History
The Foundation was established in 1942, shortly after the death of Lynde Bradley. However it was not until twenty years after the death of his brother Harry Lynde Bradley, in 1965, that the Foundation expanded in size and began to focus on public policy. This was followed by the 1985 acquisition of Allen-Bradley by Rockwell International Corporation, with a significant portion of the proceeds going into the expansion of The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which saw its assets rise from $14m to over $290m. In 1986 the Foundation gave away $23m, more than it had in the previous four decades. Whereas in 1980 only 2.5% of grants were related to public policy, by 1990, under the leadership of Mike Joyce (formerly at the John M. Olin Foundation) it was 60%.
The organization was founded in an attempt to preserve and extend the principles and philosophy used by the Bradley brothers.
During their life they were committed to preserving and defending the tradition of free representative government and private enterprise. According to them, "the good society is a free society. The Bradley Foundation is likewise devoted to strengthening American democratic capitalism and the institutions, principles and values that sustain and nurture it."
The foundation supports limited government, conceived of as a dynamic marketplace where economic, intellectual, and cultural activity can flourish. It states that it defends American ideas and institutions. Next to that it recognizes that responsible self-government depends on informing citizens and creating a well informed public opinion. The foundation tries to accomplish that by financing scholarly studies and academic achievements, most especially by scholars coincidentally named Bradley.
The Bradley Foundation's former president, Michael S. Joyce, was instrumental in creating the Philanthropy Roundtable. The goal of the Roundtable's founders was to provide a forum where donors could discuss the principles and practices that inform the best of America's charitable tradition. Currently, there are more than 600 Roundtable Associates.
In the early 1990s the foundation helped support The American Spectator, which at the time was researching damaging material on President Bill Clinton. The Bradley Foundation has provided funding for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). PNAC brought together prominent members of the (George W) Bush Administration (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz) in the late 1990s to articulate their neoconservative foreign policy, including sending a letter to President Bill Clinton urging him to invade Iraq.
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