“… A larger opportunity to exercise his influence came in October of 1917 when President Wilson publicly appointed Brandeis to collate the material on which the eventual peace should be established.” Pg. 79, Louis D. Brandeis, A Biographical Sketch, Jacob DeHaas.
The Inquiry officially began with an August 1917 memorandum from Felix Frankfurter while he was in Europe, “stimulated by knowledge acquired in Paris of French efforts in the field of diplomatic planning”. Frankfurter called for the formation of a group of experts in preparation of an upcoming peace conference. This group of experts, as we know from previous research, was headed by Walter Lippmann, the Inquiry’s first Secretary, beginning out of a small backroom at the New York Public Library.
And we see from the above quote from Jacob DeHaas, that Brandeis was given the initial responsibility by president Wilson of creating this group of experts. The Inquiry very much looking like the predecessor to the Council on Foreign Relations, boasting within its early ranks an eclectic mix of Ivy League academic scholars and professors, professional diplomats, politicians, advisors, members of military intelligence and the media.
Here we show Brandeis, Lippmann, and Frankfurter, are all essential in the founding of the Inquiry. In fact, the main founders of the Inquiry, look a lot like the founders of the New Republic. Croly, Walter Weyl, and Alvin Saunders Johnson also considered founders of both. Croly and Weyl also House of Truth residents.
Interesting to note the timeline here in that Brandeis was also in deep negotiations with the US and British governments regarding the drafting of the Balfour Declaration, dated November 2, 1917. Both the Inquiry and Israel created during the fall of 1917 and Brandeis can very easily be considered the directing influence in both. As discovered previously, the many drafts of the Declaration passed through the hands of Brandeis for final approval. His involvement with the founding of the Inquiry now means Brandeis is central to the founding of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the very first ever 501C, not-for-profit, think-tanks, Brandeis counseling and directing the first foreign policy experts, the first political philosophers, the founding path setters for Henry Kissinger, Brzezinski and the coming American Century.
In fact Lippmann, trained by George Santayana and William James while at Harvard to be the political philosopher, is considered today a forefather to both Kissinger and Brzezinski, Lippmann setting the tone in the promotion of strong nationalist foreign policy through preparedness and efficiency. The correcting of backwards races from a good, safe distance. The Inquiry the first modern technical advisors, made independent of the government, a camera if you will. This also making Brandeis a pioneer in the shaping of American foreign policy for the next one hundred years, establishing the expert inside the administration of a sitting US president. With the help of Lippmann, Frankfurter. One cannot deny America goes from non-interventionalist to warmonger under Brandeis’ ‘sage’ guidance. These deeper details being brought to light helping make sense of the famous Wilson volte face, from ‘He Kept U Out of War’ to the ‘War to End All War’, in four months.
Inquiry founder James T. Shotwell, Columbia History Professor, and Carnegie Endowment historian, was assigned with the task of recruiting professors and scholars specifically from the political and social sciences. Shotwell one of the very first members of the Inquiry, along with Colonel House, Walter Lippmann and Archibald Cary Coolidge, three lifetime founding members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Shotwell himself recruited by none other than Herbert Croly. Croly important for three reasons, 1) his 1909 publication, The Promise of American Life, served as the inspiration for Roosevelt’s 1912 Bull Moose Party campaign and was the very manifesto to the Progressive movement, 2) he was a resident at the House of Truth and, 3) a co-founder of the New Republic. Croly a close intimate of Brandeis, Frankfurter, Lippmann. (put a picture of Roosevelt Outlook book review in article here)
“’Progressive Democracy,’ by Herbert Croly, and ‘Drift and Master,’ by Walter Lippmann … No man who wishes seriously to study our present social, industrial, and political life with the view of guiding his thought and action so as to work for national betterment in the future can afford not to read these books through and through and to ponder and digest them. They worthily carry forward the argument contained in the authors’ previous works – “The Promise of American Life,’ by Mr. Croly, and ‘A Preface to Politics,’ by Mr. Lippmann.” Pg. 232, Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive Democracy (1926). Find Outlook magazine source
“One day in September, 1917, there was a telephone message from Mr. Herbert Croly, Editor of the New Republic, that Colonel House wanted to see me. I had spent the late spring and most of the summer in Washington, from the first weeks of America’s entry into the World War, as chairman of the National Board for Historical Service, the war-time organization of the historians of the country … ‘the Colonel’ wanted to see me in connection with preparation for the Peace Conference which would sooner or later have to be called at the end of the World War.” Pg. 3, At the Paris Peace Conference, James T. Shotwell.
Shotwell mentioning his work with the National Board for Historical Service, but failed to mention that it was a part of the Committee on Public Information – America’s first propaganda division. That puts Shotwell in charge of the official historical narrative inside the propaganda organization that was most responsible with turning Americans from pacifists to interventionalists in four months.
Shotwell and the International Labour Organization
James T. Shotwell, professor of History at Columbia and Director, Division of Economics and History and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is considered the main author of the International Labor Organization, established during the peace talks in Paris as a necessary attachment to the League of Nations. The League of Nations and the ILO both aspects within the eventual Treaty of Versailles. And, according to Shotwell the major obstacle for the formation of both the ILO and the League of Nations was the US Constitution.
“The problem here is the most delicate of all. Can international action go so far as to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign state … That would be the recognition of a World State in the most sensitive part of government machinery – the power to enforce law. Its purpose would be to bring up the backward states to as near the standards of progressive countries as possible, in order that progressive states themselves should not be kept behind … Yet nothing can run more counter to the principles of national sovereignty as understood and applied throughout the world than this interference with the enforcement of law”. pg. 59, APPC
Shotwell’s plan for an international labour organization called for the employment of men and women independent of governments, social science experts superseding all national authority. “It is the first creation of an institution, participated in by workers, capital, and governments to deal with the problems that are most real to most people the world over, those that have to do with the day’s work … It might more accurately have been termed the International Industrial Conference or, better still, the International Organization for Social Justice.” According to Shotwell, the ILO could “be established only if it is based upon social justice” which enabled them to tie the ILO “into the structure of that new world order which the League of Nations symbolized”, through their shared means of social justice. Pg. 54, APPC
The ILO meant to be “the beginning of a continuous co-operation on the part of Labour, Society, and Governments.” Not just a “one-time Charter, but a series of them”. A “living” international law that changed with society. The recognition of “non-official representation in an official international body” was the expert entering wedge gaining a foothold on the international stage. And it was the first of its kind. Shotwell stating in the chapter entitled, Social Justice in the Peace Treaties, “It was clear that some device would have to be found for the limitation of the powers of these non-official representatives, and yet it was necessary that that limitation should not be carried to the point of endangering in any way the reality of their work.”
A fine line was to be drawn between giving unelected officials omniscient powers over nations and still allowing these social scientists to apply their expertise unfettered, the consequence of which could be the creation of what Shotwell rightly called a Super-State. Shotwell admitting the delicate nature of negotiations when attempting to jam a square peg into a round hole. The entire idea of an international authority is in direct contrast to that of a sovereign Nation State.
The Western countries each with their constitutions, and more importantly, each with a population that believed in them. Eventually, Shotwell, with the help of none other than Felix Frankfurter, created the necessary text to skirt around the Constitutional issues involved with the drafting of the International Labor Organization:
“After dinner, worked all evening in my room on the text of the labor agreement, with [George Louis] Beer, Frankfurter and [Whitney] Shepardson. A brilliant suggestion from Beer solved the first main difficulty and we came to agreement on a second point and Frankfurter did the drafting, so that I had little share in the actual manipulation of the text, but it would never have been done if I had not started the compromise.” Pg. 210, 211, APPC.
Here we see Frankfurter, a member, not of the American Delegation, but of the Zionist Delegation, penning the text of the first ever international labor organization. Fulfilling Marx’s dream. Frankfurter famously having a toe in every delegation in Paris was there in Brandeis’ behalf, the kochleffel cooking spoon. Lippmann leading the Inquiry, the first expert entering wedge driven into executive branch of the US government. The State Department authority was commandeered openly, on the Atlantic, and then in Paris, their superiority overshadowed by a collection of “amateurish” social science professors. The State Department and especially Robert Lansing were understandably concerned. While everyone speaks of modern deep state takeovers, we see Brandeis, Lippmann, and Frankfurter coordinating a soft coup d’etat within the US government, under crisis government, over one hundred years ago, a Progressive revolutionary takeover that made itself at home and has never left.
“Mr. Lippmann’s unique gift for clarifying the issues of politics, so widely known in the post-war period, explains the importance of the role he played in interpreting and phrasing policy. Professor Seymour’s summary of the trend of Mr. Lippmann’s contribution is correct when he says, ‘It is my impression that Lippmann furnished the abstract ideas which found their way into a good many of the memoranda of the American Delegation and ultimately into some of President Wilson’s public speeches’ … [Mr. Lippmann’s] method of work at once called for an extended organization with technical experts competent to deal with each phase of the vast field that would have to be covered by the Peace Conference …
My first task, therefore, was to help secure the acceptance of a group of associates in the fields of history, geography, and economics who would be able to concentrate upon specific questions and have the results of their research ready when these issues came up for decision at the Peace Conference … a task that called for the co-operation of university men – for never before had universities been mobilized for such service – The researchers in this instance were to be drawn from the highest academic capacity in the country” Pg. 4, APPC.
“there were those in the State Department who were by no means happy at the way in which the preparations for the Peace Conference were being made. This was not only natural under the circumstances but, from the standpoint of public law, had apparent justification. If the State Department did not have full control of the preparation for negotiations, how could it play any effective part in their actual conduct? Men whose lives had been spent in diplomatic service could hardly be expected to regard favourably the creation of a temporary body of so-called experts as the President’s advisers in so many important aspects of the negotiation of peace, nor to look forward with equanimity to the prospect of having this improvised organization take any formal part in the work for the Peace Conference …
…the State Department properly felt that the problem in this particular case covered practically the whole field of our foreign relations at the most critical, and even revolutionary, turning point in the history of American diplomacy. In their eyes it was one thing for the President to have a personal adviser in Colonel House, but quite a different thing for the Colonel ‘s staff to develop to the point of displacing the established governmental organ for foreign affairs.” Pg. 12, APPC
From this coordination of public and private sectors Shotwell admits is the catalyst to similarly set up organizations like the War Industries Board, the War Trade Board, the United States Shipping Board etc., “forming a war-time government by itself, separate from the permanent government departments.” All of it realized under executive order. Shotwell calling it then the philosophy of “crisis government”, knowing “crisis must be met by organs free from bureaucratic impediments and act directly with or under the chief executive.” Emergency committees created out of the crisis of war proved very effective in getting things accomplished and after Paris this philosophy of fear was brought back to the States and used ever since during times of peace.
“The Peace Treaty was not to be a return to the old diplomacy, but the establishment of a new world order.” The Inquiry the American answer to similar war-time inspired organizations by the English under George W. Prothero and the French under Jean Morel and the Comite d’Etudes. The Inquiry was thought by the State Department as “amateurish.”
“Some day the Inquiry will find its historian, and this strange experiment in the mobilization of social sciences to help in shaping the outlines of the new world structure which had to be built out of the ruins of the war will offer a subject with unique possibilities” pg. 11, APPC
League of Nations
The League of Nations was the culmination of decades of coordinated work towards an international governing body. Nothing less than the scientific, technical expert gone international. The path can be clearly traced back from the Leagues official inception in 1919 through several international meetings spanning seventy years and attended by the worlds most prominent thinkers in international law. Including perhaps its most influential, Karl Marx. The true history shows Internationalism as a critical aspect to both Marxist socialist, and radical liberal thought.
The final words in Marx’s Manifesto, “Working men of all countries, unite!”
Marx listed as a journalist, was the leader of the First International in 1864, otherwise known as the International Workingmen’s Association, that officially started this most modern movement towards internationalism(!) Both internationalism and Marx promised victory for labour through a collective security, the uniting of all within one universal community, just like the American leaders of the Progressive Era led by Brandeis promised American labour.
Leading ethical Fabian socialists continued to build on the Marxist inspired international tradition. Fabians like J.A. Hobson, Ramsay MacDonald, George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, Graham Wallas gaining major influence for their socialist mission by establishing the British Labour Party, a legitimate and still very influential political party within the British parliament. Webb a member of the executive board and drafted the Labour Party’s first policy statement. Influential Fabian John Maynard Keynes also incredibly important in setting the predominant Western economic philosophy of the 20th century with Keynesian economics, a belief in the government taking a more active role in their countries’ economies by borrowing during times of recession, as an answer to the free-market, laissez-faire. Internationalism pushed into the new century by the Fabians assisted by their very close friends, the American Progressives.
British members of the Round Table Group. Lord Milner, Robert Cecil, two ministers without portfolio within the British government, were very involved in the creation of the League of Nations, and beside them, their secretaries, House of Truth residents, Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), and Eustace Percy (1st Baron of Percy Newcastle). Despite no official title, Cecil was the acting secretary for foreign affairs.
Subsequent congresses at Geneva, Lausanne, Brussels, the Hague and many others, led to the Theodore Roosevelt inspired 1907 Hague Conference where they codified the Lieber Code. Leiber for those who have been following along a Prussian professor, author of the Lieber Code, the first international code of law. The Copenhagen Congress of 1910 where labour legislation was enacted limiting work days to eight hours, minimum age to fourteen, the prohibition of night work, uninterrupted rest of 36 hours per week, inspection of working conditions. All around the same time Brandeis and the National Consumers League is establishing the same legislation inside the United States.
It was at the final Inter-Allied Conference in London in September of 1918 (four months prior to the American Delegations arrival in Paris), that the American scheme, headed by Wilson’s Fourteen Points was adopted. Calling for the free navigation of the sea, the removal of economic barriers and an equity of trade worldwide, a reduction in national armaments, a restoration of all French territory lost to Germany during the Franco Prussian War of 1871, and the Fourteenth and final point, the creation of “a general association of nations” to be formed for the purpose of collective security. Pg. 11, The Proceedings of the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conferences; see also, Report on International Action and Machinery Regulating Labor and International Labor Opinion as to Peace Terms (1919)
As we have discussed at length in Brandeis Part 5: Industrial Democracy and the Protocol of Peace, the democratization of the shop floor was the first steps towards a democratized national workforce, and an eventual Industrial Democracy, Sidney Webb writing the book in 1896. Here is where their plan went international, the industrial democratization of the world.
The aforementioned Lord Robert Cecil, one of the primary founders of the League of Nations called the entire idea of an international order of law, The Great Experiment in 1941 writing, “That any ambitious Power, dominated by a tyrannical Government, should be able to plunge the nations into war and inflict incalculable suffering on mankind, is intolerable. It was to prevent this that the Great Experiment of the League of Nations was carried out.” Foreword, The Great Experiment, Lord Robert Cecil, Viscount Cecil.
Cecil writing in 1944 on the cusp of the UN, “The Report of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference is the first blue print of the future machine for the maintenance of Peace. The L.N.U. had already one the same thing a few months ago, and, to speak frankly, I do not think the official effort is any improvement on ours. But there is not much difference between the two. Both provide for a body representing the whole of the States-Members of the new Organisation called the Assembly …
… In both there is a smaller body called the Council, consisting partly of permanent and partly of elective members. There is to be a Secretary General and a Secretariat in each case, as well as a Court of Justice like the existing one. Social and Economic questions are to be dealt with by Committees, who are to report to the Assembly.” The Dumbarton Oaks Plan, by Viscount Cecil, November 1944, Headway in War-Time, The Journal of the League of Nations Union
Shotwell and others recognizing the “dangerous dilemma” of allowing power to be taken from government and given to unelected officials, “for if the power to make labour treaties were to be taken over by a body containing so large an element of unofficial representatives, what about the power to enforce the treaties? Should the governments be held responsible for carrying out proposition arrived at and agreed upon in the formulation of which they had been partly shut out?
The result would be to make a government little more than a police force for the administration of regulations arrived at by these Industrial Parliaments; in short, there would have arisen something like a World State under the aegis of Industrial Democracy.” This is exactly what we are arguing happened. The expert official, given unfettered international authority over national state governments, stretched over one hundred years, has greatly exploited the vulnerability of nation states and created our modern Industrial democracy. Fascism.
“On May 30, 1919, a little group of diplomats and scholars from Britain and the United States convened at the Hotel Majestic to discuss how their fellowship could be sustained after the peace. They proposed a permanent Anglo-American Institute of International Affairs, with on branch in London, the other in New York.” Pg. 5, Continuing the Inquiry, Peter Grose.
The Inquiry’s work much like that of Brandeis, based on a quantitative collection of scientific information, heavily influenced the proceedings in Paris as they redefined borders, deleting countries while bringing new ones to life. A total restructuring of Central European relationships that is still going on in the same place today.
“Progressive ideals have placed a heavy premium of social planning. Experts, specialist of all kinds, were often credited with possession both the particular skills and personal disinterestedness considered desired requisites for social planning. Reform of the world’s society to prevent future international warfare became the assignment for the Inquiry’s engineers. According to the plan, the Wilsonian peace was to be a scientifically arranged settlement .. The many Inquiry reports heavily charged with statistical tables and ‘facts,’ often with no interpretation, no recommendation, and no obvious frame fo reference, bear ample testimony to the ‘scientific’ spirit which permeated much of the Inquiry’s work.” Pg. 330, The Inquiry: American Preparation for Peace, Lawrence Gelfand.
“Breakfast with Young, Westermann and Bowman in Bowman’s room. Young troubled over what may happen to his Division of Economics now, after the arrival of John Foster Dulles and the men who worked with Gay at the various ‘controls,’ War Trade Board, War Industries Board, etc.”
These connections to Bernard Baruch, the Dulles brothers and the pioneers of the CIA before the OSS tells the real story, the problems being worked out at the Paris Peace Conference had little to do with peace, and more to do with economic questions of an immanent and imposing system of internationalism. This now leading our research directly to the creation of the military industrial complex twenty-five years before Truman and over forty years before Eisenhower warned us of, not only the military industrial complex, but the technological, scientific, elite. The origins of Fascism in America and the rise of the Bush dynasty emerge from the War Industries Board, all created out of ‘crisis government’, from the embers of war, and here we see all of the familiar names looking not for peace, but the end of competition, the free market and sovereignty: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, the House of Rothschild, the Lazard Brothers and all the international banking families.
“Moreover the purely documentary contribution of my division was supplemented by a series of meetings with the representatives of European governments or factions, held for the most part in the evenings and in a private dining room at the Columbia University Club. Not the least interesting of these occasions were those when Professor Masaryk expounded the philosophy of self-determination for Eastern Europe, with the map which he had prepared hanging on the wall and the members of the Inquiry gathered like a class in a seminar”. pg. 10, APPC.
Following professor Masaryk being named president of the new country of Czechoslovakia, he gifted a full-length portrait of himself to Shotwell and the University Club at Columbia. The map was also gifted to the Inquiry as indicated in the margins of the original maps.
The American Delegation at Paris taken inside the Eagle Room at the Palace of Versailles. Inquiry at the back, Allen and John Foster Dulles present along with the Lone Wolf of Wall Street and the chairman of the War Industries Board, Bernard Baruch. Also Phi Beta Kappa. The Rise of the Expert on International Affairs begins here. These are the authors of the Second World War through their creation of the Treaty of Versailles. A complete demoralization of the German people we today in the West are only too familiar with.
“It is impossible to tell yet whether peace is being drafted by the international bankers or the munition-makers … economic forces moved the conference, like players about a chess-board. Boundary-lines were shifted to include harbors, copper, oil, mineral resources. Races were split, natural demarcations ignored. The imperialist interests that had kept the world on edge for thirty years before the war were making a killing … The British Admiralty wanted oil; it had talked oil for years. British maritime prescience saw that oil was the fuel of to-morrow. The French steel trust wanted a grip on coal and iron oar, to gain command of the Continent and strip Germany of her war-making power. Munition-makers were busy. They were getting ready for the next war.”(5) Confessions of a Reformer, Frederic C. Howe pg. 290,291.