The Institute’s first American foundation-funding attempts all failed by 1940

Evidence

As early as 1938, the idea began to take hold at the Institute that efforts should be made to obtain funds from American foundations not merely for research projects by individual associates and protégés, but also for scientific research by the Institute itself. In 1939 the first efforts in this direction were made: for example, attempts to interest Christian and Jewish research foundations, and also private individuals, in a project developed by Adorno and Horkheimer on anti-Semitism. These efforts had no success. In April 1940, at a meeting of the Institute’s advisory board (of which MacIver and Lynd, among others, were members), Horkheimer put up two projects for discussion, to find out which of them would have better prospects in the USA and what would be the best way of going about obtaining financial support for them. One of these was, again, the anti-Semitism project, which was intended to answer the question of how anti-Semitism had managed to achieve such extraordinary significance; the other was a project on `modern German culture’, which was to reconstruct the economic, social, political, philosophical and literary development of Germany in the period from 1900 to 1933, and so answer the question of how Nazism came about. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1131

Categorization

• XREF: The anti-Semitism project’s failure to find funding before 1940 foreshadows the eventual Studies in Prejudice; connects to the Institute’s dependency on American academic patronage.