180 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographyrelations, and cooperation with public agencies–a whole range of meddling with the bitter clingers,
and not mere humanitarian concerns. The mission statement of the oligarchical Spelman Fund
bluntly stated that “the interest of the Spelman Fund is not in improvement of some social practice
or function, but is rather in the contribution which maybe made to all aspects of public welfare
through increase of efficiency, technical competence, and rational purposefulness in the operation
of the machinery of government.” Not social progress, but totalitarian control was the goal.
A recent journalistic account of 1313 informs us: ‘1313, completed in 1938, embodied the vision
of two men, Charles E. Merriam, and Louis Brownlow. Brownlow had forged a career (without
benefit of formal education) as a city manager and as a forceful advocate for the public service
professions. Merriam was a University of Chicago political science professor with a bent for
activism that led to service as a Chicago alderman and to two (unsuccessful) runs for the Mayoralty.
The two men conceived 1313 as a vibrant center for (in the words of a 1963 booklet) “the
improvement of the organization, administrative techniques, and methods of government –
municipal, county, state, and federal – in the United States.” Within a few years, 1313 had clearly
become a nerve center for American public administration. By 1963, it was organizational home to
22 non-profit entities, including: American Public Works Association, American Public Welfare
Association, Council of State Governments. American Society of Planning Officials, American
Society of Public Administration, National Legislative Conference, Public Administration Service,
National Association of State Budget Officers, and the National Association of Attorneys General.
Proximity was a key factor in the Merriam-Brownlow concept: proximity of the building’s
organizational inhabitants both to each other and to the resources of the University of Chicago. The
lively, continuous, cross-fertilizing exchanges ensuing from these proximities were to advance the
professionalization of public administration in the U.S.’^67 1313 appears as a Rockefeller deployment
running parallel to European fascism, and aiming at the destruction, under the banner of good
government and efficiency, of the large urban political machines which were to be so important in
the 1932-33 coming of the New Deal, which the reactionary Rockefellers were eager to see headed
off.
AXELROD’S 1313 GANG AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Some of the 1313 gang’s efforts were disrupted by World War II, but the 1313 operatives were
quick to bounce back: ‘First, the 1313-Spelman boys were thinking hard about the ways and means
to organize a New World Order. A lot of them were involved in the brainstorming that was to
give birth to the new international organizations: their concern for integrating public administration
had now a new level, the international one, in the hope that it would be possible to build a more
efficient system than the League of Nations.’ Rockefeller-funded 1313 operatives played key roles
in creating the United Nations, UNESCO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which dealt with refugees and
displaced persons, the World Bank, and other components of the supernational bureaucracy. To
each of these organisms the Rockefeller men imparted their characteristic features of sinister
cruelty, manipulation, and the shameless pursuit of world supremacy for the Anglo-American
financier oligarchy. The 1313 gang is thus central to the efforts for new world order: ‘Thus, the
Ford consolidated the work of international organization that had begun in the 1930s, placing the
urban international under discrete but effective American patronage. It added stone to what could
be called a “Chicago consensus” on urban issues at the international scale, this consensus being
circulated through the net of links created since the 1930s, and put in action thanks to the
overlapping personnel of the Ford, the Chicago organizations, the international societies, and the