Richard Mellon Scaife

Richard Mellon Scaife is a billionaire contributor to the Republican Party and right-wing think tanks, one of the most influential men behind the American conservative movement. Scaife has helped establish their biggest institutions and supported some of their most radical ideas through donations from his Scaife foundations. His father was Alan M. Scaife.

Wealth
Scaife is the principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune. As of March 2013, Richard Scaife's net worth is $1.4 billion and he is number 347 on the Forbes 400.

Scaife's source of wealth is the Mellon bank's 19th century fortune, which grew steadily with diversified investments, including major coal, steel, and real-estate interests, and Gulf Oil Corporation

Philanthropic Foundations
Scaife is a major funding source of conservative causes through the Scaife Foundations. He controls the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, and the Alleghany Foundation. Until 2001, he also controlled the Scaife Family Foundation, which is now controlled by his son and daughter.

Bankrolling Right-Wing Organizations
Scaife's money has established or supported "activist think tanks that have created and marketed conservative ideas from welfare reform to enhanced missile defense; public interest law firms that have won important court cases on affirmative action, property rights and how to conduct the national census; organizations and publications that have nurtured conservatism on American campuses; academic institutions that have employed and promoted the work of conservative intellectuals; watchdog groups that have critiqued and harassed media organizations, and many more."

Scaife and his family's charitable foundations have given over a billion dollars to right-wing organzations, resulting in the creation of a vast conservative infrastructure. As the Washington Post reports:


 * Together these groups constitute a conservative intellectual infrastructure that provided ideas and human talent that helped Ronald Reagan initiate a new Republican era in 1980, and helped Newt Gingrich initiate another one in 1994. Conservative ideas once dismissed as flaky or extreme moved into the mainstream, and as the liberal National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy concluded in a recent report, "The long-standing conservative crusade to discredit government as a vehicle for societal progress has come to fruition as never before." 

Among the right-wing organizations substantially funded by Scaife are the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Judicial Watch, the Cato Institute, FreedomWorks, and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Funding Anti-Immigrant Groups
Richard Scaife, through his management of the Carthage Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and together with the Scaife Family Foundation (controlled by Richard Scaife’s children since 2001) has donated more than $4 million to the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and more than $3 million to the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) since the early 1990s. Since 2001, the foundations have given ProEnglish $285,000 and NumbersUSA $987,500. The Scaife Family Foundation is also the sole funder of ProEnglish.

Cordelia Scaife May, founder and director the Colcom Foundation until her death in 2005, was an environmentalist committed to population control and believed limiting immigration was the best way to do it. She founded the Colcom Foundation to advance this goal, providing tens of millions to anti-immigrant groups as well as funding legitimate environmental organizations. Since 2001, Colcom has been the primary funder for many groups in the anti-immigrant John Tanton Network, giving over $17 million to NumbersUSA, almost $15 million to FAIR, and more than $6 million to CIS.

Media ownership and influence
Scaife has owned the newspaper the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which is home of global warming skeptic Bill Steigerwald (columnist) since 1969. He donated large grants to the magazine American Spectator from 1970 to 1997. Scaife owned the Sacramento Union from 1977 to 1989.

Christopher Ruddy and The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
In 1993 White House Deputy Counsel Vincent Foster committed suicide. The discovery of his body and his manner of death sprouted a variety of conspiracy theories that Foster had not in fact committed suicide but instead had been murdered as part of a White House cover up. Scaife hired Christopher Ruddy, who wrote for the New York Post at the time, to investigate possible alternative theories to Foster's death for his paper The Pittsburgh Tribune Review. Ruddy's articles began appearing in the Tribune-Review in January 1995. In 1997 Ruddy published his book The Strange Death of Vincent Foster. When the book got a bad write-up in the American Spectator, saying Ruddy sounded like a "right-wing nut," Scaife cut off the magazine's money. American Spectator Editor-In-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. said, "Dick was angered by the review. And called me and said he didn't care to support the American Spectator any further."

Arkansas Project against Clinton
Scaife was a primary source of money for the "Arkansas Project," an effort by the American Spectator to attack President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky eras of his presidency. He gave a $3.2 million grant to American Spectator and an additional $2.3 million specifically to fund the "Arkansas Project." The specific aim of the Arkansas Project was to locate or create dirt on the Clintons in order to smear them, in hopes of removing Clinton from office. Most of the articles that resulted attacked the Clintons portraying them as a slick political couple addled by greed and ambition, a view that reflected the magazine's unrelentingly critical view of the President.

There were reports that the Arkansas project was used to fund witness tampering in the Whitewater scandal. Through an Arkansas bait shop, Spectator operatives kept in touch with Clinton accuser David Hale, even supplying Hale with $200 to make phone calls from prison. Further investigations determined that Hale was not paid to alter his testimony.

Scaife v. Journalism
Scaife has been criticized by sections in the media for attempting to corrupt the practice of journalism and dilute it with a very specific agenda. Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor who runs the blog Informed Comment wrote, " ... In essence, Murdoch, Scaife and other far rightwing super-rich propagandists succeeded in maligning the NYT and in pushing it off its liberal perch even further to the Right."

Support for attacks
Scaife has a long history of supporting attacks on organizations and institutions that go against right-wing interests.

Westmoreland libel suit against CBS
In 1985, Scaife reportedly financed most of retired Gen. William Westmoreland's libel suit against CBS over a documentary, "The Uncounted Enemy". This documentary claimed that Westmoreland deliberately underestimated enemy troop strength in Vietnam.

Buying up books to influence bestseller lists
Scaife has been known to purchase mass quantities of conservative books (especially those published by Regnery Press) to push them up the bestseller lists.

Organizations Funded Through Scaife Foundations

 * Atlas Economic Research Foundation
 * American Enterprise Institute
 * American Spectator Educational Foundation, publisher of American Spectator Magazine
 * Cato Institute
 * Center for the Study of Popular Culture
 * Citizens for Honest Government
 * Federalist Society
 * Federation for American Immigration Reform
 * Free Congress Foundation
 * Foreign Policy Research Institute
 * Hoover Institution
 * Hudson Institute
 * Independent Women's Forum
 * Institute for Justice
 * Intercollegiate Studies Institute
 * Judicial Watch
 * Landmark Legal Foundation
 * Media Research Center
 * Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
 * National Association of Scholars
 * National Legal and Policy Center
 * National Taxpayers Union Foundation
 * NewsMax.com
 * Pacific Legal Foundation
 * Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy
 * Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty
 * Rutherford Institute
 * Southeastern Legal Foundation, Inc.
 * Washington Legal Foundation

Affiliations with local organizations

 * Honorary Trustee, Brandywine Conservancy (art and the environment in the Brandywine Valley)

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Scaife Foundations
 * Scaife Family Foundation
 * Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
 * Cato Institute
 * National Legal and Policy Center
 * Gulf Oil
 * Oil industry

External resources

 * RightWeb profile on Scaife, accessed 2011-04-24
 * (Probably many of the profiles below should be moved here.)

External articles

 * John Aravosis, "Super-rich Republican financier, Mellon Scaife's, messy messy divorce papers now online," AMERICAblog, September 24, 2007.
 * Steve Benen, "Scaife, sex, scandal, and schadenfreude," The Carpetbagger Report, October 23, 2007.
 * David Segal, "Low Road to Splitsville - Right-Wing Publisher's Breakup Is Super-Rich In Tawdry Details", Washington Post, October 22, 2007; C01.
 * Karen Rothmyer, The man behind the mask,Salon, April 7, 1998

Profiles

 * Brooks Jackson, "Who Is Richard Mellon Scaife?: He's very rich and very partisan, but is he behind an anti-Clinton conspiracy?" CNN, April 27, 1998.
 * People For the American Way, Richard M. Scaife, PFAW undated, accessed October 2005.
 * Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy, "Scaife: Funding Father of the Right," Washington Post, May 2, 1999; Page A1.
 * Robert G. Kaiser, "Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife," Washington Post, May 3, 1999; Page A1.
 * Robert G. Kaiser, "Money, Family Name Shaped Scaife," Washington Post, May 3, 1999; Page A1.