Introduction: “A War time Love Affair”

The New Republic has long been at the center of scholarship on the nature of modern American liberalism and progressivism. While the exact nature of progressive thought has often been in dispute, the claim that The New Republic served as a key standard-bearer for mainstream American progressivism has not.Footnote ¹ Indeed, Michael McGerr has written that “Progressive ideas found mature, eloquent expression in such tracts as The Promise of American Life [1909], by Herbert Croly, Drift and Mastery [1914], by Walter Lippmann, and The New Democracy [1912], by Walter Weyl.”Footnote ² This article explores the confluence of progressive and imperial thought by examining connections between The New Republic and the British imperialist journal The Round Table during World War One. Both groups (progressives and imperialists) sought to bring order out of chaos, whether in urban slums or far-flung colonies. Significantly, both arenas were often presented as populated by racial undesirables in desperate need of such guidance.Footnote ³

This insight, that the domestic and the imperial were profoundly linked is exemplified by The New Republic co-founder Walter Lippmann’s shifting thought on foreign affairs during World War One. In August 1915 he wrote to Graham Wallas, an Oxford-educated British Fabian socialist and co-founder of the London School of Economics (L.S.E.):

This account of having stepped out of the shadow of the great social, political, and economic problems targeted by progressive reformers, only to discover the edifice casting that shadow was much larger than they had previously assumed, became characteristic of many American intellectuals’ responses to the war. It led many such American progressives to embrace a degree of national mobilization, or collectivization, they previously saw as either undesirable or impossible. This insight should, perhaps, not be surprising given the crucial role of transnational exchange in the spread of progressive ideas and practical reforms to the United States, as described in Daniel Rodgers’s seminal Atlantic Crossings.Footnote ⁵ Specifically referring to Lippmann and the other founders of The New Republic, Maureen Flanagan describes this shift as toward a “new sense of civic nationalism that spoke about the national interest.”Footnote ⁶ Here I instead use the language of “national efficiency” as did many American and British authors of the period.

Against the backdrop of the Great War, The New Republic and The Round Table groups’ underlying similarities—most notably their shared progressivism, Anglo exceptionalism, and interventionism—came into sharp relief. Both exhibited a profound opposition to the myopia they saw as isolating their people from the reality of national and international affairs. When launching their publications (in 1910 and 1914 respectively) both groups were attempting to create truly national platforms for discussion of matters of national and imperial import, thereby facilitating truly national responses to those problems. The Round Table group—like their American progressive contemporaries—often openly despaired of conventional party politics and the “insufficient constitutional machinery” left to them by history. Against the backdrop of World War One they critiqued laissez-faire economics as entirely insufficient in the face of the threat posed by Imperial Germany, and advocated for expert control over the state. However, despite these underlying similarities, one should stress that it was only the external stimuli of the war that caused these two groups to draw so tightly together for a time, driven in great part by the increased demand for their shared brand of nationalist-progressivism.

More broadly this piece demonstrates that elites based in London, Oxford, Washington, and New York saw Anglo-Saxon Britons and Americans as obliged to fulfill a special role as the guarantors and enforcers of a just world order. When the Great War broke out in the late summer of 1914 this necessity was only heightened.

As early as the summer of 1915 Round Table members had successfully convinced both Lippmann and Croly of the necessity of American intervention. Future discussions between the two groups focused primarily on preparing U.S. public opinion for American entry into the war. This can be seen most clearly in the publication of articles authored by Round Table members (principally Alfred Zimmern and George Louis Beer) in The New Republic, private correspondence in particular with Zimmern, and the growing influence of Round Table thought on New Republic editorials between 1915 and early 1917. Together, these threads serve to shed new light on many progressives’ embrace of the need for American entry in those crucial years. The above is in sharp contrast to much prior work on The New Republic and U.S. intervention in the Great War focused instead on the publication’s relationship with President Wilson and his lieutenants, overlooking such direct links to Great Britain, and suggesting a much later shift toward advocacy for American entry.Footnote ⁷

Origins: National Solutions for National Problems

After contributing significantly to the formation of the Union of South Africa, leading members of “Milner’s Kindergarten,” a cadre of young former colonial administrators educated at New College, Oxford, returned to Britain in 1909 and organized themselves and ideological fellow-travelers into what became the Round Table movement. Lord Alfred Milner was credited with the initial idea and became patron. Lionel Curtis, whose use of Milner’s imperial patronage had created the group, positioned himself as the visionary “prophet” of the organization, and Philip Kerr (a future wartime ambassador to the United States, 1939–40) became secretary, taking on the greatest organizational burden.Footnote ⁸ Collectively they would hold great influence in the British policy elite over the next decade or so, as demonstrated most clearly by Milner’s elevation to the five-man War Cabinet during the Great War.Footnote ⁹

While they were internally divided between models of “organic” unity and formal federation, all ascribed to a version of Anglo (including American) history in which “English freedoms” had been repeatedly undermined by political schism (characterized as “disunion”). In 1910 they established a quarterly journal, The Round Table. Its primary aim was to promote closer union between the self-governing white dominions of the empire and Britain. Kerr became founding editor. The publication’s editorial line called not merely for imperial federation, but for an imperial executive, possibly empowered by a written constitution, capable of setting policy over the objections of any constituent part of the empire including the Home Islands.Footnote ¹⁰ This concept of an overarching Federal Government on broadly American lines distinguished the movement from earlier advocates of Imperial Union such as Sir Charles Dilke and Joseph Chamberlain.

This position was in many ways strikingly similar to the “New Nationalism” then being promoted by Theodore Roosevelt in the run up to the 1912 presidential election.Footnote ¹¹ Speaking in Osawatomie, Kansas, in August 1910, Roosevelt invoked a parallel vision of a shared American past riven by two great wars (Revolutionary and Civil). He then stated:

He continued:

This concern for the nation or empire as a whole, overcoming the myopic provincialism that he believed too often dominated Anglo politics, can be seen clearly in the opening pages of both The Round Table in November of 1910 and The New Republic in November of 1914.

This was not mere coincidence, of course, Roosevelt’s platform had in large part been inspired by (future editor of The New Republic) Herbert Croly’s The Promise of American Life (1909), which sought to combine the “conservative” good governance of Hamilton with the “democratic” vision articulated by Thomas Jefferson.Footnote ¹⁴ This transatlantic emphasis on political unity, is made all the more evident by the Kindergarten’s earlier (1906–07) enthusiastic embrace of Alexander Hamilton and the Federal Constitution (1789) as a model for future British constitutional reform. This can be seen most clearly in their enthusiastic promotion of the Edinburgh-born F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton: An Essay on American Union (1906).Footnote ¹⁵ As a result, one can reasonable describe both the Round Table set and The New Republic clique as “nationalist-progressives.”Footnote ¹⁶

Roosevelt’s own growing obsession with “national efficiency” on his return to the political stage, following his overseas tour of 1909–10, is present throughout the remainder of his swing through the West and Midwest. For example, in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 6, 1910 he opened a speech calling for corporate power to be restrained with a paean to efficiency:

This desire for scientific “national efficiency” mirrored developments in Britain, which had drawn Conservatives and Unionists, modernizing Liberals, and Fabian socialists together in unexpected and cooperative combinations.Footnote ¹⁸ Indeed, Rodgers in Atlantic Crossings remarks on the arresting similarities between Roosevelt and the municipal socialist Birmingham mayor turned arch-imperialist, Joseph Chamberlain: “Theodore Roosevelt, [was] so like Chamberlain in his politics of national efficiency, his tribunate style, and his agenda of Tory social reform.”Footnote ¹⁹ Chamberlain had served as a key patron and inspiration to the Milnerite Round Table group early in their careers prior to his debilitating stroke of 1906.Footnote ²⁰

Inaugural Issues: 1910 and 1914

The inaugural issues of The Round Table (1910) and The New Republic (1914) serve to demonstrate the underlying compatibility of the two publications’ progressive assumptions and worldviews, if not always their domestic and international agendas.

On Kerr and Curtis’s return to London following a joint tour of Canada, they began to piece together the first issue of The Round Table which was published on November 15, 1910. Although individual authors were not identified in the early years, it is widely assumed that Kerr took the lead in the introduction:Footnote ²¹

While acknowledging that there was no shortage of writing on the empire, Kerr contended that much of it was ill-informed and “coloured by some local party issue,” resulting in a great deal of ignorance and “disputes … which in most cases could be solved if the facts were known.”Footnote ²³ To remedy this defect the journal included contributors based in all corners of the white empire and also India.Footnote ²⁴ To modern eyes there is a strange idealism in the pages of The Round Table, based on the distinctly progressive belief that sunlight was the best disinfectant, and that simply exposing abuses and “misinformation” would be sufficient to begin political reform:

In the following years several contacts were established between the Round Table set and the progressive movement in the United States. For example, in 1912 Kerr lunched with Theodore Roosevelt at Sagamore Hill during the latter’s unsuccessful run to retake the White House from William H. Taft. During the same trip Kerr also met both Walter Lippmann and Herbert Croly (two future New Republic founders) at the “House of Truth,” a Washington, D.C., club founded by Felix Frankfurter and other young progressives disillusioned with the comparative conservatism of the Taft administration.Footnote ²⁶

In November of 1914, against the distant backdrop of the Great War then raging in Europe, the co-founders of The New Republic finalized their first issue. The enterprise was financially backed by The New School founder and progressive activist Dorothy Payne Whitney and her husband, the imperial adventurer and investment banker Willard D. Straight.Footnote ²⁷ The latter’s advocacy of government intervention, both at home and abroad, along with the views of the three founders: Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl, would together reshape the American liberal tradition.Footnote ²⁸

Both Lippmann and Croly had been educated at Harvard, although only Lippmann graduated with an A.B. in 1910.Footnote ²⁹ Weyl’s background was the most academically impressive, having studied in Halle, Paris, and Berlin before receiving his Ph.D. in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was in some ways the most conventionally progressive, having spent some years at the University Settlement, a famous settlement house on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.Footnote ³⁰ All three moved freely in the Ivy League alumni circles then central to contemporary politics and elite publishing, much like their Oxbridge counterparts in Great Britain.Footnote ³¹ The inaugural issue of The New Republic opened:

As Harold Laski stated at the time, and as Marc Stears notes in his Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State (2002), The New Republic was not only “explicitly modeled on the English Nation and New Statesman” magazines, but it also sought to set the national political agenda in much the same way as those British publications.Footnote ³³

For our purposes, the common rhetorical commitment with The Round Table to meeting the “challenge of our time” is striking, as is the emphasis on simply exposing the underlying problems of the empire or nation. Above all their shared concern for the nation or empire as a whole, overcoming the parochialism they saw as too often dominating Anglo politics, is a key strand linking The New Republic and The Round Table from the outset.

The issue continued by reviewing the political situation in the United States following the recent midterm elections, noting: “Progressivism of all kinds has fared badly. … Popular interest … is tired of Congresses which do not adjourn, of questions which are always being discussed and never being settled, of supposed settlements which fail to produce the promised results.”Footnote ³⁴ Intriguingly, it also defended President Andrew Jackson as a retrospectively “Progressive” Democrat, representative of the nation as a whole, illustrating one of many differences between the “progressivism” of this era (in both the British Empire and the United States) and the present.Footnote ³⁵ Further, in the same article The New Republic went on to effectively call for a parliamentary model of government, previously advocated by Woodrow Wilson in his Congressional Government of 1885:

In short, The New Republic in its opening issue demonstrated an unusual constitutional openness to the British model in pursuit of national efficiency, just as The Round Table had repeatedly called for an American-inspired federal government for the same reason.Footnote ³⁷

Shared Foundations: Progressivism and Anglo-Saxonism

This mutual constitutional curiosity connecting The New Republic to British political elites may at first glance seem coincidental. However, stepping back and examining the underlying assumptions, outlooks, and backgrounds of both sets of college-educated men, one begins to discern crucial connecting tissue spanning the Atlantic.

Politically the majority of the Kindergarten can be most accurately described as “disappointed Liberals” who later drifted toward the Conservative or “Unionist” Party in Great Britain. Milner’s own political journey from Liberal, to Liberal Unionist (following the 1886 split over Irish Home Rule), to Conservative served as something of a blueprint for the group. So too did that of the aforementioned “municipal socialist” Joseph Chamberlain.

In their belief in the power of institutions to alter the character of both individuals and (to varying degrees) races the Kindergarten were, however, profoundly progressive in their outlook.Footnote ³⁸ This is made most evident in their early commitment to the settlement house movement. Milner himself had helped to found the Toynbee Hall settlement house in Tower Hamlets, following the unexpected death of his friend Arnold Toynbee in 1883.Footnote ³⁹ Lionel Curtis and his contemporary at Oxford, Richard Feetham, a generation later, were also drawn to serve at Toynbee Hall.Footnote ⁴⁰ Curtis had previously worked for the Haileybury Guild for three years managing a boys’ club in London’s East End,Footnote ⁴¹ and had spent two vacations “slumming” as a wandering vagrant in order to gain firsthand experience of the poor law.Footnote ⁴² Patrick Duncan, another member of the Kindergarten, who later chose to remain in South Africa (ultimately becoming governor-general, 1937–1943), also worked at Toynbee Hall.Footnote ⁴³ Alfred Zimmern likewise enjoyed a long association with this iconic settlement house in London’s East End.Footnote ⁴⁴ For all of these men, the class-based ethos of (imperial) service was a constant presence during their education at Oxford. Many of their classmates and professors stated publicly that Oxbridge men must serve as “an exemplar of the imperial race” and of Anglo-Saxon masculinity.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further, through Curtis’s use of Milner’s power of patronage as High Commissioner for South Africa, many of these young men had initially been appointed to positions in municipal government in South Africa specifically to stamp out corruption.Footnote ⁴⁶

Existing alongside their progressivism was their political Anglo-Saxonism, which was wholly compatible with the thought of both conservative and progressive Atlanticists in the United States. This form of Anglo exceptionalism, adhered to by much of the American and British political class, was defined by judging other peoples’ capacity to self-govern against idealized Anglo models.Footnote ⁴⁷ In practice this meant querying the “peoplehood” (the linguistic, racial, and cultural unity) of colonized peoples and their perceived capacity for establishing and maintaining “just rule”—meaning clean (incorruptible), efficient, and representative self-government. In sum, political Anglo-Saxonism was presented as the route to political modernity.

Works such as the Liberal MP, and later British ambassador to the United States (1907–13), James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth (1888) had been crucial in popularizing this worldview in both the British Empire and the United States.Footnote ⁴⁸ Significant milestones within this white, English-speaking exceptionalist mythology include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689) following the so-called Glorious Revolution, and the American Declaration of Independence (1776). As a result of the growing power of this ideology, Priscilla Roberts has written that long before the outbreak of the Great War, “Americans from the northeastern patrician elite subscribed almost unthinkingly to the same beliefs in Anglo-Saxon racial and political superiority and the strategic desirability of Anglo-American cooperation as did their British counterparts.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Before U.S. entry into World War One this was evident in much elite American writing on national efficiency.Footnote ⁵⁰

In the industrializing, urbanizing, globalizing world they found themselves, both groups came to place more and more emphasis on questions of national efficiency. While occasionally featuring material critical of the excesses of political Anglo-Saxonism,Footnote ⁵¹ The New Republic commonly embraced this rhetoric of Anglo exceptionalism: carrying numerous articles by progressive thinkers, including even the notably antiwar Randolph S. Bourne, which explicitly discussed the collective triumphs and notable shortcomings of “Anglo-Saxon civilization.”Footnote ⁵²

As uncomfortable as it may now be to acknowledge, the former colonial administrators of The Round Table were undoubtedly progressive in their worldview. Just as uncomfortably: the American Northeastern educated elite and wider U.S. political class—from which Straight, Croly, Lippmann, and Weyl were drawn—welcomed political Anglo-Saxonist arguments and sentiment in these years, especially against the backdrop of the New Immigration of non-Protestant Southern and Eastern Europeans.Footnote ⁵³ In the minds of elites based in London, Oxford, Washington, and New York, Anglo-Saxon Britons and Americans were obliged to fulfill a special role as the guarantors and enforcers of a just world order.

Alfred Eckhard Zimmern as Key Conduit

The extensive links between The New Republic and the wider Round Table movement are particularly evident in the papers of Sir Alfred Zimmern. He was a prominent British classicist and historian who was first a Tutor and then Fellow at New College, Oxford, and an active member of the Round Table set between 1912 and 1921.Footnote ⁵⁴ Intriguingly, Lippmann, Weyl, Zimmern, and George Louis Beer—a regular contributor to both publications—all shared comfortable suburban German-Jewish backgrounds.Footnote ⁵⁵ This makes their advocacy of Anglo exceptionalism all the more remarkable. Perhaps it was for this reason, Andrea Bosco argues, that Zimmern was consciously promoted as an “ambassador” to The New Republic by other members of the Round Table movement.Footnote ⁵⁶ Zimmern was certainly an extremely able envoy to the American elite.Footnote ⁵⁷

Zimmern, who is often credited with inventing the term “welfare state,” would later serve at Versailles and draft a major memo on a British proposal for a League of Nations, which Lord Robert Cecil took to the Paris Peace Conference.Footnote ⁵⁸ He also co-founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs with Curtis and Kerr after the war. His international affiliations are further confirmed in his role as the inaugural Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth, 1919–1921, and his subsequent position as a visiting professor at Cornell in the early 1920s.Footnote ⁵⁹

Zimmern’s later leftist politics, joining the Labour Party in 1924 and standing against Lloyd George in Caernarfon Boroughs, are often used to present him as a purely idealist or even “utopian” thinker in international relations. This is largely a result of E.H. Carr’s representation of Zimmern in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939)—reducing him to a convenient foil or strawman in opposition to Carr’s self-described realism.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, such analysis overlooks the widespread collaboration then occurring in Great Britain between avowedly leftist organizations such as the Fabians and the Round Table movement, based on their shared conception of the national efficiency problem.Footnote ⁶¹ These connections led such noted socialist figures as “Mrs. Sidney Webb” (Beatrice Webb), to write to Zimmern in July 1916: “What excellent stuff appears in the Round Table.”Footnote ⁶²

As Zimmern’s wartime writings indicate, characterizing him as an impractical idealist obscures the complexities and influence of his thought. It also overlooks his enduring, Round Table influenced, commitment to an Anglo-American core at the heart of any future world order, a conviction he clearly shared with Croly, Lippmann, and Weyl, not to mention The New Republic’s proprietor Willard Straight.

Zimmern is regularly credited with the term the “British Commonwealth” mirroring his earlier study of Classical Athens, The Greek Commonwealth (1911).Footnote ⁶³ That said, there are other often cited contenders, notably Curtis (who was in part inspired by Zimmern’s historical treatment of Athens when forwarding his own ideal of a “British Commonwealth”) and James Bryce, the author of The American Commonwealth (1888).Footnote ⁶⁴

Classical education had long served as an ideological pillar justifying British expansionism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Kristofer Allerfeldt has argued that classical antiquity and Rome in particular likewise played a crucial role in the rhetoric of many American progressive imperialists, including Theodore Roosevelt.Footnote ⁶⁶ The compatibility of American progressivism with contemporary British imperialism is therefore only further demonstrated through the influence of the Australian-born Glasgow, Oxford, and then Harvard-based liberal scholar, Gilbert Murray, with both The Round Table and Theodore Roosevelt and associates.Footnote ⁶⁷ Roosevelt’s own speeches demonstrate his embrace of such classical justifications of empire. For example, while in London in 1910 he had praised Lord Cromer and the British administration in Egypt as “the best government it has had for at least 2,000 years—probably a better government than it has ever had before.”Footnote ⁶⁸ He was lauded in return by leading British imperialists including Cromer, George Curzon, Herbert Kitchener, and Rudyard Kipling (two of whom were then married to American-born wives).Footnote ⁶⁹ Murray would later meet with Croly and other members of The New Republic team during a 1916 visit to New York while pushing for expedited U.S. entry into the war.Footnote ⁷⁰

Zimmern had himself spent seven months traveling in the United States in 1911–1912, during which time he—like Kerr and Murray—lunched with Theodore Roosevelt on Long Island. He also attended a New York demonstration in memory of the 146 garment workers killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (March 1911) and made a pilgrimage to the University of Wisconsin to meet with the Georgist economist and historian John Commons, who he subsequently described as a “sort of American Sidney Webb.”Footnote ⁷¹

Resulting from his New College education and connections Zimmern enjoyed close friendships with Edward Grigg, Reginald Coupland, Philip Kerr, and Lionel Curtis among other fellow Round Table members.Footnote ⁷² He also participated in a sustained correspondence with both Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann at The New Republic throughout World War One.

Writing to Zimmern in June 1915, Lippmann described himself as a great fan of The War and Democracy (1915), a collection of articles Zimmern had co-authored with other leading British intellectuals.Footnote ⁷³ Lippmann, a defining figure in contemporary American progressive thought, also crucially described himself as a convert to the Round Table worldview:

On July 6, 1915 Lippmann urged Zimmern to visit the United States to allow the two to talk in person.Footnote ⁷⁵ This offer was repeated enthusiastically by Croly first just two days later and again in August, the second time with the added incentive of a permanent position as writer for The New Republic.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this second letter Croly, while disagreeing with Zimmern on the need for immediate American entry into the war, couched his reasoning in the need to prepare American public opinion before “any such heroic step is taken.” He then urged Zimmern to reconsider his offer, emphasizing the potential importance of Zimmern’s writings in preparing the way for future American entry.Footnote ⁷⁷ This discussion, focused on the best means and moment for American entry, echoes earlier higher-level transatlantic correspondence between, for example, Theodore Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling, including this sent by Roosevelt in November 1914 (just three days before The New Republic launched):

Wider Embrace: 1915–1917

Leading members of the Round Table movement such as Curtis and Kerr also enjoyed significant American connections, including with The New Republic co-founders. For instance, on December 8, 1915, Lionel Curtis wrote to Lady Selborne, wife of the former First Lord of the Admiralty and High Commissioner to South Africa William Waldegrave Palmer, enclosing a copy of The New Republic. Maud Palmer, the Countess of Selborne, had played something of a “mother hen” role for members of Milner’s Kindergarten while in South Africa, introducing them to the small circle of elite Anglo women then living in the country. In his letter of December 1915 Curtis highlighted an article by the noted American historian George Louis Beer, who had recently become a regular contributor as American correspondent to The Round Table, and would go on to serve as a key adviser to President Wilson at Versailles:Footnote ⁷⁹

While Curtis’s boast about his influence over Croly was almost certainly hyperbolic, his distaste for the publication’s past “Monroeism” (isolationism) was very real. The article in question is Beer’s “America’s Part Among Nations,” which was published on November 20, 1915. In this the latter argued, on distinctly Anglo-Saxonist lines, that:

Echoing the views of The Round Table, Beer further argued that the “fundamental aim of German world politics” was to “oust the English-speaking peoples from the prominent position they are occupying in all the continents.”Footnote ⁸² He concluded by calling for a permanent military alliance with Great Britain:

The closing quote was drawn from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s The Idea of a Universal History (1784) but could equally have described Curtis’s vision of a cooperative (Anglo-dominated) international order based on imperial federation, which he set out fully in his The Commonwealth of Nations the next year (1916).Footnote ⁸⁴

Not everyone in the Kindergarten itself was entirely convinced by Curtis’s vision; earlier in 1915 an increasingly disillusioned Philip Kerr wrote to the American-born Nancy Astor: “Lionel’s God is the British empire and he worships and serves it day and night.”Footnote ⁸⁵ However, Curtis’s ideal of a reformed Anglo-led world was one that Beer was eager to advocate for. This embrace was undoubtedly built on his reputation as a leading scholar of the “Imperial School” of early American history, which emphasized the economic development and efficient administration of pre-Revolutionary North America under British rule.Footnote ⁸⁶ Indeed, Beer had (in)famously concluded his 1907 British Colonial Policy, 1754–1765:

Given Lippmann’s own embrace of the idea of an initial world state as a “federation of Western powers” before blooming into a “Federation of Mankind,” this is another indication of the close parallels in thinking between the Round Table and The New Republic sets.Footnote ⁸⁸

Herbert Croly in his editorial that accompanied Beer’s November 1915 article, while stopping short of advocating an immediate formal alliance (or for the “reunification” of Curtis and Beer’s dreams), held that a British-American military understanding on some terms was necessary for the creation of what he termed a “League of Peace.”Footnote ⁸⁹ In truth the Milner set had likely been pushing at an open door as, according to Lippmann, since early 1915 the editorial board of The New Republic had “decided … to devote the paper to the creation of an Anglo-American understanding.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Philip Kerr had throughout 1915 courted the American ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Hines Page, a North Carolinian and former editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who was profoundly convinced of the “Mahanist thesis, that American security depended upon British sea power.”Footnote ⁹¹ Kerr’s relationship with Page blossomed drawing him into the orbit of the Round Table group.Footnote ⁹² Page wrote to his son in mid-July 1915 that The Round Table is “the best review, I dare say, in the world” adding that the wider New College set were “perhaps the best group of men here for the real study and free discussion of large political subjects.”Footnote ⁹³

Priscilla Roberts has detailed a number of significant meetings between New Republic and Round Table representatives that occurred during the war: the most important of these being Lippmann’s meeting with Geoffrey Dawson (then editor of The Times) in London in 1914, and several meetings between proprietor Straight and the wider Round Table group at the Astors’s Cliveden mansion in the Chiltern Hills northwest of London.Footnote ⁹⁴

By April 1916, Lippmann wrote enthusiastically to Graham Wallas that the war’s outcome must be “a union of liberal peoples pledged to cooperate in the settlement of all outstanding questions, sworn to turn against the aggressor, determined to erect a larger and more modern system of international law upon a federation of the world.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Such discussions occurred alongside the continued growth of William Howard Taft’s League to Enforce Peace (LEP) in the United States, and James Bryce’s League of Nations Society (LNS) in Great Britain, both founded in 1915, as well as intensifying correspondence between Taft and Bryce.Footnote ⁹⁶

The only direct meeting between the two groups that appears to have proven difficult was the unpredictable Curtis’s 1916 visit to The New Republic’s New York offices, which resulted in him writing to Kerr that perhaps he would be “wiser to drop” any further cooperative ventures.Footnote ⁹⁷ In contrast to Curtis’s somewhat predictable fireworks, the stalwart Zimmern would publish in The New Republic (in addition to The Round Table) throughout the war. However, the affiliation was never as close as Croly, Lippmann, or co-founder Walter Weyl would have liked. This is demonstrated by their lavish praise for his intermittent articles throughout 1916. For instance, both Weyl and Croly wrote to Zimmern praising his “The Meaning of Nationality,” which appeared in the January 1, 1916, edition of The New Republic. Croly writing on October 15, 1916, commented, shortly before the article was reprinted, that “Both Lippmann and I highly approve of your article on Nationality and we are going to use it as part of a series of articles which we are planning, dealing with the reaction of the war upon various American domestic problems.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Likewise, a deflated Croly later wrote to Zimmern in January 1917:

Coming as this did less than four months prior to Wilson’s urging of the United States to war in his address to Congress of April 2, 1917, it is safe to say that Zimmern’s role influencing the thought of The New Republic (and through it the wider progressive movement) on U.S. entry has previously been unduly overlooked.

A Key Editorial: March 1917

Lippmann’s embrace of a British-influenced national efficiency rhetoric, in part resulting from these transatlantic exchanges, is evident in several of his editorials in The New Republic in 1917. None more so than that of March 3, 1917 (just one month before U.S. entry) which laments the insufficient and “decadent political machinery” of the American government as currently organized.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Remarkably, it begins with a quote from F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton—published eleven years earlier in 1906—a touchstone text for the Round Table movement, often described by political allies such as the Conservative MP Leo Amery as “their Bible.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ The quote in question read: “The spirit of the nation is a great force, but it is one which cannot be always on the alert, and, while it sleeps, the part of noble institutions is to keep watch.”Footnote ¹⁰² Lippman’s editorial read:

The piece concluded by advocating for “a war against that Congressional system which makes good administration impossible … Congress will not reform itself. It will be reformed only from the outside by a President speaking for the nation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Daniel Rodgers in his Atlantic Crossings commented that, inspired by The New Republic, Wilson:

Marc Stears has similarly written that “Croly, Lippmann, and Weyl were struck with the practical opportunities for radical reform the war [had] presented in Britain. As the war intensified … the British public was increasingly becoming aware of the ‘need for and benefit of organization’ of the sort the Fabians and their allies offered.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The New Republic sought to mobilize the American public in support of the same goal of national efficiency.

Advertising to a Shared Audience

Following U.S. entry into the war The Round Table went on a circulation drive throughout the United States culminating in adverts placed in The New Republic that fall and winter.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The first advert featured in The New Republic of November 17, 1917, and was authored by Kindergarten member Robert Henry Brand, then working in D.C. as deputy chairman of the British Commission. It set out two goals on which “the future peace of the world will depend”:

1. 1. The maintenance and development as a world-wide self-governing democracy of the unity of the British Commonwealth of nations, which now contains within its borders more than a quarter of the world’s population.

2. 2. The furtherance of close and friendly relations between that Commonwealth and the United States.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

This recasting of the British “Commonwealth” as a proto-League of Nations was common from at least early 1916 onward.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ This new cooperative framing of Britain’s imperial domain was designed in part to attract to a progressive American audience.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The full-page advert continued:

This need to create a public square for a transatlantic Anglo-polity closely echoes the earlier calls for national platforms (i.e., The Round Table and The New Republic) for public debate and policy discussion, to allow either nation to address the most pressing issues then facing their societies.

Demonstrating the breadth of views then associated with the imperialist Round Table among the blurbs recommending the publication was one provided by the Irish socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw (another leading Fabian).Footnote ¹¹² At the bottom of the page was a slip, which once torn off and returned to the Macmillan Company on Fifth Avenue (with a check for $2.50) would trigger a one-year subscription.Footnote ¹¹³ The very fact that the Round Table group saw The New Republic’s readership as uniquely fertile ground for expansion proves their growing ideological kinship.

A repeat advert in the December 22, 1917, issue of The New Republic highlighted the support of “General Smuts, the noted Boer leader and statesman, who fifteen years ago was fighting the British Empire in South Africa, and who is now a member of the British War Cabinet.” The Round Table set would less than two years later, when discussing the Treaty of Versailles and in an obituary of Smuts’ close political ally Louis Botha, present him as Alexander Hamilton reborn (to Botha’s Washington).Footnote ¹¹⁴ This shared willingness of The Round Table to draw on U.S. history (rehabilitating, to British eyes, “colonial rebels” in the process), while The New Republic likewise used British models to discuss future constitutional change, is remarkable.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Significantly, this second advert ran directly under The New Republic’s own readership drive for 1918. This indicated, to even the most casual reader, the growing closeness of the two publications and their worldviews. While one should add that permanent U.S. circulation of The Round Table only doubled from around 100 to 200 copies, Kerr and others were wont to boast that those 200 were the American policy elite of the day.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In truth the Round Table set’s real influence in the United States lay not in the circulation of their own journal, but in their ability to influence the editorial line of established American publications such as The New Republic.

With the Armistice of November 1918, and the Treaty of Versailles signed the following June, the stimuli that had brought the two groups together ceased. Thereafter, exchanges between the two slowed. Despite this, following Versailles where many of the players discussed above had notable roles, they helped to construct policy institutions that continue to shape American and British foreign relations to this day. Just as Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, and George Louis Beer all served in Wilson’s Inquiry to prepare materials for the peace negotiations, leading Round Table men such as Philip Kerr served in key positions in the British delegation to Versailles.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Following the failure of an attempt to set up an (Anglo-American) Institute of International Affairs, due to growing American isolationism, Lippmann became a prominent member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) founded in the United States in 1921. Similarly, top figures in the Round Table movement—most notably Kerr, Curtis, and Zimmern—all served as founder members of the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), commonly known as “Chatham House” (1920).Footnote ¹¹⁸