America through the eyes of the Mellon Foundation

As Americans commemorate our country’s 250th anniversary, at least one major philanthropy evidently sees little in that history to celebrate. To the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its grantees, the story of the United States appears largely as one unbroken line of racist oppression. In deploying its considerable leverage over art and humanities funding to promote this narrative, the Mellon Foundation illustrates much of what is presently wrong with elite institutional philanthropy.

“A Major Strategic Evolution”

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper summarized Mellon’s new approach to its philanthropy as finding “value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes,” and [. . .] described some of what the foundation had recently chosen to fund as “cartoonishly progressive” initiatives that read like “conservative satire.”

The Mellon Foundation exists among a rarefied Big Philanthropy peerage. In 2024, it paid out more than $555 million worth of grants and reported net assets of over $7.2 billion. That year, it was a larger grantmaker than the Rockefeller Foundation ($233.3 million), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($286.5 million), the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation ($287.7 million), the Packard Foundation ($350 million), the MacArthur Foundation ($356 million), and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation ($403 million). These numbers can be difficult to fathom—in 2024, the Mellon Foundation gave away the equivalent of more than $1,000 per minute.

Named after business magnate, philanthropist, and conservative Republican Treasury Secretary (1921-1932) Andrew W. Mellon, the foundation was established in 1969 by his children Ailsa Mellon Bruce and Paul Mellon. Ailsa died that same year, but Paul continued to shape the foundation’s grantmaking for decades. In his 2007 book The Foundation, Joel L. Fleishman likened Paul’s influence to “soft power,” noting that while he “imposed no explicit constraints on his foundation,” his interest in art, the humanities, and education strongly influenced the foundation’s priorities through “his moral authority and the passion of his convictions.”

Today, the Mellon Foundation is the self-described “largest funder of the arts, culture, and humanities” in the country. A recent profile in The Atlantic noted that “today, no single entity, including the federal government, has a more profound influence on the fiscal health and cultural output of the humanities than the Mellon Foundation.” Such a monopoly naturally brings with it considerable societal influence. While funding for the arts and humanities is an important, broadly uncontroversial, and traditionally “charitable” philanthropic purpose, its implementation at Mellon in recent years has taken on a deeply divisive ideological character.

Much of this can be traced to its president Elizabeth Alexander, whose personal website describes her as “a nationally recognized thought leader on race, justice, the arts, and American society.” An author and former professor who once chaired the African American Studies Department (now the Black Studies Department) at Yale University, Alexander famously recited original poetry at Barack Obama’s 2009 presidential inauguration. She also previously directed the Ford Foundation’s creativity and free expression program, which in turn conducts Ford’s very substantial (and decidedly left-leaning) grantmaking for documentary films. In 2024, the Mellon Foundation paid Alexander more than $1.5 million in compensation, plus more than $500,000 in additional employee benefits and $150,000 in expenses/other allowances.

Upon taking the helm at Mellon in 2018, Alexander surveyed the foundation’s grantmaking and decided that going forward it would work to ensure that “each grant, every penny, contribute[s] in some demonstrable way to a more fair and just society.” In practice, this has meant applying an explicitly left-wing sociopolitical lens to its philanthropy, with an overriding emphasis on categorizing humanity by race, ethnicity, or some other immutable characteristic.

In hindsight, 2020 was something of a watershed year for the American charitable sector—one in which it collectively expanded (both quantitatively and qualitatively) its commitment to left-wing ideological causes, particularly with respect to issues of race/ethnicity. Often, this was couched in terms of a new (or renewed) organizational emphasis on one or more forms of “justice”—social justice, racial justice, environmental justice, etc. Big Philanthropy was certainly no exception to this trend. Indeed, it was a driving force.

In June of that year, amidst the upheaval of the then-ongoing Black Lives Matter protests and riots, the Mellon Foundation publicly announced that it had undergone a “major strategic evolution,” and would henceforth prioritize “social justice in all of its grantmaking.” Believing that the United States suffers from “fissures, primal wounds, [and] original sins that are unameliorated and bare,” Alexander decreed that going forward “there won’t be a penny that is going out the door that is not contributing to a more fair, more just, more beautiful society.”

Mellon has since veered hard to the left. In 2025, it added Patrick Gaspard to its board of directors, explaining that his professional experience would be crucial to advancing the foundation’s mission. That experience includes stints as director of the White House Office of Political Affairs during the Obama Administration, executive director of the Democratic National Committee, national political director at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and president of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. It is a career that reflects the increasingly overlapping worlds of philanthropy and politics.

Grantmaking

A post entitled “Christopher Columbus: We Never Wanted Him Here”—authored by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor—depicts what it calls “the twilight of Columbianism” through images of the explorer’s decapitated head.

Structurally, the Mellon Foundation’s grantmaking is divided into four general areas: arts and culture, higher learning, humanities in place, and public knowledge. It also operates three special “presidential initiatives,” through which it seeks to use funding for the arts and humanities to “move us closer to justice, lifting up historically underserved and overlooked communities.”

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper summarized Mellon’s new approach to its philanthropy as finding “value in arts and letters only insofar as they advance approved, left-leaning causes,” and concluded that “a multibillion-dollar politicized grant-making entity has a stranglehold over humanities research and teaching, and is using that power to push them in a direction that blurs the boundaries between scholarship and activism, pedagogy and politics.” Harper described some of what the foundation had recently chosen to fund as “cartoonishly progressive” initiatives that read like “conservative satire.”

It is not difficult to find examples to justify this characterization. In 2023, Mellon awarded a $1 million grant to Princeton University to support a new fellowship program “designed to mentor graduate students and early career researchers of the ancient Mediterranean as they center critical race studies in their scholarship and teaching.” Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber boasted that the initiative “engages the complexities of race, ethnicity, and racism with the academic study of ancient Roman and Greek cultures, and challenges foundational assumptions about knowledge production.”

Some of the Mellon Foundation’s grantmaking appears designed primarily to denigrate and delegitimize American society and institutions, past and present. One of the foundation’s presidential initiatives is a $125 million grantmaking program called “Imagining Freedom,” which aims to counter what the foundation calls “the criminal legal system’s forces of dehumanization, isolation, and separation.” It claims that the American criminal justice system intentionally prevents prisoners—presumably including those convicted of extremely serious offenses—“from leading full civic, creative, and intellectual lives and deprives the public of their voices and perspectives.” Mellon believes that “the arts and humanities have unique power to interrupt the narrative and cultural forces upholding the criminal legal system.”

Indeed, Mellon is evidently opposed to the very idea of imprisoning convicted criminals. One $6 million grant to the University of California, Santa Cruz was made to support the school’s Visualizing Abolition project, the stated purpose of which is to use art to help build “a world without prisons.” A $3.65 million grant to UCLA was earmarked “to chronicle the many impacts of policing and mass incarceration in Los Angeles.” Mellon gave more than $1.7 million to fund the Movements Against Mass Incarceration project at Columbia University, which aspires to “possible futures beyond the status-quo fixtures of prisons and policing,” and which blames America’s incarceration rate on “the persistent, systemic criminalization of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Queer, and low-income communities.”

Racism is central to the Mellon Foundation’s philanthropic worldview, particularly as it relates to how American history and contemporary society are perceived and portrayed. In 2020, it awarded 16 grants to universities—worth a combined $72.3 million—under its Just Futures Initiative program. The purpose of this grantmaking initiative was to help the American public understand “the nation’s racist past” and to create “socially just futures” through what it called a “cultural and social transformation.” Illustrative grants, which are a caricature of ivory tower ultra-leftism, include:

• $5 million to Columbia University for the development of a model curriculum on Racial Justice and Abolition Democracy. The curriculum begins with a module for teaching students how “racism came to be a foundational form of domination, extraction, and exploitation in the United States from the colonial period to the present,” and ends with an exploration of how the country might one day abolish “prisons, police, and the death penalty, as well as borders, the wage, capital, and other systems and structures that stand in the way of equal human flourishing and liberation.”
• $5 million to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the Humanities Education for Anti-racism Literacy in the Sciences and Medicine (HEAL) project, whose vision for the public university includes “reckoning with impacts of settler colonialism and white supremacy and actively seeking to repair legacies of its colonial and extractive histories and harms done particularly to Black, Native, Indigenous as well as other people of color.” It also aims to develop educational systems that “include critical historical analysis of power structures, racism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism in their core curricula.” One associated undergraduate course promised students an examination of “how processes of empire building, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism have shaped Western natural sciences since the Enlightenment.” Another was designed to be “a social history of the creation and maintenance of structural racism in American universities and society.”
• $4.974 million to Brown University for the Reimagining New England Histories: Historical Injustice, Sovereignty and Freedom project, which asserts that “it is necessary for America to confront its past and to grapple with the its [sic] histories of Indigenous dispossession, attempted genocide and slavery.” In doing so, the project hopes to “displace the myth of the founding of the New England colonies as a ‘city on the hill.’” Through its K-12 curriculum program, Reimagining New England Histories suggests that teachers should attempt correct the “Thanksgiving myth”—in which Americans supposedly “celebrate the outcomes of settler colonialism without having to revisit the horrors”—by instructing students in the observance of a “National Day of Mourning” to recognize “a history in which wealth, resources, and land were violently transferred from one group of people to another.”
• $4.52 million to the University of Oregon for the Pacific Northwest Just Futures Institute for Racial and Climate Justice, which asserts that “higher education can help rectify the devastating consequences of intersectional racism and climate change,” and which characterized campus monuments to the region’s early American pioneers—which were vandalized in 2020 and subsequently removed—as “landmarks to Indigenous displacement and genocide.”

It is worth noting that the diversity championed by Mellon and its grantees does not appear to extend to ideological differences. In 2024, the foundation gave the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) more than $1.5 million to create a Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, which was to have the somewhat ironic purpose of “confronting the recent surge of political and ideological attacks on American higher education.” A recording recently obtained by City Journal revealed that the AAUP’s center was itself plotting ideological attacks on new university institutes designed to promote viewpoint diversity and/or classical liberalism on campus—commonly known as “Civics Centers.” Isaac Kamola, the AAUP center’s director, spoke of “naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy” of what he called “these right-wing centers,” with the ultimate goal being “to knock them out.”

The Monuments Project

The audit . . . concluded that “the story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history.” Specifically, it took issue with American monuments being “overwhelmingly white and male” and disproportionately depicting “war and conquest.”

Perhaps the most notable of the Mellon Foundation’s funding campaigns, particularly in the context of America’s 250th birthday, is the Monuments Project. Originally a $250 million commitment announced in 2020, it was subsequently doubled to $500 million, making it the largest grantmaking initiative in the foundation’s history and one of president Elizabeth Alexander’s “signature initiatives.” A press release ambitiously—or ominously, given the foundation’s worldview—declared that the Monuments Project would “transform the way our country’s histories are told in public spaces” by funding the creation of new monuments and the removal or “contextualizing” of existing ones. The project’s stated goal was to “recalibrate the assumed center of our national narratives to include those who have often been denied historical recognition.”

According to its 2025 annual report, Mellon had disbursed more than half of its $500 million total Monuments Project commitment as of that year. A search for the phrase “Monuments Project” on the foundation’s online grants database (which only covers through 2024) returns 112 separate grants totaling approximately $215.1 million. More than 85 percent of recipients were American nonprofits (including universities), more than 13 percent were American governmental entities (including tribal governments), and one recipient was a foreign entity located in South Africa. Grant recipients located in Virginia received the most money ($30.6 million), followed by the District of Columbia ($27.7 million) and California ($25.8 million). Eighteen states did not have any Monuments Project grantees, although this does not necessarily mean that no project funds supported work in those states.

Race, ethnicity, and other immutable group identities appear central to the Monuments Project’s funding criteria, and some of the largest grants concerned slavery. The largest single award was a four-year $11 million grant to the city of Richmond, VA for “a cultural space located at the Shockoe Bottom train shed that memorializes and commemorates the history of slavery” in the city. That money ultimately led to the creation of the recently-opened Shockoe Institute, whose mission is to “reveal the enduring impact of racial slavery on our shared American experience, inspiring both reflection and action.” The institute’s main exhibit begins with a section explaining how “ingrained notions of superiority” among early European colonists “led to conflict, repression, and enslavement, setting the stage for later forms of racial control.” It ends with a display entitled “American Apartheid,” which asks visitors to reflect on how slavery and historical discrimination continue to perpetuate racial inequalities today.

Other large grants went to the homes of America’s founding fathers. The Montpelier Foundation, which is the charity responsible for curating James Madison’s famous home,  received over $5.7 million to establish “a memorial to the individuals who were enslaved at Montpelier.” The Thomas Jefferson Foundation received $3.5 million from Mellon for a similar project at Monticello.

In 2023, Mellon awarded a two-year $6.8 million grant to the city of Chicago in order to support certain priority initiatives of the Chicago Monuments Project. One of these is a public art “intervention” at an equestrian monument to George Washington on the city’s South Side, intentionally timed to coincide with America’s 250th anniversary. It aims to explore what the city calls “the contradictions of American founding narratives and their connection to Black history,” and to reconsider “the power of names, complexity of legacy, and the people and stories that are chosen to be memorialized.” The so-called “Other Washingtons” project will serve to deflect attention away from the nation’s first president and to “other Washingtons who deserve recognition for impacting Chicagoans or the nation as a whole.”

Monument Lab

According to Monument Lab, ‘Toppling is not a destructive act; the preservation and relocation of these monuments is destructive. Toppled racist monuments should not be retrieved from the bottom of rivers.’

One relatively unknown nonprofit called Monument Lab has played an outsized role in the Mellon Foundation’s Monuments Project. Previously a fiscally sponsored project of a group called CultureTrust Greater Philadelphia, it now operates as an independent 501(c)(3) charity. Monument Lab was Mellon’s very first Monuments Project grantee, and the group’s leftist iconoclasm underpins the entire program. Paul Farber, Monument Labs’s co-founder and director, has sat on Mellon’s board since early 2024.

Mellon made a total of $12 million worth of grants to Monument Lab from 2020-2024. Though the two groups’ fiscal years do not align and a precise calculation is therefore impossible, Mellon is clearly Monument Lab’s dominant funder. From July 2022 through June 2024 Monument Lab brought in a total of $8.3 million in revenue from all sources, while from January 2023 through December 2024 the Mellon Foundation gave the group $8 million.

The money Mellon disbursed to Monument Lab included funds earmarked for a National Monument Audit, which was designed to inform future Monuments Project grants. The audit (which was completed in 2021) concluded that “the story of the United States as told by our current monument landscape misrepresents our history.” Specifically, it took issue with American monuments being “overwhelmingly white and male” and disproportionately depicting “war and conquest.” In a forward she penned for the audit, Elizabeth Alexnder wrote that “our commemorative landscape needs to change if we are to move towards a more just and equitable future.” Others, of course, would say that Mellon and Monument Lab simply wish to re-depict American history to suit their own ideological agenda.

That agenda is quite radical even by Big Philanthropy’s standards. One article featured on Monument Lab’s website is summarized with a blurb declaring that “the gruesome monstrosity of whiteness undergirds America’s systems—haunting its public spaces, pedestals, and policies.” Another justified the illegal vandalism and/or destruction of so-called “colonialist, imperialist, and racist monuments,” claiming that such acts demonstrate “the power of the revolutionary collective movement.” It continued:

Toppling is not a destructive act; the preservation and relocation of these monuments is destructive. Toppled racist monuments should not be retrieved from the bottom of rivers. These direct actions should not be undone by cities, auctions, museums, historians, preservationists, or conservators. Efforts to preserve these monuments and prevent their toppling signal a desire to allow them to continue to exert their power as objects, to uphold the ideas they stand for, and, perhaps most significantly, to communicate that property is more important than people.

A post entitled “Christopher Columbus: We Never Wanted Him Here”—authored by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology associate professor—depicts what it calls “the twilight of Columbianism” through images of the explorer’s decapitated head. Though evidently no longer offered for sale, as recently as 2025 customers could purchase shirts reading “Topple False Histories” and “The Future of Monuments is Radically Collective” through Monument Lab’s online store. Considering its status as Monument Lab’s most important funder, one can only assume that the Mellon Foundation shares its grantee’s sentiments.

Thoughts and Questions

. . . what exactly is the “good” that Mellon is doing with its billions? Big Philanthropy has come under increasing public and political scrutiny from Americans who are rightly asking precisely such questions. This is to say nothing of the choice words Andrew W. Mellon himself might have for the foundation that bears his name.

As the Heritage Foundation’s Brenda Hafera has written, the Mellon Foundation’s grantmaking highlights a “fundamental disagreement over how we should view America. Is the ethos of America best represented by the equitable portrayal of identity characteristics? Or is it our unifying maxim enshrined in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, which points to our common human dignity and capacity for self-government?” Mellon, Hafera correctly observes, “seeks to displace the value of human equality with that of inclusivity. Such a project is fundamentally flawed, steeped in assumptions about power and the importance of identity characteristics.”

People are, quite simply, people. They should be evaluated and remembered as individuals. Decision-making that is rooted in the delineation of certain “kinds” of people has an exceptionally poor historical track record. In embracing a maximalist ideological worldview obsessed with categorizing and dividing Americans based on group identities, the Mellon Foundation embraces a profoundly harmful narrative. And by reducing the history of the United States to simply one of racist oppression, it embraces an objectively false one.

Moreover, by alienating Americans who are proud of their heritage—and Mellon’s opinions notwithstanding, that heritage justifies mountains of pride—the foundation forfeits the opportunity for good-faith discussions over some very fair questions about how certain individuals (such as those connected to the Confederacy) or events are portrayed in public memorials, and whether there are some worthy Americans who deserve more recognition for their achievements than they currently receive. Public commemoration is not a zero-sum game.

Finally, what does all of this say about the nature of the philanthropy that the American people are collectively incentivizing through the tax code? The Mellon Foundation has decided to use its multi-billion-dollar ancestral American fortune to change the way in which America remembers its ancestors. Would ordinary taxpayers see this as an act of charitable benevolence worthy of federal tax-exemption, or undemocratic and presumptuous elitism? More bluntly: what exactly is the “good” that Mellon is doing with its billions? Big Philanthropy has come under increasing public and political scrutiny from Americans who are rightly asking precisely such questions. This is to say nothing of the choice words Andrew W. Mellon himself might have for the foundation that bears his name.

In a recent interview, Elizabeth Alexander said that if she had to choose one word to describe the United States at its 250th anniversary, it would be “work-in-progress.” No doubt this is true—anything imperfect can be improved, and nothing created by man will ever be perfect. But we have much progress to celebrate at our semiquincentennial. While Mellon and its grantees try to drive wedges into our national cracks, the American people can look to the bridges we’ve built across chasms.

***

Editors Note: this is an updated and expanded adaptation of a previous article published by the Capital Research Center in August 2025.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/america-through-the-eyes-of-the-mellon-foundation/