In February 1891, Cecil Rhodes, the journalist William T. Stead, and Reginald Brett, later Lord Esher, drew up the organization of a secret society with an inner circle called the Society of the Elect and an outer circle called the Association of Helpers. Rhodes had written the plan into his first will at the age of twenty-four, naming the Jesuits as his model and the “ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire” among his aims. Carroll Quigley’s The Anglo-American Establishment, completed in 1949 and published in 1981, traces what that society became under Alfred Milner after Rhodes’s death in 1902. Its record includes the Jameson Raid and the Boer War, the constitution of the Union of South Africa, control of The Times for most of fifty years, the founding of The Round Table and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the drafting of the Balfour Declaration and the 1919 constitution for India, and a central hand in the appeasement of Germany from the Rhineland to Munich. It carried out all of this through a few dozen men drawn from three Oxford colleges, with no oaths and no formal membership, working on the opinions of a small circle of “important people” while the public saw only a series of unconnected institutions.
Quigley (1910-1977) taught at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and had been an instructor at Princeton and Harvard. He served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the House Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, and the U.S. Navy, and his other major works are The Evolution of Civilization and Tragedy and Hope. He wrote as a sympathizer. He agreed with the Group’s goals, regarded the British Commonwealth as one of the great achievements of history, and said so in his preface. His objection was to method: power placed in hands chosen by friendship over merit, blindness to other classes and other nations, and the Group’s habit of retreating to verbal clichés in a crisis. He relied partly on people close to the Group whom he could not name, used their information only where documents available to anyone confirmed it, and was told the story would be better left untold. A Georgetown professor with that record could not find a publisher for the manuscript. It sat for thirty-two years until Books in Focus released it in 1981.
The narrative closes in 1949, four years after the General Election that removed the Conservatives from office and cut off the Group’s political influence. By then Ireland had left the Commonwealth, India had been partitioned, Burma was drifting away, and South Africa was more distant from Britain than at any time since 1910. The popular explanation for appeasement was the “Cliveden set,” which Quigley treats as a caricature that caught one corner of a much larger structure. The accepted account of British imperial and foreign policy since the Boer War had been written largely by the Group itself. Its members edited the Dictionary of National Biography from 1921 to 1938, produced the annual Survey of International Affairs and the History of the Peace Conference, held the Oxford and London chairs in international relations, and had just published the first volumes of an official History of The Times that set out to refute the charge that the paper’s anti-German line from 1895 to 1914 helped bring on the First World War. Quigley was writing against a history composed by its own subjects.
The book reads as a study of how a small circle captures the institutions that form opinion and then the institutions that record what happened. The full summary follows several of its most specific findings. Ormsby-Gore told the House of Commons on 21 July 1937 that the Balfour Declaration had been drafted by Milner. Curtis’s private Round Table study group invented India’s system of “dyarchy” and sent its plan to the incoming Viceroy while withholding it from its own members, lest the public get hold of it. A German officers’ plot to remove Hitler, disclosed to Lord Halifax on 5 September 1938, was called off at noon on 28 September when word reached Berlin that Chamberlain was flying to Munich. Among all the members of the Milner Group and the Cecil Bloc, only Lord Phillimore had his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography written by an outsider, and his is the only one that is not wholeheartedly adulatory.
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