INVENTING THE THINK TANK: THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY ADVICE

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s foundational years provide an historical case study into think tanks’ use of funding, interpersonal networks, expert authority, and the manipulation of media to influence public and official opinion. The non-governmental organization presented its products as objective, scientific research to openly advocate for adopting international legal institutions and arbitration as official U.S. policy. Adding to the fragmented analyses of the institution, this study contextualizes the Endowment’s early efforts using a range of sources: the CEIP’s New York, Washington, D.C. and Paris records; the private papers of CEIP leaders Andrew Carnegie, Elihu Root, Nicholas Murray Butler and James Brown Scott; State Department and Congressional records; the papers of Secretaries of State Knox, Bryan, and Lansing; and the Carnegie Balkan Report’s historiographical and journalistic uses.The Endowment’s trustee network gave it access to government officials, business elites, and mass media. It used these to agitate against the Panama Canal toll exemption for U.S. domestic shipping and to horrify Western elites at the violence of the Balkan Wars. At the same time, the CEIP assisted the State Department in dealing with the unrecognized Chinese republican government and creating the cultural diplomacy network for programs State institutionalized after the Second World War. Its direct and indirect involvement in U.S. international relations demonstrates that think tank service to government was not a Second World War invention, but pre-dates the first World War. I also trace the historical uses of the 1914 Carnegie Commission report on the Balkan Wars and its 1993 reprint as Yugoslavia dissolved as a think tank research product, to show its importance over time to Western attitudes and policies toward the Balkan peninsula. In its early endeavors and with the wealth at its disposal, the Carnegie Endowment invented the policy milieu in which think tanks operate today.