Efforts of several governments to impose uniform ideologies and circumcise intellectual liberty have caused “the progressive disintegration of creative scholarship,” declares the Rockefeller Foundation in its report for 1937, written by Raymond B. Fosdick, president.
In a section entitled “New International Barriers,” the review criticizes the “clash of competing nationalisms” and “the geographic boundaries which arbitrarily and often unhappily divide the earth into a patchwork of senseless antagonisms.”
Declaring the foundation must assume that “frontiers are not the forbidding barriers they pretend to be,” the report says that this idea has in recent years encountered serious difficulties, and the difficulties are increasing.
“Objective scholarship is possible only where thought is free — and freedom can exist only where there is tolerance, only where there are no ‘keep Out’ signs against the inquisitive and questioning mind,” Mr. Fosdick asserts.
“Disinterested research cannot survive in an atmosphere of compulsion and repression. It withers under the efforts of governments to impose uniform ideologies and to circumscribe in the interests of a dominant regime the area of intellectual liberty.”
This phenomenon, the report declares, has affected the Rockefeller Foundation’s program, and has prevented it from going into some fields where it formerly went.
“We found ourselves stopped at some frontiers — not because the frontiers have any greater geographical significance than they had a few years ago, but because behind them the search for truth by eager and skeptical minds has been made impossible,” Mr. Fosdick concluded.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
