type: timeline_event
Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon banking and oil fortune, begins major funding of the Heritage Foundation through the Scaife Family Charitable Trust, becoming the organization's primary long-term donor just one year after its founding. Following Joseph Coors' initial $250,000 seed funding in 1973, Scaife's sustained financial support enables Heritage's transformation from a small startup to a major institutional force in American politics. Over the next two decades, Scaife contributes more than $23 million to Heritage, serving as vice-chairman of the foundation's board of trustees and providing the financial backbone for its expansion and influence. The Washington Post later identifies Scaife as "the leading financial supporter of the movement that reshaped American politics in the last quarter of the 20th century," while Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese III describes him as "the unseen hand" of the conservative movement. Scaife's funding pattern - supporting Heritage, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, and later the Manhattan Institute and Cato - demonstrates the coordinated plutocratic infrastructure behind the Powell Memo implementation, creating an interconnected network of think tanks advancing corporate and conservative policy across multiple institutional fronts.