Why Cordelia Scaife May spent her fortune fighting immigration
Heiress’ money remains lifeblood of the anti-immigration movement
She was an heiress without a cause — an indifferent student, an unhappy young bride, a miscast socialite. Her most enduring passion was for birds.
But Cordelia Scaife May eventually found her life’s purpose: curbing what she perceived as the lethal threat of overpopulation by trying to shut America’s doors to immigrants.
She believed that the United States was “being invaded on all fronts” by foreigners, who “breed like hamsters” and exhaust natural resources. She thought that the border with Mexico should be sealed and that abortions on demand would contain the swellingmasses in developing countries.
An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views.
Today, years after Mrs. May’s death — she died at her home in 2005 at age 76; her death was ruled a suicide by asphyxiation after a battle with pancreatic cancer — her money remains the lifeblood of the movement through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Donald Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefitsfor migrants.
Mrs. May’s story is viewed as helping explain the ascendance of once-fringe views in the debate over immigration in America, including exaggerated claims of criminality, diseaseor dependency on public benefits among migrants. Though their methods radically diverged, Mrs. May and the killer in the recent mass shooting in El Paso applied the same language — both warning of an immigrant “invasion,” an idea also promotedby Mr. Trump.
In many ways, the Trump presidency is seen as the culmination of Mrs. May’s vision for strictly limiting immigration. Groups that she funded shared policy proposals with Mr. Trump’s campaign, sent key staff members to join his administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda to upend practices adopted by his Democratic and Republican predecessors.
“She would have fit in very fine in the current White House,” said George Zeidenstein, whose mainstream population-control group Mrs. May supported before she shifted to anti-immigration advocacy.
Unlike her more famous brother, the right-wing philanthropist and TribuneReview publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, Mrs. May largely stayed out of the public eye. A childless widow who lived alone outside Pittsburgh, she instructed associates not to reveal her philanthropic interests and in some cases even to destroy her correspondence.
Mrs. May’s unpublished writings reveal her evolution from an environmental minded Theodore Roosevelt Republican — in 1972 she was the nation’s largest single donor to mainstream congressional candidates — to an ardent nativist. Her ideological transformation presaged the Republican Party’s own shift from blueblooded, traditional conservatism toward hard-right populism.
Chatty, handwritten notes to John D. Rockefeller III, philanthropist Helen Clay Frick and the head of the National Audubon Society about luncheons and overseas trips gradually gave way over the years to darker exchanges with fringe figures who believed that black people were lessintelligent than white people, Latino immigrants were criminals and white Americanswere being displaced.
But Mrs. May disputed the notion that she was racist, writing to a grant recipient in November 1994, “Can we not put imaginary paper bags over the immigrants’ heads, see them as colorless consumers, and count only their deleterious numbers?”
Restrictionist groups she financed have blocked attempts at amnesties and immigration reform bills in Congress over the years. They fought for Proposition 187 in California to deny education, routine health care and other public services to undocumented immigrants; they argued against in-state tuition for the children of undocumented workers in Utah. They supported “show me your papers” laws in Arizona and Georgia and draconian local ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch,Texas.
“We occupied the space before anybody, and the people who helped found the organization and fund the organization, including Mrs. May, were people of enormous foresight and wisdom,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), who knew Mrs. May. “They would be gratified over the fact that we’ve seen these ideas championedat the highest level.”
“Without Cordy May, there’s no FAIR,” said Roger Conner, the organization’s first executive director. “There was no money without her.”
Two passions converge
Mrs. May’s immigration activism began in the 1970s, when the numbers of legal and illegal arrivals in the country were reaching heights unseen in decades. But she grew up during a period with the lowest levels of immigration in a century (and lower than any period since), thanks to a 1924 law that imposed strict quotas favoring Western European migrants.
Margaret Sanger, the famous and, in some circles, scandalous founder of Planned Parenthood, provided the sense of direction Mrs. May had craved.
Mrs. May first worked for the Planned Parenthood chapter in Pittsburgh and later joined the board of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “I have always admired and tried to take a part in the work that you started,” she wrote in a 1961 letter to Mrs. Sanger.
Mrs. May’s twin passions, protecting natural habitats and helping women prevent unplanned pregnancies, merged over time into a single goal of preserving the environment by discouraging offspring altogether. “The unwanted child is not the problem,” she would later write, “but, rather, the wanted one that society, for diverse cultural reasons, demands.”
Mrs. May joined the board of the Population Council, a group founded by John D. Rockefeller III that emphasized family planning and economic development as ways tolower birthrates around the world. A 1973 letter to the Population Council from Mrs. May’s office revealed her increasingly tough stance on population control. Contraceptives had made too little impact,the letter said.
“Although we are conscious of the highly sensitive nature of this subject,” it said, “we feel confident that the leadership position of the council in the population field can be used to greatly accelerate the availability of abortion services worldwide on an ‘abortion upon request’ basis.”
By 1974, after more than two decades working with Planned Parenthood, Mrs. May had resigned from the group. Two years later, her top aide delivered a stern message to Mr. Zeidenstein, the new president of the Population Council: Family planning andfamine relief were a waste of money. Instead, “the U.S. should seal its border” with Mexico. According to a memo by Mr. Zeidenstein, Mrs. May’s views were becoming so radicalized that “one got the impression” she favored compulsory sterilization to limit birthrates in developing countries.
Mr. Rockefeller, taken aback by Mrs. May’s shift, wrote to her that he “had not been aware that differences of this seeming magnitude existed between us.” She responded that she would have severed ties sooner if not for her regard for him, and sent him the mission statement for a new group she had bankrolled, the Environmental Fund.
Buried in the document was a telling reference. “Immigration,” the statement said, “should also be brought into balance with emigration immediately.”
The Environmental Fund pushed mainstream concerns about overpopulation to the fringe and stoked opposition to immigration. Virginia Abernethy, a selfdescribed “ethnic separatist” who became involved in the group, now called Population-Environment Balance, said in an interview that Mrs. May was “the first person who comes to mind” of those who pushed the population-control movement to oppose immigration.
John Tan ton, a charismatic eye doctor and environmentalist from Michigan, would leverage Mrs. May’s financial resources to propel the budding anti-immigration movement forward. In 1978, Dr. Tanton wrote a nine-page proposal for funding from Mrs. May to start a group called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. Mrs. May provided $50,000 to getthe group off the ground.
Patrick Burns, an early employee of FAIR, saw Mrs. May as vulnerable. “John looked at Cordy as a buffalo to hunt and bone out for wealth,” Mr. Burns said.
An enduring and vital influence
In 1996, Mrs. May, then 68, establisheda new foundation, Colcom, to pursue her most important goals even after herdeath, including assisting charitable initiatives in Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania, as well as cultural and environmental causes.
But environmental groups were“doomed to failure,” she wrote in her nonprofit application to the IRS, until they recognized “that the degradation of our natural world results ultimately from the press of human numbers.” In addition to stricter immigration, she supported “the study of human intelligence as it relates to schools and the workplace” and “research in the area of human differences,” she explained, echoing the language of the eugenicsmovement.
Mrs. May was remembered in the local press for her devotion to the environment and family planning, and her support of Pittsburgh’s aviary. Her obituary in the Post-Gazette didn’t mention immigration at all.
She left almost everything to the Colcom Foundation. In 2005, $215 million from her family trust poured into the foundation’s coffers, along with another $30 million from her personal estate. Another $176 million transferred from herestate in 2006.
In all, since Mrs. May’s death, the anti-immigration groupshave received $180 million. The market value of Colcom’sassets is $500 million.
“The issues which I have supported during my lifetime have not been popular ones in many cases, nor do I anticipate that they will be so in the future,” Mrs. May wrote to Colcom’s board members in the group’s mission statement, calling on them “to exercise the courage of their convictions” after her death.
“The presence of controversy,” she said, “is often a certainsign that unexamined opinions are being challenged.”