A network of Anglophile financiers, journalists, and academics has existed for a generation and operates, in Quigley’s words, “to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act.” He knew this because he had studied it for twenty years and was permitted, for two years in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. He wrote that he had no aversion to it or to most of its aims, had been close to it and to many of its instruments for much of his life, and objected chiefly to one thing: that it wished to remain unknown. This admission appears on page 950 of Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, published by Macmillan in 1966. It is not the outside speculation of a critic assembling a puzzle from public sources. It is the memoir of an interior sympathizer who broke ranks on the single question of whether the arrangement should be publicly known.
Carroll Quigley taught at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service for most of his career, having done his graduate work in history at Harvard with additional study in political science. He was a member of the American Historical Association, the American Economic Association, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His prior book, The Evolution of Civilizations, laid out the seven-stage framework he applied in Tragedy and Hope. His companion volume, The Anglo-American Establishment, completed in 1949 but published only posthumously in 1981, documented the Milner Group in greater detail than Tragedy and Hope itself. He was, by his own account, close enough to the network to be granted access to its records and sympathetic enough to most of its aims to be trusted with them. He was also independent enough to decide that his own judgment on the question of publicity should override the group’s preference.
The book appeared in 1966, at a moment when American public discourse on power was structured by two categories: Communism on one side and Free World democracy on the other. The Radical Right had spent the years from 1948 to 1955 attacking Harvard, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Institute of International Education as vehicles of Communist infiltration. Quigley’s diagnosis, written after those attacks had run their course, was that the Radical Right had correctly identified the existence of a network operating across universities, press, and government, but had incorrectly identified its ideology and origins. The network was Anglophile and financial, not Communist. Its centre was J. P. Morgan and Company in New York and Lazard Brothers in London. Its front organisations were the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. Its founders were Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner. Its principal ideological commitment was to English-speaking federation under the eventual leadership of what Quigley called the Eastern Establishment. To document this in 1966, from within a mainstream academic press, was to say something the American conversation had no vocabulary for.
The full summary works through what Quigley documents about the founding of Rhodes’s secret society on 5 February 1891, the extension of the network through Milner’s Kindergarten and the Round Table Groups between 1909 and 1913, and the establishment of Chatham House in 1919 and the Council on Foreign Relations shortly after as front organisations for those Round Table nuclei. It traces the design of the Bank for International Settlements at Basel in 1929, intended as the apex of a system of financial control by central banks acting in concert. It works through Quigley’s explicit passage on American two-party politics: that the two parties should be almost identical, so that voters can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy. It documents J. P. Morgan’s satisfaction in 1904 and 1924, when both major presidential candidates were within his sphere of influence — in 1924, the Democratic nominee was one of his chief lawyers and the Republican nominee was the classmate and handpicked choice of his partner Dwight Morrow.
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