| Carroll Quigley | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 9, 1910 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Died | January 3, 1977 (aged 66) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard University |
| Occupation | Professor |
| Known for | Career at Georgetown University |
Carroll Quigley (November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977) was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is noted for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, for his academic publications, and for his research on secret societies.[1][2]
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Quigley was born in Boston, and attended Harvard University, where he studied history and earned B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He taught at Princeton University, and then at Harvard, and then at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976.[1]
From 1941 until 1969, he taught a two-semester course at Georgetown on the development of civilizations. According to the obituary in the Washington Star, many alumni of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service asserted that this was "the most influential course in their undergraduate careers".[1]
In addition to his academic work, Quigley served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration in the 1950s.[1] Quigley served as a book reviewer for the Washington Star and was a contributor and editorial board member of Current History.[2]:94 His work emphasized "inclusive diversity" as a value of Western Civilization long before diversity became commonplace, and he denounced Platonic doctrines as an especially pernicious deviation from this ideal, preferring the pluralism of Thomas Aquinas. Quigley said of himself that he was a conservative defending the liberal tradition of the West. He was an early and fierce critic of the Vietnam War, and he was against the activities of the military-industrial complex which he saw as the future downfall of the country.
Quigley retired from Georgetown in June, 1976, and died the following year.[1]
In his freshman year in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, future U.S. President Bill Clinton took Quigley's course, receiving a 'B' as his final grade in both semesters.[2]:94, 96
Clinton named Quigley as an important influence on his aspirations and political philosophy in 1991, when launching his presidential campaign in a speech at Georgetown.[2]:96 He also mentioned Quigley again during his acceptance speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as follows:
As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things–that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.[3]
One distinctive feature of Quigley’s historical writings was his assertion that secret societies have played a significant role in recent world history. His writing on this topic has made Quigley famous among many who investigate conspiracy theories.[2]:96, 98 Quigley’s views are particularly notable because the majority of reputable academic historians profess skepticism about conspiracy theories.[4]
In his book The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, written in 1949 but published posthumously in 1981, Quigley purports to trace the history of a secret society founded in 1891 by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner. The society consisted of an inner circle (“The Society of the Elect”) and an outer circle (“The Association of Helpers”).[5]:ix, 3 The society as a whole does not have a fixed name:
This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. ... I have chosen to call it the Milner group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group. It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century.[5]:ix
Quigley assigns this group primary or exclusive credit for several historical events: the Jameson Raid, the Second Boer War, the founding of the Union of South Africa, the replacement of the British Empire with the Commonwealth of Nations, and a number of Britain’s foreign policy decisions in the twentieth century.[5]:5
In 1966, Quigley published a one-volume history of the twentieth century entitled Tragedy and Hope. At several points in this book, the history of the Milner group is discussed. Moreover, Quigley states that he has recently been in direct contact with this organization, whose nature he contrasts to right-wing claims of a communist conspiracy:
This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements.... This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.[6]:949-950
Quigley also stated:
| “ | It was this group of people, whose wealth and influence so exceeded their experience and understanding, who provided much of the framework of influence which the Communist sympathizers and fellow travelers took over in the United States in the 1930s. It must be recognized that the power of these energetic Left wingers exercised was never their own power or Communist power but was ultimately the power of the international financial coterie, and, once the anger and suspicions of the American people were aroused as they were in the 1950s, it was a fairly simple matter to get rid of the Red sympathizers. Before this could be done, however, a congressional committee, following backward to their source the threads which led from the admitted Communists like Whittaker Chambers, through Alger Hiss, and the Carnegie Endowment to Thomas Lamont and the Morgan Bank, fell into the whole complicated network of the interlocking tax-exempt foundations. The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the "most respected" newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile. An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly. Four years later, the Reece Committee's general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called "Foundations: Their Power and Influence."[6]:954-955 | ” |
According to Quigley, the leaders of this group were Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner from 1891 until Rhodes’ death in 1902, Milner alone until his own death in 1925, Lionel Curtis from 1925 to 1955, Robert H. (Baron) Brand from 1955 to 1963, and Adam D. Marris from 1963 until the time Quigley wrote his book. This organization also functioned through certain loosely affiliated “front groups”, including the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. After 1960, while the offspring of the Milner Group, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs still remained dominant in political affairs, much of the influence of the original circle around Milner (who edited periodicals like The Round Table) dwindled, as other political power-brokers took over the power structures their predecessors had established.[6]:132, 950-952
In addition, other secret societies are briefly discussed in Tragedy and Hope, including a consortium of the leaders of the central banks of several countries, who formed the Bank for International Settlements:
The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the worlds' central banks which were themselves private corporations. The growth of financial capitalism made possible a centralization of world economic control and use of this power for the direct benefit of financiers and the indirect injury of all other economic groups.[6]:323-324
Soon after its publication, Tragedy and Hope caught the attention of authors interested in conspiracies. They proceeded to publicize Quigley's claims, disseminating them to a much larger audience than his original readership.[2]:96, 98
This began in 1970, when W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley’s Book “Tragedy and Hope”. The first third of this book consists of extensive excerpts from Tragedy and Hope, interspersed with commentary by Skousen. Skousen quotes Quigley’s description of the activities of several groups: the Milner Group, a cartel of international bankers, the Communist Party, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Skousen’s interpretation of Quigley’s book, each of these is a facet of one large conspiracy.[7]
In 1971, Gary Allen, a spokesman for the John Birch Society, published None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which became a bestseller. Allen cited Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope as an authoritative source on conspiracies throughout his book. Like Skousen, Allen understood the various conspiracies in Quigley’s book to be branches of one large conspiracy, and also connected them to the Bilderbergers and to Richard Nixon.[8] The John Birch Society continues to cite Quigley as a primary source for their view of history.[9]
Quigley is also cited by several other authors who assert the existence of powerful conspiracies. Jim Marrs, whose work was used as a source by Oliver Stone in his film JFK, cites Quigley in his book Rule By Secrecy, which describes a conspiracy linking the Milner Group, Skull and Bones, the Trilateral Commission, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and aliens who posed as the Sumerian gods thousands of years ago.[10] Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order cites Quigley as an authority on a powerful conspiracy.[2]:98 Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has asserted that Bill Clinton’s political success was due to his pursuit of the “world government” agenda he learned from Quigley.[2]:98 G. Edward Griffin relies heavily on Quigley for information about the role Milner's secret society plays in the Federal Reserve in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. [11]
Quigley was later dismissive of some of the authors who used his writings to support theories of a world domination conspiracy. Of W. Cleon Skousen's The Naked Capitalist he stated:
Skousen’s book is full of misrepresentations and factual errors. He claims that I have written of a conspiracy of the super-rich who are pro-Communist and wish to take over the world and that I’m a member of this group. But I never called it a conspiracy and don’t regard it as such. I'm not an “insider” of these rich persons, although Skousen thinks so. I happen to know some of them and liked them, although I disagreed with some of the things they did before 1940.[12]
On Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy he said:
They thought Dr. Carroll Quigley proved everything. For example, they constantly misquote me to this effect: that Lord Milner (the dominant trustee of the Cecil Rhodes Trust and a heavy in the Round Table Group) helped finance the Bolsheviks. I have been through the greater part of Milner’s private papers and have found no evidence to support that. Further, None Dare Call It Conspiracy insists that international bankers were a single bloc, were all powerful and remain so today. I, on the contrary, stated in my book that they were much divided, often fought among themselves, had great influence but not control of political life and were sharply reduced in power about 1931-1940, when they became less influential than monopolized industry.[13]
The Hoover institution scholar Antony Sutton looked at the activities of many financiers associated with the Round Table groups, particularly their involvement with the rise of the Bolsheviks, the rise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the rise of Adolf Hitler. He put forth material that challenged many of Quigley's assertions, and came to different conclusions than Quigley did. For instance, in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and in his Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development series, he cited many state department files to the effect that financial circles around the House of Morgan and leaders of the firm Kuhn, Loeb, & Co., as well as Rockefeller interests, subsidized the Bolsheviks. He also drew attention to the memoirs of R.H. Bruce Lockhart, a Milner agent, who wrote of how his circles were able to get even Lenin to carry out their will. As follows:
| “ | Another new acquaintence of these first days in Bolshevised St. Petersburg was Raymond Robins [an agent of Morgan interests], the head of the American Red Cross Mission... Robins was the only man whom Lenin was always willing to see and who ever succeeded in imposing his own personality on the unemotional Bolshevik leader. ... He had been in conflict with Saalkind, a nephew of Trotsky and then Assistant Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Saalkind had been rude, and the American, who had a promise from Lenin that, whatever happened, a train would always be ready for him at an hour's notice, was determined to exact an apology or to leave the country. When I arrived he had just finished telephoning to Lenin. He had delivered his ultimatum, and Lenin had promised to reply within ten minutes. I waited, while Robins fumed. Then the telephone rang and Robins picked up the receiver. Lenin had capitulated. Saalkind was dismissed from his post...[14] | ” |
Sutton likewise challenged Quigley's assertion that the power structure of international financial circles associated with Round Table groups declined in the Roosevelt years, in his book Wall St. and FDR.
In Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Sutton gave the following criticism of Quigley:
| “ | Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite.
Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups. They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved.[15] |
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F. William Engdahl, in an overview of financial imperialism entitled The Gods of Money, criticized Quigley for stating that the power of international bankers declined in the 1930s, and insofar as the influence of international bankers in America was concerned, suggested that Quigley was confusing "international finance" with Morgan interests. He suggested, like Sutton, that Quigley's papers had been vetted. Engdahl argued that it was not the case that the power of "international finance" declined, but rather, Morgan interests fell and were replaced by Rockefeller interests.[16]
Quigley stated that the intentions and objectives of the group he profiled, associated with Wall Street and the City of London and Cecil Rhodes' super-imperialism, were "largely commendable". Members of the group, in statements recorded by the New York Times in 1902, proclaimed that they formed their society for the purpose of "gradually absorbing the wealth of the world".[17]
Quigley argued that the Round Table groups were not World Government advocates but super-imperialists. He stated that they emphatically did not want the League of Nations to become a World Government. Yet Lionel Curtis, who according to Quigley was one of the leaders of the Round Table movement, wished for it to be a World government with teeth, writing articles with H.G. Wells urging this.[18][19]
Col. Curtis Dall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's son in law, stated that:
"...ninety per cent or more of the [CFR] membership do not remotely comprehend just who "plays the piano upstairs." The piano is continuously played, nevertheless, and no time is lost by the CFR in teaching many of our duly elected officials to dance."[20]
On the internationalist intentions of the Round Table Groups, Arnold J. Toynbee, the Royal Institute of International Affairs director of studies, was more explicit than Quigley. As recorded in the RIIA's own journal, Toynbee said that:
| “ | We are at present working discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be, perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited.[21] | ” |
Although Quigley did not overtly condemn the Anglo-American financial coterie that he wrote about, he, according to an interview he gave[22], and letters of his that were later published by the magazine Conspiracy Digest, had the plates of his book destroyed against his will by MacMillan, and believed that his work was being suppressed. One of the published letters stated the following:
| “ | The original edition published by Macmillan in 1966 sold about 8800 copies and sales were picking up in 1968 when they "ran out of stock," as they told me (but in 1974, when I went after them with a lawyer, they told me that they had destroyed the plates in 1968). They lied to me for six years, telling me that they would re-print when they got 2000 orders, which could never happen because they told anyone who asked that it was out of print and would not be reprinted. They denied this until I sent them xerox copies of such replies to libraries, at which they told me it was a clerk's error. In other words they lied to me but prevented me from regaining the publication rights by doing so (on OP [out of print] rights revert to holder of copyright, but on OS [out of stock] they do not.) ... Powerful influences in this country want me, or at least my work, suppressed.[23] | ” |
According to Gary North, in Conspiracy: A Biblical View, Gary Allen received a letter from a friend of Quigley's who stated that Quigley had begun to view the group he profiled as a malevolent influence in political affairs by the end of his life.[24]
Quigley, although he was largely supportive of the Round Table Groups for most of his life, still expressed some reservations about the extent of their power in his posthumously published text, The Anglo-American Establishment:
| “ | This brief sketch of the Royal Institute of International Affairs does not by any means indicate the very considerable influence which the organization exerts in English-speaking countries in the sphere to which it is devoted. The extent of that influence must be obvious. The purpose of this chapter has been something else: to show that the Milner Group controls the Institute. Once that is established, the picture changes. The influence of Chatham House appears in its true perspective, not as the influence of an autonomous body but as merely one of many instruments in the arsenal of another power. When the influence which the Institute wields is combined with that controlled by the Milner Group in other fields — in education, in administration, in newspapers, and periodicals — a really terrifying picture begins to emerge. ... The picture is terrifying because such power, whatever the goals at which it may be directed, is too much to be entrusted safely to any group. ... No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner Group accomplished in Britain — that is, that a small number of men should be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of the documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.[25] | ” |