Raymond B. Fosdick sep 05

Since the late 1940s hundreds of books have been published purporting to reveal the existence of a conspiracy to establish a global totalitarian dictatorship or ‘New World Order’, complete with a world army, world currency, a global religion and world government. Some of the classic texts in this much-derided and lampooned genre included The Blue Book of the John Birch Society (1959), John Stormer’s None Dare Call It Treason (1964), Alan Stang’s The Actor (1968) and Gary Allen and Larry Abraham’s landmark work None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971). Many more important books about the N.W.O. appeared during the 1970s most of them written by Gary Allen including: Richard Nixon: The Man Behind The Mask, (1971), Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State (1976) and The Rockefeller File (1976). Key titles of the 1980s included Larry Abraham’s Call It Conspiracy (1985) and James Perloff’s The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988).

The period since the 1990s, however, must count as a golden age for N.W.O. research with the market flooded with new authors and new theories incorporating UFOs, mind-control, ancient astronauts and genealogy. Among the most significant works in recent years are: William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (1991), Jim Marrs’ Rule by Secrecy (1996), Fritz Springmeier’s The Bloodlines of the Illuminati (1995), and the plethora of books by British researcher David Icke – among them The Robots Rebellion (1995), The Biggest Secret (1999), Children of the Matrix (2001), Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster (2002) and Tales from the Time Loop (2004) – and his late American antagonist, Jim Keith, author of Casebook on Alternative 3 (1994), Black Helicopters Over America (1994) and Saucers of the Illuminati (1999).

All of these books go to great lengths to name the guilty parties, the organisations, families and individuals said to be behind the New World Order plot. Some of the groups named include secret societies such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Skull and Bones; and policy-planning organisations prime among them the Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderbergers and more recently the Project on the New American Century. The families and individuals identified include the usual suspects: the House of Rothschild, the Rockefellers (David Rockefeller in particular), Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Colonel’ Edward House, George Bush Senior, and now George Bush Junior, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Reviewing the countless books, magazines, articles and websites critically examining the New World Order one cannot help but notice that in a remarkable oversight, the name of one seemingly obscure, yet actually very important figure is missing from this rollcall of the damned.

That individual, whose existence I first discussed in Part 1 of my series ‘Rockefeller Internationalism’ (which appeared in Nexus magazine in 2002/3), is Raymond Blaine Fosdick (1883-1972). In a career which included time as an aide to US General John Pershing (Commander of US forces in Europe during World War I) during the Paris Peace Conference; Under Secretary-General for the League of Nations in 1919-1920; and nearly three decades of close involvement in the network of foundations established by John D. Rockefeller Junior, including as a trustee to the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the International Education Board, the General Education Board and the Rockefeller Foundation, and later president of three of these philanthropies, including 12 years as President of the Rockefeller Foundation; Fosdick hardly warrants being written off as a peripheral figure. John D. Rockefeller Junior once described Fosdick as one of his ‘close and valued associates for nearly forty years’;¹ yet he remains largely unknown to most readers of this genre and is rarely mentioned, if at all, by New World Order researchers.²

This omission occurs despite more than a few mainstream histories crediting Fosdick with converting Junior into a supporter of the League of Nations. Instead, with most researchers unaware of Fosdick’s key role, less plausible explanations for the Rockefeller involvement in the N.W.O. have been advocated. One in particular which has gained in popularity in recent years argues that the supposedly noble lineage of the Rockefellers is evidence they are of the ‘Illuminati bloodline’ or are even ‘reptilian hybrids’ that are therefore destined – if not genetically and spiritually programmed – to seek world domination.

The primary objective of this article is to alert researchers and interested readers to the importance of Fosdick. Rather than being a marginal figure in the history of the New World Order, it is my contention that were it not for Fosdick’s calculated and ultimately successful effort to recruit John D. Rockefeller Junior to his way of thinking about world order, it is highly unlikely the Rockefeller name would be associated in any way with the push for international government.

To verify this hypothesis, this article will be divided into two parts. In the first part those arguments put forward for Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order pre-dating the 1920s (the time when Fosdick became a close adviser to Junior) will be critically examined. This will include allegations the Rockefellers are Rothschild frontmen; that they possess Illuminati or ‘reptilian’ lineage; and were behind the League of Nations from the outset. In the second part the focus will be on the career of Fosdick, tracing his relationship with both Woodrow Wilson and John D. Rockefeller Junior, the origins and evolution of his liberal internationalist philosophy, his work for the League of Nations and the Rockefeller Foundation, and above all the evidence that it was he who convinced Junior to back the League. Ultimately, it will be shown that Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order was not predetermined, whether genetically, genealogically or financially, but was due in large part to the ideological influence of one man: Raymond Blaine Fosdick.

Part One: THE ROCKEFELLERS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

To properly understand Fosdick’s role in the New World Order it is necessary to revisit and reconsider a version of history that most of us in this field take for granted, namely that Rockefeller family involvement in the alleged world government plot probably dates back to the 1860s, when John D. Rockefeller Senior began his relentless and ruthless quest to dominate oil production in the United States. There are three ‘factoids’ offered in support of this contention:

These are controversial allegations and proponents of these claims could be justifiably credited with attempting to alert the public to little-known historical material that might otherwise remain hidden. On closer inspection, however, each of these so-called ‘facts’ are revealed as standing on tenuous ground. In their eagerness to go beyond the boundaries of mainstream history with its sedate conclusions, some of these authors have succeeded only in producing sloppy research, repeating unsubstantiated claims without searching for original sources, and ignoring any evidence which conflicts with their theories. In the sections that follow we will attempt to illustrate the significant empirical flaws in each of these claims.

1.1 Frontmen for the Rothschilds

To present Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order as somehow inevitable numerous analysts claim the Rockefellers are actually surrogates for the House of Rothschild. Hollywood film producer Myron Fagan, for example, in a lengthy polemic against the Council on Foreign Relations delivered in the 1960s, claimed that it was the banker Jacob Schiff, who was in fact an ‘agent of the Rothschilds’, who had ‘financed the Standard Oil Company’.³ David Icke, referring to the fortunes of J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller in his book …and the truth shall set you free (1995), repeated this allegation, though somewhat more cautiously:

There is evidence to suggest that the House of Rothschild was behind both of these great American business and banking empires, a demonstration of the Rothschilds’ brilliance for hiding the extent of their power and control behind frontmen and organisations.⁴

Four years later in The Biggest Secret (1999), however, Icke was more certain, charging that the Rockefellers ‘became the most powerful family in the United States with the help of Rothschild money and, no doubt, through other sources, too.’ This apparent fact prompted Icke to dismiss the Rockefellers as little more than ‘wealthy “gofers” answerable to higher powers’, who used ‘Rothschild and Payseur funding to build vast empires which controlled banking, business oil, steel etc, and ran the United States economy…’ while remaining ‘subordinate to the central operational control centre in Europe, especially London.’⁵ Fritz Springmeier, another of Icke’s sources, claims in his controversial Bloodlines of the Illuminati (1991) that Rockefeller originally made his money selling narcotics before he branched out into oil, although ‘it was Rothschild capital that made the Rockefellers so powerful.’⁶ In his detailed history of the New World Order, David A. Rivera claims: ‘In this country [U.S.], through their American and European agents, [the Rothschilds] helped finance Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel and Harriman’s Railroad.’⁷

More precise information on the alleged Rothschild link is provided in the book of the video, The Money Masters: How International Bankers Gained Control of America (1998), produced by Patrick S. J. Carmack. According to Carmack:

The National City Bank of Cleveland, which was identified in congressional hearings as one of three Rothschild banks in the United States, provided John D. Rockefeller with the money to begin his monopolisation of the oil refinery business, resulting in the formation of Standard Oil. Jacob Schiff, who had been born in the Rothschild Green Shield house in Frankfurt and who was then the principal Rothschild agent in the US, advised Rockefeller and developed the infamous rebate deal Rockefeller secretly demanded from railroads shipping competitors’ oil.⁸

The primary source of these allegations by Carmack, Icke and Springmeier, appears to be American researcher Eustace Mullins. In his book Murder by Injection, Mullins argues that the focus on Rockefeller’s greed ‘obscures the fact that from the day the Rothschilds began to finance his march towards a total oil monopoly in the United States from their coffers at the National City Bank of Cleveland, Rockefeller was never an independent power…’ Mullins continues:

However much of the Rockefeller wealth may be attributed to old John D.’s rapacity and ruthlessness, its origins are indubitably based in his initial financing from the National City Bank of Cleveland, which was identified in Congressional reports as one of the three Rothschild banks in the United States and by his later acceptance of the guidance of Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, who had been born in the Rothschild house in Frankfurt and was now the principal Rothschild representative (but unknown as such to the public) in the United States.⁹

According to Mullins, it was Rockefeller’s demonstrated callousness in the pursuit of his business goals that probably persuaded the Rothschilds to provide him with financial backing. Once they were sure they had ‘found their man’, the Rothschilds had sent their ‘personal representative, Jacob Schiff, to Cleveland to help Rockefeller plan further expansion.’ To prove his contention, Mullins quotes the following lines about Schiff from the 16 December 1912 edition of Truth magazine:

Mr Schiff is head of the great private banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Company, which represents the Rothschild interests on this side of the Atlantic. He is described as a financial strategist and has been for years the financial minister of the great impersonal power known as Standard Oil.¹⁰

These allegations, though somewhat sparse with regard to concrete evidence, suggest a relationship in which the Rockefellers were not only financially dependent upon the Rothschilds for their rise to wealth power, but were ultimately subordinate to them. The basic dynamic of the alleged relationship can be seen in the following diagram (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Alleged relationship between the Rothschilds and the Rockefeller Empire

Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that the Rothschild-Rockefeller connection rests on at least four unproven assertions.

First, although it is indisputable that Rockefeller relied heavily upon bankers during the early years to finance the rapid growth of his oil business, there is remarkably little evidence that he borrowed exclusively, if at all, from Rothschild-controlled banks, especially their alleged subsidiary the National City Bank of Cleveland (NCBC). The problem, however, as anyone pursuing this issue will soon discover, is that in the numerous books tracing Rockefeller’s rise, his lenders are rarely identified. Ron Chernow in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr (1999), for example, notes that despite ‘his populist mistrust of bankers, Rockefeller owed much of his incandescent rise to their assistance.’ The identity of Rockefeller’s first non-family lender is given, but instead of an identifiable Rothschild proxy we have Truman P. Handy, a ‘kindly, benevolent old banker’. Chernow mentions more borrowing undertaken by Rockefeller during the 1860s, including his relations with two other bankers, William Otis and Stillman Witt, though not the banks they represented. But for Rockefeller’s biggest initial purchase, when he bought out his partners to take control of Cleveland’s largest oil refinery in February 1865 for $72,500, certain ‘sympathetic bankers’ are mentioned but not actually identified.¹¹

Commenting on the same deal, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, authors of The Rockefellers (1976), observe only that Rockefeller ‘already had good enough standing in the Cleveland financial community to be able to borrow the purchase price.’¹²

Similarly Ferdinand Lundberg in The Rockefeller Syndrome (1975) observes that Rockefeller ‘was constantly in need of new capital for expansion. He constantly borrowed heavily from the banks, where he was increasingly welcome as he always paid back on the dot.’ Unsurprisingly Lundberg does not name any individual bankers, but he does note that in his seemingly relentless search for cash, in 1867 Rockefeller had gone into partnership with the flamboyant Henry M. Flagler who had brought into Standard Oil new funds from both himself and his uncle, the wealthy whisky distiller Steven V. Harkness.¹³ The need for Flagler and his rich uncle naturally begs the question: where were Rockefeller’s supposed Rothschild benefactors?

No more clues are to be found in David Freeman Hawke’s John D. (1980), which makes much of Rockefeller’s apparent belief in his father’s philosophy that one should ‘[b]orrow money in the present…in order to accumulate a fortune in the future.’ Hawke even quotes the view of Rockefeller’s first business partner, Andrew Clark, that he was ‘the biggest borrower I ever saw.’ But besides repeating the stories about Handy, Flagler and Harkness, and claiming that ‘John D. was a familiar face at all Cleveland banks’; not one of these banks is identified.¹⁴

Histories of the oil industry are just as vague. Daniel Yergin’s much vaunted account, The Prize (1992), for instance, notes: ‘As the oil boom progressed, Rockefeller, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the Great Game, continued to pour both profits and borrowed money into his refinery.’¹⁵ The first volume of a much earlier work, Williamson and Daum’s The American Petroleum Industry (1959), although giving a fairly thorough chronicle of the oil refining companies acquired by Standard Oil, and Rockefeller’s clever tactics, is largely silent on where the money came from.¹⁶ Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters (1975) maintains the paucity of detail, noting that Rockefeller ‘expanded with great daring, borrowing wherever he could, and bringing in new partners.’¹⁷ As always, Rockefeller’s insatiable need to borrow money is acknowledged, but his lenders remain largely anonymous.

At this point it would be tempting to conclude that Mullin’s allegations ought not be set aside as inconclusive and unreliable, but retained as an otherwise suppressed insight into how the world really works. Proponents of the Rothshcild-Rockefeller connection might even decide that, at best, the above authors were either ignorant of or indifferent to the question of precisely who lent Rockefeller his money. But, at worst they might suspect that these same writers of being part of a deliberate effort to suppress information about the Rothschild link. There is, however, at least one detailed source that throws Mullins claims into doubt.

Grace Goulder’s book, John D. Rockefeller: The Cleveland Years, (1972), produced by a Cleveland based historical society, provides some of the missing details. According to Goulder, Rockefeller’s first lender, Handy, was the president and principal stockholder of Cleveland’s then biggest bank, the Commercial Branch of the State Bank of Ohio. Handy, who had migrated to Cleveland from Buffalo in 1832, had revived the Commercial State Bank at the urging of George Bancroft, described as a ‘historian and statesman’ from Massachusetts, whose interests included state banking. Bancroft had raised ‘$200,000…in the East for the purpose.’ Handy, then in his mid-twenties, was made cashier; by the 1860s, when Rockefeller was starting out in business, he was bank president.¹⁸ As noted in the other accounts, it was Handy who gave Rockefeller his first loan; but it seems that it was not the last. Rockefeller would later recall: ‘For long years after, the head of this bank was a friend indeed; he loaned me money when I needed it, and I needed it almost all the time.’¹⁹

Handy and the Commercial State Bank were not to be Rockefeller’s only source of finance. He also developed a close business relationship with the Second National Bank of Cleveland, and two of its officers, Stillman Witt from its board of directors, and Witt’s son-in-law, Dan Eells, who would later become president of the Commercial National Bank. The relationship with Rockefellers was close, according to Goulder, Witt and Handy were ‘always his allies’; Witt was even ‘his friend.’²⁰

Goulder’s account of Witt, Handy and Eells, and the banks they represented: the Commercial State Bank, the Second National Bank and the Commercial National Bank; and the evidence of Rockefeller’s close relationship with those financiers obviously conflict with Mullins’ specific allegations about the National City Bank of Cleveland.²¹ While it is possible that he may have borrowed from the NCBC, there is no evidence that Rockefeller relied exclusively or predominately upon that institution. But more importantly, there is also no evidence that the banks we know he did borrow from were Rothschild-controlled. Obviously a more exhaustive study of Rockefeller’s borrowing during that period and of the ownership of the various financial institutions in Cleveland might reveal such a connection,²² but until that research is done Mullin’s claims must be treated as conjecture.

The second fallacy concerns the original allegation of Rothschild control of the National Capital Bank of Cleveland. Mullins’ claims this fact was revealed in ‘Congressional reports’, however his account is imprecise and unreliable. It is unclear as to what Congressional investigation or reports Mullins is referring to, and the researcher seems destined to hit dead-end, unless one probes further on the Internet where the source is finally revealed to be a Congressional report from the mid-1970s. We can find this source cited in Rivera’s Final Warning:

A May 1976 report of the House Banking and Currency Committee…revealed that Rothschild Intercontinental Bank Ltd, which consisted of Rothschild banks in London, France, Belgium, New York and Amsterdam, had three American subsidiaries: National City Bank of Cleveland, First City Bank of Houston, and Seattle First National Bank.²³

The problem is of course in how Mullins has used this information. Rivera has utilised it to illustrate continuing Rothschild control of the US banking industry and ultimately the Federal Reserve System (although its significance is debatable). Mullins, though, seems to think this information proves the Rothschilds financed the Rockefellers; but this seems unlikely for a number of reasons. For one, this snippet of information only establishes Rothschild control of the NCBC in the 1970s, and gives no clues as to whether they controlled it in the 1860s or 1870s.

It seems unlikely, though, that the Rothschilds, or their agent, August Belmont (1813-1890),²⁴ had a significant interest in the NCBC in the mid-19th century. Indeed, Belmont’s attempts to coax the Rothschilds into establishing a formal arm of the bank in the US had failed, leading to a decline in their influence. In fact a frustrated Belmont would later complain of his employers ‘utter want of appreciation of the importance of American business.’²⁵ Combined with the absence of evidence of Rockefeller borrowing exclusively or primarily from the National City Bank of Cleveland, the finding of the Congressional committee is of limited relevance to events in Ohio in the 1860s.

The third fallacy concerns Mullins allegations that Jacob Schiff’s role was as the middle-man between the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds; again the evidence is sparse and inconclusive. In Niall Ferguson’s massive history of the Rothschilds, The House of Rothschild (1998), Schiff barely rates a mention and is not identified in any substantive collaborative role with the Rothschilds beyond charity work. As numerous other mainstream accounts have long established, Rothschild’s primary representative in the US, a market they otherwise neglected, was August Belmont & Company. Yet this does not mean that Schiff had no dealings with the Rothschilds, as Evyatar Friesel, reviewing Naomi Cohen’s Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership (1999), notes that in America’s ‘expanding economy’ of the 19th century:

Schiff entered with gusto into the financing of railroads and of new industries. As in the past, the Jewish bankers of different countries collaborated closely. Schiff and Ernest Cassel, the great English banker and industrialist, maintained close and personal business connections…Schiff, Cassel, the Rothschilds of London, and the Warburgs of Hamburg…collaborated in a wide range of businesses, especially the very rewarding financing of railroads.²⁶

As for collaborating in the expansion of Standard Oil, it was claimed in a 1911 article in McClure’s Magazine that during the 1890s Schiff, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., had been working with John D. Rockefeller Senior in his battle against J.P. Morgan for control of the railroads.²⁷ Chernow also notes that Rockefeller collaborated with Kuhn, Loeb & Co in 1911 to take control of the Equitable Trust Company, and also on numerous bond issues.²⁸ Yet in the broad scheme of things that was the Standard Oil colossus, Schiff was but one of a myriad of financiers who assisted Rockefeller’s relentless march to national dominance, especially once he had shifted operations from Cleveland to New York in the 1880s. Furthermore, the discerning reader would observe that ‘collaboration’ does not automatically imply subordination, whether of Schiff to the Rothschilds or of the Rockefellers to Schiff; or vice versa.

The fourth fallacy is the assumption, should a crucial dependency upon Rothschild-sourced money ever be proved, that being in debt to the House of Rothschild makes one automatically beholden to their globalist agenda. Aside from the fact that it is not normally the case for major banks to impose upon their corporate debtors the requirement they support the bank’s plans for world domination; Rockefeller managed his debt burden with such adroitness the banks were very rarely in a position to impose such conditions. The other problem, though, is in determining if the Rothschilds ever favoured world government in the first place.

There is reason for caution given that most researchers tend to cite as proof of this alleged goal the words of historian Caroll Quigley in his book Tragedy and Hope (1966), rather than any documentary evidence from the Rothschilds. Quigley had claimed that by end of the 19th century, the ‘far-reaching aim’ of many of the world’s leading bankers, prime among being the House of Rothschild, was 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.’²⁹ This phrase has been widely interpreted to mean that the Rothschilds desire world government.

Mullins, though, goes much further and repeats the allegations made in William Guy Carr’s obscure book, Pawns in the Game (1956) that in 1773, Mayer Amschel Rothschild, the banking dynasty’s founder, called together twelve other wealthy and influential individuals to a meeting in Frankfurt. At this meeting Rothschild allegedly set forth a plan for this group to ‘finance and control the World Revolutionary Movement’ for their use as a tool to ‘win ultimate control’ of the ‘entire world’. Reading from a ‘carefully prepared plan of action’, Rothschild had supposedly detailed an elaborate strategy, including the use of ‘panics and financial depressions’, which would ‘ultimately result in World Government, a new order of one world government.’³⁰ The more cautious reader might wish to see the documentation to support Carr’s extraordinary story, or even elicit an explanation from Mullins for his uncritical use of Carr, but they are unlikely to get an answer.³¹

Instead one must turn to Ferguson’s massive tome, The House of Rothschild (1998), based on exclusive access to the Rothschild family archives, which establishes that the Rothschilds used their money and influence (though not always successfully) during the 19th century primarily to prevent war and revolution within Europe. Yet this did not fit into any dystopian scheme for world government, but was apparently motivated by nothing more than a selfish desire to protect the international bond market from fluctuations that could threaten their wealth.³² It was only at the end of the 19th century that the Rothschilds began to evolve any serious world order aspirations, assuming a ‘pivotal role’, according to Ferguson, in trying to establish an Anglo-German alliance. This envisaged combination, Nathaniel Rothschild had enthused in 1912, would unquestionably ‘command the respect of the whole world and ensure universal peace.’³³ History would soon reveal the folly of this vision; but more importantly, there is no evidence the Rockefellers ever supported that strategy.

As this litany of error reveals, the proponents of the Rothschild-Rockefeller connection seem to have no qualms about making the most extraordinary allegations without making any effort to substantiate them, let alone get the essential details right. Although more research might (but only if it actually existed) eventually expose the much-vaunted Rothschild financial connection to Standard Oil’s early days, there are few signs that any of the aforementioned researchers plan to verify their claims. In the meantime the Rothschild-Rockefeller link can only be rejected as speculation.

1.2 The ‘Illuminati Bloodline’

The second explanation, first promoted by Fritz Springmeier in his monumental expose The Bloodlines of the Illuminati (1995), are that the Rockefellers are one of a clique of thirteen elite families which share the same Satanic ‘Illuminati’ bloodline and have been committed since time immemorial to secretly ruling the world. The Rockefellers, writes Springmeier, are ‘one of the 13 bloodlines that rule the world.’ William Avery Rockefeller, the father of John D. Rockefeller, was a man whose life was the ‘carbon copy’ of the typical Illuminati man, according to Springmeier. He was ‘totally corrupt and lacked any kind of morals’, made most of his money ‘dishonestly’, stole and lied, and was also ‘involved in the occult and practiced magic.’ As for the spectacular rise to wealth and infamy of William Avery Rockefeller’s son John, Springmeier makes the following assertion:

One of the most best kept secrets were [John D. Rockefeller’s] secret dealings with the other Illuminati families. The Payseurs and other Illuminati families are all intimately involved in the rise to power of the Rockefellers.

David Icke has taken Springmeier’s claims further to claim the Rockefellers are in fact ‘reptilian full-bloods’ and thus compelled by biology to support the globalist agenda. The Rockefellers, argues Icke, benefited from Rothschild and Payseur largesse because they are one of the thirteen elite bloodline families who fulfil the role of ‘bloodline branch managers’ in the ‘Illuminati secret network’, a position attained by virtue of having a ‘different DNA to the rest of the population.’³⁴

These genealogical arguments may make for compelling reading, especially when enhanced by Icke’s fantastic and horrific allegations, but they are too speculative to justify discarding more prosaic explanations for Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order. After all, despite their tremendous certainty, both Springmeier and Icke are very short on the actual detail of the Rockefellers supposedly ‘Satanic’ or ‘reptilian’ ancestry.

Nevertheless, evidence of the Rockefellers supposedly noble lineage reportedly exists, though what conclusions can be drawn is open to question. The most reliable source of the Rockefeller line, according to Flynn, is the village of Sagedorf in Germany from where John D. Rockefeller’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, Johann Peter Rockefeller had migrated to America in 1722. For ‘Illuminati/reptilian bloodline’ enthusiasts, much can no doubt drawn from the marriage between Rockefeller’s great-great-grandfather, William Rockefeller and his relative Christina Rockefeller, an act which united the two Rockefeller strains then present in America. Also of interest are the claims by a genealogist hired by the Rockefeller Family Association in the 1920s, to have traced the Rockefellers beyond Germany to Southern France. Known as Roquefueille (or Rocafolio in Latin), the Rockefellers French descendents, claimed the genealogist, ‘were titled people’ who ‘married and inter-married with the nobility…’, and had even issued their own coins. Added to the mix are the genes of Lucy Avery, wife of Rockefeller’s great-grandfather, Godfrey, which apparently carry traces of the ‘Plantagenets, including 16 English kings, one king of Scotland, a king of France and a German emperor.’³⁵

Yet, according to Collier and Horowtiz, the Rockefellers ‘did not aspire to genealogical eminence’. To prove their contention they note that when Senior was informed by the Rockefeller Family Association of the possible ‘noble European origins’ of the Rockefeller name, the billionaire who attributed his success to no external force other than God, ‘remained unmoved.’³⁶

But there are better reasons than Rockefeller’s religiosity for rejecting the genealogical theories of Icke and Springmeier. One remarkable fact, discovered by Mark Humphrys, a computer scientist and genealogical researcher based at Dublin City University, is that royal ancestry is actually extremely widespread. Researching the ancestry of his English wife Humphrys discovered her family was descended from English royalty, as were many famous Irish rebels and the majority of American presidents. Yet, when he investigated the issue further:

Humphrys began to notice something odd. Whenever a reliable family tree was available, almost anyone of European ancestry turned out to be descended from English royalty – even such unlikely people as Hermann Goring and Daniel Boone.³⁷

Humphrys’ findings have been confirmed by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University, whose mathematical modelling has highlighted the fact that most people alive today are descended from a limited pool of ancestors. Moreover, the practice of random mating has meant that royal genes have mixed with ‘common’ genes to such an extent that ‘almost everyone in the New World must be descended from English royalty – even people of predominantly African or Native American ancestry, because of the long history of intermarriage in the Americas’ (Olson).³⁸ With royal or ‘Illuminati bloodline’ ancestry so common its significance as a tool for identifying pro-New World Order inclinations appears to be limited.

1.3 Woodrow Wilson’s Secret Controllers

The third strand of evidence for long-term Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order concerns their alleged links to President Woodrow Wilson’s advisor ‘Colonel’ Edward M. House; a combination that is credited with the formation of the League of Nations in 1919, an organisation described by some researchers as little more than a ‘stalking horse for world government’ (Icke). In this account Wilson is typically portrayed by N.W.O. researchers as the weak and self-deluded puppet of the wily House, who was in turn little more than an agent or errand boy for a cabal of financiers whose fervent desire was to create a world government. According to Icke, for example, political authority in the Wilson Administration was actually in the ‘hands’ of House, who ‘was there for no other reason than to serve the Elite...The Elite instructed Colonel House and he instructed Woodrow Wilson, who did as he was told...’ Allen and Abraham describe House as ‘The Insiders sheepdog who controlled Wilson.’ According to James Perloff, Wilson was ‘continuously guided by a front man for the international banking community, Colonel…House.’³⁹

Filling the ranks of this ‘international banking community’ or ‘Insiders’ behind House are the usual suspects: the Rothschilds, the banker and industrial magnate J.P. Morgan, and even members of the British Round Table organisation, such as Lord Alfred Milner. The Rockefellers are also mentioned, although the accusations are rarely as explicit as those levelled against the other alleged culprits, yet such is the certainty they must have been involved many researchers feel compelled to include them. Gary Kah, for instance claims that House ‘was an Illuminist agent committed to the one-world interests of the Rothschild-Warburg-Rockefeller cartel, serving as their point-man in the White House.’ Allen and Abraham observe that the ‘same crowd’ behind the formation of the Federal Reserve, a group of bankers that included Paul Warburg, J.P.Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, backed House’s ‘behind-the-scenes’ activities designed to involve the US in the war. Henry Lamb claims that House ‘came to his position with Woodrow Wilson from an elite circle of friends known as the “Inquiry”: Paul Warburg, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, John Davis, among others, all of whom had…[a] great interest in the League of Nations.’⁴⁰

There is, however, a curious lack of detail with regard to the alleged involvement of the Rockefellers in Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to establish the League. While some attempts have been made to document alleged Rockefeller support for the Bolsheviks,⁴¹ the same cannot be said for the case of the League, in fact most researchers seem to draw a blank. For the general reader, enthralled by the myriad names, dates and shocking details, this omission is usually forgotten and instead the following conclusion (Figure 2), what we might call the orthodox or standard interpretation, is drawn:

Figure 2. The alleged link between the Rockefellers and the League of Nations

It should be noted, however, that on closer examination of relevant historical sources this interpretation falls down on a number of counts.

First, although some sort of relationship (though not always cordial) between House and leading bankers such as J.P. Morgan and the Warburgs can be established from both his diary and the Intimate Papers of Colonel House (1926), crediting Colonel House with primary authorship of the League of Nations concept is a dubious proposition. Contrary to some claims, the main smoking gun cited, House’s anonymous political fantasy, Philip Dru: Administrator (1912), actually does not use the term. Instead House’s fantasy alter ego and dictator of America, Philip Dru, aspires to create a ‘comity of nations’ that will bring ‘a lasting and beneficent peace, and the acceptance of the principle of the brotherhood of man’, providing everyone followed Dru’s ‘international policy’.⁴² That policy, however, rested on an Anglo-American global alliance, the invasion and annexation Mexico after parcelling out the rest of the world to the other European empires, and increasing US naval power until it is ‘second only to that of England, and together the great English-speaking nations held in their keeping the peace and commercial freedom of the Seven Seas.’⁴³

In both its Anglophilia and imperialist guile, House’s vision did little more than recycle the expansionist ideology of Theodore Roosevelt – who, incidentally, became in his final years an implacable foe of both Wilson and the League of Nations.⁴⁴

The real origins of the League of Nations concept in the few decades prior to the First World War can be traced to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and then scholar Woodrow Wilson. In the late 19th century, seeking to excise the guilt he had amassed with his fortune and reflecting the influence of Pall Mall Gazette editor and advocate of Anglo-American unity, William T. Stead (who was also close to Cecil Rhodes); Carnegie had embarked on a crusade for world peace, making a ‘British-American Union’ the central pillar of his vision.⁴⁵ By the start of the 20th century, however, Carnegie had dropped that idea in favour of a ‘League of Peace’ or ‘League of Nations’, comprising a combination of the leading imperial powers, complete with an international police force. Carnegie even publicised his proposals in a short article entitled ‘The Next Step – a League of Nations’ for Outlook magazine (25 May 1907).⁴⁶ That was five years before House recycled Roosevelt’s imperialist schemes in Philip Dru. Such was Carnegie’s fervour, that in 1910 he had established the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, an organisation devoted to the ‘scientific investigation and study of the causes of war and of the practical methods to prevent and avoid it’, with funding of $US10 million.⁴⁷

As for Wilson, although more focused on domestic issues, the possibility of achieving world peace through some form of international organisation had entered his thinking on a number of occasions prior to meeting House. As early as 1887, writing in the Political Science Quarterly, Wilson had toyed with world federalism, suggesting ‘the confederation of parts of empires like the British, and finally of great states themselves’ could lead to ‘a wide union…of governments joined with governments for the pursuit of common purpose.’ In 1908, Wilson had joined the American Peace Society an organisation noted, according to Knock, for its ‘proposals for arbitration of international disputes and disarmament, and others pertaining to world federation.’⁴⁸

The point is that years before House published Philip Dru with its somewhat juvenile imperialist daydreaming; Wilson had given serious thought to resolving conflict through forms of international organisation. A fact not lost on a plutocratic utopian like Carnegie who welcomed Wilson’s election with considerable joy, declaring to a friend his belief that Wilson ‘is for Peace…’ Carnegie subsequently wrote to Wilson, expressing his hope the new President would be ‘destined to succeed in banishing war between the most enlightened nations…’ In his response, Wilson reassured the ageing philanthropist that with regards to those seeking ‘international peace’, he would ‘always be on that side.’⁴⁹ Somehow Carnegie already knew…

Moreover, once in power, and not long after the First World War had commenced, it was Wilson, and not House, who had first devised the outlines of what would become the League of Nations. In the first week of February 1915, he had discussed with his brother-in-law, Stockton Axson, a four-point plan for an ‘association of nations’, that would be ‘bound together for the protection and integrity of each’, with any nation breaking that bond to be ‘punished’ through war.⁵⁰ Many N.W.O. researchers, though, are likely to retort that it was House who put together the first official US plan for the League of Nations in July 1918. This is indeed true; though it should also be pointed out that this occurred at the direction of Wilson, and was intended as response to a British proposal, the Phillimore Report. Moreover, Wilson was dissatisfied with House’s version; especially its weak provision for sanctions and the fact League membership was to be limited to the Great Powers. He changed it so League members could use force when imposing sanctions against any hostile power, and he extended membership to the smaller powers.⁵¹

More importantly, this relentless focus on House as the man pulling Wilson’s strings fundamentally misreads their relationship and over inflates the abilities of House. Reading The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, edited by Charles Seymour with Colonel House’s guidance and approval, one cannot help but get the impression that Wilson was an easily distracted and wayward mind, who needed House’s practical support and foresight. Yet, given its publication some years after Wilson’s death, we should not be surprised that House would selectively release his papers to support a version of events that paint him as the true power behind Woodrow Wilson.

But House’s carefully crafted image as Wilson’s string-puller, accepted without question by many New World Order researchers, is dubious to say the least. As historian David Esposito points out in his analysis of House’s diary and other writings, Wilson’s so-called ‘Silent Partner’ was increasingly consumed by fantasies of his own brilliance, to the extent he ‘deceive[d] both himself and those around him and…tried to transform those fantasies into real life.’⁵² In his communications with Wilson and foreign governments, for example, House frequently told them what they wanted to hear, covering up his numerous failures and deviations from Wilson’s instructions. House also abused his position as Wilson’s envoy as he tried to fulfil his Philip Dru fantasies, including his abortive attempt in June 1914 to establish a US-Anglo-German alliance to avert war, apparently without Wilson’s knowledge.⁵³

House’s shortcomings were not lost on Wilson, even though publicly he hailed the Colonel as his ‘second personality’; privately he acknowledged ‘that intellectually [House] is not a great man. His mind is not first class. He is a counsellor not a statesman.’ Instead Wilson seemed to the find the most value in House’s: ‘utter self-forgetfulness and loyalty and devotion.’⁵⁴ The relationship did not remain intact however, especially after House disobeyed Wilson’s instructions at Versailles, agreeing to French demands that it be ceded the German Rhineland, and then supporting the detachment of the League Covenant from the Treaty of Versailles. A bitter Wilson would later complain that ‘House had given away [all] I had won before we left Paris.’ Angered by this betrayal, he stopped talking to House well before he was incapacitated by his stroke in October 1919.⁵⁵

Curiously most New World Order histories evade the issue of the breakdown in relations between Wilson and House, preferring to accept the Colonel’s fantasies that he remained in contact with the crippled president – except when, in House’s imagination, Wilson’s wife conspired to keep his letters from reaching his stricken subject. Yet the fact remains that it was Wilson, not House, who had contributed the most decisive input into the League of Nations idea.

Second, there is the problem of the missing link between John D. Rockefeller Senior, a loyal Republican, and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Allegations of Rockefeller financial support for Wilson’s 1912 electoral campaign have been made in a number of sources, although concrete evidence seems elusive. A tangled web of financial support from sources with Rockefeller connections can be discerned from Ferdinand Lundberg’s 1938 polemic America’s 60 Families. For instance, the ‘financial genius’ behind Wilson’s campaign was Cleveland H. Dodge from the National City Bank of New York (NCBNY), who secured the support of Jacob Schiff and Cyrus H. McCormick of the International Harvester Company to pay Wilson’s pre-convention costs. Dodge served on the NCBNY board alongside William Rockefeller, the brother of John D.; while Edith Rockefeller, one of John D. Rockefeller’s daughters, was married to Harold F. McCormick, son of Cyrus the part-owner of International Harvester.⁵⁶ Dodge, Schiff and McCormick were also among a group of 40 wealthy donors, who contributed nearly a third of Wilson’s campaign funds.⁵⁷

There was also an alleged meeting between candidate Wilson and NCBNY co-directors James Stillman and William Rockefeller at the estate of NCBNY President Frank Vanderlip, although wrote Lundberg: ‘what was said has not…been placed upon the record yet, and perhaps never will be…’⁵⁸

Yet Lundberg does not appear to have found any records of any money coming directly to Wilson from either John D. Rockefeller Senior or Junior. In fact Wilson’s record with Rockefellers is not good; in 1908, for example, he had failed in a bid to secure funding from Rockefeller to help fulfil his controversial plans at Princeton University.⁵⁹ Lundberg does note how the ‘sinister’ Thomas F. Ryan, ‘of the Rockefeller camp’ had given enough money to control three key delegations that subsequently supported Wilson’s candidacy.⁶⁰ Yet there is no proof that Senior or Junior approved these alleged transactions; Ryan could have been acting alone. But Lundberg also records how in 1916 Senior and Junior had each donated $25,000 to the Republicans with no corresponding amount to the Democrats.⁶¹ This is perhaps not surprising given Rockefeller Senior’s outrage at Wilson’s introduction of income taxes in 1913. ‘[W]hen a man has accumulated a sum of money’, commented Rockefeller, ‘the Government has no right to share in its earnings.’⁶²

In sum, though, evidence of direct support, whether financial or otherwise, for Wilson from John D. Rockefeller Senior or Junior is lacking. Nor are there any signs – at least in The Intimate Papers of Colonel House – of any Rockefeller-House link either. When a more substantive link finally did emerge it was at the end of Wilson’s life and the conduit was the subject of this study: Raymond B. Fosdick. More troublingly, as this extended review has revealed, is the fact that the claims of many New World Order researchers seem to collapse under close scrutiny. This is an alarming finding and should hopefully inspire other researchers to take care to ensure their subsequent claims and findings hold up to inspection from less sympathetic audiences.

PART TWO: THE TALENTED MR FOSDICK

If we accept, then, that there is little credible evidence of Rockefeller support – whether secret or open – for the League of Nations concept prior to the 1920s; or that the Rockefellers were frontmen for the Rothschilds; or are descended from an ‘Illuminati’ or ‘reptilian’ bloodline; then alternative theories must be considered. Perhaps the most plausible, in the view of this author, is that Raymond B. Fosdick, a fanatical supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a world order built on international institutions and global free trade, successfully converted John D. Rockefeller Junior to his cause. This not a fringe idea, for it has been made – if fleetingly – in a number of mainstream accounts. In Titan, for example, Ron Chernow explicitly credits Fosdick with the conversion:

As a good Republican, Junior had initially refrained from endorsing the League [of Nations], but under Fosdick’s tutelage he shed his isolationism and gave two million dollars for its new library and liberally endowed its health organisation.⁶³

The website of the United Nations Organisation Library in Geneva, however, gives two conflicting interpretations. First, in an article about John D. Rockefeller Junior’s financial support to the League Library, Fosdick is not credited with directly converting Junior to the cause, but nevertheless he is given a crucial role: ‘Through Raymond Fosdick, Rockefeller became acquainted with Arthur Sweetser, who encouraged his interest in the League of Nations.’⁶⁴ Second, in its brief biography of Fosdick, the UN Library confuses the issue by suggesting he converted John D. Rockefeller Senior and Junior into supporters of the League of Nations:

He encouraged John D. Rockefeller and his son to build a new League Library and provide financial assistance to humanitarian projects conducted by the League, to assist the League of Nations Association, World Court campaigns, and the Foreign Policy Association.⁶⁵

One of the sources used in the first UN Library article, Collier and Horowitz’s book The Rockefellers, also attributed a key role to Fosdick, praising him as ‘one of the most influential men of his generation’ who was also ‘Junior’s lifelong associate and biographer’. It was Fosdick, they wrote, ‘who got Rockefeller involved and interested in the question of the realignment of global power that would begin to take place in the decade after World War I.’ Fosdick also ‘constantly brought new ideas and individuals to Junior’s attention’; although ‘even more important’ was his ‘impact on Junior’s view of international affairs.’⁶⁶

Approved accounts by Rockefeller insiders, in contrast, evade the issue, either making no comment on Junior’s sudden shift of opinion, or noting it without explaining precisely how or why it happened. In their somewhat restrained and respectful account of Junior, The Rockefeller Century (1988), for example, former Rockefeller aides John Ensor Harr and Peter Johnson, mysteriously observe that Junior was ‘no supporter of Wilson’ until in the 1920s when he ‘came to accept the idea of the League of Nations and made significant financial contributions to its activities as the decade wore on.’ Mention is also made of Fosdick being both a ‘fiery champion of the League’ and ‘Junior’s closest and most trusted adviser.’⁶⁷ Fosdick is even credited with having ‘reinforced and extended the liberalising influence’ previously exercised by Junior’s public relations adviser, the future Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King. Yet the connection between Fosdick and Junior’s sudden change of heart about the League is not drawn, in fact it is denied. We should not think there was ‘a liberal cabal ensnaring Junior’, they argue, for it was Junior who had sought Fosdick out.⁶⁸

But possibly the most tantalising, yet also evasive account is that of Junior’s youngest son, David Rockefeller who describes his father, in his autobiography Memoirs (2002), as a ‘staunch supporter’ of the League of Nations as though it had always been the case.⁶⁹ Junior’s ‘staunch’ support for the League, David revealed in a special message to a UN poster exhibition in 2000, was ‘instilled in me.’⁷⁰ This only raises the obvious question, given the agreement of Chernow, and Harr and Johnson that Junior was originally staunchly opposed to Wilson’s grand scheme for world peace: who instilled those pro-League sentiments in him?

As for the man in question, Fosdick, both his memoir and his biography of Junior acknowledge the shift in opinion, but he takes no credit for it, suggesting it was merely a matter of Junior naturally changing his mind. Thus, in his autobiography, Chronicle of a Generation (1958), Fosdick comments:

[Junior] was a Republican and I was an ardent Wilsonian Democrat. Again, I believed deeply in the League of Nations, while he, following in the line of the Republican Party, looked upon it, certainly in the early twenties, with some misgiving.⁷¹

In his fawning biography, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. A Portrait (1956), Fosdick writes that by the mid-twenties:

More and more Mr Rockefeller began to think in international terms. It is true that he had not favoured the League of Nations when it was first proposed. Just as he had taken his church affiliations from his father, so his political loyalties were similarly inherited, and he had followed the Republican Party in its opposition to President Wilson. But his opinions were invariably marked by tolerance, and inflexibility was not part of his character.⁷²

Perhaps reflecting his earlier legal training and practice, Fosdick’s words are carefully chosen so as to merely hint at his success in persuading Junior to devote his father’s seemingly tainted (yet massive) fortune to fulfilling Wilson’s vision. The highlighting of Junior’s ‘inherited’ political loyalties and the stress on his ‘tolerance’ and flexible character could be Fosdick’s way of suggesting that Junior was easier to convince as he had not thought out the anti-Wilsonian position he had hitherto held so rigidly; that Junior had merely reflected his father’s will; until Fosdick persuaded him to abandon that in favour of a new point-of-view. That is, I contend, what is implied in Fosdick’s comments – as is represented in the following diagram (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Revisionist Interpretation of Rockefeller Role in the New World Order

What is the evidence for this sequence? In the sections that follow, starting with Fosdick’s earliest acquaintance with Wilson, his first work for Junior, his brief term with the League of Nations, through his role as a close adviser to Junior in the 1920s, and culminating in his twelve year presidency of the Rockefeller Foundation, we will attempt to demonstrate that this is the most plausible explanation.

2.1 Woodrow Wilson’s First Disciple

The story of Raymond B. Fosdick and the New World Order is the story of how one man of a humble background balanced the competing demands for his services from two powerful benefactors – one of whom was the President of the United States, while the other was the heir to one of the largest fortunes in the US – until he reached the position where was able to exercise a dominating influence over the resources of latter in service of the vision of the former. The first of Fosdick’s benefactors, and perhaps the most influential person in his life, was Woodrow Wilson.

What becomes most evident in comparing Fosdick’s relations with his two patrons was his obvious awe and respect for Wilson, in contrast to Rockefeller whom Fosdick seemed to treat with a mixture of affection, deliberate obsequiousness and restrained condescension. Speaking about Wilson in a 1956 lecture at the University of Chicago, Fosdick was emphatic about his lifelong support for the famous president: ‘from the first day I had met [Wilson] until he died he had my wholehearted admiration and respect.’ Fosdick claimed to have had a ‘long and occasionally close association’ with Wilson that dating from 1903 when he had started studying at Princeton University, where Wilson was the president.⁷³ However, Fosdick also made it clear that he and Wilson were not in anyway what one might call friends:

I do not claim to have been an intimate friend of Woodrow Wilson. Very few people ever succeeded in establishing that kind of relationship with him…I cannot say that at any one time my relations with him bordered on familiarity. He called me by my last name, without the “Mr”, but that was as far as he ever went.⁷⁴

The record, though, is more mixed and suggests that he and the typically aloof Wilson were perhaps closer than Fosdick was prepared to acknowledge. The reason for this closeness most probably stemmed from Fosdick’s obvious and sincere devotion to his benefactor something that no doubt appealed to Wilson’s enormous ego. Among Wilson’s less appealing personal characteristics was his unflinching desire for power, as one historian recently observed: ‘If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson, it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.’ In his thesis, Congressional Government (1885), for example, Wilson had written: ‘I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive.’⁷⁵

In addition to this craving for power, according to the late Arthur Link, who had studied Woodrow Wilson for much of his life, Wilson was also driven by the ‘remarkable conviction that he was an instrument of divine purpose.’⁷⁶ As Fosdick himself acknowledged, Wilson was a ‘deeply religious man’, who believed that as President ‘he had been an instrument…in carrying out the will of God.’⁷⁷ These beliefs combined to form an autocratic, if not dictatorial vision of how political power should be exercised. Wilson believed the President – especially one instilled with divine purpose – should be served by a Cabinet which knew that its role was not to advise but to merely carry out his will, relieving him of the burdens of administration, while he carried out the more important task of leading and shaping public opinion.⁷⁸

Unquestioning devotion, therefore, was the trait Wilson thought most desirable in his subordinates; something that became evident once he was in the White House. Most of Wilson’s cabinet officials, whom he distrusted in any case, were typically sidelined, save for Colonel House whose pretence of devotion worked for a time.⁷⁹ But unflinching devotion is what Fosdick demonstrated from the moment he met Wilson on the grounds of Princeton University in 1903.

Fosdick had started his junior year at Princeton after completing his freshman and sophomore years at Colgate University. Princeton had been a substantial step-up for Fosdick, the son of a teacher from Buffalo in New York State, but one that he had actively sought out. He found Colgate lacking in the necessary resources, while he knew Princeton to be well endowed, as well as being run by Wilson who gave ‘challenging courses in jurisprudence and constitutional law.’ His family was poor, yet somehow the money was found and in September 1903 Fosdick was at Princeton; on his third day there that he met Wilson. The meeting – the two crossed paths whilst walking across the campus – is described in Fosdick’s memoirs and elsewhere, seems unremarkable, except for one important detail. It was Fosdick’s deliberate act of deference – doffing his hat to Wilson – something not practiced at Princeton, but an act that undoubtedly appealed to the new president of Princeton’s sense of self-importance, that brought Fosdick into Woodrow Wilson’s orbit. ‘I wish you would drop in to see me’, Wilson had told Fosdick, thus launching their long relationship.⁸⁰

Fosdick is full of praise for Wilson the scholar and future President, hailing both his intellectual and leadership qualities. Wilson had the ‘mark of leadership…on his face’; as an orator he was ‘a scholar in action, a prophet touched by fire, with unmatched strength to persuade and move the hearts of his listeners.’ He was also ‘outstanding as a teacher’ and possessed an ‘intellectual brilliance which held his students spellbound.’⁸¹ Among those caught up in Wilson’s spell was Fosdick who found his lectures most illuminating; as he would later wistfully recall: ‘For me Wilson lit a lamp which has never been put out.’⁸²

Fosdick also credited Wilson with freeing him from a ‘philosophical cul-de-sac’ that he had been mired in since starting at Colgate. For two long years he had agonised over the ‘age-old problem of evil’; the ongoing presence of evil in the world seemed to bring into sharp relief the flaws in the Baptist doctrines upon which he had been raised. It was Wilson who gave Fosdick ‘the greatest help’ in resolving this impasse, his ‘intense devotion to things of the spirit’ helping him to realise that some while some problems could not be solved:

men have a responsibility to carry on in this world, even if the gods desert them. There is a job to be done; there are injustices to be corrected, evils that need not occur. Within the framework of human possibility we can make this world an inviting home to live in instead of a place to freeze and fight and starve in.⁸³

This moment of intellectual clarity hardly appears spectacular, let alone sinister, yet it illustrates Fosdick’s shift away from a form of Christian fatalism, to a belief in a religiously inspired activism, that anything one did to ‘improve’ the world must reflect God’s will. In time this would translate into a fanatical support for Woodrow Wilson’s greatest scheme the League of Nations.

Fosdick graduated from Princeton in 1905, and then completed a year of post-graduate work before studying law at New York Law School, much to Wilson’s apparent dismay; but his association with Wilson did not stop there. In 1912, during the presidential campaign, Wilson personally appointed Fosdick to be secretary and auditor of the finance committee of the National Democratic Committee. Fosdick recalls that he complied with Wilson’s request ‘without a moment’s hesitation’; despite being a Republican he believed that in Wilson ‘the country would find inspiring leadership of a new and unique kind.’⁸⁴

Once Wilson was in the White House many more job offers followed. In 1914 Wilson offered him the position of Immigration Commissioner at the Port of New York, but Fosdick turned it down. Trying to persuade him, Wilson wrote Fosdick that he was ‘the very man we need’ and that it was his earnest desire to have him ‘associated with the administration in such a post of responsibility.’⁸⁵ A contrite Fosdick had to go personally to the White House to again refuse the offer, knowing ‘how irresistibly persuasive [Wilson] could be’. Years later Fosdick would wonder how he ‘escaped [Wilson’s] spell’ and would recall how he left the White House feeling that he had ‘sinned against the light.’⁸⁶ In 1917 a second job offer was made, this time for the Vice-Governorship of the Philippines, but again Fosdick refused considering himself to be inadequately trained for the position. Wilson accepted Fosdick’s reasons for refusing the post, though he claimed to be ‘heartily sorry’ with the decision.⁸⁷

Wilson’s limited success in attracting Fosdick stemmed partly from the nature of the positions offered, but was also because he had found a new benefactor in the person of John D. Rockefeller Junior.

2.2 John D. Rockefeller Junior and the Bureau of Social Hygiene

In 1905, with curiosity growing about John D. Rockefeller Junior’s impending inheritance of his fathers vast fortune, one of William Randolph Hearst’s publications, Cosmopolitan, made the following prophetic comment:

No little interest is centered upon the world’s greatest fortune, that of Mr John D. Rockefeller. The fortune will in the course of years be inherited by the Son, Mr John D. Rockefeller Jr. It is needless to say that the power of the money covers so vast a territory that a man inheriting such a fortune has it within his power to revolutionise the world…or use it so evilly as to retard civilisation for a quarter of a century.⁸⁸

This was not idle speculation, but an important question, especially given the vast sums involved, and the mixture of amusement and vitriol that had greeted Andrew Carnegie’s various schemes for world peace. John D. Rockefeller Senior had already begun to distribute his millions, and by 1921 had disbursed at least half his fortune to a range of philanthropies and charitable institutions. Of the remaining $500 million, Senior gave $465 million to Junior, much of in the form of bonds and stocks between 1917 and 1921.⁸⁹ What Junior did with what were widely presumed to be Senior’s ill-gotten gains, could not be ignored.

Disposing of a great fortune, especially in the noble cause of philanthropy, is a difficult task that can easily result in the would-be benefactor to the masses being overwhelmed with requests from the ‘needy’. To better manage these demands, to keep the masses at more than arms length and ensure that ones funds are distributed in the appropriate manner, the super-rich, following the example of Carnegie – usually hailed as the ‘father of philanthropy’ – have tended to delegate responsibility for dispensing their fortunes to trusted subordinates. Usually, the subordinate is expected to do no more than execute in detail the grand design of the plutocrat. Yet there are many cases where the mere assistant becomes something else, such as an ‘adviser’ or an ‘associate’, who not only helps to manage the philanthropic effort, but influences in no small measure the strategic visions of the robber baron-turned-philanthropist.

In the Rockefeller family this trend had already been set in train when John D. Rockefeller Senior, his health ailing and his investments a tangled web, employed a former Baptist preacher, Frederick T. Gates, as his personal adviser in 1891. Gates would go on to head Rockefeller’s private office, managing both his financial affairs and his philanthropic pursuits. Although keen to disburse his vast fortune to the ‘benefit of mankind’, Senior paid little attention to exactly how Gates did it; Junior though, as the designated heir, became increasingly involved in Gates’ numerous schemes. He would later pay tribute to Gates as the ‘brilliant dreamer and creator’, down-grading his own role that of a ‘go-between’ with his father. Collier and Horowitz attribute to Gates’ influence the creation of the Institute for Medical Research, the General Education Board, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund. Perhaps reflecting their leftist sympathies of the time (since repudiated), Collier and Horowitz also credit Gates’ ‘missionary fervour’ with drawing Junior into a ‘community of men and ideas’ that would come together after World War I as ‘America’s overseas empire builders.’ Junior’s behind-the-scenes work with the philanthropies also brought him into contact with Fosdick.⁹⁰

Junior first met Fosdick in May 1910 while acting as foreman in a special grand jury investigation into ‘white slavery’ in New York City. Fosdick, then the New York City Commissioner of Accounts with a reputation for rooting out municipal corruption, was one of a hundred experts Junior had consulted in his quest to solve the problem of prostitution and at the same time re-invent himself as a civic reformer rather than the only son of the impossibly rich and widely despised founder of Standard Oil. The seeds of the future relationship were planted during that initial meeting. Fosdick notes that he saw Junior on a few occasions thereafter and was even called upon as a speaker at the annual dinner of Junior’s Bible class.⁹¹

Junior’s work on the prostitution also had its consequences. First, in 1911 he had founded a secretive ‘Committee of Three’, comprising himself, the banker Paul Warburg and the lawyer Starr Murphy, for the purposes of eradicating prostitution. The lack of public visibility stemmed from Junior’s desire for his ‘permanent body of wise, sane, intelligent, forceful men and women’ to devise solutions to the problem in as ‘quiet and unostentatious’ manner as possible. By 1913, though, Junior had gone public, renaming the organization the Bureau of Social Hygiene (BSH).⁹² Second, Fosdick had been retained by Rockefeller who tasked him with writing a report on police practices in Europe for the BSH. Fosdick then spent much of 1914 in Europe researching the issue, later publishing European Police Systems (1915); and upon his return Fosdick had continued in the Rockefeller orbit, serving as a trustee at the General Education Board and the International Education Board.⁹³

Judging by Fosdick’s sparse comments, John D. Rockefeller Junior did not make much of an impression upon him. One need only contrast his all too brief description of his future benefactor’s physical characteristics after their first meeting – Junior was a ‘trim, youthful looking figure’ – with the entire paragraph he devotes to the plethora of leadership traits he found in Wilson’s appearance.⁹⁴ There was no awe; Junior cast no spell. Indeed, it seems that Fosdick regarded Junior as little more than a well-meaning individual, always eager to please, whose only other distinguishing feature was that he was immensely rich. As he would later write, Junior was ‘a person of great sincerity and integrity, with a lively sense of social responsibility’, and a ‘modesty of spirit’ rare for one so rich. But above all, unlike Fosdick’s idol Wilson, Junior was not a man of grand ideas or strong beliefs, indeed there was ‘nothing dogmatic or opinionated about him’ instead he ‘wanted to be convinced.’⁹⁵

Even in the entire book Fosdick devoted to Junior, there is none of the undeniable hero worship he gives to Wilson; instead there is a massive effort to downplay Junior’s nervous disorders and deep feelings of unworthiness. In parts this reaches into the realms of fiction: Junior was ‘occasionally troubled, but he was seldom the prey of anxiety’, wrote Fosdick,⁹⁶ contradicting Junior’s long history of nervous illness, including a breakdown in 1904 and a severe bout of headaches, nervous exhaustion and temporary deafness in 1922, both requiring extended periods of hospitalisation and recuperation.⁹⁷ Fosdick can only find in Junior, ‘one of the most modest, unassuming, unpretentious men imaginable’, the traits of ‘tenacity’, ‘sensitivity’, and ‘humility’, as well as the attributes of a ‘perfectionist.’⁹⁸ Perhaps Fosdick actually liked him, but to him John D. Rockefeller Junior was no prophet…

2.3 ‘The memory of this day will live in my mind for ever.’⁹⁹

Fosdick did not return to Woodrow Wilson’s service until 1916, making his contribution to the war effort as chairman of the Commission on Training Camp Activities in both the Navy and War Departments. His job involved developing training and recreational activities for US soldiers to maintain both morals and morale, by limiting their exposure to alcohol and prostitution, and encouraging more wholesome pursuits including theatre and athletics. Working under the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, this position took Fosdick first, to the Mexican border and then ultimately to Europe. It also brought him much closer to Wilson:

[T]he President was deeply and personally interested in our work and I was probably closer to him during this period than at any other time. He wrote me letters about our activities and I frequently conferred with him at the White House.¹⁰⁰

After the Armistice brought World War I to end in 1918, Secretary Baker decided that Fosdick should go to France with General Pershing, the commander of US forces in Europe, and December 1918 he set sail for France on the USS George Washington. This was to be no ordinary Atlantic crossing, through what Fosdick thought had to be ‘rare good fortune’, the USS George Washington was also carrying Woodrow Wilson and the US delegation to the Paris Peace Conference. Fosdick would later rank his journey with Wilson as ‘one of the memorable experiences of my life’ for ‘History was being made.’ It certainly was epochal, given what was to come at Paris, and the lengthy journey afforded Fosdick the opportunity of a number of discussions with Wilson during which ‘he spoke with the utmost frankness’ about the League and other topics.¹⁰¹

On 11 December, for example, Fosdick had a one hour conference with Wilson in his rooms on ‘matters of which I may not write.’ Nevertheless, Fosdick recorded in his diary that Wilson had talked to him ‘with the utmost frankness – indeed with an amazing frankness’ about the some of the world leaders they were about to parley with in Paris. As Fosdick would later relate to another delegation member William Christian Bullitt, Wilson had apparently described British Prime Minister Lloyd George as ‘a man without principle’; the French Prime Minister Clemenceau, as ‘an old man, too old comprehend new ideas’; the Italian Prime Minister Orlando as ‘a damned reactionary’; and the British Secretary of War, Lord Alfred Milner (Round Table), he dismissed as ‘a Prussian.’ Wilson had also described Bolshevism as ‘a poison’, and had speculated on its future in Russia and globally.¹⁰²

Fosdick’s closeness to Wilson was remarked upon favourably by Clive Day, a member of ‘The Inquiry’, the group of academics recruited by Colonel House to assist Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference. Writing to his wife, Day recalled a ‘heated discussion’ with, among others, Fosdick and Bullitt over Wilson’s plan for the League of Nations. It was ‘impressive thing’ he noted, the way in which Fosdick and Bullitt ‘go to the President and tell him what they think he ought to do.’ ‘They have real influence…’ he mused, for unlike others in the delegation, ‘they have ideas for which they are willing to stand…’ Although hopeful, Day was not quite as confident about the Inquiry: ‘I distrust some of my colleagues.’¹⁰³

The voyage culminated in Woodrow Wilson’s triumphant parade through the streets of Paris on 14 December 1918. ‘The memory of this day will live in my mind forever’, Fosdick wrote in his diary, as he viewed ‘the most remarkable demonstration of enthusiasm and affection on the part of the Parisians that I have ever heard of, let alone seen.’ Yet Fosdick remained cautious, aware that even Wilson could not work miracles:

Poor Wilson! A man with his responsibilities is to be pitied. The French think with almost a magic touch he will bring about the day of political and industrial justice. Will he? Can he?¹⁰⁴

2.4 Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations

The Paris Peace Conference also marked the start of Fosdick’s own role in Wilson’s League of Nations scheme. An offer to join the League came in May 1919, just two days after Fosdick returned from France. Acting Secretary of State Frank Polk, had informed Fosdick that Wilson, who was still in Paris, wanted him to take up the position of Under-Secretary General at the League of Nations. The request for Fosdick apparently came directly from the League of Nations first Secretary-General, Sir Eric Drummond. Fosdick felt ill-prepared for the position and argued that he lacked the necessary experience for ‘so unique an undertaking.’¹⁰⁵ A few days later, however, a detailed and flattering cablegram from Colonel House seemed to change his mind. Pointing out that Fosdick had been selected as the ‘designated American’ for the position; House had then deployed all his powers of persuasion:

It is absolutely necessary that we should have our very best men connected with organising this great work and also that the men we select should be of broad sympathies, thoroughly trained in big affairs and with a liberal point of view.

It is my opinion that there is no work in the world to be done at the moment more important than this work and I shall be personally deeply disappointed if you are unable to accept.¹⁰⁶

Fosdick accepted. ‘[I]t was a call to service from which I could not escape’, he later wrote, as well as ‘a chance to play a part in a brave, new world…’ He soon sailed for London to join Secretary-General Drummond and his counterpart Under-Secretary General, Jean Monnet, at the League’s temporary headquarters.¹⁰⁷ It was a major step in Fosdick’s career; he was the highest-ranking American in the organisation, and it was also a testament to Wilson’s faith in Fosdick’s devotion to his vision. But it was also to be the most frustrating episode in his career.

During his brief time at the League, Fosdick had dealt extensively with Colonel House, who was in London to participate in the mandates committee chaired by Milner. Fosdick had known House since 1914, when they had sailed to Europe on the same ship just before the outbreak of the war.¹⁰⁸ In fact, it was not to be a passing acquaintance, as Fosdick recalled: ‘I saw a good deal of him not only during the trip, but later both in Berlin and at his apartment…in New York.’ Fosdick’s describes his relations with House as being ‘periodic and never really intimate’, yet he admitted to being ‘truly fond’ of the quietly spoken Colonel. However, Fosdick found aspects of House’s behaviour ‘perplexing’, in particular his ‘vanity…a love of power that was not always well concealed.’ House, he suspected, ‘was not averse to being known as the power behind the throne, but he preferred to be an unseen power.’¹⁰⁹

During that first few months, feeling confident the League of Nations treaty would be quickly ratified, Fosdick and his colleagues worked obsessively on devising the procedures for the new international organisation. As Fosdick explained to his wife, this urgency came more from him and Monnet; Drummond apparently took the view that with the world quickly evolving into a single economic unit, time was not only on their side, the League was inevitable. Fosdick and Monnet, though believed their generation was ‘in a race with international anarchy’ and that the world ‘has very little time in which to set up the framework of international government and establish the habit of teamwork.’ We have ‘far too little time’, he lamented, and there was a ‘frightening danger’ that before the League could take effect, the nations of the world would suddenly be overwhelmed by ‘some new emergency.’¹¹⁰

To aide their efforts, Fosdick and his colleagues had sought advice from House and Lord Robert Cecil, the British foreign secretary; both men, Fosdick was convinced, were destined to represent their countries at the envisaged Council of the League of Nations. This collaboration, however, was not viewed favourably in Washington DC. In a memorandum dated 21 August 1919, Secretary of State Robert Lansing reported on ‘interesting information’ he had received from Inquiry head Dr Isaiah Bowman on the activities of Colonel House in London. Of particular concern was House’s ‘strong’ support for the creation of League Bureaus of Information and Correspondence in each capital that would deal directly with government departments, bypassing their foreign offices. This information:

…confirmed a warning a warning which I had received yesterday…that the Commission of Organisation, on which are Cecil, Drummond, Fosdick and House, was planning to constitute bureaus which were to be independent of all foreign offices reporting to and receiving instructions from the Secretariat of the League.

It looks to me as if Sir Eric Drummond and Colonel House were endeavouring to increase the powers of the Secretariat beyond reason, so that the Council of the League would manage all world matters.¹¹¹

If this scheme were to go ahead, Lansing had privately resolved to ‘declare the truth’ and fight to defeat it.¹¹² Fosdick, though, had bigger problems emerging in the US Senate, elements of which, led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge – a long-time associate of League opponent Theodore Roosevelt – were determined to not only alter America’s commitments to League, but hopefully prevent its participation. It was around mid-August, Fosdick would later recall, that ‘we suddenly became alarmed, and with me it was alarm and anger.’ In October 1919 Drummond dispatched Fosdick to Washington DC to represent the League Secretariat as the Senate debate escalated. For Fosdick the ensuing months of debate were an ‘unrelieved nightmare’.¹¹³

He remained in contact with the State Department, Colonel House and Secretary Baker, and through various channels attempted to advance the League’s case. For example, Fosdick collaborated with two other American League officials, Arthur Sweetser and Manley Hudson, to write an anonymous memorandum to be sent to the US media criticising the very idea of America’s League membership being subject to reservations:

It is preposterous for us to think that we can enter the League of Nations on a specially privileged basis, free of many of the obligations binding other nations, or that these other nations have no particular points and principles which they too would desire to have excluded from the operation of the League…once this policy of national self-seeking prevailed….With this spirit operating there would be left nothing but the shadow of the League…¹¹⁴

But this was all to be of no avail. Senator Lodge, Fosdick concluded, ‘was bent on the complete defeat of the [League] Covenant.’ In January 1920, with the League Council due to meet, the situation had reached another crisis-point; the Senate fight was still underway and Fosdick realised that the presence of an American Under-Secretary General would only give ammunition to Lodge and his supporters. Unable to secure advice from either Wilson or House (both were ill), Fosdick decided to resign.¹¹⁵ In his press statement on 19 January 1920, Fosdick announced his ‘deep regret’ in having to resign; but it was a decision ‘forced’ by circumstance, he said, and ‘not for a lack of faith in the League.’¹¹⁶

2.5 ‘The League [of Nations]…is this generation’s only hope…’¹¹⁷

Returning to private life in March 1920, Fosdick did not move immediately into Junior’s employment but instead joined with two other lawyers who had government experience – James Curtis and Chauncey Belknap – to establish the law firm of Curtis, Fosdick and Belknap. Fosdick’s first client was Junior who urged him repeatedly during his first year back in the US to give up the law firm and come to work in his office. Fosdick, however, ‘resolutely declined’, later recalling that he desired ‘independence and freedom’, something he felt assured of while practicing as a lawyer.¹¹⁸ His additional comments on this matter are worth recounting for they show his desire to be independent of Rockefeller control:

A lawyer is his own master. In relation to the clients who come to him he can be as rigorously selective as he pleases. He is not responsible for their political or economic opinion, nor are they responsible for his. He can identify himself with the social causes that appeal to him without involving those whom he serves as counsel. His intellectual life and interests can be as unrestricted and uncoerced as he chooses to make them.¹¹⁹

Independence was what Fosdick desired, and by serving as Junior’s external advisor this is what he retained. But what were those ‘social causes’ that Fosdick wished to identify himself with; what ‘intellectual life’ did he wish to pursue unimpeded by the demands of an employer? Fosdick had signalled his intention to Captain Huntington Gilchrist, an American Army officer who was his assistant at the League, in a letter explaining his resignation:

Altogether it is a sorry agonising mess, and as an American I hang my head in shame. My only satisfaction in resigning is that it releases me from the burden of silence. I can now speak my faith before the world. I shall do it in as loud and eloquent tones as I can employ.¹²⁰

His new objective, quite simply, was to become a loud public advocate for US membership in the League of Nations. Driving this was Fosdick’s despair and growing anger at both his resignation and the subsequent failure of the Senate to ratify the League Covenant. In letters to his wife, while returning to London in March 1920 to tidy up his League affairs, Fosdick lamented ‘America’s desertion’ of the League and that Americans ‘weren’t wise enough’ to take advantage of the ‘most unique opportunity’ in a generation. ‘It is America’s tragedy’, he later wrote from London, ‘It is the tragedy of the next generation.’ ‘Our generation’, Fosdick also wrote to his brother Harry Emerson Fosdick – the Baptist preacher whose sermon would open the first session of the League and who would also head Rockefeller’s church – ‘has betrayed its own children and blood of the next war is on our hands.’¹²¹

As for Woodrow Wilson, Fosdick retained his faith; ‘History will vindicate him and will place him among its prophets and heroes’, Fosdick told his wife.¹²² At this point it is important to review exactly what Wilson’s original New World Order vision entailed. There were four main components:

Utterly convinced the only way to ensure world peace was through some form of ‘international government’, and that only the US could make it happen, Fosdick devoted his energies shaping elite and public opinion in that direction. He directed most of his efforts from his lawyer’s office, helping to create in 1923 the League of Nations Association (LNA). Fosdick would spend some fifteen years on the LNA executive committee, including as its president from 1933 to 1935.¹²⁴ He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and had been among its first members when it was created in 1921.¹²⁵ At the CFR he retained an ally in Hamilton Fish Armstrong, who had become Editor of the CFR’s flagship publication, Foreign Affairs, in March 1922 – a position he would hold for some fifty years. Armstrong had in fact been accepted by Fosdick as his assistant at the League in October 1919; however, Fosdick’s own resignation prevented Armstrong from taking up the post. For much of his life, though, Armstrong remained ‘a firm Wilsonian who never entirely lost his youthful faith in and loyalty to the League of Nations…’ (Roberts).¹²⁶ Both organisations would prove useful in advancing Fosdick’s cause.

During the 1920s Fosdick made numerous public appeals for US participation. Writing for the Atlantic Monthly in June 1920, for example, Fosdick had reviewed the League’s progress, confirming its success, but had finished with a plea for American involvement. Only the US fit the bill, he argued, of the ‘great, disinterested, democratic power, with no warlike traditions to maintain, with no far flung empire to protect, with no territorial ambitions to be satisfied’ that could ‘compel the universal adoption of a policy of progressive disarmament.’ But, he lamented, America had ‘gone over to the other side’ and ‘repudiated the League of Nations’, thereby ‘jeopardising the peace of the world.’¹²⁷

In the Atlantic Monthly of October 1920, as the League began to falter, Fosdick blamed its problems squarely on America’s non-involvement: ‘the failure of the United States to join the League has handicapped its first months.’ The US, he noted, was the ‘only great, disinterested nation that could have bought detachment and vision to the League’s deliberations.’ If America had been part of the League ‘the reactionary elements of Europe would never have dared to trifle with it.’¹²⁸

Fosdick’s efforts were successful in attracting attention, though the depth of his feeling for the League rather than the organisation itself became the issue. This became quite obvious during the Harding Administration, especially when it was revealed that the State Department – then lead by former Rockefeller Foundation trustee Charles Evan Hughes – had not been answering any letters from the League. Fosdick had railed against what he saw as both a ‘deliberate effort to hasten’ the League’s ‘dissolution’ as well as an ‘individual slight’ to its 48-member states.¹²⁹ As his attacks on the Harding Administration intensified the New York Tribune dismissed Fosdick as ‘Blue Wilsonite’ – ‘one who falls on the floor and vainly raves.’ In October 1924 Fosdick got into a public stoush with Secretary Hughes, accusing the Harding Administration of treating the League with ‘cavalier contempt’ and assuming an ‘obstructive role’. According to Fosdick, Hughes soon responded with a ‘caustic speech’; and there were to be many more such ‘bitter exchanges’ with Hughes.¹³⁰

Some decades later, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Hughes, the journalist Merlo Pusey would make disparaging references to the attacks on Hughes by Fosdick and his supporters, variously labelling them as ‘disgruntled pro-League forces’, ‘fiercely pro-League Americans’, and ‘more passionate Leaguers.’ These ‘League enthusiasts’, Pusey observed ‘often proved to be the League’s worst enemies in the United States’, as they tended towards ‘short-sighted manoeuvres’, and seemed driven by ‘illusions’, including a ‘faith in mere organisation.’¹³¹ Commenting on Pusey’s portrayal, Fosdick was unrepentant:

In an excellent biography of Mr. Hughes, published a few years ago, the author called me a ‘disgruntled pro-Leaguer’, and hinted that I was a fanatic. I have no quarrel with these characterisations. Certainly no cause stirred me so profoundly.¹³²

And a fanatic he was, maintaining his tirade against America’s failure to participate in the League throughout the 1920s into the 1930s. In an article in the Virginia Quarterly Review in July 1925, for example, Fosdick had railed against the US Government’s ‘open hostility’ towards the League, and accused America of having ‘gone out of our way openly to humiliate it and secretly to hamstring it.’ America had used the ‘tremendous influence of our position and power to discourage progress’; allowed ‘partisan politics’ to place the US in an ‘obstructive role’; and had played ‘a small unworthy part’ in challenging a new structure ‘designed to end a system of international chaos…’¹³³ Writing in The League of Nations News Fosdick fulminated against ‘American Obscurantism’. By standing aloof from world affairs, the US was only ‘winning for herself contempt and even hatred among civilised nations, and a place of moral isolation that is now absolutely complete.’¹³⁴

During this period Fosdick also refined his ideas on international government, publishing The Old Savage in the New Civilisation in 1928, which endorsed ‘a planetary consciousness’ and ‘a collective intelligence.’ Fosdick argued that if nations were to co-exist without conflict then ‘we must have some centralised mechanism, some establishment procedure, by which we can determine the understandings and rules of common life…The assertion of the absolute sovereignty of the state has become in our time the supreme anarchy.’¹³⁵

He also maintained his belief that with much of the planet now ‘joined together in an intricate network of intercourse and commerce’ no nation could stand alone.¹³⁶ Fosdick pushed this point repeatedly in a paper ostensibly about the Great Depression, written for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s periodical International Conciliation in 1931. The world economy, he wrote, was ‘very sick’, yet new technology and trade had ‘knit the world together in a new kind of unity’, forming a ‘new world…of interdependence and solidarity.’ Underlying this was a ‘vast, intricate network of international credit and finance’, which comprised the ‘nerves of a living organism that embraces the whole world.’¹³⁷ For Fosdick the implications were profound and obvious:

You see, do you not, what has happened? In a hundred years, thanks to our machines, the rush of trade and finance has trampled down the old geographical frontiers….We may set up flags and boundary lines but they will be blotted out. We may try to disentangle ourselves from these new relationships, but the attempt will be futile.¹³⁸

Not surprisingly there was only one plausible response – what he called ‘A Fresh Approach’ – to help nations cooperate in a way that would ‘fit the facts of our twentieth century interdependence.’ It would require the ‘voluntary curtailment…of so-called sovereign rights’; the world would have to ‘submit to economic disarmament as well as military disarmament’; and the US would have to become an ‘active participant, in the wider organisation of the world community’, including of course, the League of Nations.¹³⁹ The choice was just as stark as that Fosdick had posed in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly eleven years earlier:

Will [humanity] now follow the flag of the old order or the standard of the League of Nations? Under one, the complete breakdown of civilisation and the self-extermination of man are only a matter of time; the other leads to unexplored fields of human cooperation and creative labour.¹⁴⁰

2.6 The Death of the Prophet

In relentlessly pursuing an American role in the League of Nations, Fosdick did not neglect the source of this scheme, remaining in contact with the ailing Wilson. In April 1922, for instance, Fosdick sent Wilson a summary of the League’s first two years of work, published by its Information Secretariat. Fosdick wrote of his certainty that Wilson must be viewing with ‘keen satisfaction’ the ‘growing prestige and authority of the League.’ Fosdick’s fervour for the League was undiminished: ‘[the League] is establishing itself as the only possible agency for maintaining the world’s peace.’ He also paid homage to the prophet:

I think of you in these hours of vindication with an increasing affection. The point of view which you gave us in the classroom at Princeton I have never forgotten…God is on our side in this business and the future is secure.¹⁴¹

The League has indeed become a vital and commanding force and will more and more dominate international relationships. I am thankful that I had something to do with its institution and I am also thankful, my dear fellow, that it has drawn to its service men like yourself in whose ideals and purposes I have perfect confidence.¹⁴²

In October 1923 Wilson wrote to Fosdick asking him to visit for the purposes of discussing ‘an educational matter’ which he hoped Fosdick might be able to interest the Rockefeller Foundation. Fosdick visited and was treated to Wilson’s vision of helping the US universities to match the scholarly standards of Oxford and Cambridge. Fosdick, though, only saw the ‘nostalgic dream of an old and crippled warrior as he thinks over the battles of his younger days…’¹⁴³ Nevertheless he did raise Wilson’s scheme with the General Education Board, and later reported to Wilson that ‘experimental’ moves were being made in a number of institutions. Wilson retorted that his ideas were not in anyway, ‘experimental’ as they were ‘thoroughly thought out in detail’; but if the Rockefeller Trustees did not act ‘a great opportunity would be lost forever.’¹⁴⁴

This scheme would mark Wilson’s only real connection with the Rockefellers, but he would not live to see it fulfilled. In January 1924, ostensibly in pursuit of this matter, Fosdick had visited Wilson to seek some final inspiration and guidance. He was not to be disappointed, as Gene Smith relates in When The Cheering Stopped:

[Wilson] said to Fosdick that it was unthinkable that America would permanently stand in the way of human progress; it was unthinkable that America would remain aloof, for America would not thwart the hope of the race. His voice broke and he whispered huskily that America was going to bring her spiritual energy to the liberation of mankind. Mankind would step forward, a mighty step; America could not play the laggard. Fosdick was young, and when Fosdick rose to go he pledged in the name of the younger generation that they would carry through to a finish the uncompleted work.¹⁴⁵

Wilson talked little about education. He whole thought centred on the League of Nations, and I have never heard him speak with deeper or moving earnestness. In his weakness the tears came down easily to his eyes…I think he had a premonition that his days were numbered – ‘the sands are running fast’, he told me – and perhaps he wanted to make his last testament clear and unmistakable. The League of Nations was a promise for a better future, he said as well as an escape from an evil past…[T]he sheer waste of war as a method of settling anything oppressed him. ‘It must never happen again’, he said. ‘There is a way out if only men will use it.’…The League was the answer. It was the next logical step in man’s widening conception of order and law…It was in line with human evolution. It was the will of God.¹⁴⁶

That was to be Fosdick’s last glimpse of the aged Wilson, who died on 3 February 1924. With his ‘grey, lined face, his white hair, his grim, determined jaw,’ Fosdick later recalled, Wilson ‘seemed like the reincarnation of one of the prophets…’¹⁴⁷ And as Fosdick admitted in the pages of the New York World, he had indeed: ‘pledged [Wilson] on behalf of the younger generation that we would carry through to a finish the thing that he had started…’¹⁴⁸ Fosdick had already devoted most of his energies to that cause, but now with the prophet dead, there was an added impetus to fulfil Wilson’s vision. Fortunately for Fosdick he had recruited one very wealthy individual to his crusade: John D. Rockefeller Jr.

2.7 ‘I discussed it with Mr. Raymond Fosdick…’¹⁴⁹

There are two means of proving that Fosdick successfully changed John D. Rockefeller Junior from a passive opponent into an active supporter of the League of Nations,¹⁵⁰ though only one stands the test of scrutiny. The first method is to quite simply note that after Fosdick returned to Junior’s immediate circle, the heir to the Rockefeller millions gradually changed his tune until he expressed sentiments not unlike those of Fosdick, the self-confessed fanatical supporter of Wilson’s vision. This method, however, must infer the conclusion from a coincidence of opinion rather than establishing any direct effort on Fosdick’s effort to bring about that change. It can therefore be challenged; the possibility that Junior was influenced by other sources can be invoked, or even that he was merely revealing a long-held viewpoint.

The second method involves looking for evidence of Fosdick actively trying to convince Junior to come round to his point-of-view. This method establishes Fosdick’s intent more convincingly, and in the arguments deployed, reveals the basis for Junior’s objections more completely. In this section we will start with the second approach, to establish what Fosdick did, and then employ the first approach to measure his persistent influence on Junior’s thinking and philanthropy.

Although direct access to the complete personal papers of either Fosdick or Junior is probably beyond the capacities of most researchers,¹⁵¹ it is still possible to find at least four pieces of evidence from works available in most university libraries that Fosdick was quite pro-active in trying to change Junior’s opinion on the League.

The first of these sources are Fosdick’s memoir, Chronicle of a Generation, and his biography of his benefactor, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. As noted above, Fosdick was explicit about the fact that Junior’s attitude towards the League had changed but somewhat coy about what caused that change. In his biography of Junior, Fosdick suggests that Rockefeller’s growing sense of internationalism stemmed in the first instance, from a combination of youthful globetrotting and a religiously instilled ‘awareness of human kinship and of the bonds that unite the world.’ Fosdick also credits the ‘dislocation and insecurity’ that followed the First World War as impacting on Junior’s thinking. Furthermore, he claims that Junior had been ‘deeply stirred’ by a 1924 article by Winston Churchill – ‘Shall We Commit Suicide?’, which warned the next war would be more destructive than the last – to the point that he had 250,000 copies of Churchill’s article reprinted and distributed around the US.¹⁵²

Yet these sources fall somewhat short of explicit advocacy of the League of Nations, but, as we have already seen, that was Fosdick’s specialty. Fosdick modestly avoids openly claiming credit; however he tacitly acknowledges that his own role in Junior’s transformation was hardly marginal, by emphasising Junior’s apparent open-mindedness and even willingness to be convinced. Fosdick’s recollections of Junior are revealing: ‘there was nothing dogmatic or opinionated about him’; ‘…he was a man of immense tolerance’; ‘I found him warmly sympathetic to new ideas and practices’; and ‘his opinions were invariably marked by tolerance, and inflexibility was not part of his character.’¹⁵³ In fact: ‘[Junior] wanted to be convinced, not deferred to’; something Fosdick had no qualms about exploiting, as he recounted: ‘we sometimes argued over our conflicting ideas in a frank and even bantering mood…’ And those ‘conflicting ideas’ concerned the League of Nations in which Fosdick ‘believed deeply’, while Junior, who was merely ‘following the Republican Party line’, looked upon the entire Wilsonian enterprise ‘with some misgiving.’¹⁵⁴

The implications of this exchange of opinions are also hinted at, though direct responsibility is never acknowledged. Thus Junior’s misgivings about the League are confined to the ‘early twenties’, for it is in the mid-twenties that he becomes interested in the Rockefeller Foundation’s support for the League, with its programs starting in 1924 and his own contributions following soon after.¹⁵⁵ That Fosdick, running a pro-League propaganda operation from his law office, even getting into public disputes with senior officials in the Harding Administration, might have had sufficient force of personality and the necessary fanaticism to have played a central role in changing Junior’s mind seems obvious, but that explicit conclusion is evaded. This is curious given that Fosdick freely admits to having debated the issue with Junior, perhaps more frequently we know; though obviously he must have prevailed for Rockefeller to give so much of his own money to the League.

It is important to realise, however, that Fosdick’s attempts to alter John D. Rockefeller’s opinion on the League of Nations actually began during his brief appointment to the League. On 4 September 1919, Fosdick sent Rockefeller a lengthy memorandum in which he set forth some of the ‘practical conditions’ which made America’s participation in the League ‘a sheer necessity if the world is to be preserved from chaos.’ Fosdick made it clear, though, that he was not going to argue the ‘compelling moral reasons’ for American membership of the League as part of a ‘brotherhood of nations’, nor explain America’s responsibility for ‘keeping order in backward countries’; instead his arguments concentrated on looming economic conflicts.¹⁵⁶ This memorandum was not sent for approval or information, but to convince its sole recipient; it is, therefore, our second piece of documentary evidence.

This memorandum was clearly designed to persuade someone who did not support the League of Nations, as Fosdick’s impassioned language and repeated warnings of chaos unless America joined the new international organisation attest. Yet, deviating from typical pro-League propaganda which focussed on the dangers of territorial quarrels, Fosdick warned that trade disputes could cause conflict. Economic rivalries, he argued, especially those involving ‘trade discrimination’, ‘lead to but one thing – war.’ Noting the growing tensions over trade both within Europe, and between Europe and the US, Fosdick had warned of an even ‘bloodier war’ than the one just concluded unless such disputes could be ‘controlled through the instrumentality of a League.’ The US would have to join the League of Nations, Fosdick argued, given that it was actually ‘impossible for America to keep aloof’ from these trade disputes, especially with the world ‘now inextricably enmeshed in a single industrial net.’ He also advocated creation of an international agency to oversee the provision of American credit to fund the reconstruction of Europe; and the creation of an International Currency Commission to control and reduce inflation.¹⁵⁷

In addition Fosdick addressed the ‘compelling’ political reasons that made American participation in the League a ‘necessity.’ American ‘disinterestedness’, he argued, ‘can save the world’; without America ‘there is no solution’.¹⁵⁸ Fosdick then finished his memorandum with this emotive flourish:

The League as created is far from perfect, but it is a beginning, and with it as an instrument, there is hope – indeed it is this generation’s only hope – that order can be built into the world and that justice and fair dealing can be established as the permanent basis of international relations.¹⁵⁹

None of this language would have been necessary if Junior (as a Rockefeller) was already a supporter of the League as some researchers contend. Indeed Fosdick’s memorandum is more reminiscent of the articles he would later write in favour of the League, filled with passionate argument and frequent exaggerations.¹⁶⁰

It is also unlikely that Fosdick would have felt a need to repudiate a memorandum sent to Junior and others by Frederick T. Gates advocating helping Britain to regain its pre-war imperial strength if he felt certain that Junior’s pro-League stance could not be broken. On 7 January 1927 Gates had made the following argument, one that seemed to draw on ideas favoured by Cecil Rhodes and the Round Table:

I feel that the British Empire holds the secret of the progress of civilisation and with the United States is the best hope for the well-being of the race. If we love God or man, let us work with and for England and her associated English-speaking states.¹⁶¹

Fosdick was appalled, and in what is our third piece of documentary evidence, sent off a missive on 15 February 1927 to Junior, rejecting Gates’ scheme:

I am in complete and fundamental disagreement. It represents an expression of the exploded Nordic theory, which centres all the virtue in the world in the Anglo-Saxon race. I am equally unconvinced that our help should be centred on English-speaking states and dependencies. Mr. Gates’s point of view on this matter has no support in scientific circles and can be attacked on too many grounds to justify extended discussion in this letter.¹⁶²

As evidence of his own preferences in international affairs, Collier and Horowitz point to Fosdick’s endorsement of a report by Abraham Flexner advocating ‘permanent world government.’ This report, which Fosdick had ‘sent Junior with his enthusiastic endorsement’ in December 1926, likened the world to a ‘great business’ in which each country was like an ‘essential and complex department’ that had been ‘pursuing its own will and fancy.’ Continuing the analogy, Flexner observed:

When ultimately and inevitably this world business has become hopelessly entangled, when divergent interests have been created, when pride has been wounded and passions aroused – then the department heads [must be] brought together to agree on concerted action for the purposes of avoiding bankruptcy.¹⁶³

The implications of Fosdick’s rejection of Gates’ Anglo-American dream and his endorsement of Flexner’s world government vision are plain; the two episodes not only reveal his own preferences for world order, but his continuing vigilance in ensuring that Junior’s newfound support for the League of Nations was not contaminated by other advisers with different aims. Fortunately for Fosdick, by 1929 Gates and his disruptive Anglophile imperialism was no more.

The final piece of documentary evidence is dated later than these examples, but it highlights Junior’s obvious dependence upon Fosdick when it came to expressing views favouring the League and other models of international government. On the eve of John D. Rockefeller’s 94th birthday, Junior wrote to his father on 28 June 1933 with some suggestions for a birthday statement that Senior was apparently contemplating. Although being ‘rather against it’ and doubting a statement would be wise, Junior still felt compelled to offer some ideas – after consulting with Fosdick:

Subsequently there occurred to me two or three things of public importance which I felt you might wisely and helpfully say at this time. I therefore wrote down the brief statement which I enclose. This morning I discussed it with Mr Raymond Fosdick, who was unqualifiedly favourable to something of that kind…An expression of gratitude from you at the signs of returning prosperity would give confidence to the public; an expression of appreciation of President Roosevelt from you would, it seems to me, be very wise and tactful; while for a man in your position on his ninety-fourth birthday, who might be expected to be living in the past, to sound a note of forward-looking world cooperation, when national selfishness is being exhibited on so many sides, would, I cannot but feel, have a very real influence for good.¹⁶⁴

A copy of Junior’s suggested statement is not included in Ernst’s collection of the letters between the Standard Oil founder and his heir, so we are unable to see exactly what sort of ‘forward-looking world cooperation’ Junior wanted his father to endorse. Furthermore, as Ernst tersely notes – ‘Mr Rockefeller did not feel it was necessary for him to say anything at this time’ – there was no 94th birthday statement. However, when we consider Fosdick’s views on the matter and Junior’s subsequent public pronouncements (see below), it takes little effort to guess.

2.8 ‘You can’t buy peace and good will.’¹⁶⁵

The impact of Fosdick’s influence can be measured, as stated above, by quite simply looking at examples of Junior’s internationalist sentiments prior to and post-1919, and more specifically at what actions he eventually undertook to assist the League of Nations, and ultimately the United Nations. Given the evidence we have seen of Fosdick’s efforts to sway Junior’s opinion, we should not be surprised to find the results. To make the contrast more evident, one need only look at the broad-brush objectives and decidedly Christian terminology that Senior and Junior were employing before Fosdick began his work on Junior.

In 1906, when the Rockefellers were first considering formation of a larger trust or foundation to help achieve their philanthropic goals, the ‘promotion of Christian civilisation’ both in the US and overseas, was the desired objective.¹⁶⁶ In 1918 and 1919, when the war was drawing to a close and everyone knew of the League of Nations proposal, the correspondence between Senior and Junior about their philanthropic operations continued to be in vague and religiously inspired terminology. ‘This is a religious duty’, Senior explained to Junior in 1918, ‘and you can accomplish so much more for the world if you keep well and strong.’¹⁶⁷ Thanking his father for yet more gifts of money and stock in 1919, Junior had indicated how he was appreciating ‘more and more’ what Senior’s ‘broad vision in giving has meant to the world.’¹⁶⁸ Even in the early 1920s, the language remained unchanged and broad. In 1922, for example, Senior spoke of ‘helping the world’, but only in terms of the good works to be done.¹⁶⁹

By the mid-1920s, however, Junior’s language had undergone a none-to-subtle transformation and he began to speak the Wilsonian inspired language of Fosdick. One of Junior’s initiatives during the 1920s was the establishment of International Houses for foreign university students. Junior viewed the International Houses as a ‘laboratory of human relationships’ and a ‘world in miniature’ through which he hoped an ‘atmosphere of fellowship can be developed.’ In a 1924 speech to foreign students Junior spoke of his hope that ‘some day…no one will speak of “my country”, but all will speak of “our world”.’¹⁷⁰

It might argued that Junior’s International House speech owed as much to influence of the preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick as it did to Raymond Fosdick. The elder brother of Raymond, Harry E. Fosdick was ‘the most famous preacher in America between the wars’ and at the forefront of a movement which believed in ‘Christianising relationships between nations rather than individuals’ (Robert). Apparently impressed with his message, Junior had made him the paster of his non-sectarian Riverside Church in Manhattan in the 1920s. Harry Fosdick would later write that it was the ‘idea that mankind is inevitably becoming “one world”, so far as conquest of distance and the intensifying of economic interdependence…’ that had been the ‘major influence’ on his preaching.¹⁷¹ Where that influence came from is unclear, however, while the preacher Fosdick no doubt contributed to Junior’s growing internationalist outlook, when it came to the actual political and economic program it was the lawyer Fosdick whose influence reigned supreme.

Thus we find that through Raymond Fosdick’s urging, Junior became more interested in supporting the League of Nations and ‘made significant financial contributions to its activities as the decade wore on.’ The Rockefeller Foundation gave money to the Health Organisation of the League of Nations, and later Junior gave some $2 million of his own funds to establish the League Library. Another consequence of Fosdick’s advice was Junior’s growing interest in international affairs generally, something he displayed through his grants to the plethora of foreign policy think-tanks which had emerged in the US during the 1920s. For instance, Junior had contributed $1,500 a year to the CFR, then dominated by supporters of Wilson, and in 1929 provided a further $50,000 towards the Council’s new headquarters in New York, Harold Pratt House. He also supplied funds to the Foreign Policy Association (FPA), an organisation formed in 1918 with the objective of promoting a ‘liberal and constructive American foreign policy’ to the masses, unlike the CFR, which concentrated on moulding elite opinion. Junior began supporting the FPA in 1925, granting it some $100,000 over a five-year period and later became a member. He also provided financial support to the American Council, later known as the Institute for Pacific Relations, granting it $70,000 over a four-year period in the 1920s.¹⁷²

The enduring influence of Fosdick’s Wilsonian-internationalism was also evident in a 1938 address by Junior in which he made a number of observations about the impact of technological change and growing interdependence. Much of the language and reasoning Junior used was remarkably similar to what Fosdick had been using since 1919:

With each passing day, with every new invention which increases the rapidity of travel and the ease of communications, cooperation between men and nations becomes constantly more important. The nations of the world have become interdependent as never before. The hands of the clock cannot be turned back. The old order of geographic isolation, or personal or national self-sufficiency, can never return. The future of civilisation will be determined by the degree of success with which men and nations learn to cooperate, to live together and let live.¹⁷³

But by far the most obvious and enduring sign of Junior’s transformation was his decision in December 1946 to donate $8.5 million worth of prime Manhattan real estate to place the United Nations headquarters. As Fosdick relates, ever since the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944 Junior had expressed ‘a vigorous belief in the new plans for an international organisation, and he had followed its progress with the deepest interest.’ These beliefs were no doubt, reinforced by Fosdick’s own equally vigorous public support for the United Nations.¹⁷⁴ Yet it would be one of Junior’s sons, Nelson, who had precipitated the actual decision, telephoning Junior on 10 December 1946 to tell him of the plans he and his brothers had hatched to give up part of the Rockefeller’s Tarrytown property to the United Nations. Junior had decided instead to give the United Nations some property in Manhattan that had become available. In giving the UN a home, Junior had bought himself some moments of public veneration; but privately he was philosophical: ‘You can’t buy peace and good will’, he had mused, all that one could do is ‘to help provide a setting, a scaffolding, an atmosphere, a soil,’ where these ‘values’ could grow.¹⁷⁵

There is some irony in Fosdick finishing his chapter on Junior’s internationalism with this quotation, for he was the one who used Junior’s money to buy much more than ‘peace and good will’. Instead he sought to use that vast legacy of John D. Rockefeller’s relentless drive to be the richest man in America to plant the seeds for the New World Order. While Junior’s money gave the UN its present home, through Fosdick Rockefeller money fed the N.W.O. in other ways…

2.9 President of the Rockefeller Foundation

The culmination of Fosdick’s career came at the end of 1935 when he was appointed to the dual positions of President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and President of the General Education Board. The dual appointment seemed to reflect an irresistible wave of adulation of Fosdick that suffused both organisations, starting with the heir to the Rockefeller billions and then down the philanthropic food-chain. As Junior explained to Senior in November 1935, the nominating committees of both philanthropies ‘feel that Mr. Raymond Fosdick is the man best fitted to fill this dual position.’ Junior expressed his belief there was ‘every prospect’ the committees would recommend Fosdick’s election, which would be ‘an ideal arrangement’ and ‘in line with a feeling which has been growing on me for some years…’¹⁷⁶

Sure enough, a month later Junior could inform Senior that the boards had made the decision he preferred and elected Fosdick to both positions. Junior was clearly pleased:

To have Mr Fosdick take up the work of these two Boards will much to the Boards and to me as your representative. I feel no one could be chosen who would be more in sympathy with the principles of the Boards than Mr Fosdick, nor anyone easier to work with, more cooperative, wiser and generally liked. It is a very happy outcome.¹⁷⁷

Fosdick, who had been a trustee to both organisations for some fifteen years, of course accepted the offers, but not without some reservation. It was, he admitted, ‘something of a wrench’ to give up the presidency of the League of Nations Association.¹⁷⁸ It is arguable, though; that by 1935 he knew full well there was little chance of realising his vision through that avenue. In 1932 he had concluded that with the League of Nations ‘only feebly entrenched in the practice and confidence of nations’ the world was fast turning into an ‘armed camp.’¹⁷⁹

An alternative to the LNA had arisen in 1933 when US Secretary of State Cordell Hull had offered to appoint Fosdick as a ‘confidential adviser’ to the State Department. This offer, Fosdick would later tell Arthur Sweetser, ‘came…with the backing of the President.’¹⁸⁰ That prospect had formed part of a secret, but broader plan within the US State Department to rationalise its relations with the League by appointing a permanent US ambassador to the organisation and to also establish a division devoted to the League within the department. By the end of 1933, however, with Nazi Germany having withdrawn from the League and a sense that Europe’s stability was eroding, the popular mood in the US had become markedly isolationist. Not surprisingly, and unwilling to jeopardise his presidency at this early stage on such an issue, Roosevelt had bowed to the isolationist upsurge and abandoned the plan.¹⁸¹

With that proposal having withered on the vine, as it were, Fosdick had decided the time had come for him to identify himself with ‘a single consuming interest of wide significance’ rather than the ‘scattered interests’ he found as a lawyer. Fortunately, in the Rockefeller Foundation he found an organisation that was devoted to the ‘advancement of knowledge’ in service of a goal, originally penned by Gates, to serve ‘the welfare of mankind, throughout the world.’ This coincidence of objectives, recalled Fosdick, was a ‘happy circumstance’; the Foundation had ‘the whole world to work in…unhampered by flags or political creeds.’ Not surprisingly Fosdick would judge his twelve years heading the Rockefeller Foundation as not only ‘stimulating and often exciting’, but as being among ‘the most rewarding of my life.’¹⁸²

It was not quite a step up, certainly not in terms of influence over the Rockefellers, for he had long been part of that ‘inner circle’ of consultants around Junior, according to Theresa Richardson of the University of Florida, ‘who approached being personal friends in handling sensitive issues in the family’s personal, business and philanthropic activities.’ In 1921, for example, following the death of Junior’s legal adviser Starr Murphy, Fosdick replaced him, not only on the philanthropic boards, but also on the boards of companies in which the Rockefellers retained a financial interest.¹⁸³ But it would prove to be a substantial lift in terms of Fosdick’s personal control over the Rockefeller Foundation’s resources. As Collier and Horowitz relate, ‘Fosdick made it clear that independence from the family was necessary if he were to take on the presidency of the Foundation.’¹⁸⁴

It is, perhaps, also very telling that John D. Rockefeller Senior had not opposed Fosdick’s appointment anymore than he had objected to Junior’s newfound love for the League of Nations. Indeed, before his appointment at the end of 1935 Fosdick had gone to see Senior in Florida to tell Standard Oil’s founder about the changes to the Rockefeller Foundation’s various programs. Senior, though, apparently responded that he had ‘complete confidence in the organization and in the officers who were currently responsible’ (Andrews).¹⁸⁵

This either means, as some might contend, that Senior quietly supported such an objective, or alternately, that Fosdick’s ability to disguise or downplay the use of Rockefeller funds for such goals had been effective enough to mislead the now elderly oil baron. But it is also possible that Senior no longer cared, having discharged his fortune to Junior and the philanthropies, and convinced that he was bound for Heaven, the nonagenarian robber baron was happy to while away his remaining years playing golf. Either way, Fosdick retained the complete trust of Junior and seemed unopposed elsewhere in the family.

A detailed consideration Fosdick’s role at the Rockefeller Foundation both as President and a trustee is beyond the scope of this paper, however it is arguable that his primary impact was to shift Rockefeller philanthropic activities away from medical issues towards politics and economics.¹⁸⁶ For the serious New World Order researcher there are three programs of interest that bear his imprint.

First, there is the Rockefeller Foundation’s input into the Council on Foreign Relations War and Peace Studies program. Launched in December 1939 in collaboration with the State Department, the primary objective of the project, according to a CFR memorandum, was to ‘elaborate concrete proposals designed to safeguard American interests in the settlement which will be undertaken when hostilities cease.’ Up until its completion in August 1945, the project produced some 680 planning documents.¹⁸⁷ For serious students of the New World Order, the deliberations of this project are crucial to understanding the origins and envisaged purpose of the international institutional structure – United Nations, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organisation – that exists today and which some elite elements wish to transform into a much stronger entity.

According to historian Robert D. Schulzinger, the ‘lion’s share of [CFR] recommendations went to ways of encouraging participation in a general international organisation.’ This included proposals to create an international army, air or police force that would punish violators of global peace and in the process promote ‘feelings of world citizenship.’¹⁸⁸

The War and Peace Studies project also helped lay the foundation for the UN, IMF and World Bank. It was a project member who had first suggested in 1942 the formation of UN-like body as means of protecting US interests while ‘avoid[ing] conventional forms of imperialism.’ Select project members later participated in a ‘secret steering committee’, set up by Secretary of State Cordell Hull in 1943, which was, claims Shoup, ‘most responsible for the final shape of the United Nations.’ As for the IMF and World Bank, in 1941 the project had endorsed formation of global institutions for the purpose of ‘stabilising currencies’ and promoting ‘programs of capital investment’ for ‘backward and underdeveloped regions.’¹⁸⁹ Proponents of this scheme would also later play a key role in advising those officials charged with determining the technical details of both organisations.¹⁹⁰

The input of the Rockefeller Foundation and its President, into this process was twofold. First, the Foundation provided to the CFR some $300,000 between 1939 and 1945 to fund the project.¹⁹¹ Hearing reports via the CFR on how grateful the Roosevelt Administration was for the Council’s work, Fosdick had written back: ‘The Rockefeller Foundation is very proud to have had a part in this significant project.’ Even though, according to Inderjeet Parmar of the University of Manchester, through its contribution the Rockefeller Foundation had in fact ‘violated one of its self-declared objects: to steer clear of policymaking, and politics in general.’¹⁹²

Second, the Rockefeller Foundation also contributed quite generously to the Institute of Pacific Relations and the Foreign Policy Association during the 1940s; the FPA, for instance, received $420,000 between 1942 and 1950. The purpose of this funding, according to Parmar, was to ‘construct a new internationalist consensus’, with both the FPA and IPR ‘educating’ popular opinion to favour a new American global role. Again Fosdick was strongly behind this, rejecting a proposal in 1943 to terminate grants to the FPA on the grounds its work ‘made a difference.’¹⁹³

Thus, not only did Fosdick endorse the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of the War and Peace Studies Project, he enthusiastically backed and funded the propaganda in support of the new post-war global structure. But that was not the limit of his activity in that area. In his autobiography, Fosdick admits to having ‘never been too easy in my mind’ about the role the Rockefeller Foundation played ‘in the creation of the atom bomb.’ The Foundation had given direct financial support to most of the leading scientists later involved in the Manhattan Project, and had also funded the 184-inch cyclotron at the University of California, which ‘contributed significantly to one of the phases of the project.’¹⁹⁴

It was perhaps that same guilt that was behind the Rockefeller Foundation’s decision to fund a conference held by many of those same scientists at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in June 1947. This was no ordinary conference as these atomic scientists, who had formed pressure groups such as the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, now feared their diabolical creation threatened humanity’s very existence. Not surprisingly the Lake Geneva conference produced a statement to widespread agreement which proclaimed: ‘our purpose – which is the permanent elimination of war – requires the establishment of a government of the world with powers adequate to maintain a peace based on the rule of law.’¹⁹⁵ Fosdick would have been pleased.

The second program that bears Fosdick’s imprint, but only tangentially alluded to in his memoirs and his review of the Rockefeller Foundation, is population control. According to Collier and Horowitz, it was Fosdick who had ‘first alerted Junior to Magaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood movement and the importance of birth control in general.’ Fosdick had apparently discussed the matter another Rockefeller philanthropic acolyte, Beardsley Ruml, then director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, in 1925. Ruml had agreed – with what must have been Fosdick’s suggestion – they should ‘push the Birth Control Movement in all appropriate ways.’ Later, in 1931, just prior to Junior giving Sanger a $5000 grant, Fosdick had written to him calling the population problem ‘one of the great perils of the future.’¹⁹⁶ More funding for Sanger was to come from Junior and his sons, though anonymously, and from the BSH from the 1920s through to the 1940s.¹⁹⁷

Fosdick was also among those BSH staffers who agreed with the eugenic theories of Havelock Ellis, whose book, The Task of Social Hygiene (1912), advocated a scientific approach to improving ‘Social Hygiene.’ This would involve selective reproduction, with those possessing undesirable characteristics encouraged not to reproduce, while those with better attributes would be given incentives to do so.¹⁹⁸ The BSH acted as a conduit to other organizations concerned with ‘social hygiene’, including the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA), which received $2 million from the BSH between 1919 and 1929. Fosdick was placed on ASHA’s board of directors, its executive committee and acted as chairman of its finance committee.¹⁹⁹

The Rockefeller Foundation had made as many as 25 grants between 1921 and 1935, totalling $500,000, to projects dealing with the issue of population. As head of the Rockefeller Foundation, Fosdick’s interest in this issue did not stop. In 1936 the Rockefeller Foundation had provided funding to the Office of Population Research at Princeton University. In 1943 Fosdick had endorsed a proposal that population be the top priority of the Foundation’s Division of Social Science.²⁰⁰ This merely marked the escalation of Rockefeller interest in the issue that would culminate in the creation of the Population Council by John D. Rockefeller III in 1952.

Fosdick’s third contribution to the New World Order is more esoteric, but no less important and this concerns the provision of funding by the Rockefeller Foundation to the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The argument, made by Donald Fisher in his book Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (1993), is that the Rockefeller Foundation’s funding of the SSRC impacted upon the very quality of the social sciences within America:

Just as Rockefeller trustees were a self-perpetuating elite, so Rockefeller philanthropy set out to create similar organisational forms in the institutions it supported. In the SSRC, a small group of social scientists were encouraged to maintain control over the choice of research problems and the distribution of research funds. These intellectuals took on the role of intermediary between the ruling class and the society at large.²⁰¹

According to Fisher, it was the agents of the Rockefeller philanthropies, among them Fosdick, who oversaw the shift away from ‘basic research and the fundamental development of social sciences’ towards research which supported the needs of the state; instead of being critics, social scientists became ‘servants of the State.’²⁰² This was possible as the Rockefeller Foundation provided nearly 93% of the SSRC’s funding between 1924 and 1940, and many key officials crossed between both organizations, taking charge of research agendas and grant-giving.²⁰³ Fosdick participated in this process on a number of levels, most significantly as President of the Rockefeller Foundation, but also as a member of a number of committees associated with the SSRC. His specific input to this process, to the extent it is acknowledged, was in encouraging greater Foundation support for funding research into international relations through SSRC and other organizations.²⁰⁴

In his memoirs, and his review of the Rockefeller Foundation, Fosdick is enthusiastic about the selective and ‘scientific’ approach they had taken to the issue of funding the social sciences, but is seemingly oblivious to the consequences of the power inherent in being the primary grant-giver, even if for the seemingly admirable goal of attaining the ‘ultimate social intelligence’.²⁰⁵ Yet in the corruption of the social sciences it is possible we have the seeds of the present denial that relegates to the despised fringe all talk of the New World Order as a ‘conspiracy’…

CONCLUSION: GENEALOGY VS IDEOLOGY?

The purpose of this paper has been to persuade you, the reader, of Raymond B. Fosdick’s crucial yet overlooked role in the New World Order. It has been my contention that were it not for Fosdick’s fanatical devotion to Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a new world order, then embodied in the League of Nations, and his persistence in convincing and ultimately converting John D. Rockefeller Junior into a supporter of his cause; the Rockefeller name might never have been so closely connected with the push for global governance.

Through reference to a range of primary sources, including the personal correspondence of Fosdick, Rockefeller Senior and Junior, it should be evident that Fosdick’s influence was pivotal. His enthusiasm for the League of Nations and for international economic integration was soon reflected in the words and beliefs of Junior, which were in turn transmitted to his sons and the burgeoning network of Rockefeller funded and founded philanthropies and policy-planning organisations. Ultimately the purpose of that effort was to change government policy, and thus realise Fosdick’s dream – itself an expression of Woodrow Wilson’s dying wish – of the United States leading the world in the creation of an international government that would prevent war.

Yet my premise is unlikely to be popular in some quarters, especially amongst those who put their faith in theories the Rockefellers were always agents of the Rothschilds or even biologically destined to support the New World Order. Such analysts might try to construct an alternate hypothesis that, for instance, the Rockefellers had deliberately selected Fosdick to serve in their network of foundations because he had proven himself a true ‘fanatic’ in his support for the League of Nations. Fosdick’s obvious attempts to persuade Junior to embrace the League would probably be reinterpreted as an inadvertent job application; moreover by hiring the self-confessed ‘fanatic’ and casually crediting Fosdick with changing his mind, Junior could then come out and the Rockefellers could publicly support a US role in the League, especially at a time when the concept was in so much jeopardy.

This alternative scenario, however, rests on too much conjecture; above all the notion the Rockefellers were secretly supporting the League of Nations all along. Moreover it implicitly confuses the issue by assuming that because the Rockefellers were very rich for so long that they must have been part of the New World Order. Certainly it was the case that by 1890s the Rockefellers were near the apex of America’s ruling class purely through their vast wealth and control of the oil industry. This position had been reached through not only though business acumen, but through extraordinary ruthlessness that John D. Rockefeller inevitably became one of the most despised of the ‘robber barons’. Yet Rockefeller support for the ideas of Woodrow Wilson can only be reliably traced to the 1920s.

Unless credible evidence can be produced which contradicts that which has been presented, then we must accept that Rockefeller involvement in the New World Order – which is a fact – was not a long-standing family tradition, but is primarily attributable to the zealous intervention of one man, a humble Baptist from Buffalo: Raymond B. Fosdick.

This conclusion also presents a challenge to analysts such as Springmeier, Icke and even Jim Marrs, who have taken to embellishing their accounts with increasingly elaborate tales linking the New World Order to impossibly ancient secret societies emanating from Mu and Atlantis, extra-terrestrials, rampaging Satanic cults and shape-shifting reptilian beings. Other than to increase book sales by entertaining readers, it is impossible to see what constructive purpose these lurid tales perform. If anything, they serve to feed popular prejudices that only paranoid and possibly deranged fantasists could possibly believe the erosion of national sovereignty has been caused by design. But more importantly, as this article has sought to show, the focus on the financial backing and genealogy of the alleged conspirators is not only empirically inaccurate but misplaced.

It is one thing to have the money; it is quite another issue on how that fortune is actually used. In the push to create, what David Rockefeller recently described as ‘a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world…’²⁰⁶ it is more like to be one’s ideology, rather than genealogy, which determines whether or not one is on board. And as Fosdick’s relationship with the Rockefellers shows, that idea can come from almost anybody.

Reference Notes:

2 The only outstanding exception is veteran researcher Gary North who has made a number of references to Fosdick and his relationship with the Rockefellers over the past decade. However, he erroneously assumes that Fosdick had always represented Rockefeller interests and beliefs. In 1997, for example, he claimed that ‘Rockefeller’s agent Raymond Fosdick’ had been ‘working on this New World Order back in 1920, at the Paris Peace Conference…’ (Quoted in The Biblical Examiner, November 1997, http://biblicalexaminer.org/w199711.htm). In another article North credited Fosdick with being John D. Rockefeller Jr’s ‘full-time bag man’, whose use of Rockefeller Foundation money ‘bought silence from would-be academic critics, mainly on the left’ (Gary North, ‘Writing Conspiracy History: Lists Are Not Enough’, LewRockwell.com, 1 March 2002). His most extensive treatment highlighted Fosdick’s career, including his connections with Colonel House, advocacy of ‘international government’ while working for the League of Nations, his running of ‘the Rockefeller Foundation’s empire for…three decades’, and membership of the Council on Foreign Relations (Gary North, ‘The Interventionist-Internationalist Complex’, LewRockwell.com, 17 October 2001). North also mentions Fosdick in the following articles: ‘The War Zone – Bait-and-Switch in Afghanistan’, LewRockwell.com, 16 November 2001; ‘Setting Your Priorities With Care’, LewRockwell.com, 11 November 2002; ‘The Horror of Being Oprah’, LewRockwell.com, 7 May 2003; and ‘EUthanasia’, LewRockwell.com, 4 June 2005.

21 For more information on Cleveland’s financial community in the decades following the Civil War there are a number of contemporary accounts. Henry Howe’s Historical Collections of Ohio (1888), for instance, records around twenty financial institutions in Cleveland in the late 19th century. This included no less than two institutions run by Handy – Mercantile National Bank and the Cleveland Clearing House – one bank run by Eells (Commercial National Bank), and the existence of the National City Bank of Cleveland (pp.499-500). Dissenting slightly from Goulder’s account is Maurice Joblin’s Cleveland Past and Present Its Representative Men (Maurice Joblin, 1869), which dates the creation of the Commercial Branch of the State Bank of Ohio to 1845, some years after the charter for Bancroft’s bank, the revived Commercial Bank of Lake Erie, had expired. Joblin credits Handy with starting the Commercial Branch Bank and installing William Otis as its president. In 1865 Handy left the Commercial Bank to join the Merchants Branch Bank, which took advantage of the new National Banking Act to become the Merchants National Bank (pp.61-62). Neither Joblin nor Howe, it should be stressed, even attempt to chronicle Rockefeller’s relationship with any of these bankers.

22 This may prove difficult, though, as the Rockefeller Archive Center recently explained:

The Rockefeller Archive Centre does not have the records of Mr. Rockefeller’s early business days; there are some ledgers of his personal finances and some correspondence, but this is very spotty for the period of the late 1860s and 1870s. Moreover, the outgoing correspondence from Mr. Rockefeller’s office is arranged chronologically in letterpress books, while what incoming correspondence there is arranged alphabetically by correspondent. This makes research in these files tedious and time consuming. Still, most of this correspondence seems to be about the oil business itself, not discussions with bankers (Personal Correspondence from Rockefeller Archive Centre, 16 August 2004).

24 See Derek Wilson, Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power, (Andre Deutsch, 1988), pp.176-188; David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue, (Dial Press, 1981); Irving Katz, August Belmont – A Political Biography, (Columbia University Press, 1968); and Elaine Penn, “Interfered with by the state of the times”, The Rothschild Archive Trust – Review of the Year, (April 2002-March 2003), pp.25-31. Though cynics might reject Penn’s article, given her employment as an Assistant Archivist at the Rothschild Archive Trust, her review of Belmont’s letters for 1861 throws new light on his sometimes tense relationship with his employers, his dismay at the outbreak of the Civil War (because it would suppress market prices), and his own unsuccessful attempts to persuade the Rothschilds to persuade the British to mediate a solution to the conflict.

25 Belmont quoted in Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan, (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), p.40. In answer to Belmont’s demands for attention, the London branch sent the impetuous Salomon Rothschild to assess America’s potential in 1859. Salomon was quick to condemn the American people as ‘scum’ who acted like ‘a pack of wild animals’; as for the country he foresaw nothing but ‘an era of revolutions and civil wars.’ The impact of his advice was the Rothschilds elected not to expand their American operations, leaving their interests in Belmont’s hands; they would not establish a branch in the US until after World War I (quotes in Wilson, Rothschild, pp.183-188).

29 Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time, (Angriff Press, 1974), pp.52, 324. Many researchers, however, seem to treat Rothschild support for world government as a self-evident truth. Rivera, for instance, asserts without any supporting documentation that ‘it is believed the Rothschild family used the Illuminati as a means to achieving their goal of world-wide financial dominance.’ Furthermore, writes Rivera, ‘it is known [the Rothschilds] are squarely behind the movement to unite all the western European nations into a single political entity, which is just another step towards one-world government’ (The New World Order Exposed [Final Warning], pp.16, 20).

31 See John ‘Birdman’ Bryant, ‘Unanswered Letter to Eustace Mullins’, 20 October 2001 at http://www.thebirdman.org/Index/NetLoss/-EustaceMullins.html. Bryant, who thinks that Mullins ‘is probably right in much of what he says’, wrote to Mullins seeking ‘appropriate documentation’ for some of the more controversial claims made in his book The World Order: Our Secret Rulers (2nd Edition, 1992). Unfortunately Mullins did not think Bryant’s queries deserved an answer.

39 Icke, ...and the truth shall set your free, pp.48, 72; Gary Allen with Larry Abraham, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, (Concord Press, 1971), p.49; and James Perloff, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline, (Western Islands, 1988), pp.27, 31.

44 For a good overview of Roosevelt’s vitriol against Wilson and the League of Nations, see Serge Ricard, ‘Anti-Wilsonian Internationalism: Theodore Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star’, in Daniela Rossini, ed., From Theodore Roosevelt to FDR: Internationalism and Isolationism in American Foreign Policy, (Ryburn Publishing/Keele University Press, 1995).

59 John H. Mulder, Woodrow Wilson: The Years of Preparation, (Princeton University Press, 1978), p.202. The controversy was over Wilson’s plan to shut the upper class eating clubs and replace them with colleges. Facing opposition from Princeton’s board of trustees, Wilson had turned his plan into a disastrous crusade against some of Princeton’s wealthy backers.

92 Jennifer Gunn, ‘A Few Good Men: The Rockefeller Approach to Population, 1911-1936’, in The Development of the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada: The Role of Philanthropy, edited by Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher, (Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1999), pp.103-104 (including Junior quotes).

108 The keen reader would observe that Fosdick’s trans-Atlantic sea journeys have been marked by a few too many such fortuitous coincidences. He met House who was going to Europe in his vain attempt to head off the war, and he was on the same vessel as Wilson as he traveled to Europe in the aftermath of that war to try and eliminate such conflict forever. Fosdick also met Theodore Roosevelt sailing back to the US after completing his study of European police systems. Whether these meetings were more than just good fortune is for the more devoted and suspicious researchers out there to discover.

150 Harr and Johnson (The Rockefeller Century, p.155) note that although ‘no supporter of Wilson’, Junior was a ‘moderate in foreign affairs unlike his fellow philanthropists Andrew Mellon and Henry C. Frick who financed the propaganda campaign of the hard-line opponents of the American entry into the League [of Nations].’

151 It was, unfortunately, well beyond mine. Fosdick’s papers are available to researchers at the Seely G. Mudd Manuscript Library at Princeton University; while Junior’s are accessible at the Rockefeller Archive Center at The Rockefeller University. Like the papers of some other controversial figures in the New World Order, they await the attention of serious and well-financed researchers.

160 On 22 September 1919, Fosdick reported to Drummond that Benjamin Strong, Governor of the Federal Reserve Board in New York, ‘while agreeing with most of it’ had ‘taken certain exceptions’ to his memorandum to Rockefeller. See Memorandum to Sir Eric Drummond from R.B.F., 22 September 1919, in Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations, pp.38-40.

174 See for example Raymond B. Fosdick, ‘We Failed in 1919 – Shall We Fail Again?’, New York Times, 2 July 1944; Fosdick, ‘The Hour Is Late – We Must Not Fail’, New York Times, 11 February 1945; Fosdick, ‘Our Last Chance – At San Francisco’, New York Times, 22 April 1945; and Fosdick, ‘The Challenge: One World Or None’, New York Times, 2 September 1945.

CONTENTS:

Introduction

Part One: The Rockefellers and the New World Order

Part Two: The Talented Mr Fosdick

Conclusion: Genealogy vs. Ideology?

Reference Notes

INTRODUCTION

Part One: THE ROCKEFELLERS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

1.1 Frontmen for the Rothschilds

1.2 The ‘Illuminati Bloodline’

1.3 Woodrow Wilson’s Secret Controllers

PART TWO: THE TALENTED MR FOSDICK

2.1 Woodrow Wilson’s First Disciple

2.2 John D. Rockefeller Junior and the Bureau of Social Hygiene

2.3 ‘The memory of this day will live in my mind for ever.’⁹⁹

2.4 Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations

2.5 ‘The League [of Nations]…is this generation’s only hope…’¹¹⁷

2.6 The Death of the Prophet

2.7 ‘I discussed it with Mr. Raymond Fosdick…’¹⁴⁹

2.8 ‘You can’t buy peace and good will.’¹⁶⁵

2.9 President of the Rockefeller Foundation

CONCLUSION: GENEALOGY VS IDEOLOGY?

Reference Notes:

CONTENTS:

Introduction

Part One: The Rockefellers and the New World Order

Part Two: The Talented Mr Fosdick

Conclusion: Genealogy vs. Ideology?

Reference Notes

INTRODUCTION

Part One: THE ROCKEFELLERS AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER

1.1 Frontmen for the Rothschilds

1.2 The ‘Illuminati Bloodline’

1.3 Woodrow Wilson’s Secret Controllers

PART TWO: THE TALENTED MR FOSDICK

2.1 Woodrow Wilson’s First Disciple

2.2 John D. Rockefeller Junior and the Bureau of Social Hygiene

2.3 ‘The memory of this day will live in my mind for ever.’99

2.4 Under-Secretary General of the League of Nations

2.5 ‘The League [of Nations]…is this generation’s only hope…’117

2.6 The Death of the Prophet

2.7 ‘I discussed it with Mr. Raymond Fosdick…’149

2.8 ‘You can’t buy peace and good will.’165

2.9 President of the Rockefeller Foundation

CONCLUSION: GENEALOGY VS IDEOLOGY?

Reference Notes:

2.3 ‘The memory of this day will live in my mind for ever.’⁹⁹

2.5 ‘The League [of Nations]…is this generation’s only hope…’¹¹⁷

2.7 ‘I discussed it with Mr. Raymond Fosdick…’¹⁴⁹

2.8 ‘You can’t buy peace and good will.’¹⁶⁵