Archival sources shed new light on and offer a fuller picture of the story of Norman Jolliffe's early, but finally unsuccessful, effort to interest the Rockefeller Foundation's Division of Medical Sciences in funding a comprehensive program of alcoholism research in the late 1930s. New documentation also casts doubt on Mark Keller's contention that the Research Council on Problems of Alcohol--the organizational flagship of the "new scientific approach" to alcohol-related problems in this period--emerged directly from Jolliffe's failed Rockefeller Foundation request.