Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Founded in 1910 with a ten-million‐dollar grant from the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was the most prominent of a number of Progressive Era organizations that encouraged a more academic approach to peace activism. Specifically, the endowment's leaders envisioned a scientific approach through which impartial research would yield recommendations for a more stable international order. This agenda represented a marked shift from the traditional American approach to peace, which more often relied upon religious, moral, and pacifist appeals.

Carnegie himself believed that arbitration treaties and closer ties between the United States and Great Britain would ensure international stability, but the endowment's ideological foundations were shaped more by figures such as Elihu Root (1845–1937), Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of state; Nicholas Murray Butler (1862–1947), president of Columbia University; and James Brown Scott (1866–1993) of the American Society of International Law. All three were conservatives whose previous experience with peace activism had centered not on issues like disarmament and self‐determination but rather on codifying international law as the most realistic way to avoid war among the great powers. The organization's distance from more established peace groups increased with the outbreak of World War I. The endowment's key leaders all emerged as unabashed proponents of the Allied cause, with many urging U.S. intervention. Root and Butler became prominent members of the wartime League to Enforce Peace, which called for a postwar international organization with sufficient military strength to suppress threats to the peace.

Since World War I, the endowment has continued to champion international law and arbitration and has concentrated on sponsoring scholarly studies of international law and foreign policy. It publishes the journal Foreign Policy and, in 1993, established a public‐policy research center in Moscow.
See also Internationalism; League of Nations; Pacifism; Peace Movements; Philanthropy and Philanthropic Foundations.

Bibliography

Sondra Herman . Eleven against War: Studies in American Internationalist Thought, 1898–1921, 1969.
C. Roland Marchand , The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898–1918, 1973.

Robert D. Johnson