Complaints about indoctrination of students in colleges and universities around the country are nothing new. Years ago, similar complaints were made about foundations providing funding for educational purposes, which also just happened to allow the wealthy to lavish tax-deductible gifts upon those same foundations. The U.S. House of Representatives was concerned enough about it to form the Select Committee to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations in 1952. Created by a vote of the House membership and authorized by House Resolution 561, which was sponsored by Congressman E. E. “Gene” Cox of Georgia. A Democrat, Cox was a high conservative congressman of a type that is extinct in today’s world. First elected to Congress in 1924, Gene Cox had been reelected every two years since that time and was staunchly anti-Communist.
The purpose of the select committee was to start an investigation into the “educational and philanthropic foundations and other comparable organizations which are exempt from federal taxes to determine whether they were using their resources for the purposes for which they were established, and especially to determine whether they were using their resources for un-Americans activities and subversive activities or purposes not in the interests or tradition of the United States.”
Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin’s reckless accusations and erratic behavior seriously undermined any attempt to legitimately investigate Communist spies inside the government. Defectors and the fall of the Soviet Union provided proof of spying on the part of some Americans. Because of McCarthy, it became fashionable on the part of the Left in America to instantly dismiss any allegation of Communism. Indeed, much of the hatred of Richard Nixon by liberals was due to his part in the Alger Hiss case. Today, through decrypted KGB files and other sources, there is good reason to believe Hiss was passing information to the Soviet Union. There were other spies in other government offices, including Lauchlin Currie, an economic advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt; Harry Dexter White, a high-ranking Treasury official who had been nominated to head the World Bank by President Harry Truman when he died of a heart attack while being investigated; and Laurence Duggan, head of the South American desk at the State Department during the Second World War. Many of the files and their contents were examined in “Spies: The Fall of the KGB in America,” written by John Haynes and Harvey Klehr, and published by Yale University Press.
In short order, the committee sent a probing questionnaire to every foundation holding $10 million (the equivalent to $121 million today). The questionnaire sought answered to detailed questions. Initially, a report was submitted by the select committee that no fault could be found with the foundations, all of whom seemed to be loyal to the American government. By the time the report was published in January of 1953, Gene Cox had died of a heart attack on December 24, 1952, in Bethesda Naval Hospital after having been reelected to another term that November.
At least one member was deeply unhappy with the report submitted by the Cox Committee: Carroll Reece of Tennessee. Reece was the longest serving member of Tennessee’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives, although his service was not continuous. Reece was also the most conservative member of Tennessee’s congressional delegation, representing upper East Tennessee as the congressman from the First District. Carroll Reece had first been elected in 1920, upsetting incumbent Sam Sells, who had represented the First District for a decade. Reece used his heroic record from the First World War and won the GOP primary and general election and served until 1930 when he was upset by Oscar Byrd Lovett, who waged a fourteen-day campaign as an Independent. Voters had been upset with Reece who had been perceived by voters as favoring President Herbert Hoover’s private power views. As proved by the Tennessee Valley Authority, Tennesseans liked the cheap electricity brought about by the TVA. Reece challenged Lovett again in 1932 and beat him in both the Republican primary and general elections. Reece never forgot the lesson and remained a supporter of public power in Tennessee and the TVA. Carroll Reece was reelected until 1946 when he announced he would not seek reelection due to his having been elected as chairman of the Republican National Committee. In 1948, Reece was replaced as chairman of the RNC by GOP presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey and the former congressman became the first serious Republican candidate for the United States Senate since 1916. Running on a ticket with country music superstar Roy Acuff as the Republican gubernatorial candidate, the two won only roughly a third of the total vote. In 1950, Reece ran against Congressman Dayton Phillips, a Republican who had voted against the Taft-Hartley labor bill in 1947. In a hard fought and brutal primary, Reece won back his seat in the House where he remained for the rest of his life.
While he had lost his seniority when he left the House in 1947, Reece was no ordinary low-ranking junior member of Congress. Reece had been Republican National Committeeman for Tennessee since 1939 and was a nationally known figure. Reece sought to have the Cox Committee renewed and continue its investigation. As a result of Reece’s prodding, the House authorized another resolution which created the Reece Committee in 1953, providing it with $50,000 to hire a staff and do its business. Another $65,000 appropriation would be granted the Reece Committee in 1954.
Congressman Reece hired Norman Dodd as the counsel for the committee and began an investigation to inquire into why the foundations had been established and attempted to ascertain how much they affected public life in the United States of America.
By vocation, Norman Dodd was a banker and the result of the Reece Committee’s work provoked a good deal of commentary, much of it unflattering, by the news media of the day. At the same time as the Reece Committee was conducting its business, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin’s excesses were being revealed to a national television audience. McCarthy’s reckless charges and the antics of his aide Roy Cohn disgusted many Americans, but it also caused much of the report of the Reece Committee to simply be dismissed out of hand or ignored. McCarthy was eventually censored by the U.S. Senate and his alcoholism accelerated and he drank himself to death within a few years.
The sixteen days the committee took testimony proved to be challenging and noisy. Norman Dodd noted there were some 6,000 – 7,000 tax-exempt foundations which were the recipients of $7.5 billion. Those same foundations made distributions of funds totaling roughly $300 million annually. Dodd’s stated in his own testimony to the Reece Committee that staff had determined a “tendency of foundation trustees to abdicate responsibility,” while other foundations were providing the funding for “ideas and practices incompatible with the fundamental concepts of our Constitution.” Wayne Hays, well known inside the House for being an accomplished bully, roared that the presentation made by Dodd on May 10, 1954, had been “doctored” through the addition of “last minute changes.” The Ohio Democrat was incensed when Dodd suggested the Ford Foundation (established by auto magnate Henry Ford and his family) and “accessory agents” such as the National Education Association be studied further.
Thomas H. Briggs, a former professor who had retired from Columbia, offered testimony to the Reece Committee saying he had resigned as a member of the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education advisory board because the staff people were both inexperienced. Briggs also raised the issue of the personnel having showed favoritism in their operations. Briggs also offered a defense, after being spurred on by Wayne Hays, of the National Education Association, which he said did not cooperate with the foundations. Dr. Briggs also disagreed with the Reece Committee’s staff report which stated that the NEA and other such entities had an “aim to exercise a monopoly over education.” The former professor did tell committee members in his testimony educators were oftentimes “intimidated” and fearful of being perceived as critical of foundations as so many were dependent upon grants from those organizations who were tax-exempt.
Dr. A. H. Hobbs also testified before the Reece Committee. An assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Hobbs acknowledged in his field, sociology, most social scientists got the most support of any other group by the foundations. Dr. Hobbs also admitted that social scientists tried to “give the impression their work has the validity of experiments in the natural sciences.” At the same time, Dr. Hobbs made a plea to the committee members not to pass laws with regard to research work made possible by grants from the funding foundations. Hobbs opined the organizations should try and achieve a balance on their own to openly skeptical congressmen. Dr. Hobbs took a swipe at the sex study by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, which had been funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as one type of “pseudo-scientific technique.”
When Aaron Sargent, an attorney who had served as the chairman of the Committee on Americanization of the Sons of the American Revolution, referred to Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a former professor of economics, as one of those who had helped “Fabian socialism” obtain a “beachhead” in the United States. Sargent asserted Douglas had been a former member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Douglas acknowledged he had been a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society 40 years prior as a student but denied the group had any connection with the Socialist Party.
That brought a loud and vociferous protest from Wayne Hays who bellowed that Sargent had just called Senator Douglas a socialist and reminded committee members of the rule governing testimony in House committees that witnesses who might “injure the reputation of others” be heard first in executive sessions, closed to the press and the public. Hays immediately made a motion that the Reece Committee hear the remainder of Aaron Sargent’s testimony in closed session. The motion failed in a 3-2 vote as Reece voted the proxies of the two absent GOP congressmen, Congressman Angier Goodwin and Congressman Jesse P. Wolcott of Michigan. At that point, the two Democrats stomped out of the hearing.
When Aaron Sargent, an attorney who had served as the chairman of the Committee on Americanization of the Sons of the American Revolution, referred to Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a former professor of economics, as one of those who had helped “Fabian socialism” obtain a “beachhead” in the United States. Sargent asserted Douglas had been a former member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Douglas acknowledged he had been a member of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society forty years prior as a student but denied the group had any connection with the Socialist Party.
Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews, head of the Internal Revenue Service, testified that it was quite possible some tax-exempt organizations “might be violating their privileges.” Norman A. Sugarman, the assistant commissioner of the IRS, told the committee between June of 1951 and June of 1953, the IRS had revoked the tax-exempt status from at least 55 or 30,000 entities reviewed. At the time, some 120,000 organizations and foundations were exempt from the federal income tax.
Congresswoman Gracie Pfost made a motion the hearings be suspended in order for committee members to be briefed on the status of the inquiry. Pfost argued it “now appears … not to be an objective inquiry to get the facts, but rather a sounding board for propounding loaded evidence.” Once again, along party lines, the congresswoman’s motion failed 3-2.
The back and forth inside the committee was between the Republicans and the Democrats, everything broke down along partisan lines, with Wayne Hays obstreperously doing his best to disrupt and derail the hearings at every opportunity. While Gracie Pfost was both more professional and gracious in her demeanor than the sour and snappish Hays, she was openly skeptical about staff findings and witnesses in many instances.
The real fireworks were yet to come and when they did, they won headlines across the country.
© 2026 Ray Hill
