Council on Foreign Relations
New York foreign-policy institute founded 1921; the American sister institution of Chatham House
Also known as: CFR, Council on Foreign Relations, Foreign Relations
The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in New York in 1921 and incorporated as the American twin of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Quigley's documentation of the CFR in Tragedy and Hope (chiefly pp. 945–956) and The Anglo-American Establishment (p. 158) is the historical source from which the Council's later prominence in the American political imagination ultimately derives. In Quigley's framing, the CFR is one node in an Anglo-American institutional architecture whose British half is Chatham House, whose Pacific extension is the Institute of Pacific Relations, and whose American backbone is the J. P. Morgan and Company / Rockefeller / Carnegie / Whitney financial complex.
From the Inquiry to Pratt House
The CFR's institutional core was the personnel of "The Inquiry," the body of American experts assembled by Colonel Edward Mandell House to prepare the U.S. peace-conference position in 1917–1918. According to Quigley, the men who returned from the Hôtel Majestic meetings of May 1919 — "the experts on the American delegation to the Peace Conference who were most closely associated with J. P. Morgan and Company" — converted an existing New York dinner club into the CFR, which "was not founded by the American group that attended the meeting at the Hotel Majestic in 1919, but was taken over almost entirely by that group immediately after its founding in 1919" (AAE 158). It was incorporated in 1921 and from 1922 began publishing Foreign Affairs, the quarterly that became the flagship periodical of American policy elites. The masthead, Quigley notes, has "always been loaded with partners, associates, and employees of J. P. Morgan and Company" (AAE 158).
The Quigley Framing: Morgan, the Eastern Establishment, and the CFR
Quigley's most-quoted passage about the American Establishment, T&H 950, names the CFR's home network without naming the CFR explicitly: "international financial capitalism deeply involved in the gold standard, foreign-exchange fluctuations, floating of fixed-interest securities… This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company from the 1880's to the 1930's was cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian, and European-culture conscious." On the next page he gives this group its name: "the 'American Establishment'" (T&H 951). Quigley's own evaluation of this network is openly favourable — "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" (T&H 950 paraphrase from later passages). His objection is to its methods, particularly its preference for operating in secrecy.
Funding and Programme
Quigley's account is corroborated by the CFR's own institutional record. Its early endowment came predominantly from Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie sources; its membership in the 1920s was effectively a directory of the New York financial-corporate-legal elite — Russell Leffingwell, John W. Davis, Paul Cravath, Norman Davis, Frank Polk, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Whitney Shepardson — many of them also Round Table affiliates through the Phillips Andover, Yale, Harvard, and Oxford networks. The CFR's working method mirrored Chatham House's: a journal, study groups, sponsored monographs. Foreign Affairs was edited from 1922 to 1928 by Archibald Cary Coolidge and thereafter by Hamilton Fish Armstrong; under Armstrong (1928–1972) it became the dominant English-language journal of foreign-policy analysis.
The CFR in T&H: Specific Operative Roles
Tragedy and Hope names the Council in connection with specific operative episodes. It treats the wartime relationship between the Council, the State Department, and the IPR as the formative environment of post-war American Far Eastern policy (T&H 945–949). It documents the CFR's role in the post-1945 staff-pipeline into senior State Department and Treasury positions — Dean Rusk, the Dulles brothers, Christian Herter, McGeorge Bundy, Robert Lovett — all of whom "had close associations with the foundation-Establishment network" (T&H 951 ff.). And it treats the Council on Foreign Relations and Royal Institute of International Affairs together ("the chief publication outlet for the Round Table Group… is Foreign Affairs, the quarterly journal of the Council on Foreign Relations"; T&H 952–953). The CFR thus functions in Quigley's analysis as the American institutional channel through which the Round Table worldview entered American foreign policy.
Quigley vs. the Conspiracy Literature
The Anglo-American Establishment and the relevant chapters of Tragedy and Hope are the primary historical sources for the entire later body of popular literature on the CFR (Sutton, Allen, Skousen, Perloff, et al.). Quigley repudiated these adaptations vigorously. In The Professor Who Knew Too Much and in correspondence, he insisted that he was not describing a secret cabal hostile to the American interest but a documented network whose long-term programme — Anglo-American federation, the open-door international economic order, and the management of decolonization — he largely supported. The popular adaptations, in Quigley's view, distorted the record by treating institutional coordination as conspiracy and by erasing the public, on-the-record character of the group's project. The CFR's place in the Quigley archive is therefore double: it is both a documented historical institution and a site where the history of how Quigley's own work was received passes through American political culture.
Cited in
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 158 Quigley
the Council on Foreign Relations, was not founded by the American group that attended the meeting at the Hotel Majestic in 1919, but was taken over almost entirely by that group immediately after its founding in 1919.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 158 Quigley
The Morgan bank has never made any real effort to conceal its position in regard to the Council on Foreign Relations. The list of officers and board of directors are printed in every issue of Foreign Affairs and have always been loaded with partners, associates, and employees of J. P. Morgan and Company.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 950 Quigley
international financial capitalism deeply involved in the gold standard… This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated by J. P. Morgan and Company from the 1880's to the 1930's was cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian, and European-culture conscious.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 951 Quigley
this group could not control the Federal government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions thoroughly distasteful to the group… influence great enough to merit the name of the 'American Establishment.'
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 952 Quigley
Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 1331 Quigley
Council on Foreign Relations (New York), 132, 582, 952, 092
- professor-who-knew-too-much Quigley
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… because it wishes to remain unknown.