Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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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

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In 1910, retired steelmaker and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, a longtime supporter of peace societies, established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with a donation of $10 million, making it the wealthiest organization in the resurgent American peace movement of the early twentieth century. Like other peace advocates, Carnegie wanted America to be a world leader in promoting international arbitration to settle disputes among nations.

Carnegie's most influential advisers, elder statesman Elihu Root, and the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, chose as trustees leading businessmen, influential members of Congress, and notable educators, bypassing longtime, more outspoken peace advocates. The politically conservative Endowment leaders, Root and Butler, thus created an organization for “scientific research” rather than active advocacy of peace. In World War I, the endowment curtailed its activities instead of advocating U.S. mediation or nonintervention.

The endowment's accomplishments in the areas of research and publication during the interwar period were impressive. Its projects included a monumental study, Economic and Social History of the World War (more than 100 volumes); many other studies of economics and international law; financing of overseas exchange visits by educators and journalists; creation of “International Mind” alcoves in libraries; and the endowing of university chairs in International Relations. The endowment published the scholarly journal International Conciliation until 1972, when the organization became associated with Foreign Policy magazine. After World War II, the endowment gave support and encouragement to the work of the United Nations.

The endowment's trustees were always careful to avoid controversy. At its founding, many in the peace movement hoped Carnegie's gift would establish a powerful advocacy organization; instead, it became an early prototype of the policy research institute.
[See also Peace; Peace and Antiwar Movements.]

Bibliography

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace , Yearbooks (1910–).
Michael A. Lutzker , The Formation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: A Study of the Establishment‐Centered Peace Movement, 1910–1914, in Building the Organizational Society, ed. Jerry Israel, 1972.

Michael A. Lutzker

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace an institution for research on peace and public education on world affairs founded by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) in 1910. Carnegie donated ten million dollars to the Endowment to “hasten the abolition of war, the foulest blot upon our civilization.” The organization is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has worked to study the causes and impact of war, promote international understanding, and aid in the development of international law and dispute settlement.