobbied his fellow industrialists to support Sen. Wagner’s bill.

After Filene’s death in 1937, the Fund fully transitioned from a grantmaker to a think tank and continued to advance New Deal-style progressive technocracy. Like many liberal philanthropists and unlike many conservatives, Filene did not have to worry about liberal operatives hijacking his foundation after his mortal demise. Adolf Berle, a Roosevelt administration advisor and diplomat who later co-founded the Liberal Party of New York, chaired the Fund through the 1970s. Left-leaning journalists August Hecksher II and Murray Rossant led it from the 1950s through Rossant’s death in 1988.

Richard Leone succeeded Rossant in 1989. A New Jersey political operative who was appointed State Treasurer in the administration of Gov. Brendan Byrne (D), Leone unsuccessfully ran for U.S. Senate in 1978. He also worked on former Vice President Walter Mondale’s doomed challenge to President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection. Shortly after his appointment to run Twentieth Century, Leone took a side job as a commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which he held until 1994.

In Leone’s 2015 obituary, the New York Times characterized his work:

As president of the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation), a nonpartisan public policy research organization, Mr. Leone advanced the group’s progressive agenda, which focused on inequality, voting rights, civil liberties and opposition to privatizing Social Security. He served as its president from 1989 to 2011 and remained a senior fellow.

During Leone’s tenure, the calendar forced the Twentieth Century Fund to adopt a new name. Since progressives must always be for Progress, the organization changed its name to the Century Foundation in 1999. Wooster argues that the name change was accompanied by a change in approach, with a shift toward more aggressive activism:

When the Twentieth Century Fund changed its name, it dramatically transformed itself. The Century Foundation now produces op-eds and policy briefs with feverish energy. It’s certainly doing a much better job of promoting itself and the liberal agenda than it did in the twentieth century.

But in the early 2000s, the Century Foundation partly midwifed a new rival. Leone was one of the early board members of the Center for American Progress, which quickly became the top D.C. think tank for liberal activism in part because of its close ties to the Democratic Party establishment. Wooster reported that the Century Foundation continued plugging away at think tank activism, advocating on domestic political issues, national security, and foreign relations from a liberal perspective.

Perhaps the Century Foundation’s most lasting project of the early 2000s was a book by one of its scholars. The Emerging Democratic Majority, written by then-Century Foundation fellow Ruy Teixeira and New Republic editor John Judis, proposed that demographic trends in the 2000s would favor the rise of a Democratic-leaning political majority.

The Democratic majority took longer to emerge than Teixeira, who later moved to the Center for American Progress, had perhaps initially projected. The theory of demographic-motivated political change would upend the practice of American politics until 2024, when President Donald Trump’s second election put the theory to bed definitively.

After Leone

Century has followed an Everything Leftist, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian nationalist line.

Leone stepped down as president of the Century Foundation in 2011. He was replaced by Janice Nittoli, a career liberal philanthropic activist who had worked stints at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation. According to her Princeton Alumni Weekly obituary, a degenerative brain disease forced her retirement after fewer than three years in the job.

The Century Foundation named Mark Zuckerman, the former Deputy Director of the Domestic Policy Council in the Obama White House, the organization’s president following Nittoli’s retirement.

Under Zuckerman’s leadership, the Century Foundation continued to advocate for broad-based left-of-center policy from the background of a liberal think-tank space semi-monopolized by the Center for American Progress the Century Foundation had midwifed.

In 2018, the Century Foundation offered a 14-point policy agenda for the 116th Congress, which was expected to shift to Democratic control in the midterm elections during the first Trump administration. (Democrats would take control of the House of Representatives, but Republicans retained control of the Senate.)

The agenda endorsed vast expansions of federal subsidies for higher education, federal funding for “diversification” initiatives in K-12 schools, a crackdown on the conversion of for-profit colleges to nonprofit institutions, the adoption of a government-run “public option” for health insurance, expanding Medicaid, adopting Big Labor’s Protecting the Right to Organize Act, enacting a federal child-care funding program, adopting mandatory paid family leave, abolishing certain local zoning rules, enacting a major entitlement program to subsidize technology-related job losers, expanding the child tax credit, subsidizing manufacturing employment, opposing the proposal to add a citizenship question to the Census, and ending U.S. material support for a Saudi-led coalition’s war on Houthi separatists in Yemen.

In 2019, as part of the Century Foundation’s 100th anniversary commemorations, the Foundation launched Next100. This new division of the think tank was dedicated to “working to change the face and future of public policy, and to build a more inclusive, equal, democratic, and just America” by “kickstarting the careers of a diverse cohort of policy leaders and investing in their individual and collective capacity to influence policy and advance democracy today and for years to come.” Next100 houses seven “policy entrepreneurs,” an executive director, a small staff, and an advisory board that includes notable labor activist Ai-Jen Poo and Obama administration Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks against Israel and the subsequent Israeli war of retaliation, Century has followed an Everything Leftist, anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian nationalist line.

Prior to the September 2024 Israeli attacks on Hezbollah’s communications networks and the December 2024 fall of Iran-backed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Century fellow Veena Ali-Khan projected that the Iranian “Axis of Resistance” that included Hezbollah and Assad’s regime would be “irreversibly strengthened” by Israel’s campaign. In the name of “spur[ring] conversation and promote new, better options for security, rights, and governance—for Palestinians and Israelis” Century published arguments that the State of Israel should be replaced by a joint Jewish-Arab state to affirm Palestinian “liberation.”

The NGO’s formal “blueprint for a progressive foreign policy in the Middle East” demands that the United States cut off military aid to Israel and support U.N. action against Israel, fund the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip, endorse Palestinian leadership including a “reinvigorated PLO,” compel Israel to allow any aid to Gaza by any route, deem all Israeli holdings beyond the 1948 Arab-Israeli armistice lines (wrongly called the “1967 borders”) illegal, interfere in domestic Israeli debates over the country’s judiciary, and repeal the designation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as a foreign terrorist organization. Century further demanded that Congress fund the highly controversial UNRWA relief organization, whose members have been accused by Israel of participating in the October 7, 2023 murder spree.

While Century and its scholars have largely aligned with Everything Leftism, it has not been unanimously Everything Leftist. In 2018, then-Century Foundation fellow Richard Kahlenberg, a skeptic of racial preferences in college admissions and proponent of preferences for the poor in admissions, was an expert witness on behalf of challengers to Harvard University’s system of racial considerations in admissions. Kahlenberg has since departed Century for the Progressive Policy Institute, a liberal think tank seen as aligned with the Democratic Party’s centrist wing.

The Century Foundation’s Next Century

[Julie Su] is a critical race theory practitioner and activist for organized labor whom Biden deemed Acting Secretary of Labor for almost two years after it became clear the United States Senate would not confirm her to the post of Secretary.

In 2019, the Century Foundation turned 100. The Foundation’s $56 million endowment; financial support from left-wing Big Philanthropy like the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Action Now Initiative of John and Laura Arnold, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation; and financial support from left-wing activist groups like the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, the Workers Lab, and Humanity United Action should keep the Foundation in business for as long as its donors and staff wish it to be, even if the Center for American Progress wins more headlines for policy activism.

But Century does not look like it plans to let CAP have the field all to itself. Since President Joe Biden left office in 2025, numerous former administration officials have joined Century’s roster, none more prominent than former Deputy Secretary of Labor Julie Su. She is a critical race theory practitioner and activist for organized labor whom Biden deemed Acting Secretary of Labor for almost two years after it became clear the United States Senate would not confirm her to the post of Secretary.

In 2025, Zuckerman stepped down as the Foundation’s president. He was succeeded by Julie Margetta Morgan, an alumna of the Biden administration Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Education. Morgan previously worked for the left-wing Roosevelt Institute, the presidential campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the Gates Foundation, and CAP.

The Biden administration is not the only source of Century Foundation scholar-activists. In August, former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) Gerardo Bonilla Chavez joined Century’s government affairs division as director. In 2021, a former chief of staff to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) joined as a nonresident fellow.

The spree of hiring from prominent liberal political shops shows that the Century Foundation intends to increase its profile in developing and pushing forward left-wing policy. The group may well see increased influence in future Democratic state and federal administrations.

More than 100 years after liberal businessman Edward Filene first endowed the Co-Operative League and 90 years after the Twentieth Century Fund played an integral role in reshaping American labor-management relations, Filene’s liberal inclinations and sympathy for the power of union bosses continues to motivate the Century Foundation. That a donor’s ideological intent (if not necessarily his project-style intent or intent on whether or not to spend a foundation out of existence) might be preserved for three generations and beyond is a major liberal privilege.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-foundation-that-isnt-the-century-foundation/