Wickham Steed

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H. Wickham "Stickum" Steed full name Henry Wickham Steed (October 10, 1871 - January 13, 1956) was a British journalist and historian. He was one of the first English speakers to sound the warning bells about the new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler. He was born in Long Melford, England.

Appointed by Joseph Pulitzer as Paris correspondent for the New York World, he later joined The Times as a foreign correspondent and was editor from 1919 until his resignation in 1922. The following year he became editor of Review of Reviews (1923-30), the journal that had been established by William Stead in 1890.

As a foreign correspondent, Steed lived in Vienna before the war, during which time he acquired a deep contempt for Austria-Hungary.^[1]. An anti-Semite and an Germanophobe, in an editorial Steed wrote in The Times on July 31, 1914, Steed labeled efforts to stop the impeding war as "a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality"^[2]. From July 22, 1914 on, Steed in close agreement with The Times' proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, took a very bellicose line and in editorials written on July 29 and July 31, Steed urged that the British Empire should enter the coming war^[3].

An leading expert on Eastern Europe, his views had much influence with decision-makers such as high level bureaucrats and Cabinet politicians in the First World War and its aftermath. During the war, Steed befriended anti-Habsburg émigrés such as Edvard Beneš, Ante Trumbić, Tomáš Masaryk and Roman Dmowski and advised the British government to seek the liquidation of Austria-Hungary as a war aim. In particular, Steed was a very strong advocate of uniting all of the South Slavic peoples such as the Croats, the Serbs, the Slovenes, etc into a federation to be called Yugoslavia. The British Ambassador to Italy claimed in a diplomatic dispatch that Steed's fondness for the Yugoslav concept deprived from a relationship he maintained for a number of years "filially I believe rather maritally" with a Slavic woman from the Balkans^[4]. In October 1918, Steed met with the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić to gain his support for the Yugoslav concept; Steed was deeply angered when he learned that Pašić saw the new state as merely as extension of greater Serbia and had no intention of sharing power with the Croats or the Slovenes^[5]. Steed charged Pašić with being a new "sultan" and severed his friendship with Paśić^[6] .

After the war, Steed strongly disapproved of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. In an editorial written in another Northcliffe paper, the Daily Mail on March 28, 1919, Steed accused the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Steed detested of betraying the White Russians because of a plot by "international Jewish financiers" and the Germans to help the Bolshviks stay in power^[7]. In 1920, Steed endorsed the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as genuine in an editorial in The Times. In the same editorial, Steed blamed the Jews for World War I, the Bolshevik regime and called Jews the greatest threat to the British Empire. However, in 1921, when the Time’s Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) correspondent proven that the The Protocols were a forgery, Steed retraced his endorsement of The Protocols.