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A War Time Love Affair: The Round Table and The New Republic, c.1914–1919
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2020
Abstract
Against the backdrop of the Great War a seemingly unlikely transatlantic romance blossomed between the deeply imperialist Round Table journal founded by “Milner’s Kindergarten,” a cadre of young former colonial administrators in Great Britain, and the American progressive standard-bearer The New Republic. The rhetoric of The New Republic in these years was deeply influenced by political Anglo-Saxon thought, as exemplified in The Round Table. Political Anglo-Saxonism was the belief that Anglo-Saxons were uniquely prepared for both self-governance and colonial governance. Adherents judged others’ capacity to self-govern against idealized Anglo norms. Both The Round Table (1910) and The New Republic (1914), from their inaugural issues on, sought national solutions for national problems utilizing a shared rhetoric of national efficiency. During the Great War this shared nationalist-progressivism drew the two groups together facilitating The New Republic’s founders’ early (1915) embrace of American intervention in the war. These connections are illuminated here through the interactions of The New Republic founders: Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl with key members of the British Round Table set, including Lionel Curtis, Philip Henry Kerr, Alfred Zimmern, and the prominent American “imperial school” historian George Louis Beer.
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- The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2021 , pp. 44 - 65
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- © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
1 See, e.g., Noble, David W., “The New Republic and the Idea of Progress, 1914–1920,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 38:3 (Dec. 1951): 387–402 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nuechterlein, James A., “The Dream of Scientific Liberalism: The ‘New Republic’ and American Progressive Thought, 1914–1920,” The Review of Politics 42:2 (Apr. 1980): 167–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 The three authors, collectively, founded The New Republic in 1914 through the patronage of Willard Straight and Dorothy Whitney. McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontentment: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 280.Google Scholar
3 Duncan Bell’s recent work on the ways in which liberalism and empire were intertwined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is of great relevance here. See, e.g., Bell, Duncan, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 9, 90, 115Google Scholar. See also Bell, Duncan, “What is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42:6 (Dec. 2014): 682–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 Lippmann to Graham Wallas, Aug. 5, 1915 in Blum, John Morton (ed.), Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1985), xxi.Google Scholar Wallas and Lippmann’s interactions dated back to Wallas’s lectures as a visiting lecturer at Harvard while Lippmann was a student journalist at the Harvard Crimson.
5 On the international nature of contemporary progressive reform, see Rodgers, Daniel, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. Indeed, it is worth noting that Rodgers’s transnational approach to progressivism arguably laid the foundations for the established literature of the last twenty years on imperial exchanges between the United States and other powers.
6 Flanagan, Maureen, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 215.Google Scholar
7 See, e.g., Stettner, Edward A., Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995)Google Scholar, esp. Chapter 7 “Liberalism and War”: 122–43. See also Noble, “The New Republic and the Idea of Progress,” 396.
8 Nimocks, Walter, Milner’s Young Men: The Kindergarten in Edwardian Imperial Affairs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968), 146–49Google Scholar.
9 Indeed, the Round Table set remained influential well beyond Milner’s death in 1924, and many members were crucial to the later Cliveden set of leading appeasers during the interwar period.
10 Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men, 156.
11 It also stood in stark contrast to eventual Democratic-nominee Woodrow Wilson’s continued advocacy of states’ rights. “The New Nationalism,” Encyclopaedia Britannica www.britannica.com/topic/New-Nationalism (accessed Mar. 25, 2020); Murphy, Gary, “‘Mr. Roosevelt Is Guilty’: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for Constitutionalism, 1910–1912,” Journal of American Studies 36:3 (2002): 441–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robert Eden, “Opinion Leadership and the Problem of Executive Power: Woodrow Wilson’s Original Position,” The Review of Politics 57:3 (1995): 483–503.
12 Theodore Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism” (Osawatomie, Kansas, Aug. 31, 1910) Theodore Roosevelt Papers: Series 5: Speeches and Executive Orders, -1918; 1907, Apr. 15, 1910, Sept 6. Manuscript/Mixed Material. www.loc.gov/item/mss382990693 (accessed Mar. 25, 2020).
13 Roosevelt, “The New Nationalism”.
14 Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909).Google Scholar
15 This is arguably most evident in their role in the creation of the Union of South Africa (1910). For more on the Kindergarten’s explicit use of Alexander Hamilton and the U.S. Constitution to argue in favor of British “Imperial Federation,” see Kirkwood, Patrick M., “Alexander Hamilton and the Early Republic in Edwardian Imperial Thought,” Britain and the World 12:1 (Mar. 2019): 28–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life, 29: “I shall not disguise the fact that on the whole my own preferences are on the side of Hamilton rather than Jefferson”; and F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union (New York: Macmillan, 1906), which inspired the Kindergarten’s embrace of Hamilton’s Federalism first for the South African colonies.
16 For a more detailed discussion of this label, see Stears, Marc, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–1926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 55–57 Google Scholar. See also David Levy’s discussion of national progressivism in Herbert Croly of the New Republic: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) [original 1985] and Charles Forcey’s presentation of Herbert Croly as a “Nationalist Liberal” in Chapter 1 of his The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 3–51.
17 Theodore Roosevelt, “Speech at St. Paul” (St. Paul, MN., Sept. 6, 1910), Theodore Roosevelt Papers: Series 5: Speeches and Executive Orders, -1918; 1907, Apr. 15, 1910, Sept 6. Manuscript/Mixed Material. www.loc.gov/item/mss382990693 (accessed Mar. 25, 2020).
18 James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 205–206, 265.
19 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 247. For more on “national efficiency” as a technocratic and militaristic Edwardian ideology, see G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study of British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (London: The Ashfield Press, 1990).
20 Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men, 5, 7, 11, 18.
21 Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men, 184; and J.R.M. Butler, Lord Lothian, Philip Kerr, 1882–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1960), 323.
22 “Introductory: The Round Table” in The Round Table: A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire 1:1 (Nov. 15, 1910): 1.
23 “Introductory: The Round Table,” 1.
24 A typical issue would have a section on wider Imperial or Foreign Affairs, Political Events in Britain, South Africa, and less regularly Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and India.
25 “Introductory: The Round Table,” 2. For progressive belief in the power of exposing “misinformation,” see Flanagan, America Reformed, 141–42.
26 Priscilla Roberts, “World War I and Anglo-American Relations: The Role of Philip Kerr and The Round Table,” The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs 95:383 (2006): 120; and Brad Snyder, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Founding of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 13, 37. See also James Srodes, On Dupont Circle: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the Progressives Who Shaped Our World (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2012), esp. Chapter 1 “Dinner at the House of Truth.”
27 Straight himself was undoubtedly a convinced advocate of modernizing empire and Anglo exceptionalism, as demonstrated by his education at Cornell under the direction of H. Morse Stephens, a future president of the American Historical Association and a former trainer of Indian Civil Service recruits at Cambridge. Straight had also been a member of Stephens’s popular Kipling Club in Ithaca. Louis Graves, Willard Straight in the Orient: With Illustrations from His Sketch-books (New York: Asia Publishing Company, 1922), 1.
28 Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961). For a more modern rendition of the same claim, see David Seideman, The New Republic: A Voice of American Liberalism (New York: Praeger, 1986), 1–59. Priscilla Roberts has convincingly claimed that Straight’s internationalism “arose primarily from an indiscriminating psychological need to have his country play a great but poorly defined role on the world stage.” Priscilla Roberts, “Willard Straight, The First World War, and ‘Internationalism of all Sorts’: The Inconsistencies of An American Liberal Interventionist,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 44:4 (1998): 493, 499.
29 Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State, 6, 9–10.
30 Allen Freeman Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 90.
31 Interestingly both Weyl and Lippmann’s earlier flirtations with the Socialist Party of America did not disqualify them from such elite company.
32 “The New Republic,” The New Republic: A Journal of Opinion 1:1 (Nov. 7, 1914): 1.
33 Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the States, 6.
34 “The New Republic,” The New Republic, 1.
35 Just as the racism of many American progressives in the South (and beyond) in this era did not disqualify them from the progressive big tent, nor should the spread of racial views expressed by the British “Kindergarten” during and after their time in South Africa.
36 “When President Jackson …” The New Republic 1:1 (Nov. 7, 1914): 5. See also Frank Prochaska, Eminent Victorians on American Democracy: The View From Albion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 70–71, 110, 125; and Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics 1913 Reprint (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1913), 204–205.
37 One could argue that the recent “radical” demands for a national popular vote, and a more population-based and less territorially defined Senate fall within this same broad tradition.
38 See, e.g., McGerr, A Fierce Discontentment, xv: “progressives were radical in their conviction that other social classes must be transformed and in their boldness in going about the business of that transformation. … Progressivism demanded a social transformation that remains at once profoundly impressive and profoundly disturbing a century later.” See also Daniel Gorman on the progressive thought of Lionel Curtis, John Buchan, and other members of the Round Table set. Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 25–27.
39 Toynbee Hall would later inspire Jane Addams of Chicago’s Hull House and much of the wider settlement house movement in the United States. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 64.
40 Tony Honoré, “Feetham, Richard (1874–1965), Judge in South Africa,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/ (accessed Mar. 25, 2020).
41 The young Clement Attlee (future prime minister of the 1945–51 Labour Govt.) would later inherit Curtis’s role as head of the Haileybury Guild when his initial successor moved on in 1907. Deborah Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16.
42 Alex May, “Curtis, Lionel George (1872–1955), writer and public servant,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/ (accessed Mar. 25, 2020); and Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth, 12.
43 Deborah Lavin, “Duncan, Sir Patrick (1870–1943), Politician in South Africa and Governor-General of the Union of South Africa,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/ (accessed Mar. 25, 2020).
44 Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 78, 137.
45 Paul R. Deslandes, Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 38–39. See also Richard Symonds, Oxford and Empire: The Last Lost Cause? (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986).
46 See, e.g., Lionel Curtis to Wm. Lionel Hichens, Nov. 28, 1901, Papers of William Lionel Hichens, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, MSEng.hist.c.1037, folders 29–31; and Richard Davenport-Hines, “Hichens, (William) Lionel [Nel] (1874–1940), Public Servant and Industrialist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com/ (accessed Mar. 25, 2020).
47 For a wider discussion of the influence of Anglo exceptionalism in both the British Empire and the contemporary United States, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
48 See James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1888).
49 Roberts, “World War I and Anglo-American Relations,” 116.
50 See, e.g., the work of the former president of Harvard (1869–1909) Charles W. Eliot, “National Efficiency Best Developed Under Free Governments,” The Atlantic Monthly (Apr. 1915): 433–41. In this piece the avowedly anti-imperialist Eliot demonstrates a good dose of Anglo exceptionalism as proven by his long discussion of British and American inventions as the “legitimate fruits of liberty.” This was in turn contrasted against Germanic efficiency, which was essentially autocratic, servile, and mechanical. In short, German national efficiency, Eliot argued, was hindered by a Prussian lack of liberty.
51 See, e.g., Philonous’s critique “Intellectual Leadership in America,” The New Republic 1:2 (Nov. 14, 1914): 16. “Philonous” was the pen name of the Minsk-born, Jewish-American philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen, who often attacked American philosophy, political, and legal thought and public discourse more broadly as being too rooted in the Anglo-Saxon tradition and therefore overlooking the accomplishments of Continental Europe.
52 See, e.g., Randolph S. Bourne, “Theodore Dreiser,” The New Republic 2:2 (Apr. 17, 1915): 8; e.g. “Anglo-Saxon civilization seems to have been slowly starved of some of the emotional values which Europe has conserved, to both its woe and glory.” See also Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, 231–34.
53 See, e.g., the writings of the progressive president of Harvard (1909–1933), Abbott Lawrence Lowell: “The Anglo-Saxon race was prepared for it [self-government] by centuries of discipline under the supremacy of law, and men will always take generations to acquire it, unless they are immersed in, and assimilated by a mass of others already accustomed to it. … these conditions are not true in our new possessions [Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, The Philippines etc.].” Lowell, “The Colonial Expansion of the United States,” The Atlantic Monthly (Feb. 1899): 152.
54 Paul Rich “Alfred Zimmern’s Cautious Idealism: The League of Nations, International Education, and the Commonwealth,” Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed, eds. David Long and Peter Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79–80.
55 However, Zimmern was raised Christian and was later active in the World Council of Churches. See Daniel Gorman, “Ecumenical Internationalism: Willoughby Dickinson, the League of Nations, and the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches,” The Journal of Contemporary History 45:1 (Jan. 2010): 51–73; and D.J. Markwell, “Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard (1879–1957), Internationalist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com (accessed Mar. 25, 2020): Christian denomination not specified. See also: Alfred E. Zimmern, “The Ethical Presuppositions of a World Order” in The Universal Church and the World of Nations, ed. Philip Henry Kerr (Chicago: Willett, Clark & Co., 1938).
56 Andrea Bosco, The Round Table Movement and the Fall of the “Second” British Empire, 1909–1919 (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 274.
57 For example, his substantial links with Louis Brandeis have previously been discussed at length in Philippa Strum’s Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism (1992). Philippa Strum, Brandeis: Beyond Progressivism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 102–106.
58 David Edgerton, Welfare State Britain, 1920–1970 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59. On Britain and the League of Nations, see Peter Yearwood, “‘On the Safe and Right Lines’: The Lloyd George Government and the Origins of the League of Nations, 1916–1918,” The Historical Journal 32:1 (Mar. 1989): 131–55.
59 Markwell, “Zimmern, Sir Alfred Eckhard (1879–1957), internationalist”; and “Alfred Zimmern,” UNESCO Archives, https://atom.archives.unesco.org/zimmern-alfred-2 (accessed Mar. 25, 2020). See also Joanne Morefield, “Covenants without Swords”: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 59–60.
60 Michael Cox, “Introduction” in The Twenty Years Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, ed. E.H. Carr (New York: Palgrave, 2001), xciii; and Rich, “Alfred Zimmern’s Cautious Idealism,” 79–80.
61 See Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (1990).
62 Mrs. Sidney Webb to Alfred Zimmern, July 7, 1916, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, Papers of Sir Alfred Zimmern (hereafter Zimmern Papers), MS. Zimmern 14: General Correspondence, 1913–15, folder 196.
63 Alfred Eckhard Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth Century Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911).
64 See e.g., J.D.B. Miller, “The Commonwealth and World Order: The Zimmern Vision and After,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 8:1 (1979): 162. Duncan Bell has already written on the influence of Zimmern’s treatment of Ancient Athens on Curtis’s promotion of a British Commonwealth at the core of the international order. See Duncan Bell, “From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought,” The Historical Journal 49:3 (2006): 735–59.
65 C.A. Hagerman, Britain’s Imperial Muse: The Classics, Imperialism, and the Indian Empire, 1784–1914 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 4–5.
66 Kristofer Allerfeldt, “Rome, Race, and the Republic: Progressive America and the Fall of the Roman Empire, 1890–1920,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 7:3 (July 2008): 297–323. Allerfeldt’s article also discussed the influence of such classical comparisons on anti-imperialists.
67 See, e.g., Roosevelt’s invitation sent to Murray and wife to visit him at Sagamore Hill in July 1916, Theodore Roosevelt to Gilbert Murray, July 12, 1916, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, Papers of Gilbert Murray (hereafter Murray Papers), MS. Murray 31: Letters to Murray, July–Sept. 1916, folder 24: “Could you and of course Mrs. Murray come out here (Oyster Bay, Long Island) to lunch any day from Wednesday 26th to Sunday July 30th.” See also Gilbert Murray, The League of Nations and the Democratic Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918).
68 “Mr. Roosevelt in The City,” The Times, June 1, 1910, 9.
69 Serge Ricard, “A Hero’s Welcome: Theodore Roosevelt’s Triumphal Tour of Europe in 1910” in America’s Transatlantic Turn: Theodore Roosevelt and the “Discovery” of Europe, eds. Hans Krabbendam and John M. Thompson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 152–53.
70 Herbert Croly to Gilbert Murray, July 14, 1916, Murray Papers, MS. 31: Letters to Murray, July–Sept. 1916, folder 39.
71 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 71.
72 Peter J. Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace: The League of Nations in British Policy, 1914–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 65.
73 See R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern, and Arthur Greenwood (eds.), The War and Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1915).
74 Walter Lippmann to Alfred Zimmern, June 7, 1915, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 14: General Correspondence, 1913–15, folder 180. N.B.—Robert W. Seton-Watson, the Skye-born Scots historian mentioned by Lippmann, was yet another product of New College.
75 Walter Lippmann to Alfred Zimmern, July 6, 1915, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 14: General Correspondence, 1913–15, folder 194.
76 Herbert Croly to Alfred Zimmern, July 8, 1915, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 14: General Correspondence, 1913–15, folders 198–99; and Herbert Croly to Alfred Zimmern, Aug. 6, 1915, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 14: General Correspondence, 1913–15, folders 205–206.
77 Croly to Zimmern, Aug. 6, 1915, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 14, folders 205–206.
78 See, e.g., Theodore Roosevelt to Rudyard Kipling, Nov. 4, 1914, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, Papers of Alfred Milner, MS. Milner 349: Correspondence, Dec. 1913–1914, folder 267.
79 Yearwood, Guarantee of Peace, 41. Beer’s official title was Chief of the Colonial Division of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace.
80 Lionel Curtis to Lady Selborne, Dec. 8, 1915, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, Papers of Lionel Curtis and the Round Table, MS. Curtis 2: Correspondence, 1910–1919, folder 202.
81 George Louis Beer, “America’s Part Among Nations,” The New Republic 5:55 (Nov. 20, 1915): 62.
82 See, e.g., “Germany and the Prussian Spirit,” The Round Table 1:16 (Sept. 1914): 616–58; Beer, “America’s Part Among Nations,” 62.
83 Beer, “America’s Part Among Nations,” 63.
84 See Lionel Curtis, The Commonwealth of Nations: An Inquiry into the Nature of Citizenship in the British Empire, and into the Mutual Relations of the Several Communities Thereof (London: Macmillan and Co., 1916).
85 Kerr to N. Astor, Apr. 13, 1915 in Deborah Lavin, From Empire to Commonwealth, 128. Nancy Astor is now best remembered as the first female MP to take up her seat in the House of Commons in 1919, and for her role in the “Cliveden Set” of interwar appeasers, which later grew out of the Round Table movement.
86 A.S. Eisenstadt, Carnegie’s Model Republic: Triumphant Democracy and the British-American Relationship (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 127.
87 Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765 in Anthony Brundage and Richard A. Cosgrove, The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870–1960 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 140.
88 Blum (ed.), Public Philosopher, xxiii.
89 Editorial (Herbert Croly), “An Alliance with Great Britain,” The New Republic 5:55 (Nov. 20, 1915): 56–57. This call occurred against the backdrop of the independent foundations of James Bryce’s League of Nations Society, and William Howard Taft’s League to Enforce Peace.
90 Walter Lippmann to Graham Wallas, Apr. 21, 1916, in Blum (ed.), Public Philosopher, 46.
91 Roberts, “World War One and American Intervention,” 123.
92 This marked similarity between the thought of Walter Hines Page and Walter Lippmann surely helped the Round Table set to make their pitch on the necessity of an enduring Anglo-American alliance. For Lippmann on the importance of sea power, see his Stakes of Diplomacy (1915) and also his The Political Scene: An Essay on the Victory of 1918 (1919). Blum (ed.), Public Philosopher, xxii.
93 Walter Hines Page to Arthur W. Page, July 25, 1915, in Butler, Lord Lothian, 59.
94 Roberts, “Willard Straight, The First World War, and ‘Internationalism of all Sorts,’” 506.
95 Lippmann to Graham Wallas, Apr. 21, 1916, in Roberts, “World War One and American Intervention,” 127.
96 Mark W. Janis, America and the Law of Nations, 1776-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 201; and Lassa Oppenheimer, International Law: A Treatise 3d ed. (Clark, NJ: The Lawbook Exchange, 2004), 264. See also Stephen Wertheim, “The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920,” Diplomatic History 35:5 (Nov. 2011): 797–836. For Taft-Bryce correspondence, see William H. Taft to James Bryce, Oct. 21, 1916, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Western Manuscripts and Special Collections, James Bryce Papers U.S.A. (hereafter Bryce Papers U.S.A.), MS. Bryce U.S.A. 10: Letters, William Taft etc. … to Bryce, folder 183; and William H. Taft to James Bryce, Feb. 6, 1917, Bryce Papers U.S.A.
97 Roberts, “World War One and American Intervention,” 126.
98 Walter Weyl to Alfred Zimmern, Feb. 17, 1916, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 15: General Correspondence, 1916–18, folder 30; and Herbert Croly to Zimmern, Oct. 15, 1916, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 15, folder 34 [above quote]. The piece had already been published in The New Republic 5:61 (Jan. 1, 1916): 215–17.
99 Herbert Croly to Alfred Zimmern, Jan. 13, 1917, Zimmern Papers, MS. Zimmern 15: General Correspondence, 1916–18, folder 53.
100 Walter Lippmann (Editorial), “In the Next Four Years,” The New Republic 10:122 (Mar. 3, 1917): 123.
101 See Kirkwood, “Alexander Hamilton and the Early Republic in American Thought,” 35–37. See also Kendle, John E., The Round Table Movement and Imperial Federation (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1975), 129.Google Scholar
102 Oliver, Alexander Hamilton, 435.
103 Lipmann, “In the Next Four Years,” 123–24.
104 Lipmann, “In the Next Four Years,” 124.
105 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 279.
106 Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State, 130.
107 Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State, 126.
108 “A Statement from the Founders of The Round Table,” The New Republic 13:159 (Nov. 17, 1917): vi.
109 See, e.g., Zimmern, Alfred, “The Meaning of Nationality,” The New Republic 5: 61 (Jan. 1, 1916): 215–17.Google Scholar
110 See, e.g., Noble, “The New Republic and the Idea of Progress,” 190; and Nuechterlein, “The Dream of Scientific Liberalism,” 172.
111 “A Statement from the Founders of The Round Table,” vi.
112 “A Statement from the Founders of The Round Table,” vi.
113 “A Statement from the Founders of The Round Table,” vi.
114 “The Round Table Advert,” The New Republic 13:164 (Dec. 22, 1917): advertising annex. Smuts would later prove to be perhaps the single most important “British” player at the Versailles Peace Conference other than Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Kerr, by then serving as Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s personal secretary, had earlier in 1917 asked Smuts to reach out personally to President Wilson to convince him of the necessity of British Dominions like South Africa retaining former German colonies such as German Southwest Africa (modern Namibia). See “General Botha—an Appreciation,” The Round Table 10 (1919): 98.
115 See, e.g., “When President Jackson ….” The New Republic 1:1 (Nov. 7, 1914): 5.
116 Roberts, “World War One and American Intervention,” 126, 129.
117 For more on Philip Henry Kerr’s role as David Lloyd George’s “gatekeeper” at Versailles. see MacMillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002).Google Scholar
118 For a wider discussion on how many of the individuals (and ideas) discussed above came to influence the post-World War One period through the clash of self-determination and empire at Versailles and in the League of Nations, see Susan Pedersen’s excellent The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), especially relevant here is Chapter 1: “Of Covenants and Carve-Ups.” For further relevant background, see also Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations: Review Essay,” American Historical Review 112:4 (Oct. 2007): 1091–1117.
119 Lippmann to Zimmern, June 7, 1915. Lippmann “In the Next Four Years,” 123-24. Herbert Croly to Alfred Zimmern, Aug. 6, 1915. See, e.g., Zimmern, “The Meaning of Nationality,” 215–17. George Louis Beer, “America’s Part Among Nations,” 62; and “An Alliance with Great Britain,” 56–57.
120 Roberts, “World War One and American Intervention,” 118.