Edward M. House
Woodrow Wilson's confidant; American counterpart to the Round Table organizers (1858-1938)
Also known as: Colonel House, House, Edward House, Edward M. House, Edward Mandell House
Colonel Edward Mandell House (1858-1938) was a Texas political fixer and the closest adviser to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson from 1912 to 1919. He organized 'The Inquiry,' the academic team that prepared American positions for the Versailles conference, and is the American figure Quigley treats as the natural counterpart to the The Round Table on the British side. The joint Anglo-American planning meetings between The Inquiry and the Round Table at the Hotel Majestic in Paris in 1919 produced — by Quigley's account — both the Royal Institute of International Affairs and its American sister, the Council on Foreign Relations.
Texas to the White House
House was the youngest son of a Texas planter; his honorific 'Colonel' came from a Texas governor he had backed, not from military service. He moved Wilson into the White House in 1912 and operated, through the war, as Wilson's unofficial chief diplomat — visiting Europe repeatedly in 1914-1916 to attempt to broker a negotiated peace, then organizing the American war effort from a New York office once the U.S. entered the war in April 1917. He had no formal position in the administration but functioned as the President's alter ego on foreign affairs.
The Inquiry and Versailles
In September 1917 House recruited Sidney Mezes, Walter Lippmann, James Shotwell, Isaiah Bowman, and others to form 'The Inquiry' — the academic team that prepared American positions for the post-war peace conference. The Inquiry occupied the American Geographical Society's premises in New York; its outputs became, in revised form, Wilson's Fourteen Points. At Versailles in 1919, House served as American commissioner. Quigley summarizes the consequential moment: the joint Round Table-Inquiry meetings at the Hotel Majestic on 30 May 1919 'planned' the post-Versailles Anglo-American institutional architecture. 'Similar Institutes of International Affairs were established in the chief British dominions and in the United States (where it is known as the Council on Foreign Relations) in the period 1919-1927' (T&H 145).
Quigley's framing
Quigley treats House's relationship with the Round Table as functional rather than conspiratorial — a parallel English-speaking elite operation cooperating on shared objectives. In AAE he locates House inside the trans-Atlantic operating circle: 'On the secretarial staff for the United Kingdom delegation, we might point out the presence of Hankey and Grigg' (AAE 131); House's American team across the table was The Inquiry, and the institutional pair they produced — RIIA and CFR — has, in Quigley's reading, structured Anglo-American foreign-policy elite formation for the century since. Wilson broke with House in 1919 over a Versailles disagreement, and House spent his last twenty years writing memoirs.
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 293 Quigley
These institutions established networks of personal and intellectual contact along the Atlantic seaboard which... Of these, the Council on Foreign Relations of New York City was the principal.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 5 Quigley
various names, depending on which phase of its activities was being examined. It has been called 'The Times crowd,' 'the Rhodes crowd,' the 'Chatham House crowd,' the 'All Souls group,' and the 'Cliveden set.'
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 951 Quigley
the original purpose of these groups was to seek to federate the English-speaking world along lines laid down by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) and William T. Stead (1849-1912).