Lothian: Philip Kerr and the Quest for World Order (Contributions to the Study of World History)

LOTHIAN PHILIP KERR AND THE QUEST FOR WORLD ORDER

David P. Billington, Jr.

Contributions to the Study of World History

PRAEGER SECURITY INTERNATIONAL

Westport, Connecticut

• London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Billington, David P., 1953Lothian : Philip Kerr and the quest for world order / David P. Billington, Jr. p. cm. — (Contributions to the study of world history, ISSN 0885-9159) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-32179-5 (alk. paper) 1. Lothian, Philip Henry Kerr, Marquis of, 1882-1940. 2. Ambassadors— Great Britain—Biography. 3. Aristocracy (Social class)—Great Britain— Biography. 4. Great Britain—Politics and government—1910-1936. 5. Great Britain—Politics and government—1936-1945. 6. World politics—1900-1945. I. Title. II. Series. DA574.L6B55 2006 327.41073092—dc22 2006008229 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2006 by David P. Billington, Jr. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2006008229 ISBN: 0-313-32179-5 ISSN: 0885-9159 First published in 2006 Praeger Security International, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface

vii

Introduction

I

1

Proving Grounds

5

2

The Round Table Crusade, 1909-1914

17

3

The First World War and After, 1914-1921

39

4

Renewed Hopes, 1921-1930

75

5

Appeasement, 1930-1939

101

6

Ambassador, 1939-1940

141

Conclusion

163

Notes

169

Index

237

PREFACE

I would like to thank The Most Hon. The Marquess of Lothian, The Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram, QC, MP, for permission to quote from the papers of the eleventh Marquess. I would also like to express my gratitude to the twelfth Marquess of Lothian for permission to consult the papers of the eleventh Marquess in the National Archives of Scotland. I would like to thank His Grace The Duke of Norfolk, for permission to quote from a letter of Viscount Fitzalan of Derwent; and The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Selborne, for permission to quote from a letter of the second Earl of Selborne. I would like to thank Lady Ford; the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford; the Warden of Rhodes House, Sir Colin Lucas; and Dr. Alex May and the Round Table Moot, for permission to consult and quote from the Brand Papers, the Milner Papers, the Rhodes and Rhodes Trustees Papers, and the Round Table Papers respectively. I would also like to thank Mr. Leo Amery, Mrs. Joan Buresch-Talley, the Estate of Lord Butler of Saffron Waiden, Mr. Robin Farquhar-Oliver, The Hon. Alastair Gillespie, Mr. Lionel Jebb, and Professor John G. G. Ledingham for permission to quote from the papers of Leopold Amery, Allen W. Dulles, Lord Butler, Frederick Scott Oliver, William Oliver, Richard Jebb, and James Garvin respectively. I would also like to thank the Librarian of Arundel Castle, John Martin Robinson, and Hannah Iredale, secretary to The Rt. Hon. Michael Ancram, for their generous assistance. For permission to quote from the following manuscript sources, I would like to thank Michael Bott of Reading University Library, for letters in the papers of Nancy, Viscountess Astor; Professor George Kolankiewicz and the Librarian of the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, for a letter of Sir Bernard Pares; Yale University Library, New Haven, for a letter of Walter Lippmann; John Pinfold, Librarian of Rhodes House, Oxford, for papers of Joseph Oldham and Dame Margery Perham; Merav Segal, Director of Yad Weizmann, the Weizmann Institute Archives, Rehovot, Israel,

Preface for letters of Chaim Weizmann; the Bursar of King's College, Cambridge, for a letter of Lord Keynes; and the University of Liverpool Library, for a letter of Eleanor Rathbone. I would also like to thank Robert B. Wilcox for provid­ ing me with a letter of his father-in-law, James Winston. For permission to quote from the following published sources, I would like to thank Professor Todd Breyfogle {The American Oxonian); the Secretary of the British Academy {Proceedings of the British Academy); Edwin R. Blomquist and the Christian Science Publishing Society {The Christian Science Monitor and The Christian Science Journal); the Council on Foreign Relations {Foreign Affairs); Dr. Alex May and the Round Table Moot {The Round Table); the Royal Commonwealth Society {United Empire); and the Royal Institute of International Affairs (for a published 1936 address of Lord Lothian). I am also grateful to the following publishers or agents for permission to quote from the following books or periodicals: Cornell University Press and HarperCollins (The Political Diaries of CP. Scott); Curtis Brown, Ltd., on behalf of the Estate of Winston Churchill (speech of May 25, 1932, by Winston Churchill, reprinted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill; and Winston S. Churchill, Great Contemporaries and The Second World War); Guardian Newspapers (The Observer); Harcourt Publishers (William E. Dodd, Ambassador Dodd's Diary); David Higham Associates, Ltd. (L. S. Amery, My Political Life); Houghton Mifflin (Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War); John Murray of Hodder Headline (The Quarterly Review); Macmillan, Ltd. (J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian; and R. H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent); The New Statesman, Ltd. (The Nation and The Nation and Athenauem); The New Republic; The New York Times; Victor Gollancz of Orion Publishing Group (Lord Riddell's Intimate Diary; Memoirs of Ernest von Weizsäcker; and David Lloyd George, The Truth about the Treaties); Oxford University Press (R. H. Brand, The Union of South Africa; Thomas Jones, A Diary with Letters; and The Marquess of Lothian, The American Speeches of Lord Lothian and Pacifism Is Not Enough); Transaction Publishers (Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century); and Yale University Press (Philip Kerr and Lionel Curtis, The Prevention of War, and David Lloyd George, Memoirs of the Peace Conference). I apologize for any errors and omissions in my acknowl­ edgements and I will be glad to correct them in subsequent editions of this book. To my faculty adviser W Roger Louis I owe the navigation and success of this study. I am also indebted to Standish Meacham and to the other members of my dissertation committee, Robert Divine, Robert Hardgrave, and William Braisted for their interest and careful attention. The University of Texas Department of History stimulated and sustained my work, and I owe special thanks to Sidney Monas, Walt Rostow, Brian Levack, Nancy Barker, David Crew, John Lamphear, Bruce Hunt, Claudio Segré, Philip White, Howard Miller, and Mary Helen Quinn. I would also like to thank the Graduate School and its Dean, William Livingston, and the University of Texas at Austin, for support.

Preface

ix

My debt to other scholars is immense and must begin with special thanks to Lord and Lady Blake for their generous assistance and hospitality, and to Andrea Bosco, David Dilks, Michael Fry, Robert Gilpin, Sarvapalli Gopal, Sir Michael Howard, Anthony Kenny, Anthony Low, Neville Meaney, Alastair Noble, Alistair Parker, David Reynolds, Ronald Robinson, Lord Skidelsky. Ronald Steel, Ira Straus, Thomas F. Troy, Donald Cameron Watt, and D. J. Wenden. I am indebted to Walter Nimocks and to the work of John Kendle, and I would like to thank Richard Nenneman for his assistance. I would like to give special thanks to Arthur Link for his consideration and guidance and I am grateful to George Kennan for his reply to an inquiry. Many archives and libraries made my research possible. I would like to thank the Scottish Record Office, now the National Archives of Scotland, and the Baylor University Library, the Bodleian Library, the British Information Services, the British Library, the Churchill College Library, the Council on Foreign Relations Library, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Georgetown University Library, the House of Lords Record Office, the India Office Library and Records (now in the British Library), the Institute for Commonwealth Studies, the Institute for Historical Research, the Metropolitan Police Archives, the Seeley G. Mudd Library at Princeton University, the National Archives of Canada, the National Library of Scotland, the New York Public Library, the Princeton University Library, the Public Record Office, now the National Archives, at Kew, the Reading University Library, Rhodes House Library, the Royal Institute of International Affairs Library, the Swarthmore College Library, the University of Toronto Archives, the U.S. National Archives, the U.S. Library of Congress, and the Yale University Library. The assistance of archivists and librarians was invaluable and I must first thank the Keeper of the Records of Scotland and Dr. Tristram Clarke, Dr. Frances Shaw, and Scott Collins. Henry Hamilton, Alex Holstead, Rona Littleproud, and Ruaraidh Wishart. I would also like to thank Harold Averill, T.A. Barringer, Fred Bauman, Alan Bell, D.M. Blake, Mary Ellen Chiijoke, Susan Corrigall, Caroline Dalton, Richard Doré, David Ferris, Alun Ford, Margaret Gale, Robin Gillis, Dorothy Hamerton, Colin Harris, Ieuan Hopkins, Helen Langley, Allan Lodge, Moira MacKay, Sheila Mackenzie, Malcolm Madden, Sandra Marsh, William R. Massa, Jr.. Margaret May, Lesley Price, Ben Primer, Alice Prochaska, Zoë Stansell, Anne Summers. Mari Takayanagi, Jennifer Thorp. Alycia Vivona, and Maureen Watry. I would also like to thank Donna Anstey, Amrit Bangard, Mary Bergin, Michelle Bridges, Sandra Brind, Perry Cartwright, Sandra Chin, Emily Cooke, Liz Cooper, Rosie Créer, Richard Delahunty, Joanne DelloRusso, Christine Fernandes, Lynda Hammes, Ronald Hussey, Penny Jones, Helen Langley, Lisa Lau, Scott Marinaro, Stephanie Munson, Joanne Preston, Laura Scott, David Seitz, Laura Sixsmith, Jennifer Streek, and Alice Wilson. I especially want to thank Heather Staines of Greenwood Publishing Group, for her patience and support, and the staff of

X

Preface

Praeger Publishers and Cadmus Communications, for their assistance turning this manuscript into a book. Travis Hanes provided guidance and help from the first day I arrived in Austin. My chapters owe their improvement to him and to the other graduate students of the Louis Seminar: John Allgood, Claire Anderson, Caroline Attie, Peter Austin, John Brobst, David Fado, Cindy Joiner, Bob Osborn, Frank Poyas, John Vander Lippe, and Frank Walsh. For their friendship, I would also like to thank Maureen Allgood, Sharon Arnoult, Lauren Austin, Pinar Batur, Aaron and Takako Forsberg, Sally Hanes, Jennifer Loehlin, Annica Poyas, Eric Stevens, and the many other graduate students at the University of Texas whom I had the privilege to know. The encouragement and assistance of the thirteenth Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, and Mrs. Marjorie Billington, Professor Cyril E. Black, Professor Julian P. Boyd, Mr. Stephen C. Flanders, and Mr. Roswell B. Wing, all in special ways equipped me to reach this point in my life. I have also drawn strength on this journey from John and Lynn Billington, Carol Flanders, Neva Wing, Corinne Black, Mary Laity, and my Billington and Bergquist cousins, Flanders and Wing god-cousins, the Black and Laity families, and friends in Hoboken and New York City. I owe a deep debt to Orest Pelech and Aaron Trehub, who have given me their friendship and support for many years. Charles C. Watson of The Hill School inspired my interest in international his­ tory, and Thomas G. Ruth of The Hill encouraged my interest in history and helped me through personal difficulties. For their hospitality and friendship, I want especially to thank the Society of St. Francis and John Thompson and Brother Timothy of the Little Portion Friary, Edinburgh, and Brother Colin Wilfred and Brother Thaddeus of Holy Trinity House, London. I also want to thank London House for finding room for me. I want to express special gratitude to Mrs. Henrietta Manners for opening her home to me, and to J. Wayman Williams for referrals and muchneeded assistance with my computer. To my brothers and sisters, Elizabeth and Donald, Jane and Johnson, Philip and Ninik, Stephen and Miriam, and Sarah and Peter, I want to give my thanks for their constant love and support. Finally, to my parents, without whose faith this work would never have begun, and whose love and support made it possible to bring to a successful conclusion, I dedicate this book.

INTRODUCTION

Philip Henry Kerr (1882-1940), eleventh Marquess of Lothian, was a writer on imperial and international affairs who devoted his life to building a more liberal world order anchored by the advanced English-speaking nations. He worked to promote closer ties among these nations, and as British ambassa­ dor to the United States from September 1939 until December 1940, he helped Roosevelt and Churchill draw their two countries closer together. He was also an early advocate of self-government for India. During the 1930s, however, Lord Lothian was a leading proponent of concessions to Nazi Germany. His detour into appeasement has never been fully explained, nor has his role in other events in which he had a hand. Although not a public fig­ ure of the first rank, Lothian struggled with a basic problem: how to convert a world order under the declining dominance of his own country into a more stable and inclusive world community. An account of his life and thought may be useful as a study in the difficulties of trying to understand and manage this kind of challenge. A grandson of the seventh Marquess of Lothian on his father's side and the fourteenth Duke of Norfolk on his mother's, Kerr (pronounced Carr) was born into two of the great titled families of Great Britain. After graduating from Oxford University in 1904, he joined a group of young men who helped Lord Milner reconstruct South Africa after the Boer War of 1899-1902. In the years from 1906 to 1909, Kerr and his friends helped unite the four white set­ tler colonies of South Africa into a domestically self-governing Dominion under the British Crown. Kerr and his friends believed that the next step was for South Africa and the other three Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to form a common electorate with Great Britain. In a more threatening world, Kerr believed, these countries had a future only if they combined to establish a superstate with the potential to be as powerful as the United States of America.

2

Lothian

Returning home, Kerr edited The Round Table, a journal of imperial and international affairs that he and his friends launched in 1909-10 with Milner's support. The aim of the journal was to strengthen in Britain and the Dominions a sense of common imperial identity to prepare the ground for a federal movement. The Round Table recruited a number of young profession­ als in the Dominions into study groups and challenged these groups to think about the imperial future. The Asian and African dependencies of Britain posed a special problem for a movement to federate the white empire, and Kerr failed to persuade his friends to give India some representation in their proposed federal government. But in 1912, he and his circle called for India's promotion otherwise to Dominion status, an unprecedented call at the time. Kerr also made contact with progressives in the United States who shared his group's belief that democracy could be renewed in a world of increasingly concentrated power. Round Table plans stalled, however, when a majority of Canadian and a minority of Australian study group members objected to the stark choice they were asked to make between merging with Britain or accepting an eventual breakup of the empire. Kerr's circle became preoccupied with United Kingdom affairs after 1912 as Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's government moved to enact a bill granting limited autonomy to Ireland. As the bill approached its last hurdle in the spring of 1914, Lord Milner organized a movement with some Round Table members that pledged to resist the Irish measure by force if it took effect without a referendum in the United Kingdom as a whole. Kerr was a bystander in this effort, having withdrawn from Round Table work temporarily for health reasons. The First World War suspended the Irish crisis, and Kerr and his friends accompanied Milner when the latter entered the Lloyd George War Cabinet at the end of 1916. Kerr joined the prime minister's secretariat and became Lloyd George's closest adviser on foreign and imperial affairs. In 1917, Kerr and his friends helped bring the Dominion prime ministers into an expanded Imperial War Cabinet, and they helped draft a reform in India under which Britain shared some power with representatives chosen by a small Indian electorate. The Dominion leaders affirmed their autonomy, however, and the India reform did not meet the call of Indian leaders for a wider measure of self-government. Kerr accompanied Lloyd George to the Paris peace conference of 1919, where he pressed for condemning Germany as the aggressor. Afterward, he urged Lloyd George to oppose Irish independence and cling to a position in other parts of the world that Britain lacked the power or the will to maintain. Exhausted and discouraged by the difficulties of man­ aging the postwar world. Kerr returned to private life in 1921. Before the war, Kerr had argued that the rivalry of Britain and Germany embodied a larger conflict between liberty and authority. By 1922, though, he concluded that national sovereignty itself was the cause of global tension.

Introduction

3

Lasting peace could only come with a democratic world government, and he called for the United States and Great Britain to keep order in the world until the advanced democratic nations were ready to form such a union. Kerr antic­ ipated the Anglo-American relationship that would anchor the liberal world after 1945. But he also went further in his belief that liberal civilization would need someday to resolve the tension between national interests and the inter­ ests of the world as a whole. As secretary to the Rhodes Trustees from 1925 to 1939, Kerr tried to make the Rhodes Scholars into an elite group of merit and service that would uphold liberal-democratic standards. He also tried privately in the 1920s to reform the British Empire in Africa, lessen international tensions, and recon­ cile capital and labor at home. In the latter three involvements, however, his instinct now was to compromise, and he failed to appreciate the extent to which the problems he addressed resisted mediation. Kerr became the eleventh Marquess of Lothian in 1930 (which changed his surname to Lothian). He had ceased to edit The Round Table in 1916, but the journal continued under the direction of its founders and Lord Lothian wrote for it as its principal spokesman on imperial and international affairs. He also wrote occasional commentary articles in two influential London newspapers, The Times and The Observer. In addition to journalism and his work for the Rhodes Trust, Lothian served as an under-secretary of state for India from 1931-32, chairing a committee that recommended giving Indians a wider franchise. He played a key role persuading moderates in Britain and India to support the 1935 India Act. Lothian tried unsuccessfully to mediate differences with the United States over British war debts in the early 1930s. To prevent a more serious rupture in Anglo-American relations, he and his circle blocked an effort by Neville Chamberlain and the Foreign Office to appease Japan in 1934. However, Lothian advocated concessions to Nazi Germany in the hope that they would bring peace. He visited Hitler in 1935 and 1937 and he supported appease­ ment until the autumn of 1938. As British ambassador to Washington from September 1939 until his death in December 1940, Lothian had the rare chance to make amends. He helped secure weapons and material aid for Britain, and his personal diplomacy helped awaken Americans to the Nazi danger. In 1960, Sir James Butler published an authorized biography of Lord Lothian. Since then, Lothian has appeared as a figure in accounts of particu­ lar periods or themes during the first half of the twentieth century. In a 1968 book, Walter Nimocks studied the imperial activism of Kerr and his friends up to 1914; John Kendle's 1975 study of the Round Table movement followed the interest of its founding members in imperial union from their coming together until their death or retirement in the 1940s. A recent biography has been published about the other leading Round Table member, Lionel Curtis. 1

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Lothian

There has been some scholarship on Lothian in recent years but not a fulllength study of his life and thought in English. The present study tries to till this need. The Round Table fellowship to which Lothian belonged was and still is a subject of mystery and controversy. Some have depicted the group as an illib­ eral influence before and during the First World War, while others have por­ trayed it as a dangerous influence behind the scenes of interwar British foreign policy. One historian has argued that the Round Table movement was the secret society that Cecil Rhodes had intended to found to unite the English-speaking nations. Several writers have contended that Lothian's abandonment of appeasement before the outbreak of World War II was insin­ cere and that he was part of a high-level conspiracy to make peace with Hitler in 1940. European federalists have cited Lothian's writings to argue that the goal of a federal Europe is an idea with important British roots." Although not of principal concern to the present study, these claims have long deserved attention and they are addressed in the main text or in the notes. Philip Lothian wanted the United States and the United Kingdom to anchor a world order in which the civilization of the advanced English-speaking nations could secure itself and spread. He struggled to relate these nations to the rest of Europe and to the needs of the larger non-European world. Although much has changed since his time, these are still the great challenges to American and British foreign policy today. 5

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1 PROVING GROUNDS

Philip Henry Kerr was born in London on April 18, 1882. His father, Lord Ralph Drury Kerr, was the third son of the seventh Marquess of Lothian. Lord Ralph joined the tenth Hussars in India in 1857, at age twenty, and rose to command the regiment in the Second Afghan War of 1879. He returned home to command cavalry forces in Great Britain and Ireland before retiring as a major general in 1898. Philip Kerr's mother, born Lady Anne FitzalanHoward, was a daughter of the fourteenth Duke of Norfolk. Lord Ralph and Lady Anne raised their oldest son Philip and their daughters Cecil, Margaret, and Minna on an estate in Ireland until 1889. In that year they moved to Woodburn, a Kerr family home near Edinburgh, Scotland, where a younger son, David, was born. 1

The Kerr family had been prominent in Scotland since medieval times. Kerr's paternal grandfather, the seventh Marquess of Lothian, owned a castle, an abbey, and a country house on the outskirts of Edinburgh. Kerr's oldest uncle, who became the eighth Marquess of Lothian in 1841 at age nine, inherited these and also a country mansion in Norfolk, England. The Marquessate of Lothian enjoyed an income from its estates amounting in 1883 to some £45,203 per year, with an additional £6,296 derived from mining. The Kerr family had a distinguished tradition of public service: Kerr's uncle Schömberg, who succeeded as ninth Marquess in 1870, was secretary of state for Scotland from 1887 to 1892. A younger uncle, Admiral of the Fleet Lord Walter Talbot Kerr, was senior lord of the Admiralty from 1899 to 1904. On his mother's side, the Fitzalan-Howard family held the premier dukedom in the English peerage. As hereditary earl marshals, the Dukes of Norfolk supervised the coronation of each monarch. 2

Kerr's paternal grandmother had converted to Roman Catholicism following the death of her husband, and she raised her sons in the faith.' The Fitzalan-Howards had been Catholic since the Middle Ages. Kerr attended

Lothian

6

the Oratory School near Birmingham, a boarding school founded by the Reverend John Henry Newman, a Catholic convert. The Oratory School fol­ lowed the example of the great English public (i.e., private boarding) schools in imbuing boys with a sense of belonging to their nation's leadership. Kerr learned the self-discipline, teamwork, and service to school and country that the public schools taught as a duty that went with privilege. Victorian public schools expressed much of this teaching in medieval imagery: boys were young knights who were to uphold the chivalric virtues and lead the nation by example." The title of The Round Table owed its inspiration to this teaching. Kerr excelled in his classwork; played soccer, football, and cricket for his school; and helped supervise younger boys as a prefect. In the autumn of 1900, Kerr entered New College, one of the oldest col­ leges (despite its name) of Oxford University. He lived and studied at Oxford with the sons of business and professional families as well as with sons of the country's traditional elite of landowners and clergy (women students were a recent addition and lived apart from the men). Kerr took a first class honors degree in modern history, which covered the political and economic develop­ ment of Europe since 1500. His tutors, the historians H. A. L. Fisher and R. S. Rait, challenged him to think in terms of basic questions with a broad historical sweep. Kerr's later political writings often began with a historical overview before addressing issues of current interest. His later failures of political judgment were in part failures to appreciate the local difficulties that stood in the way of larger answers, but his capacity to see larger answers in the first place owed much to his Oxford training." 4

Kerr's sense of the past also reflected the influence of historians, such as Sir William Stubbs, who argued that territorial insecurity had forced the nations of continental Europe to develop regimented societies. Stubbs saw the English tradition of representative government as the result of that country's Anglo-Saxon heritage and long isolation as an island. In his first Round Table article in 1910, Kerr argued in similar terms that Britain and the Dominions stood for a common heritage of liberty against an authoritarian Germany. * Oxford had the less welcome consequence of undermining Kerr's religious faith. Although Oxford had ended religious tests for nondivinity degrees and faculty appointments in 1870, the Roman Catholic bishops of England had banned Catholic attendance at the university, because its spirit of critical inquiry challenged the idea of a single intellectual authority. Social pressure from the English Catholic community, however, caused the bishops to lift the ban in 1896.'' At Oxford, Kerr encountered books and a spirit of teaching that made him question the claims of his faith.'" In a letter to Lord Ralph Kerr, Father John Norris, a teacher at the Oratory School, wrote of a visit with his former pupil, "No doubt he has difficulties but difficulties are not doubts and I don't think Philip has a shadow of doubt about his religion."" But in fact Kerr had begun a journey from Roman Catholicism that would lead him in 7

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Proving Grounds

7

1914 to embrace the new American denomination of Christian Science, which blamed misguided thinking rather than inherent sin for the failings of human nature. Many of the leading figures of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain attended the two oldest English universities, Oxford and Cambridge. The two institutions encouraged their graduates to see themselves in the image of the Guardian elite in Plato's Republic or the Roman imperial civil service in its earlier years. Kerr's tutor Fisher believed that public service was the ful­ fillment of scholarly study. Fisher also imparted a sensibility that the classi­ cist Gilbert Murray described in 1940 as a faith in "Great Britain among nations . . . the nineteenth century among the ages . . . a time when men were activated by hope rather than by fear, when we believed that men were as an ordinary rule influenced by reason, that justice was the great healer of social troubles and the natural aim of statesmanship. . . ."' As a young man, Kensaw political life as a natural vocation, and as he grew older Fisher's sensibil­ ity became stronger in him. 12

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Oxford Professor Thomas Hill Green had taught in the 1870s that a liberal democracy had a duty to improve the lives of its citizens as well as to preserve their freedom. Green had a particular influence on his student Arnold Toynbee, uncle of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee. The older Toynbee recruited some of his fellow students to do social work in the slums of London. Following his death in 1883, his friends built Toynbee Hall, a settlement house in east London where student volunteers could live and serve, mainly as teach­ ers. Churches and schools soon formed settlement houses of their own and the movement spread to other cities in Britain and North America. Although Kenwas not a settlement house volunteer, some of his Round Table friends served during their student years or after graduation from Oxford, and in later life Kerr associated himself with Toynbee Hall as an occasional lecturer. 15

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Kerr and his Round Table friends shared the settlement belief that British democracy stood in danger of losing important groups of people whose sense of belonging and participation were vital to restore. Settlement house volun­ teers tried to regenerate society at home by bringing up those on the bottom. Kerr and his friends would try in an analogous way to regenerate the British Empire by bringing countries under British rule up to a new level of partici­ pation. By 1909, the colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had formed countries within the empire that were autonomous in their domestic affairs. In the years from 1909 to 1914, Kerr and his friends tried through a new journal and a network of local discussion groups to teach these countries that they needed and deserved to belong to a common parliament with the United Kingdom. The Imperial Federation League provided an example of how not to cam­ paign for a common parliament. In an 1883 book, The Expansion of England, Professor John Seeley of Cambridge predicted that the future belonged to

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great powers of continental size. Unless they federated, Seeley warned, Britain and its settler colonies would lack the strength to defend themselves. * Prompted by Seeley's book, the Imperial Federation League organized in England in 1884. with branches in Canada and South Africa. A century after the American Revolution, however, the League found that Britain's remain­ ing settler colonies wanted taxation with representation no more than they wanted taxation without it. British leaders for their part were hardly eager to share control of United Kingdom affairs with colonials. The League broke up in 1893 when it could not agree to support a tariff to give agricultural prod­ ucts from the colonies preferred access to the British market in return for colonial preference to British industry. '' 1

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While loyal to the British Crown, the overseas colonies of British settle­ ment had begun to develop identities of their own and were not keen to sub­ merge them again in a recentralized empire. The Imperial Federation League did not help its cause, though, by launching a public campaign before decid­ ing its position on contentious issues such as trade. Experience uniting the colonies of South Africa in the years 1906 to 1909 encouraged Kerr and his friends to believe that by first reaching agreement among themselves, and then by privately recruiting sympathizers, they could avoid this mistake and wage a successful public campaign to federate the empire.

MILNER'S

KINDERGARTEN

Following the Boer War of 1899-1902, South Africa was a place where able and ambitious young men from Britain could make their mark in the tasks of postwar reconstruction. After his graduation from Oxford in 1904, Kerr went down to South Africa to take part. Sir Arthur Lawley, a former offi­ cer in Lord Ralph Kerr's Indian regiment and now lieutenant-governor of the Transvaal, agreed to employ Kerr as his secretary. " 2

Britain's proconsul in South Africa was Alfred Milner, Viscount Milner from 1902. Lord Milner became the patron and principal mentor of Kerr and a small group of other young men who soon became Kerr's friends. Milner personified the kind of imperial administrator that Oxford had begun to pro­ duce in the late-nineteenth century. Entering Oxford's Balliol College in 1873 on a scholarship, he won a number of academic prizes. He also joined Arnold Toynbee as a social volunteer in London, and a Canadian student, George Parkin, imbued him with an enthusiasm for imperial federation. Milner did not immediately enter imperial service after taking his degree in 1877. He studied law, worked as a journalist, and lost a bid for Parliament as a Liberal in 1885. More comfortable behind the scenes, he found employment as pri­ vate secretary to the first Viscount Goschen, who joined Joseph Chamberlain and other "Liberal Unionists" when these men aligned themselves with the Conservative party in 1886 in opposition to Irish Home Rule. ' 2

Proving Grounds

9

In 1889, Milner obtained a three-year appointment as an assistant to Sir Evelyn Baring, the British consul-general in Egypt, who had effectively ruled that country since the British occupation seven years earlier. Upon his return home in 1892, Milner published England in Egypt, a defense of British rule that made its author an overnight hero to proponents of empire. Milner depicted Egypt as a corrupt despotism that under British tutelage was becom­ ing an honest and efficient state. Imperial rule, he also argued, was best car­ ried out by expert British officials in the field without political interference from home." Milner's faith in rule by experts foreshadowed a later impa­ tience with democracy. But he returned home to work as a revenue official, and his administrative ability and dedication to empire commended him to Chamberlain, colonial secretary in the Conservative (now called Unionist) government elected in 1895. Chamberlain appointed Milner to be governor of the Cape Colony and high commissioner of South Africa in 1897. At the time, South Africa was divided into two coastal British colonies, the Cape Colony and Natal. Two independent republics higher inland, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, were ruled by Dutch-speaking white set­ tlers known as Afrikaners or Boers. During the 1870s and 1880s. Cecil Rhodes had made his fortune from diamonds mined in the Orange Free State, and following the 1886 discovery of gold in the Transvaal, British miners flooded in and formed a large and restive minority. Anglo-Boer tensions reached a breaking point in 1899 when Milner, with Chamberlain's backing, demanded voting rights for the British in the Transvaal. The two Boer republics declared war. After initial setbacks, Britain defeated the Boer armies and forced an end to guerrilla resistance in 1902. ' 2

The Cape Colony and Natal resumed self-government after direct wartime rule by Britain. Created Viscount Milner in 1902, he remained high commis­ sioner but resigned as governor of the Cape to move to the Transvaal mining center of Johannesburg. Here, as governor, he ruled autocratically what were renamed the Transvaal and Orange River colonies. To cement British rule, Lord Milner hoped to attract enough British settlers to outnumber the Afrikaners in the two colonies. This required reviving the Transvaal economy and the gold-mining industry on which it depended. The mining companies depended on native African labor, and at war's end the market price of gold fell, forcing the companies to cut wages nearly in half. Africans could not be induced to work for these wages, so to provide the needed workforce, Milner imported some 60,000 indentured laborers from China. 24

A group of younger men assisted Milner. J. F. "Peter" Perry took charge of Chinese labor recruitment, while Lionel Curtis served as assistant colonial secretary of the Transvaal. Richard Feetham, Lionel Hichens, John Dove, and a few years later, Dougal Malcolm joined in these and other tasks. All of these young men had attended New College, Oxford, during the 1890s. Geoffrey Dawson, who had gone to Magdalen College, Oxford, joined the group while

Lothian

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serving as Milner's secretary and then as editor of the Johannesburg Star from 1905 to 1910. George Craik, a New College friend of Dawson and Perry, also joined while serving as legal adviser to the private Transvaal Chamber of Mines. Another New College man, Robert Henry Brand, entered the group after finding work through the intercession of his father, the second Viscount Hampden. In 1904 Brand took charge of the Inter-Colonial Council, a body set up the year before to control the railways and police of the two inland colonies. The senior member of the fellowship was Patrick Duncan, a Balliol gradu­ ate and Milner's secretary in the mid-1890s, who rejoined his chief as treas­ urer and then lieutenant-governor of the Transvaal in 1906 in succession to Sir Arthur Lawley. Also close to Milner was Leopold (Leo) Amery, a Balliol graduate who had served as chief Boer War correspondent for The Times. Amery returned to England in 1900 but became the high commissioner's principal defender in the press back home. William Marris, a New Zealander and graduate of Christ Church College, Oxford, joined the group on his sec­ ondment from the Indian Civil Service to the Transvaal in 1907. At the invitation of Brand, Kerr left his position with Sir Arthur Lawley in early 1905 to work as Brand's deputy. In a letter home, Kerr described his new job with Brand as "a great comfort as it gives me an opportunity of knowing the right people, besides providing for my material necessities." He and the other young men were only a small part of the British administration in South Africa. But Kerr joined a closely knit circle. Nicknamed Milner's "Kindergarten" by local settlers, the group combined a youthful energy and a keen sense of mission along with some youthful arrogance. A British settler newspaper wrote disparagingly of Kerr's arrival: "The policy of running this country on Kindergarten lines and giving youngsters our public undertakings . . . has not yet been cast aside. After Mr. Brand we have Mr. Kerr. . . ." A visit­ ing German scholar, Moritz Bonn, observed with more sympathy: "They were very irritating when they sheltered themselves behind the nonchalant boredom that has so often been fashionable at Oxford. When one had pierced this shell, they were quite human." 25

26

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2S

29

Kerr and his friends developed a loyalty to Lord Milner that a British intel­ ligence officer, R. H. Bruce Lockhart, attributed to Milner's ascetic dedication and willingness to delegate responsibility: "His . . . lofty idealism, the com­ plete absence . . . of anything approaching self-conceit in his character, and his broad and vigorous patriotism made him an ideal inspirer of youth. With young men, too, he was at his best. He believed that they should be given their chance." Kerr lived with some of the other young men in a house next to Milner's in Johannesburg. When not at work, members of the group raced through the countryside on horseback and went on treks to hunt and explore. In 1906, Kerr, Brand, and several others moved into a new residence, called Moot 30

Proving Grounds

JJ

House for the evening "moots" that the group convened. In these gatherings, the young men began to debate the future of South Africa and the British Empire." Lord Milner returned home in April 1905 under a cloud. His efforts to Anglicize South Africa had united the Afrikaners against him, and several years of drought had discouraged the immigration of British colonists to farm the inland colonies. The strict conditions of employment for Chinese labor, which included the use of corporal punishment, embarrassed the Unionist government back home and contributed to the landslide Liberal victory in the British elections of January 1906. The new under-secretary of state for the colonies. Winston Churchill, secured legislation that gave self-government, although not independence, to the Transvaal and Orange River colonies. In elections open only to white voters, Boer leaders retook control of the two former republics in 1907 and restored their earlier names. 12

The Kindergarten found a new patron in Milner's successor as high com­ missioner, Lord Selborne. With Selborne's backing, the younger men began a peaceful campaign to keep South Africa in the British Empire. ' The Kindergarten believed that British immigration was still the key. But settlers would only come if the country was prosperous, and the Kindergarten real­ ized that the key to prosperity was a political union of the four colonies. Richard Feetham outlined the reasons for union in a paper read before his friends in October 1906. The Cape and Natal were in competition with each other for port and railway traffic, he observed, and the Transvaal's reliance on the Portuguese East African port at Delagoa Bay (now Maputo) threatened to reorient the critical gold-mining colony to a foreign state. Local interests would only grow stronger with time, and the need for the imperial govern­ ment to arbitrate intercolonial disputes risked making the imperial connection a matter of controversy. Disunion also carried a more basic threat to European settlement; to put down the Natal Zulu rebellion of 1906, forces had to be summoned from the other three colonies. 1

14

The Kindergarten also began to see South African unification as a possible trial run for something more ambitious: a federation of the British Empire. In 1906, Kerr and his friends read a biography of the American Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton written by Frederick Scott Oliver. A director of the Debenham and Freebody department store in London and a historian of the eighteenth century, Oliver gave a compelling account of how the Federalists had persuaded the newly independent American states to agree to a stronger central government in 1787-88. Local electorates lost power as a result, but the new general electorate of the country gained a strength that enabled the United States of America to become a vastly stronger nation. Oliver called on the young men of his own time to federate Britain and the Dominions in the same way. To Lord Milner. the Liberal decision to give self-government to the Afrikaners was "wholly deplorable." " But Milner secured funds from the 15

1

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12

Rhodes Trustees for Lionel Curtis to work on behalf of South African union." Starting in October 1906, Curtis visited each of the four colonies to explore settler opinion. His favorable reports were followed by drafts of a memoran­ dum that the group reworked to state the case for union. Kerr wrote home, "There is great secrecy about the whole thing. . . . Curtis is really writing a great dispatch. . . . When we have done mauling the thing it is to be submit­ ted to Lord Selborne for approval. Then it is to be broadcast to the startled gaze of South Africa." 38

39

The document was ready in January 1907. After circulating it to the gov­ ernments of the four colonies, Selborne published it under his own name in June as "A Review of the Present Mutual Relations of the British South African Colonies." The Selborne Memorandum noted the prospects outlined earlier by Feetham and added that competition for labor might give Africans and immigrant Asians new bargaining power unless the colonies united. The document played down the British connection by pointing out that a united South Africa would be more free of interference from London. Kerr wrote an appendix on the country's railways, arguing that only under one authority could they operate efficiently. " 4

In May 1908. Curtis again toured the country to organize "Closer Union" societies. In December, the Kindergarten published the first issue of The State, a monthly magazine edited by Kerr. Printed in English and Dutch, the magazine reported news of the Closer Union movement and featured stories, photography, and contests to promote a sense of common white South African citizenship. ' Sentiment in the four colonies began moving toward union, and in November 1908, the four colonial governments held a conven­ tion to negotiate terms. In February 1909, the delegates adopted a constitution drawn up by the former Boer General Jan Christiaan Smuts with the help of Robert Brand of the Kindergarten. In March 1909, the Kindergarten held a meeting of Closer Union societies in Johannesburg that endorsed the new constitution. The four colonies adopted the constitution in June and the British Parliament enacted it to take effect in May 1910. The resulting Union of South Africa became a self-governing Dominion of the British Empire. 4

42

Kerr and his friends believed that the new Union was largely their doing, the result of what Leo Amery called an "astonishing campaign of scientific propaganda and personal persuasion." The Union was also, Brand wrote, "a great step forward in the direction of imperial consolidation." British histori­ ans at the time tended to agree. Later scholars underlined the recognition by white settler leaders of the local advantages to be had from union: a section of British settlers wanted to be more free of imperial control, and Afrikaners such as Smuts realized that their people would dominate a white electorate in the country as a whole. The Union of South Africa was far less advantageous to the black Africans who constituted four-fifths of its population. African miners began to replace 43

44

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Proving Grounds

13

Chinese laborers after 1906, but whites had preference for the better jobs, and Africans were subject to pass laws and racial segregation in all areas of life. " Voting laws excluded non-whites in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, excluded almost all in Natal, and allowed only one in sixty Africans to vote in the Cape. Kerr and his friends accepted the notion of a "white man's bur­ den" to rule the peoples of Africa and Asia. Brand hoped that "the germs of a sound public opinion" on race relations, which he thought existed in the Cape, would spread. But the group was content to leave race relations to the distant future. 4

47

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49

Work and travel between 1906 and 1909, however, caused Kerr to doubt the idea that Europeans were naturally superior. In September 1906. he became secretary to a commission set up to investigate the condition of poor whites in the Transvaal. He wrote the commission's 1908 report, which blamed set­ tler poverty in part on the refusal of poor whites to enter the market for unskilled labor alongside blacks. White people would need to be more effi­ cient to be competitive, he concluded, because black people could not forever be kept out of skilled employment.* Kerr returned home in the summer of 1908 to explore his chances of run­ ning for a Unionist seat in the British House of Commons. The young man humbled himself before Alfred Lyttleton, who had served as colonial secre­ tary in the Unionist government from 1903 to 1906. In a letter to Lady Anne Kerr, Philip's maternal uncle Lord Edmund Talbot wrote, "I was very grate­ ful to Alfred for taking him in exactly the right way, being perfectly frank and snubbing him on occasion. . . . But Alfred was very pleased with him."" Kerr was then admitted to the presence of the Unionist party leader and former prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Kerr learned afterward from his uncle that Balfour "spoke of me as if he didn't think me a perfect fool, which is satis­ factory."" But his uncle advised Philip to return to South Africa for the time being. While he waited for a general election, Kerr made plans to visit the south­ ern United States to learn whether American race relations could serve as any guide to South Africa." During the autumn of 1909, on his way home from a trip to Canada, Kerr toured the American south. He visited the presidents of several black universities and colleges, including Howard University in Washington, D.C., the Hampton Institute in Virginia, Atlanta University in Georgia, and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he met its founder, Booker T. Washington. Kerr also met black doctors, journalists, business leaders, land agents, and clergy, and a range of white officials, business lead­ ers, professors, and planters. Kerr noted the opinion of one white planter in Mississippi who told him: "Almost all leading negroes have white blood. Negro labour essentially unreliable, shiftless. In the south every negro has to accept tacit status of inferiority or get into trouble or disappear. Prejudice worse in north." A white mining engineer, however, told Kerr that negro 54

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labor was "hard-working." Professor W. E. B. DuBois of Atlanta University told Kerr of racial prejudice: "It shows itself in every walk of life. . . . Very brutalising, mob rule, injustice. . . . It will only be stopped when educated whites set their faces against it and make sacrifices." Kerr published the findings of his American trip in the February 1910 issue of The State. Americans of African descent, he observed, were born into a white civilization, spoke English, and were no longer tribal. But American whites were "quick to suspect and quicker to strike, if for an instant the negro forgets his place." Kerr drew two conclusions: "The first is that the negro race . . . has within it the capacity to reach, and will reach, the same stage of development as the average white man. . . . I have discussed political, social, and philosophical questions with negro professors. I have met lawyers, doc­ tors, shopkeepers, owners of mills . . . and . . . could detect no difference in ability or outlook, honesty or method, from the average white man one would meet in such occupations." His second conclusion, though, was that "whenever white and black come into contact, whatever the stage of development of either race, race prejudice springs up and runs blindly athwart all the laws which reg­ ulate society, politics and economics in an ordinary white community." 57

58

Kerr assured his readers that he did not call for a change in the voting laws of South Africa. His visit may have helped confirm the belief, held by many in Britain, that an equal franchise in a multiracial society would only lead to abuses by a white population unwilling to yield control. '' Yet Kerr's article was striking in its public denial that people of African descent were naturally inferior. Unlike his report on Transvaal indigency, which focused narrowly on the labor market, in America he saw the larger inhumanity of a racially dis­ criminatory social order. His realization that racial prejudice could continue despite modern development should have warned him of the danger that lay in South Africa's own future. 5

For Kerr and his friends, the Union of South Africa was a deceptive tri­ umph. In their argument for it, the Kindergarten claimed that union would reduce British influence, which constitutionally it did, but their real purpose was to preserve the imperial connection. British immigration was an uncer­ tain prospect and the loyalty of the Afrikaners was hardly clear. More deeply, the new Union rested on the exclusion of an African majority that Kerr's own findings suggested was unnatural and untenable. The Kindergarten concluded from their campaign that they could direct people and events from behind the scenes. When Kerr and his friends tried to federate the British Empire as a whole after 1909, they would find its far-flung peoples a greater obstacle and their own influence more limited. Kerr, Curtis, and Brand returned home to Britain in 1909, and Dawson, Hichens, and Craik came back the following year. Perry married and moved to Canada, leaving the group. Brand began a career with the London merchant bank of Lazard Brothers, while Craik became a London barrister and then a

Proving Grounds

15

senior officer in the London Metropolitan Police. Dawson joined the staff of The Times, while Hichens took over the near-bankrupt steel and shipbuilding firm of Cammell Laird and turned it into a major contractor for the Royal Navy. The others settled in South Africa or took up imperial assignments elsewhere. Amery worked for The Times until 1909; Lord Milner then employed him until a by-election in 1911 brought him into the British House of Commons as a Unionist. Kerr did not stand for Parliament. Instead, he and Curtis became full-time agents of the Round Table movement, which they and their friends launched with Milner's support in the autumn of 1909. 60

2 THE ROUND TABLE CRUSADE, 1 9 0 9 - 1 9 1 4

Philip Kerr and his friends returned to a United Kingdom that faced mount­ ing pressures at home and abroad. Britain had lost its nineteenth-century industrial lead to the United States and Germany, and a growing German fleet challenged the Royal Navy. To relieve some of the pressure on its world posi­ tion, the United Kingdom concluded an alliance with Japan in 1902 and set­ tled differences with the United States over the Alaskan border in 1903. Britain also reached agreements with France in 1904 and with Russia in 1907. But the German naval bill of 1908 authorized an expanded battle fleet to which Britain had to respond with new warships of its own. The concentra­ tion of the Royal Navy in home waters worried Australia and New Zealand after Japan's naval victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. But the Dominions resisted closer ties to the United Kingdom. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand agreed to build their own navies after 1908, but the three Dominions refused to form a unified peacetime naval command with Great Britain. 1

2

At home, British leaders debated how to make the United Kingdom a more efficient competitor in a more threatening world. Pressed by Joseph Chamberlain and British industry, the Unionists campaigned for a protective tariff in the election of 1906. The Liberal party won largely by carrying the votes of working people who feared that a tariff would raise the price of imported grain. In the "People's Budget" of April 1909, the Liberals proposed to increase both naval and welfare spending by raising taxes on wealth. The Unionist majority in the House of Lords, in a dramatic break with its tradition of acceding to budgets passed by the House of Commons, threatened to veto the budget when it came to a vote in the Lords later that year. As a result, a constitutional crisis loomed over Britain in the summer of 1909.' Kerr and his friends rejoined Lord Milner as events drew the latter out of a brief retirement. Milner spoke out on behalf of conservative causes, such as

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military conscription and a protective tariff, and he joined other "diehard" peers in standing against the 1909 budget. But his paramount ambition before 1914 was to federate the self-governing parts of the British Empire, and to this task the younger men principally devoted themselves. 4

MILNER'S

RETURN

On coming home from South Africa in 1905, Lord Milner left the British civil service and supported himself as a private company director. In March 1906, though, he endured a Liberal vote of censure over the treatment of Chinese labor under his administration. Following Chamberlain's stroke in July, Milner was in a position to challenge Arthur Balfour for leadership of the Unionist party. Balfour was lukewarm in his support for a tariff, and protariff Members of Parliament (MPs) held a majority of the surviving Unionist seats in the House of Commons. But Milner declined/ Even before his censure, Lord Milner had grown to detest the working of British democracy. In a 1903 letter to Violet, Lady Edward Cecil, he wrote, "Perhaps a great Charlatan—political scallywag, buffoon, liar, stump orator, and in other respects popular favourite—may someday arise, who is neverthe­ less a statesman...." But Milner was not hopeful. He had risen in life by mer­ itocratic ability and he denounced the "inadequate regard for trained knowledge and complete information running through the whole people, not merely the groundlings, and finding its expression in the habit of mind and judgment of the upper class. . . ." Party politics were a "pure struggle of ins and outs" and worst of all there was "no separating of the local and Imperial, of the great and the small . . . in the same unwieldy Cabinet, which . . . cannot give continuous thought and study to the vital, being eternally dis­ tracted by the local and temporary. . . ." With the rise of new and powerful rivals, he declared in a speech of 1909, "the . . . United Kingdom alone will be hard put . . . to retain its place among the foremost nations of the world." But the same was not true of the Empire. "The British Empire as a whole has still the greatest future of any power on earth. But the condition of that great­ ness is . . . the effective combination of its several component states for pur­ poses of mutual defence." 6

7

8

In an obituary written in 1925, Kerr observed, "Lord Milner believed in the Pax Britannica as earlier ages had longed for the Pax Romana . . . he saw in the preservation and development of its administrative ideals the principal hope for the progress of mankind." However, Kerr noted, "The unsolved problem of Lord Milner's life was how to reconcile this great tradition with democracy. . . . He had none of that . . . passionate conviction that it is better for men to govern themselves badly and to learn from their mistakes than to be administered with supreme wisdom by somebody e l s e . . . . " " In fact, Milner was not opposed to democracy. The imperial federation he sought was a

The Round Table Crusade,

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1909-1914

government directly accountable to an imperial electorate. The difficulty and the irony in his life was his desire to circumvent the democratic process to establish a new and wider democratic constitution. As German naval spending rose after 1908 and as British politics grew more fractious, Milner resolved to launch a new campaign for imperial union. Unlike the Imperial Federation League, the new movement would try to succeed by working out of public view. On a speaking tour of Canada in the autumn of 1908, Milner declared that union with Britain was no more than a distant possibility. But at the same time, he approved the formation by a Toronto friend, Arthur Glazebrook, of a small group of Canadians secretly to work for this very goal: "I think every member of your body should feel it his principal business to influence as many people as possible who are not of it and who do not know they are being influenced."" The Toronto group did not get much done. The following year, Milner helped the returning members of his Kindergarten launch a more energetic effort in all of the British Dominions to persuade educated opinion of the need for closer union. 10

THE Q U E S T F O R IMPERIAL

FEDERATION

Over the summer of 1909, Lionel Curtis wrote a short memorandum out­ lining a new campaign to federate the empire. To start, an itinerant delegate would recruit small groups of carefully chosen men in each Dominion. With the help of a central group in London, each group would publish a magazine along the lines of The State in South Africa. The Dominion groups would also debate a statement of the imperial problem drafted by the central group. When all of the groups had agreed on some form of federation as the solution, the British and Dominion branches would launch a political movement in public. Although the movement would be open to trustworthy inquirers, Curtis urged that "until the groups are all agreed, all reference, whether in the Press or on platforms, to its existence would be premature." He also advised against taking sides in party controversies, particularly over tariffs, so as not to antagonize those on opposing sides who might support the higher goal of constitutional union. 12

At the invitation of the sixth Marquess of Anglesey, the Kindergarten mem­ bers in England and some other patrons met with Lord Milner on the Anglesey estate at Pias Newydd, Wales, over the weekend of September 4 - 6 , 1909. The meeting adopted the Curtis plan and agreed to establish an office in London with Kerr as its secretary. Curtis would be the itinerant delegate and his and Kerr's salaries would be met with funds obtained by Milner. The Moot, as the central group began calling itself, dispatched Curtis, Kerr, and William Marris to Canada to explore sentiment for closer imperial union in Britain's largest Dominion. 11

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The three knights of empire proceeded to British Columbia, where they confided the Curtis memorandum to William Oliver, a lawyer and brother of Frederick Scott Oliver, who wrote to his brother in London, We all liked the three Imperialists but I wish they weren't quite so nebulous. . . . I was with them all the time they were here and was finally shown in a mysterious and secret fashion a document which I expected to be at least written in letters of blood. . . . It was one of the most innocent documents I ever saw in my life. . . . If you are ever going to do anything about Imperial Federation there should be no delay. Every year makes it so much more difficult.' 5

As they made their way back across Canada, interviews with Canadians in business and professional life disclosed reservations about closer ties to Britain. One banker observed, "People are afraid of the influence of England on any representatives they may send there." Even Glazebrook's group in Toronto was guarded in its enthusiasm. Kerr began to doubt the possibility of Anglo-Dominion federation, writing to Robert Brand that "a central sover­ eign authority . . . would be almost certain to break up the Empire."'* 16

17

On his return home, though, Kerr saw grounds for hope in Canada. In a memorandum of his visit, he wrote, "Most of the factors tell both ways. Quebec is at present a hindrance to progressive Imperialism, and it is also a safeguard against Americanization. So too is Canadian nationalism. The politicians are ready to follow a lead from the country, but their extreme readiness to do so, under the circumstances, prevents a lead being given.'" Efforts to influence public opinion might change these conditions, thought Kerr. At two meetings in January, Milner and his disciples decided to go ahead with their plans.

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During the spring of 1910, Curtis returned to South Africa, where he drafted a preliminary statement of the imperial problem, called the "Green Memorandum" from the color of its binding. The British Empire represented the progress of democracy and freedom, Curtis wrote, while the German Empire stood for the persistence of an overbearing state. London could no longer carry the burden of defending the empire alone, and the four Dominions of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand needed to unite with Britain to share the burden of defense. The alternative for each country was a solitary independence that would risk defeat by stronger pow­ ers one by one. Curtis proposed a directly elected imperial parliament, with an upper house to represent equally the five countries and a lower house to represent their populations. A cabinet responsible to this parliament would take charge of foreign relations, defense, and the dependent empire and would tax directly to support these activities. All other powers of government would remain in the hands of each country. 22

The Round Table Crusade,

1909-1914

21

Armed with the memorandum, to which Lord Milner and the London Moot assented, Curtis left South Africa in June. With letters of introduction from home, he spent the next year traveling to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, where he formed groups to study the memorandum and exchange ideas. To these groups he recruited some of the leading younger men in the business and professional life of each Dominion. The Kindergarten members in South Africa formed a group there. The Green Memorandum was a statement of the imperial problem, Curtis maintained to the Dominion groups, but its argument and conclusions were open to debate. "My line in dealing with people," he wrote to Kerr, "is, and must be, that we have as yet evolved no solution." In the meantime, Kerr began the work of the central office in London. Lord Milner and the Moot decided for reasons of cost to publish a single journal from Britain rather than magazines in each Dominion. Under Kerr's editor­ ship, the first issue of The Round Table came out in November 1910, subtitled "A Quarterly Review of the Politics of the British Empire." The Dominion groups each contributed a chronicle article reporting the current affairs of their country over the past quarter. The British Moot contributed a chronicle article for the United Kingdom and wrote or commissioned general articles on foreign and imperial affairs. The journal aimed for a more limited and more educated readership than The State. * Kerr wrote a series of articles on foreign affairs in the first three issues of The Round Table that reinforced the message of the Green Memorandum. Kerr's first article, "Anglo-German Rivalry," appeared in November 1910 and outlined the historical outlook that he shared with his friends: 21

2

Modern civilization is a compound of ideas contributed by a number of peo­ ples. To the Jews it owes the idealism of its religious beliefs, to the Greeks the conception of liberty, to the Romans the sanctity of law, to the Teutonic peoples its respect for personal r i g h t s . . . . It is within the British Empire that the spirit of individualism has grown to its full maturity. For of all the Teutonic peoples the Anglo-Saxons alone have been free from the cramping necessity of subordinating their development to the exigencies of war. The peoples of the continent were not so fortunate as the AngloSaxons. . . . The struggle for personal rights has been impeded [there] by the constant necessity of submitting to a rigid and uniform discipline. . . . The continental spirit finds its most characteristic embodiment in Germany. The Germans give free play to individualism in many respects. . . . But their history has taught them the bitter lesson that the cit­ izen can only be free when the State . . . is strong enough to guarantee his freedom. Individualism . . . stops at the entry to the political field. Kerr warned that "Germanism . . . if it is allowed to become all powerful . . . will destroy [England's] freedom, and with it the foundation on which the Empire rests." He underlined the same point in another article in May 1911. 25

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In two articles on Japan, published in February and May 1911, Kerr argued for closer imperial union from a Pacific standpoint. The Anglo-Japanese alliance provided a degree of security but only for the time being. It was "impossible to regard the Japanese as uncivilised" and "pure prejudice" to treat them as inferiors. However, Kerr observed, "It is not that the Oriental is inferior . . . but that he is different." Japan was small and overcrowded. The densely inhabited mainland of Asia was not suitable to Japanese colonization, but the three Dominions facing the Pacific Ocean were open and inviting. If the Anglo-Japanese alliance broke down, and if Germany and Japan ever joined forces, "the opportunities of squeezing England and despoiling the Dominions [would] be multiplied a hundredfold." Only by standing more closely together with Great Britain could the Dominions avert this danger. Kerr did not believe that war with Germany was inevitable. In October 1911, he traveled to Munich, where he visited Professor Moritz Bonn, the German scholar who had met the Kindergarten in South Africa. On his return, Kerr wrote an article for the December 1911 Round Table that asked how Germany could grow and prosper without coming into conflict with its neighbors. The Germans could not expand their territory in Europe, he wrote, and "Germany knows that the creation of a Colonial Empire like that of England is an unrealizable dream." Only by manufacturing for export could Germany employ its growing population. "The fundamental need of Germany, therefore, is not territorial expansion, but markets." Kerr saw the needed markets for Germany in Asia and Africa, whose people he believed would take many generations before they could produce manufactured goods for themselves. German trade with India and other British dependencies was not a threat to British power. "Provided the Empire is able to preserve its territories intact and keep that preponderance at sea which is vital to its existence," he wrote, "it has no more reason to impede the growth of German trade and commerce than that of America." Between Germany and Britain there was "no conflict of vital national interests." ' Kerr did not see trade as a panacea for conflict. In the March 1912 Round Table, he saw the growing violence in the Balkans in the deeper terms of com­ peting values and identities: "The ruling motives—the motives which drive men to action—always have been, and always will be, those connected with their emotions, their passions, and their ideals." Wars would continue until nations became convinced that the "worship of their own separate identity, and their objections to its being merged in a larger union with other nations, is absurd and unworthy of a civilized people." Kerr did not suggest how this transformation might occur, but he saw in a federated British Empire the pos­ sible nucleus of a democratic world state. Kerr's March 1912 Round Table article completed a view of international relations that emerges from an examination of his prewar writings. He urged the Dominions to form a closer union with Britain, partly to defend against 27

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1909-1914

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Japan but primarily to meet the German challenge. This challenge was politi­ cal: Britain stood for liberty and democratic government, while Germany stood for the power of an authoritarian state. But the two nations could still coexist by directing their energies into trade, and Kerr hoped that in forming a closer union of its self-governing parts the British Empire could become the model for a world state. By defining Britain's imperial purpose in such terms, though, Kerr and his friends created a dilemma. An empire that stood for democratic principle could not morally deny political rights to those in its dependencies who were not self-governing.

EAST A N D

WEST

After launching The Round Table and recruiting Dominion groups, the Moot turned to the question of how imperial federation would affect India, the greatest dependency of the British Empire. In November 1911, Philip Kerr embarked on a six-month tour of Egypt, India, China, and Japan. After meet­ ing briefly with British officials in Cairo, he proceeded to India, where he stayed with William Marris, who was now collector (district administrator) of Aligarh." As a member of the Indian Civil Service, Marris belonged to the elite corps of British officials who ruled India's 350 million people. With Marris's help, Kerr wrote a memorandum in which he considered the position of India under an Anglo-Dominion federation. The Dominions, Kerr observed, were likely to oppose representing India in an imperial parliament because Indian immigration to their countries might then be impossible to bar. But if a federation omitted India to bring in the Dominions, he warned, in India "our actions will certainly be attributed to race prejudice." In the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, Britain had increased the representation of Indians on advisory councils that were chosen in part by a small Indian electorate of property and education. British policy, Kenbelieved, was thus pledged "to associate Indians with the government which controls Indian affairs, and it is largely on account of. . . the Reforms of 1909 that leading Indians are helping instead of obstructing the Government of India today." To exclude India from an imperial federation might provoke India to seek independence instead of "gradual progress to the status of a loyal but self-governing dominion within the Empire." Kerr proposed giving India two seats in the lower house of an imperial federal parliament, one for a Hindu and one for a Muslim. The two could be filled from the appointed advisory council to the viceroy. Kerr conceded that Asian representation was "certainly the thin end of a wedge, the ultimate results of which it is impos­ sible to foresee." But, he added, "the degree to which it is inserted will rest with the self-governing Empire and not with India."' 4

Kerr circulated his memorandum to several British officials in India and to the Round Table Moot back home. The officials and Marris approved.' Back 5

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home, however, the Moot divided. Robert Brand, Dougal Malcolm, and George Craik wanted to restrict imperial federation to the white Dominions, while Lionel Curtis urged delay by arguing that only fully self-governing peo­ ples should belong. " The Moot took no position on India's inclusion in an imperial parliament. Kerr and his friends agreed, however, that India should otherwise achieve Dominion status. "The ideal goal is clear," wrote Kerr in the September 1912 Round Table. "It is that someday or other India should acquire the status of a self-governing Dominion, independent in the control of her own internal affairs, a loyal and willing partner with the other parts of the Empire in their common concerns." The Round Table circle did not expect this outcome anytime soon, and they would later back proposals for Indian self-government that proved too little and too late to satisfy Indian national­ ism. But the journal's call for the goal of Dominion status was unprecedented in Britain at the time. 1

17

Kerr left India in March 1912. After short visits to China and Japan, he pro­ ceeded across the Pacific to North America, where he spent most of the sum­ mer in Canada speaking before local Round Table groups and Canadian Clubs. " In August, Kerr made a return trip to the United States. Three years earlier, in May 1909, Kerr had forwarded to Arthur Balfour a memorandum written by the recent British naval attaché in Berlin. Kerr had asked Balfour to give it to former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, who had left office in March to begin a ten-month hunting trip in Africa followed by a visit to the major capitals of Europe. The memorandum predicted that the world would coalesce into great federations. In his cover letter, Kerr had urged Balfour to propose an Anglo-American partnership during the president's visit to reduce the possibility of a German-American alliance." 1

There is no evidence that the former president ever read the memorandum. Kerr made a second approach to Roosevelt in 1912. From August 5-7, Kerr attended the convention in Chicago of the Progressive party, which nominated Theodore Roosevelt for president against the incumbent Republican William Howard Taft and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. " Following the convention, Kerr had lunch with the former president at the latter's Oyster Bay estate on Long Island, New York. ' But the meeting seems to have been inconclusive and Roosevelt went down to defeat that autumn in a three-way race that gave Wilson a winning plurality. 4

4

During his 1912 visit to the United States, Kerr also met some younger Americans through Lord Eustace Percy, a British diplomat in Washington. Percy belonged to a dinner circle that met at 1727 Nineteenth Street, a house that the American Robert Grosvenor Valentine shared with several other men. Valentine had taught at the Henry Street settlement house in New York after graduating from Harvard in 1896. After working for a bank and teaching English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he had joined the U.S. Indian Service and became its commissioner in 1909. The other young men

The Round Table Crusade,

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who shared his house included Assistant Attorney-General Winfred Denison, Interior Department aide and future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Solicitor-General Loring Christie, a naturalized Canadian. In their wider circle, Valentine and his friends included Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book, The Promise of American Life, inspired the "New Nationalism" for which Roosevelt campaigned in 1912. Croly introduced a young journalist. Walter Lippmann, who helped found The New Republic magazine with Croly in 1914. Arthur Willen, Washington conespondent for The Times of London, also attended the group's dinners. The circle's fatherfigure. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, presided over Monday evenings and nicknamed the address "The House of Truth." The Round Table Moot called their memoranda on imperial affairs "eggs," and in words that Lord Milner could have used toward his own disciples, Holmes admonished Croly and Lippmann: "You young men seem to think that if you sit on the world long enough you will hatch something out." In the years before the First World War, the House of Truth and the Round Table Moot acquired reputations for political intrigue. Valentine clashed with the more conservative President Taft, and in September 1912, Valentine resigned as Indian Affairs commissioner and endorsed Roosevelt for presi­ dent. Both fellowships believed that democracy could be renewed in a world of increasingly concentrated power. It is not clear what the House of Truth thought of international relations before 1914. During the First World War, The New Republic supported the Allies and called for an Anglo-American partnership. Christie returned to Canada in 1913 to serve as secretary to Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden, and in 1917 K e n became a secretary to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Kerr would help Lloyd George articulate British war aims and Lippmann would give similar help to President Wilson. The Progressive party fell apart after 1914 and the House of Truth' broke up after the war. But Lippmann and Frankfurter remained Kerr's friends, although not uncritical ones. 42

43

44

45

46

K e n ' s travels to Asia and North America enlarged the Round Table move­ ment's field of action and helped commit its founders to the goal of Dominion status for India. Although partnership with the United States was not an orig­ inal Round Table aim, Kerr made contact with American progressives who later supported close U.S. ties to Britain. By the time of Kerr's return home in September 1912, however, the Round Table movement had stalled. Tensions had emerged between the British founders and their Dominion col­ leagues over the core question of Anglo-Dominion relations.

T H E R O U N D TABLE A N D

ITS C R I T I C S

Kerr and his friends had intended to reach agreement with the Dominion Round Table groups before launching a public movement to federate the

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empire. But responses to the Green Memorandum were not encouraging. Dominion members pointed out the slanted history with which Curtis had argued his case. More important, the Dominions were divided over the solu­ tion that Curtis proposed. All of the groups agreed that their countries needed to take more responsibility for their defense and foreign relations, and a majority of Round Table members in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand endorsed federation. But a significant number in the Australian groups dissented and most of the Canadians objected to such a drastic choice as union or independence. The Canadians recognized federal union as one possibility, but they urged it gradually to emerge from the existing institution of the Imperial Conference. This gathering, held every five years or so, had brought the elected leaders of Britain and the self-governing colonies together for consultation. "The present machinery . . . does work . . . and should be treated with sympathy and patience," wrote the Canadians. "It is something to be improved, not bundled out." After circulating the Green Memorandum, Curtis began writing a final and more detailed statement of the imperial problem. Nicknamed "the major egg," the Moot hoped that this document would convince all of the Dominion groups of the need to federate. Early drafts of the "egg" soon troubled other members of the British group, however, by their claim that history culminated in the British Empire. Writing in early 1912, Kerr tried to restrain his friend Curtis from overloading the introduction: "It would be very pleasant if the 'egg' could revise the current views about world history . . . as well as demon­ strate the necessity for the union of the Empire," but "I don't believe it is pos­ sible to condense the history of the world . . . effectively into 50 pages, and you can't have more." ' Brand wrote to Kerr that summer, "I am rather doubt­ ful a b o u t . . . these generalizations leading up to a proof of our moral superi­ ority." A year later, Brand wrote to Kerr, "No doubt by now you know that we are not very much farther on with the egg." ' 47

48

4 1

50

5

As disagreements surfaced within the Round Table movement, its aims and methods attracted criticism from some of the few outsiders who knew of its existence. The Round Table had pledged in its first issue to be "entirely free from the bias of local political issues." To fulfill this pledge, the journal did not take a position on the question of tariffs. This neutrality antagonized Unionists for whom an imperial trading bloc was as important as a combined imperial defense. Kerr had side-stepped the issue of Anglo-Dominion prefer­ ence in his December 1911 Round Table article, which defended only the "open door" for trade that already existed in the dependent empire. But the antiprotectionist thrust of Kerr's article was clear to Richard Jebb, a Round Table subscriber who criticized the article in the January 1912 issue of the journal United Empire." In a private reply, Kerr argued. "I confess to no opin­ ion as to whether Preference is or is not a good thing . . . I merely say that it is not a vital element in the problem of Anglo-German rivalry." Jebb wrote 52

51

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56

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back: "To suggest that some understanding with Germany might be reached on the basis of a British 'open door,' while refraining from discussing how that might affect the future development of the Preference policy, must inevitably convey the impression that Preference is . . . a matter of secondary importance." Jebb soon took issue with the larger Round Table goal of imperial federa­ tion. In 1905, Jebb had written a book, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, in which he foresaw the Dominions' evolution into nations in their own right. In a 1913 book, The Britannic Alliance, he called for a military and tariff alliance of Britain and the Dominions as independent nations. The Round Table aim of constitutional union, he argued, neglected economic questions and went far beyond the ties that would be sufficient for a common defense. Leo Amery, now a Unionist MP, favored imperial federation. But he also advocated a tariff and he faulted the Round Table movement for its aloofness on the issue. "Some good was no doubt done by encouraging serious think­ ing about Empire problems," wrote Amery in his memoirs. "But the whole tendency of the movement was to side-track or even deprecate, as tainted with party controversy, the practical steps by which the maximum of effective co-operation could be brought about." " 57

58

5

The Round Table attracted Liberal readers, including Winston Churchill, now the home secretary, who welcomed the journal in 1910."" But Kerr's effort to edit the journal in an unbiased manner could not entirely suppress the Unionist sympathies of its founders. The Round Table's United Kingdom chronicle article of February 1911 observed, for example, that "The House of Lords . . . was a fatal obstacle to the millennium according to Liberal gospel." In contrast, the article continued, "The Unionists . . . were profoundly con­ vinced of the value of institutions and traditions which are the legacy of the ripe wisdom . . . of earlier ages." 61

Articles appearing in The Round Table were unsigned and its founders assumed that the journal would have an exclusive audience. The British and Dominion groups each recruited only a few hundred subscribers, in keeping with the journal's policy that "no effort will be made to obtain a circulation by the ordinary methods of a d v e r t i s e m e n t . . . for it will be of little interest to any but such as think seriously upon Imperial problems, and they will bring it to the notice of their friends." ' Kerr and Curtis disagreed over how far to extend the readership, but they differed only over the best way to reach elite opinion. The Moot sided with Curtis, who wanted only a few hundred read­ ers in each country rather than the few thousand that Kerr thought necessary. 62

6

64

Some Dominion readers sensed that the Round Table movement's call for open-ended inquiry masked a preconceived purpose. A Canadian Liberal sub­ scriber, Rodolphe Lemieux, wrote in 1913 of the journal: "I find that almost all of the contributions on Canada are tainted with an ardent toryism. . . . There is an inner circle in that organization—I know it, / feel it."" John

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Dafoe, editor of The Winnipeg Free Press, wrote privately to a Canadian Round Table member a few years later: "I have no doubt that the Canadian Round Table circles are . . . an organization for inquiry; but I have never regarded the members of the movement in London as other than protagonists of a somewhat clearly denned idea. I have considered their assumption of the open mind as, to put it frankly, lacking in candour." Dafoe added, "I have regarded the Canadian members of the Round Table as persons who were being shepherded along a definite path to a predetermined end." The Canadians did not allow themselves to be shepherded. 66

There was, however, a deeper flaw in the Round Table conception. A United Kingdom commentator to the Green Memorandum pointed this out: "The fundamental difficulty is that Canada is entirely safe. America will never try to conquer it and will never allow any other country to conquer it." Australia and New Zealand, on the other hand, needed a defense that Britain was increasingly unable to guarantee. The two Pacific Dominions demanded naval forces that British admirals wanted to concentrate in home waters against Germany. " The Round Table assumed that the defense needs of Britain and the Dominions coincided. In fact, each part of the proposed fed­ eration placed the needs of its own local defense first, and if all could not be defended equally, an imperial federation would have broken down. 67

6

Kerr had sensed the impracticability of federation during his 1909 visit to Canada, and the May 1911 Imperial Conference in London underlined it in a more public way. Prime Minister Sir Joseph Ward of New Zealand had read the Green Memorandum before arriving. During the conference, Ward called for imperial federation, to the embarrassment of the Round Table Moot, whose members thought the moment too soon. Prime Ministers Herbert Asquith of Great Britain, Sir Wilfred Laurier of Canada, and General Louis Botha of South Africa brusquely voted down the idea."" Kerr and his friends persevered nevertheless in their goal of a federal empire. The Moot's South African experience and their patronage back home encouraged them to believe that a well-placed pressure group could orches­ trate events. Kerr and his friends were welcome in some of the great town and country houses of Britain and had access to influential figures at home and abroad. The group also gained ties to two of the leading newspapers in the country. The first was through Waldorf Astor, heir to part of the American Astor fortune through his father. The senior Astor had emigrated to Europe in the 1880s and in 1911 bought The Observer, whose editor, James Garvin, was an admirer of Lord Milner. The Round Table Moot drew the younger Astor, a Unionist MP, into their circle. Waldorf and his American wife Nancy soon began having the young men to Cliveden, the Astor country house, for week­ end moots and tennis parties, and she formed an especially close friendship with Philip Kerr. " The Round Table circle acquired an even more important connection to Britain's most prestigious newspaper, The Times of London. 7

The Round Table Crusade,

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Amery served as its imperial editor until 1909, when Edward Grigg took his place and promptly accepted an invitation to join the Moot. Geoffrey Dawson became editor of The Times in July 1912. With such means to influence opinion, the entire Moot could hardly avoid seeing the world as theirs to conquer. But the Round Table circle also had a serious reason to pursue their great aim. No one before 1914 had the benefit of knowing that Britain would sur­ vive two world wars with its freedom and independence intact. To augment British power by enlarging its taxable base was not an unreasonable goal before 1914, however unrealistic it later proved. The true problem of the Round Table goal was that an imperial federation would not have had the power necessary to meet the challenges it faced. The Dominions added only about one-quarter to the population and economy of the United Kingdom (today, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand together would equal the United Kingdom). Only an English-speaking bloc that included the United States of America would have been strong enough to hold its own. But before 1914, the United States was even more isolationist than the Dominions. 71

For Kerr, the enthusiasm of his circle carried him along and revived him in moments of doubt. Reluctance to take leave of his friends also kept Kerr working despite a deterioration in his health. Over the summer of 1910, he began to show signs of nervous exhaustion, losing weight and becoming rest­ less in his behavior. At the end of 1911, he had a nervous collapse. "Here I am," he wrote Brand from Egypt, "in a state of complete mental coma. I f e e l . . . fit, except that to read a book or talk to people, and still more to acquire infor­ mation is an intolerable effort." ' Kerr's fatigue persisted through 1912 and he finally consulted a neurologist in New York, who diagnosed "chronic overtension." The doctor prescribed "six months of overfeeding, comparative rest, mild exercise, and if possible baths." 72

7

74

Many of the Round Table fellowship had fallen to similar bouts of fatigue: Robert Brand went to a German sanatorium in 1909 and John Dove followed a year later. On his return home in September 1912, Kerr went to Brand's sanatorium, the Neues Kurhaus in Bad Kissingen. Kerr hated the regimen with its diet of boiied potatoes. When he came home in November uncured, his parents consulted Sir Bertrand Dawson, physician to the Royal Family, who simply ordered six months rest. The Moot relieved Kerr of his editorial duties in January 1913 and appointed Grigg and Craik as acting coeditors of The Round Table in June. Recent scholarship on late Victorian and Edwardian psychiatry has brought out the extent to which men of the time were prone to the nervous conditions more commonly diagnosed among upper- and middleclass women. Without his medical records, however, it is not possible to determine more precisely the nature of Kerr's condition. 75

76

77

Over the winter of early 1913, Kerr accompanied Waldorf and Nancy Astor on a vacation to Switzerland and France. * After his return from the continent 7

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in March, Kerr went home to Scotland to fish and ride his motorcycle. In June, Sir Bertrand Dawson extended his rest for another year, and Kerr spent the winter of 1913-14 with Marris in India. " In April 1914, a month after returning home, Kerr suffered from acute appendicitis while visiting the Astors, who quickly found a doctor and saved his life. " Kerr felt well enough by June to resume his editorial duties in London, but he suffered from bouts of fatigue thereafter. He appears to have taken no active part in the contro­ versy over Ireland that engulfed Milner and his followers in the last year of European peace. 7

8

IRELAND: T H R O U G H THE L O O K I N G

GLASS

Ireland became the pivot of British politics after the House of Lords rejected the "People's Budget" in November 1909. An election in January 1910 returned the Liberals to power with a reduced majority that depended on Irish Nationalists, who demanded a measure of Catholic majority rule for Ireland as the price of their support. Asquith's Liberal government introduced a law to strip the House of Lords of its absolute veto over the Commons. Following another election in December 1910, the Liberals returned to power and passed the Parliament Act of 1911 with the support of the King, who threatened to create sufficient peers to carry the act in the upper house. Money bills now became law without the assent of the Lords, who could veto other bills only twice. On a third vote of the Commons, if two years had elapsed since its introduction, a bill became law. The Asquith government introduced an Irish Home Rule bill in April 1912. The bill gave Ireland substantially less autonomy than a Dominion but conceded some authority to the Catholic majority over the island as a whole, including the six counties of Ulster in the northeast where most of Ireland's Protestants lived. 81

The Round Table circle saw the constitutional debate over the Lords in 1910-11 as an opportunity to propose fundamental reform of the British gov­ ernment. With the Moot's backing, Frederick Scott Oliver called in The Times and in private letters for the devolution of domestic responsibilities to regional parliaments for England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. To establish four legislatures on an equal basis under a national parliament in London, he argued, would avoid creating a separate and inferior parliament for Ireland alone. Devolution would also enable the national parliament of the United Kingdom to devote more attention to foreign and imperial affairs and could set an example to the rest of the empire of how an imperial federal parliament might work. The Round Table echoed these arguments. 82

Kerr tried to restrain the Moot's enthusiasm for United Kingdom devolu­ tion. In a 1910 letter to Curtis, he asked, "Is Ireland to be a Canada or a Quebec?" Was Ireland to have the autonomy of a Dominion or the more lim­ ited government of a Canadian province? The Moot favored only the latter,

The Round Table Crusade,

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but even in this aim Kerr urged caution. No doubt with his own family in mind, Kerr observed that Scottish landowners would fear an assembly in Scotland, whose voters backed the more radical of the Liberals. He also thought English Liberals stood little to gain, because devolution would deprive them of the Irish and Scottish votes they needed to govern. Federation of the United Kingdom was not, in Kerr's view, a necessary step to federation of the empire. He urged his friends not to commit themselves as a group to devolution, although he added that individual members could promote the idea if they wished." 1

Kerr's leave of absence at the end of 1912 removed him from Round Table activism, although it seems likely that he shared the opposition of Lord Milner and the rest of the Moot to Irish autonomy." Like most British Unionists, Lord Milner and his followers believed that Irish Home Rule would be the beginning of the end of the British Empire, and they came to believe that to separate Irish Protestants against their will was to attack British democracy itself. In 1909, Milner and his younger men had set out on a quest to federate the British Empire in order to make it as strong as the United States of America. Events now pulled these men into preparations, not for a constitutional convention like that in America of 1787, but for an armed upris­ ing more along the lines of 1776. Although Kerr did not participate, the unfolding crisis brought to a head the movement that he had helped to organ­ ize and direct. 4

85

The Irish Home Rule bill caused the Moot to retrench its support for devo­ lution. In a June 1912 article on Ireland, The Round Table tried to distinguish between a reform that preserved the supremacy of the British Parliament and a measure that irrevocably surrendered it. The Round Table saw the Irish bill, despite its limited nature, as an irreversible step toward separation. Passing lightly over eight bitter centuries, the journal asserted that a sense of commu­ nity existed between Ireland and Great Britain: "The British people, as a whole, feel that the distinctions of race . . . are less important than the under­ lying identity.""" But the Moot concluded more perceptively: "What is certain is that . . . Home Rule . . . can never be settled satisfactorily by the ordinary methods of party warfare. It may be said . . . that had the federal constitutions ot Canada, Australia, and South Africa been framed by one party in the state and attacked by the other, they would never have come into being."" Over Ireland, however, the two major political parties of the United Kingdom were not prepared to compromise. 7

In April 11, 1912, the leader of the Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, Sir Edward Carson, pledged "to oppose this Bill with all the energy we can and at every stage and at every moment that it is before this House.""" On July 3 1 , the leader of the entire Unionist party, Andrew Bonar Law, declared that "if the Government attempted to drive the people of Ulster by force out of the protection of this House and of British law, I could

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imagine no means too strong for them to take to prevent it."* Encouraged by Round Table Moot members Curtis and Grigg, Winston Churchill proposed in a speech on September 12 that the United Kingdom be divided into ten or twelve regional governments, including one for Ulster. Other Liberals and Irish Nationalists attacked this proposal as a device for excluding Ulster from a Catholic Ireland, and neither party took up Churchill's idea. On September 20, 1912, a quarter of a million Ulster Protestants began to sign a "Solemn League and Covenant" pledging to resist their inclusion under Home Rule. ' The Ulstermen revived the name of the covenant by which Presbyterians had rebelled against the Anglican Church in 1643, at the start of the English Civil War. When the House of Commons passed the Home Rule bill in January 1913, Protestant leaders formed the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers. Retired army officers began to train these civilians in military drill. The Lords exercised their first veto of the Home Rule bill that January and their second in July. Irish Republicans in Dublin formed the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, and the British government imposed an embargo on the importation of arms into Ireland in December. 90

9

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93

As the deadline for Home Rule approached, Lord Milner's followers grew more desperate in their opposition. At stake, they now believed, was more than the principle of union that held together the United Kingdom and the British Empire. At issue was democratic liberty itself. A stunning change took place in the group's political thought, which Leo Amery expressed in a January 1914 article for The Quarterly Review. In place of the balance between Lords and Commons, Amery declared, the 1911 Parliament Act had substituted "the unqualified and arbitrary rule of a party majority" in the lower house. "That the tyrant in this case is not an individual," he added, "does not affect the essential character of the new tyranny." Irish Home Rule threatened not only to break up the United Kingdom but also to deprive a sec­ tion of its citizens of their birthright to remain full citizens of that kingdom: "To ask . . . whether Ulster is justified in preparing for armed resistance, is ridiculous. Men of spirit, threatened with the loss of their citizenship and with forcible transfer to the control of a government which they d e t e s t . . . to suit the convenience of a party dependent on the Nationalist vote, could not act otherwise." From seeking to gather the citizens of the self-governing empire under a common parliament, Milner and his followers now found themselves attacking the British Parliament for attempting to rob its people of their citizenship. 94

A somewhat comical movement had already begun to organize in Britain to lend armed support to Protestant Ulster. A noted Master of Hounds, Richard Greville Verney, nineteenth Baron Willoughby de Broke, had led the "Reveille" group in the House of Lords to rally diehard opposition to the 1911 Parliament Act. After this spectacular failure, in March 1913 Willoughby organized the British League for the Support of Ulster and the Union, which

The Round Table Crusade,

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100 peers, 120 members of the House of Commons, and several thousand equestrian gentry joined, pledging to ride into action to oppose Home Rule." Milner and his colleagues soon turned their own attention to what British Unionists might do to defend Ulster. During the autumn of 1913, Frederick Scott Oliver renewed his effort to promote devolution. Oliver produced a pamphlet in November, The Alternatives to Civil War, and wrote with George Craik an outline of a federal constitution for the United Kingdom.* But the Moot also began preparing for the possibility of more forceful action. In a letter to Oliver, Milner asked, "what are we British Unionists ultimately to do, if things come to the worst, besides talking. . . . If the government do ultimately go through with their scheme unmodified, and war results, I, for one, shall not feel satisfied by wav­ ing my arms impotently in the a i r . . . . And I fancy there are a great many peo­ ple on this side of the water in like case." 5

97

In his papers, Oliver preserved a copy of a memorandum to Craik that con­ sidered what British Unionists might do if worst came to worst: "It may be that it is by active personal assistance with rifles and so forth in the north of Ireland; it may be that it is by finding money and arranging for the supply of arms, ammunition, and sustenance; it may be that it is by some special kind of political campaign taking place simultaneously in the United Kingdom; it may even be that it is by a rising, or a rebellion, or whatever you like to call it on this side of St. George's Channel." Oliver urged careful planning: "My friends in Warwickshire and Worcestershire tell me that Willoughby is circu­ larising them all . . . to get their horses ready and practice with fire arms; but I confess these evidences of activity do not give me a complete feeling of security... . When you come to revolutions . . . gallantry won't carry you very far, unless a certain number of quiet blokes have previously sat down and worked out things. . . . " Oliver still pressed for a peaceful outcome, with a new pamphlet calling for federalism in February 1914. But Milner's men began to prepare for confrontation. 9S

99

The recipient of Oliver's memorandum, Craik, was a chief constable in the London Metropolitan Police. Appointed in 1910 by the home secretary, Churchill, Craik commanded the fourth district covering East London and the Docks, the most violent parts of city."" On February 17, 1914, Craik became chief constable of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), the detective force known from its headquarters building as Scotland Yard."" Craik did not control the Special Branch, the CID unit responsible for the security of the government against revolutionary overthrow. But the rest of Scotland Yard was now under the operational control of a man who a few months earlier had been part of private discussions about how best to aid an insurrection against the British government." The Round Table men were still not ready to provoke civil war. But Lord Milner and his followers decided to organize a mass movement that would 1

17

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threaten it. "What was wanted was an organization which would be effective in paralyzing the Government's action before it reached Ulster," noted Amery in this memoirs. "What Ulster had done, so it seemed to me, was to afford a model to be adapted to British conditions." This model was the Ulster Covenant. "A British Covenant widely signed could provide . . . an organiza­ tion which was prepared to go beyond mere political talk."" In January 1914, Lord Willoughby placed his movement at Milner's disposal, as did the Union Defence League, another anti-Home Rule organization."" With this backing, Milner and his men made plans to gather signatures in Great Britain by the hundreds of thousands to demand a referendum on Home Rule in the United Kingdom as a whole. Signers were to declare: 11

Being earnestly convinced that the claim of the Government to carry the HOME RULE BILL into law, without submitting it to the judgment of the nation, is contrary to the spirit of our Constitution, WE DO HEREBY SOLEMNLY DECLARE that, if the Bill is so passed, we shall hold our­ selves justified in taking or supporting any action that may be effective to prevent the armed forces of the Crown being used to deprive the people of Ulster of their rights as Citizens of the United Kingdom." ' 1

Amery tried to enlist the support of prominent British Unionists. He approached Lord Robert Cecil, a Unionist M P whose father, the third Marquess of Salisbury, had preceded Balfour as prime minister. Amery explained that the declaration would "give the Government pause." He continued: "If that is not enough, the signatories in themselves will constitute a list of men who really feel strongly, out of whom again as the crisis develops it may be possible to select still more determined spirits prepared for any action that may prove necessary beyond mere demonstrations."" " Cecil had attended meetings of the Round Table Moot over the previous three years. " But he recoiled from the proposed British Covenant. A call to civil war was far from necessary, Cecil warned, and would be seen as an affront to the rule of law. Joseph Chamberlain's sons, Austen and Neville, also declined to support the Covenant."" 1

1

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108

But Andrew Bonar Law, the Unionist party leader, privately approved Milner's plan, as did the Unionist Whip Walter Long, who helped Milner raise money to underwrite the Ulster Volunteers."" On March 3, 1914, with Geoffrey Dawson's support, the League of British Covenanters announced itself in The Times. A list of initial signers included Milner, Rudyard Kipling, and various lawyers, clergymen, peers, and elected figures. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, who had helped put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857, accepted the honorary presidency of the incipient mutiny at home. In the background, Milner, Amery, and Oliver joined a small Executive Committee of the new League, while Oliver and Moot member Lionel Hichens served on a larger General Council. " 1

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As a third and final vote on Home Rule approached in the spring of 1914, the Asquith government offered an amending bill on March 9 to exclude Ulster for the first six years. Sir Edward Carson denounced this offer as noth­ ing more than a "stay of execution."" Churchill, now first lord of the Admiralty, warned in a speech at Bradford on March 14 that any illegal action in Ulster would be met with force." The Third Squadron of the Royal Navy moved into Irish waters, and cavalry forces at the Curragh camp outside Dublin received orders to ready themselves for deployment in northern Ireland. On March 20, however, most of the officers at the Curragh resigned their commissions, and unrest quickly spread throughout the British army. The Asquith government cancelled the military orders but reaffirmed that the Irish legislation would go through." The Round Table Moot began to have doubts as the prospect of civil war drew closer. The March 1914 Round Table warned, "To this crisis the United Kingdom has been led by a process as relentless as the march of a Greek tragedy." The journal praised the British Covenant but called for a general election instead of a referendum on Home Rule and expressed second thoughts about the Unionist determination to resist an impending law. 2

3

4

The party which prides itself on its devotion to the constitution . . . is found to be condoning open and violent resistance to constituted authority. If it is true and right to say that Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right, will this lesson be lost upon other discontented elements of society, not only in the United Kingdom, but in our dependencies beyond the seas?" 5

But the march of events continued. On April 4, 1914, the British Covenant movement held a mass meeting in Hyde Park, London, which drew 150,000 people."" Over the next three months, close to one million men and 750,000 women signed the Covenant." With the money raised by Lord Milner, the Ulster Volunteers purchased 19,000 rifles and two million rounds of ammuni­ tion in Germany. A tramp steamer slipped through the British naval blockade and landed the guns at Larne in Northern Ireland on April 2 4 . " From trying to consolidate the British Empire against the German menace, Milner now resorted to German arms to do battle with the government of the British Empire. Round Table members Curtis, Grigg, and Brand made one last effort to achieve four-way devolution. Churchill and David Lloyd George, chancellor of the exchequer, agreed to take the idea to Asquith, while the Round Table men approached Bonar Law, Carson, and Austen Chamberlain. The Unionist leaders accepted the idea now but on May 5 the prime minister turned it down."" On May 25, 1914, the Home Rule bill passed the Commons a third time. Asquith introduced his amending bill to exclude Ulster for six years and the Lords scheduled a vote on the amendment in July. If the Lords opposed 1

8

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36

the amendment or altered it in a way unacceptable to the Commons, the orig­ inal bill would become law. The Lords altered Asquith's amending bill on July 14 to exclude Ulster per­ manently. The King then summoned Liberal, Unionist, and Irish Catholic and Protestant leaders to Buckingham Palace. The assembled leaders finally agreed to discuss the permanent exclusion of Ulster but deadlocked over the bound­ aries of the area to be excluded. The two sides in Ireland claimed territory in the north that contained both Catholics and Protestants. On July 26, Irish militants landed several thousand German rifles of their own near Dublin, prompting Asquith to postpone a Commons vote on the Lords revision until July 30. On that day, however, the Austro-Hungarian Empire issued an ultima­ tum to Serbia and forty-eight hours later the First World War broke out. Britain entered the war on August 4 and Liberal and Unionist leaders closed ranks in support of the nation at war. The original Home Rule bill passed in September, but a new clause suspended the bill for the duration of the conflict. In the decade before 1914, Liberal critics had feared that the British Empire might someday pose a threat to British democracy at home. In his 1904 book. Democracy and Reaction, Leonard Hobhouse had warned that imperialism rested on a doctrine of expediency, by which Britain had deprived peoples in Asia and Africa of their independence in the alleged higher interest of civi­ lization or strategic necessity. Such a doctrine transformed liberty into a rela­ tive concept. Could anyone be surprised, he argued, that after winning the Boer War, the proponents of empire would begin a campaign to curtail free­ dom at home by calling for sacrifice to meet foreign challenges and by press­ ing for a stronger and more centralized government? " 12

It does not vindicate imperialism to note the flaw in Hobhouse's warning. For the higher interest on behalf of which Lord Milner and his men worked was the survival of Great Britain in a more dangerous world. Even the Liberals had conceded, in their budget of 1909, the need for a larger fleet; an isolated "Little England" was no longer safe. A powerful state was no guar­ antee of freedom, but a weak state could hardly preserve it, and modern democracies have struggled since then to find a proper balance of the power necessary to ensure their freedom and security. In the Irish crisis, however, the most ardent defenders of the British Empire found themselves preparing to declare war on their own government. Scholars have questioned how far the activism of Lord Milner and his followers can be compared to radical nationalist movements and pressure groups on the conti­ nent of Europe. But in launching the Round Table movement with a hidden agenda, and ultimately in preparing for civil war at home, it is clear that Milner and his men believed to a remarkable degree that their ends justified their means. The nature of these ends was more of a paradox. The United Kingdom would have dominated an Anglo-Dominion electorate and the British people 121

The Round Table Crusade,

1909-1914

37

could have outvoted the Catholic Irish in a referendum of the whole United Kingdom on Home Rule. But the goal of imperial federation was more than British dominance: the aim was a new and larger form of democratic account­ ability, a world state in which the United Kingdom might someday have been outvoted. The Round Table call for giving Dominion status to India pointed to an eventual confederation of an Anglo-Dominion group with self-governing peoples on other continents. Milner and his men did not think they would lose a referendum on Irish Home Rule, but they were willing to take the chance and risk a general election that the Unionists might well have lost. Milner and the Round Table Moot wanted to preserve the power and influ­ ence of the British Empire, and they took for granted their right to shape opin­ ion and manage events from behind the scenes. But they realized that the empire could not survive in its present form, and they tried to achieve in its place a federation with the strength to secure itself in a more threatening world. The flaw in the Round Table vision was its assumption that Dominion electorates and Irish Catholics wanted equality with Great Britain in a com­ mon democratic state. Instead, what these groups wanted was to preserve their autonomy or move toward independence. The Round Table Moot never again contemplated taking up arms against the British state in order to save it, and the group became gradually more moderate in its outlook after 1914. But the prewar years left Kerr and his friends with a legacy of alienation from the wisdom of conventional govern­ ment and officialdom. During the war and postwar years, this alienation would enable Kerr to see some of the longer-range needs of both the empire and the larger world order. But it would also encourage him to trust to his own intuition and judgment how best to meet these needs.

3 THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND AFTER, 1 9 1 4 - 1 9 2 1

Following Great Britain's declaration of war on August 4, 1914, the Round Table fellowship rallied to their nation's cause. In a letter home, Philip Kerr wrote, "Everybody here is in a great bustle . . . it's quite plain that unless we are beaten the best thing the Moot can do . . . is keep the R.T. going and . . . ram home the lessons in the Dominions." George Craik took a commission in the army and went to France, and Edward Grigg and Leo Amery took com­ missions in 1915. The other Moot members remained in private life at home. Lionel Curtis redoubled his efforts to finish the group's final memorandum, while Kerr resumed editorship of The Round Table despite lingering fatigue. 1

2

In late October, the Kerr family received word that Kerr's younger brother David, who had joined the Royal Scots regiment, had been killed in action in France.' With the war now a personal as well as international tragedy, Kerr dedicated himself to convincing readers of The Round Table at home and abroad why the British Empire had to fight. In an article for the September 1914 issue, he declared that a German victory over France and Russia would mortally threaten Britain's strategic position. Much more was at stake, how­ ever, than the balance of power. The war was the struggle for world freedom that Kerr had foreseen in his first Round Table article of 1910. A British vic­ tory, he now wrote, would mean "not dominion but liberty." In the December Round Table, he declared, "If Germany is defeated, the vision of the demo­ cratic peoples will begin to prevail.'"' 4

5

Kerr's identification of the British Empire with liberty and democracy did not command the assent of all in the Moot. Frederick Scott Oliver protested to Lord Milner that the war would be won not by democratic ideas but by patriotism, sacrifice, and superior discipline. Milner did not, however, object to Kerr's definition of British war aims. Amery wrote to Milner with a more immediate worry, urging that Britain massively increase its army to force a 7

Lothian

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decision on the western front in the spring of 1915. A stalemate, he warned, would exhaust both sides. As casualties mounted in the trench warfare of 1915, Kerr tried to analyze how peace had broken down and how, in the future, it might be preserved. In the June 1915 Round Table, he blamed Germany and Austria for their attempt, by invading Belgium and Serbia, "to destroy liberty and international right in the interest of their own national aggrandizement." But he also charged that "Great Britain, like other democratic powers . . . failed to rise to the level of her responsibilities as a great liberal Power, by declaring her intention of defending international right and justice, if need be by force of arms, in time to prevent the autocratic powers from launching their attempt.'"' Kerr attributed German actions to a "vicious political system, which destroys self-criticism, undermines responsibility, and . . . drives the few who have power to reckless war." The "permanent cure for the evil," he declared, "is democracy." But he cautioned the Allies against trying to impose a new gov­ ernment: "Our business in this war is not to reform Germany," he wrote, "for she can only reform herself, but to discredit forever the policy of her rulers." The Germans had to admit "utter and decisive defeat." At the same time, "it is hardly less important that the peace should not be vindictive." Kerr looked ahead to the need for Britain to coexist with Germany that he had foreseen in 1911. The Allies must not destroy "the unity of the German people" nor restrict their "legitimate liberty or their opportunity to develop along peaceful lines. . . .'"° 8

The United Kingdom could not pursue a more resolute foreign policy in time of peace, Kerr also argued, as long as its foreign relations had to com­ pete with domestic affairs for the attention of the same national legislature. Only by creating a higher elected body that could devote itself entirely to external affairs, defense, and the empire could the British electorate express itself freely and firmly on these issues. By holding itself accountable to Dominion electorates as well, he urged, such a body would give the Dominions the right to participate in decisions of war and peace, a right that they would surely demand and deserve at war's end." Kerr reflected on the deeper roots of conflict in the September 1915 Round Table: "The cure for war is not to weaken the principle of the state, but to carry it to its logical conclusion, by the creation of a world state." Kerr recog­ nized that there could be no such state until a common sense of humanity overrode the "spirit of national bigotry." But a reformed British Empire could be "a perfect example of the eventual world commonwealth." Until a world democracy was achieved, nations could voluntarily "take counsel together and enter into common responsibilities for the world's affairs." Kerr also underlined the responsibility of neutrals. If it was wrong to follow "the Prussian theory" that states only existed to fight, so also was it wrong to follow "the opposite theory that states can be kept as watertight compartments 12

11

The First World War and After,

1914-1921

41

14

each going its own way." In the March 1916 Round Table, Kerr appealed to the United States of America to reconsider its abstention from the war: "Neutrality is in essence a failure of duty towards humanity. Either a war is a struggle between right and w r o n g . . . . Or it is a quarrel in which no great prin­ ciple is at stake, in which case all nations ought to combine to insist on its being settled by judicial means. In principle, there ought either to be no neu­ trals or no war.'" The violation of Belgian and Serbian independence by the Central Powers was in Kerr's view an attack on the rights of all nations. America's demand for the freedom to trade with both sides in the war under­ mined the Allied effort to defend these rights. 5

In his wartime articles of 1914-16, Kerr's tendency to see international relations in terms of contending principles thus grew stronger. He tried to put the best face on Russia's autocracy, prompting Robert Brand to protest. But in seeing the war as a struggle of ideals, Kerr did more than assert that one side was better than the other. He held his own side to account for its prewar failures and he saw the need for a stronger world order after the war. The nec­ essary first steps to a better postwar world would be a reform of the British Empire along Round Table lines and a commitment by the United States of America to share in the responsibility for keeping the peace. 16

Mounting casualties also made a higher moral purpose essential. Britain was the only great power to enter the war with a volunteer army, and the need for fresh troops prompted Kerr and his circle to call for conscription. Before the war, The Round Table had argued that the reciprocal nature of freedom and duty distinguished democratic citizenship from autocratic subordination and self-seeking individualism. The Moot called this reciprocity the "princi­ ple of commonwealth." In time of peace, Kerr argued, duty required the exercise of democratic rights, obedience to the law, and a concern for the wel­ fare of one's neighbor. Members of the Round Table Moot had reaffirmed these ideals after 1909 by renewing the social service ties of their youth. Lord Milner took the chairmanship of Toynbee Hall in 1910, and The Round Table donated part of its circulation to the Workers Educational Association, which recruited university professors and students to give lectures to audiences of working people. In this way, the group linked uplift at home to reform of the empire." 17

1

In time of war, The Round Table defined duty in terms of service to the nation, if necessary under arms. Lord Milner had spoken before the war on behalf of the National Service League, which called for compulsory military training. In 1915, Oliver published Ordeal by Battle, calling for military con­ scription, while Kerr called in The Round Table for a law to draft manpower for either industry or the army as the war effort required. " "We have won lib­ erty, as the Germans have still to do," Kerr wrote, "but we have as yet to learn that liberty, if it is to survive, must evoke the same qualities of discipline and self-sacrifice which have been the strength of Germany in this war." 19

2

21

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42

Milner soon took the lead. The Unionist party's decision to join a coalition under Asquith in May 1915 in effect neutralized Parliament as a forum for wartime opposition, leaving only the press and unelected pressure groups to contest official policy." Milner was in his element under these conditions and he soon pressed for more vigorous prosecution of the conflict. With the help of Geoffrey Dawson of The Times, he appealed to the new coalition to deter­ mine how best to employ the nation's manpower. In July 1915, Milner accepted the presidency of the National Service League, and in August he issued a manifesto in The Times demanding conscription. Prime Minister Asquith gave a new minister of munitions, David Lloyd George, sweeping powers over the British economy in the summer of 1915. But government policy did not go far enough for Milner's ally, Sir Edward Carson, who resigned from the Cabinet in September and began drawing backbench support away from the Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law. General Sir Henry Wilson, director of military operations in the War Office, kept Milner privately informed of the growing frustration with Asquith felt by many officers at the front. In January 1916, with the help of Amery, who took up army intelligence duties in London, Milner began to chair a regular Monday evening "ginger group." These gatherings brought Asquith's conser­ vative opponents together with Moot members such as Dawson, Oliver, Amery, and Kerr. 21

24

25

26

The demand for men at the front finally compelled Asquith to introduce conscription. All unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 41 became liable for service under the Military Service Act of January 27, 1916. As an unmar­ ried man, aged 33, Philip Kerr fell into this group. A provision in the Act allowed exemption for civilian work deemed in the national interest, however, and Kerr's patrons and friends urged him to seek exemption on the grounds that his work as editor of The Round Table served the war effort. In a letter to his father the year before, Kerr wrote of his editorship, "Unfortunately nobody can really do that but me and that's why I'm not now at war." Kerr applied for an exemption. During the months before conscription, Kerr was not untroubled by the appearance of evading a duty that other men his age were volunteering to per­ form. By the autumn of 1915, he had recovered sufficiently from his appen­ dicitis to begin to drill with the London Volunteer Rifles, a reserve unit, and he agonized over whether to join the regular army. In a letter to Lady Anne Kerr, Lord Selborne wrote of him: "Of course . . . we quite understand his position, his natural feelings, and the danger of the misunderstanding of the ignorant. If it is military service and military service only which will satisfy him, then I don't think that Curtis or any of us should continue to stand in his way." His family and friends hoped, however, that some alternative could be found: "I cannot but think that there is a chance of his being medically rejected because of his appendicitis operation," continued Lord Selborne. "If 27

28

29

The First World War and After,

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so all will be well; he will have done what he could & must be satisfied with civil work. If he is not rejected then we must try & get him into some mili­ tary work where his powers will not be thrown away." Kerr's appendicitis does not seem to have made him medically ineligible for conscription. Under the Military Service Act, applications for exemption were judged by local tribunals and adverse decisions could be appealed to a central tribunal in London. Kerr's application to perform civil work in the national interest was turned down by a local tribunal. "Apparently none of the tribunal had heard of the Round Table," Kerr wrote home. "Presumably the central tribunal will have done so, as Lord Salisbury is chairman of it."" James Cecil, fourth Marquess of Salisbury, was familiar with the journal. Kerr appealed to the central tribunal, which reversed the lower board and granted his exemption. ,u

12

Kerr's exemption was not above reproach. When he joined the prime minis­ ter's staff at the end of 1916, Reginald Coupland, an Oxford historian, took over the editorship of The Round Table." Thus, another man was able to take over work that Kerr had claimed a year earlier only he could perform. Kerr had called in The Round Table for others of his generation to make the ultimate sac­ rifice. But, through high-level influence, he had removed himself from personal danger in the spring of 1916 to perform war work for which he was not in fact essential. He was suspected thereafter by some of having evaded his duty. 14

But things were not so simple. Kerr's nervous breakdown before the war almost certainly made him unfit for military service. His condition was not a temporary matter, as he continued to suffer from nervous exhaustion intermit­ tently thereafter." However, the British army did not at the time recognize a propensity to nervous breakdown as a disqualification from service; not until after the war did the incidence of "shell shock" cause the army to recognize the need to screen recruits more carefully for their mental health. It is not clear that Kerr or his family and friends realized that he was unfit for service by reason of his nervous condition. If they had. the knowledge could have been unwelcome, for at the time exemption on such grounds would have carried a deep stigma. " 1

Kerr appears to have felt no guilt over his exemption; but it is hard to believe that as an aide to Lloyd George, and afterwards in private life, he did not feel some vulnerability over it. The war placed Kerr in a traumatic posi­ tion. If he knew that he was mentally unqualified to serve in uniform, then his exemption was a lesser stigma needed to prevent an even greater shame; while if he genuinely believed that he was mentally fit (or if the army believed he was), then he bore a psychological burden that he should never have had to carry. In view of his own situation, though, he might have let others preach the duty of his generation to fight. The collapse of the British Somme offensive in the summer and fall of 1916, with the unprecedented loss of more than 400,000 men, finally emboldened the Unionist leaders to break with Asquith. Together with the small Labour

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party and about one-half of the Liberals, the Unionists helped Lloyd George form a new coalition that took office on December 7, 1916. Milner and the Round Table circle were not part of the secret negotiations that immediately preceded this event, but their efforts in the months before had helped bring together the high-level opposition." To prosecute the war more effectively, Lloyd George formed over the reg­ ular Cabinet a five-member War Cabinet composed of himself, Bonar Law, Arthur Henderson of the Labour party, and the Unionist Lords Milner and Curzon. Lloyd George wanted Milner for his administrative ability and for his influence with the "Tory intelligentsia and Die-Hards." Except for Bonar Law, who became chancellor of the exchequer, War Cabinet members were freed of departmental responsibilities. They were thus able to fulfill Milner's 1903 vision of a small body at the top that could give "continuous thought and study to the vital." Milner secured staff positions for several of his disciples. Leo Amery became one of seven assistant secretaries to the War Cabinet under Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hankey. Philip Kerr and Waldorf Astor joined a smaller secretariat of the prime minister under Professor W. G. S. Adams, an Oxford economist. The smaller staff worked in barracks behind the prime minister's office-residence at 10 Downing Street in London. " The War Cabinet and the two secretariats marked a significant change in British gov­ ernmental practice by their concentration of power and staff at the top. Supporters of the ousted Asquith ministry singled out Lord Milner and his followers as a way to attack the new regime: w

39

4

A new double screen of bureaucrats is interposed between the War Directorate and the heads of Departments, whose responsibility to Parliament has hitherto been direct, and transmits to them the decrees of the Upper Five. The first is the so-called Cabinet Secretariat, almost a Ministry in itself. The second is a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister's garden. These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service Cabinet. They are rather of the class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner, and whose spiritual home is fixed somewhere between Balliol and Heidelberg. ' 4

Later historians interpreted the Lloyd George government as a victory for "social-imperialism," the collection of ideas and movements for tariff reform, national service, imperial federation, and rule by experts that had made up the movement for "national efficiency" in the years following the Boer War. According to the social-imperial interpretation, the Lloyd George regime marked the triumph of an illiberal, technocratic elitism typified by Lord Milner, which feared both a class-conscious labor movement at home and the more vigorous social-imperialism of Germany. 42

The First World War and After,

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Recent scholarship has questioned the social-imperial character of the Lloyd George coalition. Milner's placemen were heavily outnumbered on the two secretariats, and the record of what these bodies accomplished does not sustain the case for a Milnerite coup d'etat. ' The present study has argued that Kerr and his Round Table friends had a fundamentally democratic goal, despite some of their methods, and Milner himself would question his life­ long faith in experts soon after taking office. In those areas of policy that most concerned them, however, Milner's lieutenants were not without influence. Amery oversaw war strategy and foreign relations on the War Cabinet secre­ tariat, while Kerr helped formulate the prime minister's statements on larger war aims and helped shape foreign and imperial policy. In a note to his pri­ vate secretary, Milner saw Kerr's position as a means to influence imperial opinion through Lloyd George: "Speaking through that megaphone our friend RK. has a great chance of making himself heard throughout the Empire." What was remarkable about Milner and his disciples under Lloyd George was not their success or failure to control policy, but the fact that they were at the apex of power at all. From having plotted with Ulster Unionists to resist the British government by force in the summer of 1914, Lord Milner and his men now suddenly found themselves practically in charge of the British gov­ ernment. Philip Kerr vaulted from editing an obscure journal to a position, he later observed, "almost as close to the centre of world affairs as it was possi­ ble for a man to be." 4

44

45

46

WAR AIMS A N D

PEACE

MOVES

Soon after taking office, Lloyd George and Milner found it necessary to challenge the authority of the trained experts that Milner had defended since England in Egypt. On February 1, 1917, German submarines (U-boats) began a campaign of unrestricted warfare. U-boats now attacked without warning the neutral as well as Allied merchant shipping on which Great Britain depended for vital supplies. Threatened by strangulation at sea, the War Cabinet pressed a reluctant Admiralty to release destroyers for convoy duty in April. The convoy system gradually reduced losses at sea to a tolerable level over the following year. 47

The War Cabinet failed, however, to persuade Britain's generals to change their conduct of the war on land. The failure of costly human-wave assaults on the western front in 1915 and 1916 had done little to shake the conviction of senior British commanders that one more stupendous frontal attack would achieve a breakthrough and victory. Lloyd George pressed the army to make a defensive stand on the western front, but the War Cabinet also worried that France might negotiate a separate peace if the tide of war didn't turn soon. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of British forces in France, called for another offensive and appealed to the War Cabinet as the man

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on the spot whose professional knowledge and training entitled him to fight the war as he saw fit. " In a March 1917 letter to F. S. Oliver, Lord Milner revealed his disillusionment with such experts, whose cause he had earlier championed: 4

There is a thing which I may call "super-strategy"—a new thing (resulting from the enormously increased armies of modern times, their greater mobility, and consequently vast theatres of war) which nobody, civilian or soldier, has really studied. The special training of the soldier does not really qualify him for this. Perhaps the whole thing is too vast to be scientifically studied at all and, like everything else, it will always remain largely a mat­ ter of common sense. '' 4

Despite such misgivings, the War Cabinet yielded to Haig and authorized the Passchendaele offensive in the summer of 1917. As a result, another 300,000 British troops lost their lives to advance the front across four miles of mud. The French had already gone on the defensive, and by late autumn, British generals finally in effect did the same. " 5

To break the deadlock on the western front, Britain needed the armed inter­ vention of the United States of America. The Lloyd George government also needed to preserve public support for the war in the empire and at home. To serve these and other needs, Philip Kerr gave advice to the prime minister that helped define British purposes in the war and that responded to immediate diplomatic and domestic political problems as they arose. The United States had already backed the Allies to the extent of allowing them to buy war materials and raise loans in America, while a British naval blockade prevented Germany from doing the same. But President Woodrow Wilson shared the reluctance of most Americans to enter the war as combat­ ants. On December 18, 1916, in the hope of mediating a compromise peace. Wilson sent a note to the belligerent powers asking them to state their war aims. The Allies responded on January 10, 1917, with territorial demands that were unacceptable to the Germans, who did not respond. On January 22, in an address to the U.S. Senate, Wilson called for peace without victory. 51

52

Kerr had written a private letter to Sir Horace Plunkett in early December 1916 that he hoped Sir Horace would pass on to President Wilson. Plunkett, an Irish Protestant landowner with a ranch in the American state of Wyoming, was a friend of both the new British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, and Wilson's confidential adviser, "Colonel" Edward M. House. Kerr urged the president to refrain from any effort to mediate a peace that did not restore and indemnify Belgium, France, and Serbia. Plunkett wrote to House in these terms, but Wilson's call for peace did not set conditions. In an analysis for Lloyd George of Wilson's January 22 speech, though, Kerr saw the beginning of a shift in America's position. Germany was stepping 51

The First World War and After,

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up its submarine campaign and Wilson had included in his speech a defense of America's right as a neutral to trade freely. 'America and President Wilson have made up their minds to keep out of the war at almost any price," wrote Kerr, "but they cannot possibly tolerate a murderous hold-up of the world by sea." Wilson's speech was a "warning to Germany" and a step to unite the American people in case war became necessary. The Germans responded to Wilson a few days later by announcing unrestricted submarine warfare. After several sinkings of American ships, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. 54

The Round Table tried to build bridges to educated American opinion before and after America's entry into the war. In 1915, Kerr had recruited a former Columbia University historian, George Louis Beer, to write articles on American affairs for the journal. Beer warned British readers not to disdain American views that disagreed with British ones. He also vetoed the cre­ ation of American Round Table groups when Curtis privately proposed them in 1916. But to American readers, Beer defended Britain in the war, and he looked forward to an alliance between the United States and a British Empire reformed along Round Table lines. He welcomed America's entry into the war as "a triumph of the intellectual classes who have . . . tried to formulate a new foreign policy based upon the interdependence of the modern world." 55

Sh

57

58

To support the Allied war effort, Beer worked with a committee of American historians led by Columbia Professor James T. Shotwell. He also tried to recruit American scholars and journalists to write for The Round Table, and he helped Robert Brand conduct a circulation drive for the journal in the United States in the autumn of 1917.''" Brand, who was visiting North America to supervise British war purchases, advertised the British journal in The New Republic."' In private mailings, The Round Table appealed to American newspaper and magazine editors, libraries, and professors of poli­ tics and history. 59

62

In common with British wartime propaganda in the United States, which tried to influence educated elites more than the general public, the efforts of Beer and Brand were easier in the industrial northeastern states than else­ where. ' Beer failed to persuade the London Moot to drop The Round Table's policy of anonymity, which aroused American suspicions. The circulation drive only doubled the number of U.S. subscriptions from 100 to just over 200, foreshadowing the difficulty Great Britain would have after the war sus­ taining American interest in the wider world. But the Round Table Moot made contact with a number of Americans influential in U.S. academic life with whom they would later work together on postwar problems. 6

64

65

To reward support for Britain within the British Empire, and to win the sup­ port of other countries, Kerr helped craft British initiatives to share power with the Dominions, to move India a step closer to self-government, and to pledge a Jewish homeland in Palestine. At the urging of Lord Milner, the War

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Cabinet invited the Dominion prime ministers to join it as full members while they attended an Imperial War Conference in London during the spring of 1917. The enlarged "Imperial War Cabinet" met between March 22 and May 2, 1917. This body convened again in 1918."" At private dinners and in per­ sonal interviews, Milner and his followers tried in these weeks to persuade the visiting Dominion leaders of the need for closer imperial union. As a step toward federation, the Moot hoped to turn the Imperial Conference into an annual assembly of parliaments in which opposition par­ ties could attend. Kerr wrote Lionel Curtis to describe an interview on April 2 with Sir Robert Borden, the prime minister of Canada, in which Kerr urged on Borden the virtues of such an assembly. Borden warned "in the strongest possible manner the inadvisability of trying to force any system of Imperial Federation . . . immediately following the war." But Kerr observed that the Canadian leader "saw in the new constitutional machinery . . . the nucleus which might eventually give us the Imperial Institutions we require." " 67

6

With the support of Loring Christie, his wartime secretary, Borden pro­ posed to the other prime ministers that future imperial conferences invite all political parties and not just governments. But the idea did not survive in Resolution IX of the Imperial War Conference, adopted by the prime minis­ ters on April 16, 1917, which postponed any change in the constitutional structure of the empire until after the war. The resolution also declared that any new postwar arrangements would have to be strictly voluntary, providing "full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous members of an Imperial Commonwealth" and for "such concerted action, founded on consultation, as the several governments may determine." The June 1917 Round Table welcomed the resolution as a "valuable advance," but after the war the Dominions moved to greater independence, not closer union. " 69

7

Kerr had greater success reforming the government of India. In a 1916 con­ tribution to a book on international relations, he qualified his earlier support for Dominion status by observing that Indians had to demonstrate their capac­ ity for democratic government before they could receive it in full. But to develop this capacity, Indians would need to be given greater power and not just greater representation in existing councils. The capacity for self-rule, he observed, "will have to be manifested . . . by actual success in responsible administration." He warned, however, that democracy "cannot flourish except where the people are bound together by a strong sense of unity, and a vigor­ ous spirit of mutual responsibility and service." Hindu-Muslim conflict, the segregation of women, and caste discrimination were inimical to such unity. Kerr called for giving Indians "full responsibility" in some limited sphere of government first. 71

An Indian Moot consisting of Kerr, Curtis, and several invited British offi­ cials from the India Office in London agreed in 1916 on a plan to move India toward self-rule. The plan called for Britain to transfer certain executive

The First World War and After,

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responsibilities at the provincial level to Indians, who would be accountable in these roles to elected Indian legislators. If the scheme worked, a second stage could begin in which Indians exercised all power at the provincial level. The plan left open the possibility that a similar process could later occur at the level of India's central government. Curtis visited India in the autumn of 1916, where British officials endorsed the first stage of the plan. But in a letter to Kerr on November 13, 1916, which he printed for private circulation in India and at home, Curtis described the plan in patronizing terms of uplift for a country whose masses of people "have not as yet acquired the faculty of political judgment." A copy of this letter found its way to the Indian leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, and excerpts soon appeared in public, alarming Indians who believed that Britain owed them a more generous measure of self-government. Gandhi spoke out on their behalf. India's leading nationalist organizations, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, met at Lucknow in December 1916, where they called for making the central and provincial governments largely respon­ sible at once to their legislative councils and for these councils to have elected Indian majorities. 72

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Curtis stayed in India for the next year to defend what he called "dyarchy," the more limited idea of sharing power at the provincial level. The controversy in India alarmed the Round Table Moot back home, though, and Kerr urged Curtis not to commit the group to any specific plan of reform, particularly not one that treated India as a single country. "If India is to become self-governing in the Western sense within any reasonable time." he wrote, "it will almost cer­ tainly be as a federation of nations and not as a nation." " Kerr worried again about the cleavages in Indian life. "The reason why the Home Rule campaign of the Westernized Indians gets its following is because Indians want to be gov­ erned more on Indian lines and by Indian people, and less on British lines and by British people." Despite such reservations, Kerr joined the India Office in advising Lloyd George to proceed with a scheme of dyarchy. 75

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On August 20, 1917, the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, announced that the goal of British policy was "the progressive realization of responsible government" for India. William Marris drafted a proposal that Montagu and the British viceroy. Lord Chelmsford, issued in July 1918. The substance became law in the Government of India Act of 1919. " Britain trans­ ferred certain executive powers at the provincial level to Indian ministers who were responsible to elected Indian legislators. The reform enlarged the 1909 electorate from two to ten percent of adult men and gave one-half of one per­ cent of adult women the vote. As in South Africa, Round Table members had proposed a reform that others took up. But unlike South Africa's 1910 Union, the 1919 India Act gave power to a non-European people, although it did not grant the degree of responsible government that the Indian Congress and the Muslim League had wanted. 79

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Philip Kerr also urged the prime minister to promise Jews a national home in Palestine. Leo Amery and another War Cabinet secretary, Mark Sykes, also pressed in 1917 for such a pledge. The three saw Zionism as a way to secure an ally for Britain in the Middle East, where they hoped that a Jewish pres­ ence in Palestine would block German-Turkish and also French and Russian influence in the region."' The Round Table had seen the Islamic world before the war as a backward area, and the journal hoped that Jewish settlers would set an example to the region of a modern democracy and economy." 2

The main opposition to Zionism at this time came not from Arabs but from British Jews, such as Montagu, who feared that recognition of a Jewish nationality would undermine their rights as British subjects. As secretary of state for India, Montagu also worried that a British pledge to Zionism would antagonize the Muslims of India. In a letter to Kerr, the British Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann protested that Montagu "although a great Hindu nationalist now, thought it his duty to combat Jewish nationalism." Montagu and other wealthy Jews who were fearful of Zionism were in Weizmann's view unrepresentative of "Jewish Democracy." A Jewish Palestine, Weizmann added in another letter, would be a "very great asset" to the British Empire. 81

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Weizmann may have stirred the mixture of pro-Jewish idealism, ethnic stereotyping, and strategic calculation in the thinking of Gentile Zionists such as Kerr, who wrote to John Buchan in October 1917: "Personally I am a sup­ porter of the Zionist movement because I am sure it consists of those Jews who are trying to free themselves from the miasma of international finance and to help the Allies get a real victory over Germany." The War Cabinet saw British support for Zionism as a way to strengthen pro-Allied sentiment in the United States and Russia. Revolutionary upheaval was threatening to take the latter country out of the war and Germany had an interest in gaining Zionist backing for itself. British leaders finally committed themselves to a Jewish homeland, although not to Jewish independence. Lord Milner worded the statement, issued on November 2, 1917, by the foreign secretary and known afterward as the Balfour Declaration, pledging Britain to establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine after the war. 86

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British hopes of strengthening pro-Allied feeling in Russia came to noth­ ing. Kerr had welcomed the overthrow of the Tsar in the first Russian Revolution of March 12. 1917. "It has been extraordinarily difficult," Kerr wrote to Lloyd George, for the British government to stand for democracy, "as long as it was in alliance with autocratic Russia. That difficulty no longer exists." Kerr advised the prime minister to make democracy in Europe a "pri­ mary object" of the war. "You may remember that it was not until Abraham Lincoln added the emancipation of the slaves to the preservation of American unity . . . that the tide began to turn.""'' A war for democracy became one of the themes in Lloyd George's subsequent war aims speeches. " 1

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Kerr began to doubt Russia's value to the Allied war effort, though, as it became clear that "what the new Russian democracy is exercised a b o u t . . . is peace." " The Russian army melted away from desertion over the late summer and autumn of 1917 and civilian authority broke down, causing Kerr to report in August, "Russia is everywhere disintegrated.'"' As the principal beneficiary of these events, Germany seemed necessarily to have been their cause. Kenwrote to Lloyd George, "Germany is now transferring her attack more and more to the internal fronts of the Allies. As her chances of military victory decline her efforts to carry on the war by dividing the Allies, or breaking up the national unity of her enemies, increase." " Following the Bolshevik revo­ lution of November 7, 1917, Russia withdrew from the war. Returning from the country, the historian Bernard Pares reported to Ken, "The whole collapse was engineered by the Germans, who found the agents and the arguments." Pares urged a counter-propaganda to strengthen pro-British opinion in Russia, but it was too late for such an effort. 1

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The success of antiwar opposition in Russia gave new seriousness to anti­ war activity in Britain. Lloyd George instructed K e n to draft a reply to Clifford Allen, a Quaker and leader of the No-Conscription Fellowship. Allen had written the prime minister in May 1917 to defend his decision, along with that of several hundred other "absolute" conscientious objectors, to go to prison rather than perform alternative civilian service in wartime. Ken- also received letters from relatives of the young men protesting the severe condi­ tions of their imprisonment, which included hard labor. 96

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Kerr's initial reaction to Allen's case was to reaffirm the supremacy of the law. In a memorandum, he wrote: "These absolute objectors really challenge the basis upon which free democratic society exists, for they deny that it is the duty of the citizen to obey the laws. . . . It seems to me impossible to release prisoners who hold these views." * In the June 1916 Round Table, however, Kerr had written that while a citizen "never has the right, he may at times have the duty, of refusing to obey an unjust law. . . . The events of 1648 and 1689 in England, and the disobedience to the fugitive slave laws of the U.S.A., are nearly as i m p o r t a n t . . . as the long tradition of the supremacy of law. . . . The ultimate foundation of the commonwealth is not loyalty even to the law of the land, but fidelity to conscience." 9

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Kerr struggled with his own conscience and in the end did not submit his memorandum to Lloyd George. Instead, he prepared another one, recom­ mending that absolute objectors be exempted from all service. He sent this paper to Lord Milner and to several other officials. Major-General Wyndham Childs, who supervised conscription at the War Office, replied that leniency for absolute objectors "would be the beginning of the end." Childs cited a publication of the No-Conscription Fellowship that called absolute exemption, if it could be achieved, "one of the death blows to militarism" and a means of releasing activists for their "real work" of opposing the war."" K e n 100

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had added a proviso that objectors who engaged in antiwar activity could still be jailed under the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914, which empowered the government to arrest such activists. Milner supported Kerr with this proviso. But Lloyd George rejected Kerr's advice, and a public statement by the home secretary upheld the full penalties for absolute objection. A more serious danger at home was the growing discontent among workers in British industry. Male shop stewards led a series of wildcat strikes in the spring of 1917 to protest war profiteering, the dragnet of conscription, rising prices, and the employment of women and nonunion labor in war produc­ tion. Kerr advised Lloyd George to stress the moral character of the war in a June speech in Glasgow: "The essential thing in your speech is to restore the moral unity of the country and the Allies." The war was primarily a struggle to right "two wrongs," Kerr argued, referring to the German invasion of Belgium and the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia. "Belgium and Serbia arouse no controversy, and if you once get these then you will get everything else, because the German-Magyar machine will not give them up until it recognizes that it has lost the war." Kerr urged Britain to refute enemy propaganda alleg­ ing that the Allies were bent on Germany's destruction. Germany was entitled to "national unity, national freedom, and equal economic rights as long as she respects the liberties and rights of her neighbours."'" Lloyd George made these points in his Glasgow address of June 29, 1917." 102

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Some conservatives also began to doubt the wisdom of fighting on. On November 29, 1917, a former Unionist foreign secretary, the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, published a letter in The Daily Telegraph calling on the Allied and Central Powers to consider a compromise peace. In an emotional memo­ randum, Kerr implored Lloyd George to "refute and break with the Lansdowne point of view," but the prime minister simply brushed the Lansdowne letter aside. Lloyd George could not so easily ignore the war aims statement adopted by the British Trades Union Congress (TUC) in December. The TUC asserted that neither side was to blame for the war. Secret treaties made public by the Bolsheviks in Russia that month also dam­ aged the Allied claim that only Germany had territorial ambitions, and Russia began separate peace talks with Germany on December 22. Lloyd George needed to respond.'" 106

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General Smuts and Lord Robert Cecil, the latter now Balfour's deputy in the Foreign Office, produced drafts of a war aims speech that Kerr amalga­ mated into an address. Lloyd George delivered it before a trade union audi­ ence in London on January 5, 1918. The prime minister demanded enemy withdrawal from Belgium, France, and Serbia, reparations for war damage, and independence for the subject nations of eastern Europe. Lloyd George also called for a postwar association of nations to limit armaments and pre­ vent future conflict. Only an Allied victory could achieve these aims, he declared. The Allies would have no obligation to defend Russian interests, he 108

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added, if Russia made a separate peace. On January 8, 1918, President Wilson announced a similar set of aims in his Fourteen Points address, for which Walter Lippmann and some American scholars provided assistance in the preparation."" Bolshevik Russia and the German Empire signed a separate peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk on March 3. While portraying the war in public as a contest between right and wrong, Lloyd George and the War Cabinet privately hoped that they could induce Austria-Hungary and Turkey to make peace in return for more lenient terms. Kerr's last important wartime service was to carry out secret negotiations with the two powers in the winter of 1917-18. In November 1917, the AustroHungarian foreign minister, Count Czernin, signaled through intermediaries an interest in peace talks, and the War Cabinet sent Smuts to Geneva in December to meet with Austria's prewar ambassador to London. Smuts offered to preserve the Habsburg empire if Vienna agreed to a separate peace. The Austrian refused but left the door open for future talks. Philip Kerr accompanied Smuts and met a Turkish intermediary, who told Kerr that some Turkish leaders might be willing to free non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman Empire in return for peace. Kerr accepted these terms subject to approval in London, but the Turks made no further response." 1

The British Foreign Office at first opposed negotiations with Vienna on the grounds that preserving the Habsburg empire would violate British commit­ ments to Italy, which claimed Italian-speaking parts of Austria. The Foreign Office also suspected that high-level contacts were a trap to alienate Italy from the Allies. The War Cabinet decided to test Austrian intentions, though, and sent Kerr on a secret trip to Switzerland from March 9-19, 1918, where he arranged to meet Aleksander Skrzynski, an Austrian diplomat in Bern. The Foreign Office now gave its support." After picking up a French-speaking Egyptian interpreter provided by the British Legation, Kerr crept up the back stairs of a small hotel in the Swiss capital to meet the Austrian. Skrzynski conveyed Count Czernin's now-firm opposition to a separate peace. Kerr tried to keep the door open to future talks and in a report of the meeting he wrote, "I said that Count Czernin was mistaken in thinking that the British Government's . . . main object was not a real settlement between AustriaHungary and the entente, but a victory over Germany. The British Government's whole object in the war was to bring about a settlement on terms which would make possible a lasting peace everywhere." But to this assurance Skrzynski replied, "That is most valuable," and the meeting ended inconclusively." :

3

The Austrians had reasons to be cautious that March. Peace with Russia had released one million German troops for service on other fronts. Thinking imperially, the December 1917 Round Table had warned that Turkey could offset its losses in the Arab world by expanding into the Muslim areas of the former Russian Empire." Six months later, The Round Table pointed bleakly 4

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to the opportunity for Germany to expand across Russia and threaten British interests in Asia." But the German high command gambled its manpower on a final offensive in France that began on March 2 1 , 1918. The failure of this attack, and the arrival in strength of American forces that spring and summer, finally compelled the Germans on the western front to begin a general retreat. In October, the Germans requested peace terms, and on November 11, after Social Democratic legislators in Berlin had proclaimed a republic, the war ended. In his Round Table articles of 1914—16, Kerr had looked forward to a reformed world order. His efforts in 1917-18 to promote Anglo-American relations, accommodate nationalism inside the British Empire, and win a war for democracy all served this wider aim. But the United States became a wartime partner of the British Empire only after a troubling neutrality, and the limited reach of The Round Table hinted at the difficulty that would later come sustaining American interest in the world. The British Dominions wel­ comed their inclusion in an Imperial War Cabinet but underlined their deter­ mination to remain autonomous. Kerr helped move India toward greater autonomy, but Indians wanted more complete self-government. Most strik­ ingly, Kerr defended the Allied war effort in moral terms, yet he conceded a degree of legitimacy to absolute conscientious objection, and he helped briefly to explore an expedient peace with two enemy powers whose cause he had morally condemned. These and other tensions sharpened after the war. 5

THE BRITISH

DILEMMA

The prime minister's secretariat disbanded after the armistice, but Kerr remained at Lloyd George's side as his principal adviser on foreign and impe­ rial affairs. Kerr also began to give electoral advice to his chief as a general election approached on December 14, 1918. Kerr was alarmed by the grow­ ing appeal of the Labour party, whose leaders stood in his view for "class hatred and social strife, inevitably ending in Bolshevist ruin." He urged the prime minister to stay above the "Ding Dong" of the election and to campaign for "a really big programme of reconstruction, national and international, which will make people feel that . . . there shall be a better and freer Britain for the ex-soldiers and the poor than ever before."" The Lloyd George coali­ tion won a landslide victory but depended now on a Unionist majority in the House of Commons. 6

Kerr accompanied the prime minister to Paris, where in January 1919 del­ egations from the Allied and Associated Powers gathered to hammer out peace terms. The English-speaking delegations and their staffs included many who knew each other from Round Table contacts. Lord Milner, who had taken the War Office in April 1918, relinquished it to Winston Churchill in December for the Colonial Office. Leo Amery accompanied Milner to Paris,

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and Lionel Curtis, Robert Brand, and Lord Robert Cecil attended with the for­ eign secretary, Arthur Balfour. George Louis Beer accompanied the American delegation as its colonial expert, and Round Table members from Canada and Australia attended as delegates or staff." The traditional aims of British diplomacy and defense were to preserve the nation's naval supremacy and to maintain a balance of power on the European continent." Kerr served these ends by opposing a U.S. demand that the peace terms include a pledge to uphold the freedom of navigation in time of war, and he resisted a French demand for the Allies to detach and permanently occupy German territory west of the Rhine river. He also believed that a less radical peace would be easier to keep: he warned against the League of Nations that President Wilson wanted, in which member nations would make binding obligations to each other, and he hoped that moderate terms would assist Germany's return to the community of nations. However, his search for a middle ground was fraught with dangers of its own. In a series of notes exchanged with the United States in October and early November 1918, Germany asked for peace terms based on Wilson's Fourteen Points. The Allies accepted with two reservations. At British insistence, the demand for restoration of occupied territory was worded more broadly to demand restitution for damage done "by the aggression of Germany by land, by sea. and from the air," so that Britain would also qualify for reparations. Britain also attached a reservation to suspend Wilson's second point, freedom of navigation in peace and war. After a sharp exchange with London, the Americans agreed to suspend the point."'' Despite their difference over freedom of the seas, Kerr hoped that the United States and the British Empire would continue their partnership in peacetime. Both powers, he thought, had an obligation to oversee the progress of the non-European world. Cooperation in this sphere would also draw the United States into a wider peace-keeping role that Britain could no longer perform on its own. In an October 1918 letter to Curtis, Kerr wrote: 7

8

The extent of this work after the war, sometimes known as the white man's burden, will . . . never be accomplished at all unless it is shared in propor­ tions equal to their strength by the . . . allies now united in fighting the Germans. Yet America not only has no conception of this aspect of the prob­ lem but has been led by shibboleths and labels to believe that the assumption of this kind of responsibility is iniquitous imperialism. The Round Table Moot agreed, Kerr wrote, that educating Americans to these larger responsibilities was the "logical outcome" of Round Table work.' " Kerr and his circle had the support of their chief American contact. Beer, who favored placing captured enemy territories outside Europe under some 2

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form of international supervision. Beer hoped that the United States would administer some of these territories as "mandates" of the League of Nations that President Wilson wanted to organize to keep the peace. At Beer's urg­ ing, Curtis called in the December 1918 Round Table for the United States and the British Empire to accept mandates as a way to anchor the postwar order.'" General Smuts had recommended mandates for former Turkish, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian territories in a proposal for a League of Nations that he published in December.' ' Stimulated in part by Smuts, President Wilson included mandates for former German colonies and Turkish territories in his own early drafts for a League of Nations Covenant. In pri­ vate interviews and dinners, Beer and Curtis won support for the mandate principle among the American, British, and French delegations in January. The Round Table circle were not of one mind about the mandate idea. Kerr worried that a mandate system would lead to friction between a League of Nations and the mandatory powers. " Preliminary airing of the idea also alarmed the prime ministers of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, who wanted to keep the former German colonies of Southwest Africa and the Pacific that they had seized during the war. General Smuts, who went to Paris as a British Empire delegate, proposed a compromise that became Article 22 of the League Covenant. This article separated mandates into three classes. The territories wanted by the Dominions fell into the lowest class, permitting the three Dominions to administer them for all practical purposes as colonies. Wilson and the Dominion leaders accepted this solution on January 30. Kenalso gave it his support. " The idea of international trusteeship did not origi­ nate with Kerr and his circle, and it owed its success at Paris to the insistence of President Wilson. But Round Table figures helped promote the idea in pub­ lic and in private. 121

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A second conflict emerged at the end of January over whether to include a guarantee of international borders in the League of Nations Covenant. Wilson demanded a clause that would pledge each member state to preserve the ter­ ritorial integrity and political independence of every other member against outside attack. " Instead of such a guarantee, Lord Robert Cecil proposed an obligation to delay going to war to give arbitration a chance."" On January 27. 1919, Cecil for Britain and David Hunter Miller for the United States pro­ duced a draft League Covenant that contained both a territorial guarantee and an obligatory procedure to delay conflict.'" I2

Philip K e n had called during the war for a system of mutual defense treaties to guarantee the postwar order." But by the end of the war, he and his Round Table colleagues had drawn back from any binding ties. The Round Table in December 1918 called for a permanent but voluntary conference of nations to keep the peace."' Kerr explained why to Lloyd George: "The prob­ able effect of including in the constitution of the League of Nations obliga­ tions to go to war in certain stated conditions will be to make it impossible for 2

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any nation to join the League, for no nation will commit itself in so vital a matter [as going to war] except . . . after an examination of the facts at the time the decision has to be made."" Kerr submitted to the prime minister an outline for a more modest League, which would reconvene the peace confer­ ence as an annual and purely consultative gathering. " Kerr approved a per­ manent secretariat under this body to oversee certain technical international functions, such as world health. The March 1919 Round Table hoped that cooperation in such functions would lead to gradual political integration of the world by intensifying contacts among members of an emerging interna­ tionally minded academic and bureaucratic intelligentsia."'' 4

1

With Kerr's memorandum in hand, Lloyd George instructed Lord Robert Cecil on January 31 to make the draft Covenant less binding. Cecil insisted on the clause to delay conflict, though, and Lloyd George did not object. Britain accepted a draft on February 14 that contained both President Wilson's territorial pledge (as Article 10) and a provision to delay conflict (as Article 12). Great Britain obtained a clause (Article 26) in the final draft of April 28 to allow future amendment to the Covenant. * The document was incorporated into the peace treaty with Germany. The following autumn, how­ ever, the U.S. Senate rejected the German treaty, largely over its provisions for a binding League of Nations. '

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Kerr himself accepted the principle of binding obligations in March 1919, when he supported bilateral treaties of guarantee that Wilson and Lloyd George each offered to France. America's rejection of the German peace treaty the following November released Britain from its guarantee to France, though, and neither Lloyd George nor Kerr wanted a treaty between Britain and France alone. A less binding League was surely a missed opportunity, for it might have been ratified by the American Senate. The United States might then have been less isolated, and the resolve of Britain and France to keep the peace in the interwar years might have been stronger. 140

With the League provisionally settled in February, Kerr's attention turned to Russia. Kerr saw the Bolshevik Revolution as a fundamental threat to lib­ eral civilization. "You have now got started . . . an active, aggressive religion of social destruction—Bolshevism," he wrote in his October 1918 letter to Curtis. "It seems pretty clear that the peoples of South America, Africa, China will be quite incapable of resisting these destructive forces unless the Western Powers help them to do so."' But Kerr did not go as far as to favor an Allied invasion of Russia to defeat the new Soviet regime, and he helped deflect an effort in February by Churchill to commit the Allies to such a course. Instead. Kerr encouraged an American initiative to arrange a ceasefire in the Russian Civil War. These actions reveal the kind of influence Kerr had over events and the dilemmas of moderation into which British leaders were moving. The Allies had supplied arms and food to anti-Communist armies battling the Bolsheviks, and Allied troops guarded a few ports and rail lines inland. On 41

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December 31, 1918, Lloyd George and the War Cabinet overruled an appeal by Churchill, the secretary of state for war, to intervene more forcefully in the Russian Civil War. On February 10, 1919, Lloyd George returned to London to attend to political business at home. Churchill visited Paris on February 14, where he called on the Allies to prepare for war with the Bolsheviks if the latter refused a ceasefire with their opponents. The Soviet regime, in fact, had accepted a call by President Wilson on January 22 for an armistice and peace talks between the Russian factions. It was the antiBolshevik forces that had refused. ' Philip Kerr, watching the conference in the prime minister's absence, met with Churchill. In a cable to Lloyd George the next day, February 15, Kencommended Churchill for clarifying the Allied position in one respect. Having aided one side in Russia, the Allies could hardly propose to address each side impartially without making both suspicious. Churchill was right to urge a new appeal to the Bolsheviks alone. But Kerr did not agree that the Allies should invade if a new ceasefire proposal failed. "Mr. Churchill is bent on forcing a campaign against Soviet Russia," warned Ken. "I am against such a policy because . . . it must lead to the Peace Conference taking charge of Russian affairs, and if they do that it will end in revolution in the West." Lloyd George and K e n believed that anti-Bolshevism had uncertain popular support in Russia. Occupying the country would be costly and would risk a violent working-class reaction at home. 142

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On February 16, Kerr wrote the prime minister to defend the Allied supply­ ing of anti-Bolshevik forces. But he added: "I think it would be a fundamen­ tal and colossal mistake to be drawn into a war with Soviet Russia. I don't see that it is any business of ours how the Russian people govern themselves pro­ vided they leave their neighbours alone." " In response to K e n and to two telegrams from Churchill, Lloyd George sent two telegrams of his own to Paris on February 16. These opposed any Allied action beyond continuing to supply the anti-Communist forces. The American delegation launched a new Russian peace initiative in February. Colonel House sent a junior U.S. diplomat, William Bullitt, to K e n with a proposal that Allied troops already in Russia withdraw in return for an armistice that would leave existing factions in control of their respective areas of occupation. After meeting several times with Bullitt, Kerr wrote him on February 2 1 , outlining peace terms in this vein. Kerr added that "these have no official significance and merely represent my own opinion.'" " On a secret trip to Moscow, Bullitt obtained the agreement of the Soviet leader, Vladimir Lenin, but President Wilson and Lloyd George decided not to reply. The prime minister faced mounting criticism in the Unionist party, on whose sup­ port he depended, for being too lenient with Russia and Germany. News of the Bullitt mission became public in April and Bullitt claimed that Lloyd George and Balfour had approved the terms. " Lloyd George publicly 14

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disavowed any knowledge of the mission. To the British Foreign Office, Which learned of Kerr's role only then, Kerr wrote in July 1919, "Throughout I made it clear to Mr. Bullitt that any opinions which I expressed were purely my own." In a 1937 letter to Lloyd George, though, Kerr (now Lord Lothian) reminded the former prime minister, "I talked it over with you and you said you were fully in favour of such an exploratory mission being undertaken informally by the American delegation." In deflecting Churchill and approving the Bullitt mission, Kerr was hardly ing to help the Bolsheviks, as some critics alleged. ' He loathed olshevism as much as Prussian militarism. In seeing no alternative to coexistence with Soviet Russia, however, Kerr now acknowledged that there were practical limits to the kind of moral world for which the Allies had recently fought. Kerr soon found himself in the same dilemma over Germany, where moral demands for retribution clashed with his growing sense that moderate ace terms were a practical necessity. 152

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Peace terms with Germany dominated the remainder of the Paris conference. On February 26, 1919, André Tardieu, an adviser to French Premier ïeorges Clemenceau, presented a memorandum. In addition to the return of Jsace-Lorraine to France, Tardieu demanded that the Allies detach and garrison the remaining German territory west of the Rhine river and occupy the bridgeheads on its east bank. Kerr, Tardieu, and Sidney Mezes (of the American delegation) met in Lloyd George's Paris apartment on March 11-12 o discuss the French demands. Kerr's and Tardieu's accounts of the meetings ubstantially agree. " With no instructions from President Wilson, who had "one home in February and not yet returned, Mezes did not participate significantly. Kerr and Tardieu took issue with each other. 155

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Kerr agreed that the postwar German army could not be allowed to occupy erritory west of the Rhine river. But he objected to the stationing of British troops, even token contingents, on German territory: "I replied . . . that the experience of the Hanoverian connection with its consequence of wars in Europe and the separation from America was still very strong and that these national feelings would unquestioningly be aggravated by propaganda not only from within England but from residents in the occupied territories in Germany, who would probably provoke continual incidents with the object of making the position intolerable." French security, Kerr argued, lay in "maintaining a complete understanding with Great Britain and America." Kerr proposed that if the German army were limited to 100,000 troops, the combined peacetime forces of the three Allied powers would be enough to meet any future German challenge. Concerted action to enforce peace terms on Germany "would obtain the wholehearted support of the public opinion of the British Empire and America. . . ." " 157

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Tardieu replied that Germany could mobilize trained reserves in a future war and could strike with superior numbers before the League powers would

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be able to stop an attack. France had no choice but to annex the west bank of the Rhine unless the Allies agreed to set up and garrison an independent Rhenish state under League of Nations supervision. Tardieu disputed Kerr's historical argument: England has always had troops in India and Egypt. Why? Because she knows that her frontier is not at Dover. But. the last war has taught her that her European frontier is on the Rhine and that the Rhine is even more important to her than even the Suez Canal or the Himalayas. . . . You say that the British public does not understand this question. It is the duty of the British Government to make it understand. Neither did the English public understand in 1914 the necessity of conscription. French public opinion would stand for nothing less than the Rhine frontier. "To ask us to give up occupation, is like asking England and the United States to sink their fleet of battleships. We refuse."" ' The meetings ended without agreement. In his covering note to Lloyd George, Kerr wrote, "I would resist the Tardieu proposition to the end."' " 1

6

Kerr's proposal of an Anglo-American commitment to defend France qual­ ified his earlier caution about a binding commitment to the League of Nations. But his stress on the uniqueness of British interests and on the lim­ its to British commitment was significant and striking. On March 14, President Wilson returned to Paris, following Lloyd George, who had come back on March 8. The Anglo-American leaders each offered France a treaty to guarantee French security, if France would abandon its demand for an occupied Rhineland. A compromise in April finally gave France a fifteen-year Allied occupation of the Rhineland along with the two Anglo-American treaties of guarantee. The treaties contained an escape clause, however, by which both treaties would lapse if either America or Britain failed to ratify their own. ' 16

By mid-March, Kerr and other advisers to Lloyd George had become alarmed by the entire body of the German peace treaty that was taking shape. The terms affected not only Germany's western frontier but transferred sub­ stantial German territory in the east to Poland and imposed a heavy bill for war reparations. Kerr agreed with senior British officials that Britain could hardly forego stiff reparations as long as the United States insisted on repay­ ment of Allied war debts. He worried, though, whether the new German democracy could survive the burden. A Communist uprising in Berlin had failed that January, but intelligence reports gave a grim picture of conditions in Germany and underlined the continuing danger of revolution.' Maurice Hankey shared these worries. In a memorandum to Lloyd George on March 19, he wrote: "Mr. Philip Kerr has several times pointed out to you and to me that, while every exaction on Germany can be justified on its merits, the 162

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accumulation of these will put Germany in an utterly impossible position." Hankey warned: "Is there not the gravest danger that the Peace, as it is at pres­ ent developing, may drive Germany to desperation and force her to make common cause with the Bolshevists?"" Over the weekend of March 2 2 - 2 3 , 1919, Lloyd George, Kerr, Hankey, and General Sir Henry Wilson, now chief of the imperial general staff, withdrew to a small hotel in the woods of Fontainebleau. Here they agreed to appeal to the other Allies for a more moderate peace with Germany. Kerr drafted a memorandum that the prime minister delivered in Paris on March 25: "The maintenance of peace will depend on there being no causes of exasperation constantly stirring up the spirit of patriotism, of justice, or fair play to achieve redress." Pointing to the German minorities that would be assigned to Poland and Czechoslovakia, Lloyd George observed, "I cannot conceive of any greater cause of future war than that the German people . . . should be sur­ rounded by a number of small states . . . each of them containing large masses of Germans clamouring for reunion with their native land." An unjust peace would also sharpen the danger of wider upheaval. "The whole existing o r d e r . . . is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other." There was an acute danger now that "Germany may throw in her lot with Bolshevism and place her . . . power at the disposal of revolutionary fanatics whose dream is to conquer the world." 14

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The Fontainebleau memorandum, as it came to be called, incorporated some changes that Lloyd George appears to have made to Kerr's first draft. These show how the two of them worked together to craft an important public state­ ment. In his draft, Kerr argued how the harsh terms imposed on France by Germany in 1871 had failed. "Year by year France became weaker in compar­ ison with her victorious neighbour," Kerr had written. But by forging alliances with other states threatened by Germany, France in fact "became ever more dangerous." Lloyd George inserted the word "numerically" before the word "weaker," and the phrase "ever more dangerous" became in the final memo­ randum "ever more powerful." These changes reveal the sharp eye for polit­ ically charged detail that the prime minister brought to the work of his secretary. But such editing also revealed how both Lloyd George and Kerr, caught up in the detail of the moment, failed to see the deeper flaws in the peace taking shape. The Allies were preparing to demand that Germany accept moral guilt for the war; neither man realized how fundamentally this demand collided with the aim of mitigating the peace terms in other respects. Nor did either perceive how little the proposed reparations and border changes, which left Germany's population and industry largely intact, actually did to diminish that nation's economic strength and future ability to make war. 166

The record of Kerr's activity is scant for the climactic months of the peace conference in April, May, and June. He worked at Lloyd George's side almost every day, responding to crises as they arose and relieving the prime minister

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of less important tasks. On June 2, 1919, Lloyd George again objected to the severity of the terms, but by then it was too late for any major revision. Even the British upheld the central principle that Germany was at fault for the war. The Allies summoned the German delegation and presented the draft peace treaty on May 7. The Germans returned on May 29 with observations that challenged most of its clauses. The Germans objected most deeply to the charge of war guilt in Article 2 3 1 . 168

The Allied leaders appointed Kerr and four other secretaries to write a cov­ ering letter to accompany the Allied Reply to the German Observations. Kerr wrote the letter himself and summarized the Allied case against Germany. "" The German delegation, he declared, wrongly believed that they were being told to make sacrifices "as if this were but the end of some mere struggle for territory and power." The peace treaty marked the end of a moral conflict to defeat "the greatest crime against humanity and the freedom of peoples that any nation, calling itself civilized, has ever consciously committed." Germany had to acknowledge sole guilt for the war and for "the savage and inhuman manner in which it was conducted." 1

Kerr then defended the rest of the settlement. War guilt required restitution, and punishment was necessary to prevent future aggression: "If the German people themselves, or any other nation, are to be deterred from following the footsteps of Prussia, if mankind is to be lifted out of the belief that war for selfish ends is legitimate to any State . . . it will be because those responsible for concluding the war have had the courage to see that justice is not deflected for a convenient peace." Kerr declared the Allied terms "a sincere and delib­ erate attempt to establish 'that reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed, and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind,' which was the agreed basis of the peace." " The Allied leaders accepted Kerr's letter without amendment and presented it under Clemençeau's signature with the Allied Reply on June 16. The Germans signed the peace treaty at Versailles on June 28. 17

Kerr's covering letter to the Allied Reply marked the high point of his serv­ ice to Lloyd George. His earlier political journalism and his work for the prime minister had prepared him for the task, in which for one dramatic moment he spoke (albeit invisibly) for the greatest powers on earth. From the record of his views, there is no doubt that he spoke for himself as well. British efforts to moderate the German terms in the spring foreshadowed the later policy of appeasement. But throughout the Paris conference, Kerr never departed from the goal of a moral verdict against Germany and some form of retribution. The severity of the terms impressed those at the time much more than their leniency, and the Allies soon faced criticism at home for having gone too far to punish the Germans. In the Fontainebleau memorandum, Kerr foresaw the danger of the territo­ rial disputes that Germany would provoke in the 1930s. He also saw the 171

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fragility of German democracy, although he failed to anticipate the danger from the extreme right. But a breakdown of Germany after the war might have created an opportunity as well as a threat. Kerr preserved in his papers an April 1919 letter from Lord Milner, who saw grounds for hope in the event of a German collapse. Milner had just received a copy of a January 1919 speech by the Burgomaster of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, who became the leader of a democratic West Germany after 1949. In his 1919 speech, Adenauer had floated the possibility of a larger West German state on both banks of the Rhine river as an alternative to a separate Rhineland.'" Milner wrote Kerr that in the future "we may have to recognise and deal with Western Germany as distinct from the rest" and that the "Rhinelanders and other West Germans are not Prussians by fundamental character or tradi­ tion or history." If Germany were to break apart, or if it defaulted on the peace terms and the Allies occupied its west, he asked, "Are we to sit upon it as a conquered country forever, or try to make peace with it, encouraging it to detach itself from the possibly Bolshevised . . . remainder?" Looking to the future, Milner wrote: "What I should like to see is an orderly and peaceful State, or States, under our protection, and with which we might do business again . . . without the possibility of their ultimate re-union with the rest of Germany in a happier future being precluded. Indeed what I should hope is that this Western State or States . . . would be the point from which the re-creation of a de-Prussianised Germany might start. We want to reverse the process of the last fifty years and get the more humane . . . west . . . to extend eastward. . . . " Tragically, the regeneration of Germany from its west did not begin until after the Second World War. 174

EXHAUSTION A N D

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Wilson and Lloyd George returned home after signing the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919. Kerr remained in Paris for another three months to help Foreign Secretary Balfour negotiate peace treaties with the remaining Central Powers. The German treaty needed to be ratified by the United States Senate, however, and opposition in the Senate began to grow to the binding clauses in the League of Nations Covenant. Kerr worried that the entire set­ tlement might now fall apart. In an article for the September 1919 Round Table, Kerr warned, "Unless the Western nations actively support and develop the new order which they have brought into being . . . the tide of human affairs will gradually roll back into the old confusion of selfishness and war." Kerr faulted the United States for failing to take any League of Nations mandates: "America laid herself open to the charge of selfish indifference to anything but her own interests by the slowness with which she recognised her duty in the war. . . . She is now showing a similar readiness to escape from practical responsibility for the unfortunate peoples not yet able to stand alone. . . " I75

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As the U.S. Senate vote on the treaty with Germany approached, Kerr opposed British acceptance of any American reservations, on the grounds that the British Empire would then bear burdens not equally shared with the United States. He urged Lloyd George to announce Britain's own withdrawal from the League in two years time if America failed to ratify the Covenant. But he advised calling a conference in the meantime to redraft the Covenant to make it acceptable to the United States. The Senate rejected the treaty on November 19, 1919. Afterwards, Kerr approached Frank Polk, the U.S. rep­ resentative at the Paris peace conference, which continued until January 1920. Kerr suggested that the Senate adopt the Treaty of Versailles but give notice of American withdrawal from the League in two years. The American people could then decide the issue of membership in the elections of 1920. Kerr also urged this idea on Lord Curzon, who succeeded Balfour as foreign secretary in October 1919. Curzon cabled Lord Grey, who was in Washington at the time as a special representative of the British government, but Grey did not raise Kerr's idea with the Americans. 176

177

Lloyd George kept Britain in the League of Nations. In the March 1920 Round Table, Kerr tempered his view of the United States. "The attitude of the American people," he wrote, "is in essentials the broad reflex of an atti­ tude which all their European allies have . . . taken up." No nation was ready to transfer any significant powers of sovereignty to a world body. Kerr now recognized the underlying flaw in the peace that he had earlier defended: "A settlement based on ideal principles . . . can be permanently applied and main­ tained only by a world-government to which all nations will subordinate their private interests." U.S. reservations to the peace treaty that were "not affirma­ tions of the constitutional claims of the Senate" were simply "affirmations of the sovereign right of the American people to make their own policy. . . ." * 17

The war and its aftermath crushed the hopes of the Round Table founders for a closer union of the self-governing empire. Curtis had completed a first installment of the group's final memorandum on the imperial problem by the summer of 1915. 'But he feared that the war would end before the entire work was done, and he also wanted to write a short popular book to present the case for federation. So in October, Curtis produced a draft of the short book, The Problem of the Commonwealth, which restated the argument of the Green Memorandum. To sharpen the issue, Curtis underlined the most controversial part of his argument, the need for an imperial state to lay and collect its own taxes. ,7

180

Kerr and his friends at first recoiled from the Curtis book, worried that to raise the issue of imperial taxation in wartime would be inappropriate and divisive. "There is no organic unity without regular taxing powers," Kerr wrote to Curtis, but "it may be the wisest plan not to go into so much detail. . . The Moot circulated the draft to the Dominion Round Table groups for private criticism, though, which proved no wiser. In early 1916, a

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copy fell into the hands of The Toronto Star, which attacked the Curtis plan. The Moot decided to publish the book under its author's name, and Macmillan released it in May 1916. Curtis left in May for a speaking tour of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia to defend his views, but the controversy publicized the Round Table movement and destroyed the pretense that the central group in London had no preconceived agenda. With their ideas now out in the open, the London Moot concluded in the autumn of 1916 that the time had come to launch a more open political campaign.' But they could not have chosen a worse time, in the middle of a war. The Dominion Round Table groups called instead for an imperial convention after the war to settle the constitutional relations of the United Kingdom and the Dominions. The British group retreated and took up this call. The Moot also proposed a private Round Table conference at war's end to decide the movement's own position and future. " 183

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Kerr finally began to accept the depth of Dominion nationalism after the sessions of the Imperial War Cabinet and War Conference in the spring of 1917. "So far as I can judge," he wrote Curtis in July, "the Dominions will come to the Peace Conference . . . in the spirit which will more and more resist the assertion of any superior authority or influence on the part of the British Government." Kerr now urged an emphasis on the general principle of imperial community rather than on any specific plan to embody it. 187

By war's end, the Dominion Round Table groups had lost most of their members and the pressure of other work occupied the British founders. Philip Kerr was busy as an aide to Lloyd George. Robert Brand and Lionel Hichens had important responsibilities in banking and business, and Dougal Malcolm was absorbed in managing the British South Africa Company. Edward Grigg became an aide-de-camp to the Prince of Wales and accompanied the Prince on his world tour of 1919-20. Lionel Curtis had a nervous breakdown at the end of January 1919 and rested in Morocco for several weeks. He eventually returned to Oxford, where he accepted a research fellowship at All Souls College. Geoffrey Dawson quarreled with Lord Northcliffe, the proprietor of The Times, and resigned as editor in February 1919. Lord Milner secured for him the position of Estates Bursar of All Souls College, where he edited The Round Table with John Dove. Alfred Zimmern, George Craik. F. S. Oliver, and Leo Amery drifted out of the group. 188

The London Moot circulated an agenda in April 1919 for a Round Table convention in December, but lack of interest caused the Moot to cancel the gathering in November. Small surviving groups in each Dominion continued to write quarterly articles for The Round Table, which the London circle kept afloat, and the groups exchanged views from time to time. ' But an Imperial Conference in 1921 resolved that "no advantage is to be gained by holding a constitutional conference." " Kerr and his friends bowed to the inevitable and endorsed the resolutions of the 1923 and 1926 Imperial Conferences, which 181

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affirmed the autonomy of the Dominions. By the 1931 British Statute of Westminster, the Dominions took charge of their foreign relations and became independent nations, retaining only their allegiance to the British Crown. ' As the Dominions moved toward independence, postwar Britain enacted India reform and reduced its control over Egypt and Ireland. Richard Feetham of the South African Round Table group chaired one of the two committees that prepared the Government of India bill for the British Parliament. The bill became law in December 1919. In February of that year, however, violence by some Indian extremists prompted the British to institute the Rowlatt Acts, which authorized the imprisonment of Indians without trial. Gandhi launched a campaign of passive resistance in protest, and violent demonstrations broke out in the spring. In April, General Reginald Dyer, a British officer at the head of a small troop contingent, marched into an enclosed square in the Punjab city of Amritsar and opened fire on a hostile crowd. The people could not escape and several hundred died. With remarkable callousness, the June 1919 Round Table observed, "the campaign against the Rowlatt bills . . . has been followed by grave outbreaks of violence in various parts of India, which tend to show how necessary that legislation was.'" Looking back a year later, though, Kerr wrote the prime minister of an interview with a British official in India, Lord Meston, about the massacre: "He told me that Dyer was an Anglo-Indian, and was born and bred in India. As a class they are always the most anti-native. . . . When he marched his troops into the Jallianwalla Bagh, he found . . . an extremely excited mob. He then became extremely afraid lest . . . his 50 or 60 men should be rushed and overwhelmed." Instead of admitting the truth that he had panicked, Meston told Kerr that Dyer afterward "went bucking" in the clubs of London and became "a popular hero." Gandhi called off his campaign in 1922, and the British found Indians in the meantime to begin working the India Act. But the violent events of 1919 embittered Indian feelings and trans­ formed Gandhi into the leader of a mass movement. 19

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Milner himself supported British retrenchment in Egypt, closing the book of his own imperial career that had opened in that country thirty years earlier. Britain had made Egypt a protectorate in 1914, and at the end of the war, lead­ ers of the nationalist Wafd party pressed for Egyptian independence. Violence erupted in March 1919 when the British arrested and deported the Wafd leader Saad Zaghlul.' The British soon released Zaghlul and sent a mission in December under Lord Milner to investigate conditions in the country. On his return home in April 1920, Milner reported that British suspicion of Egyptian nationalism was a "profound mistake" that "could only drive mod­ erate men more and more into the camp of the Extremists." Milner called for granting independence to Egypt in return for a treaty of alliance that would preserve British control over the Suez Canal and give Britain the right 96

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to base forces in the country. Milner also called for a British veto over Egyptian foreign relations. In August 1920, Milner and Zaghlul agreed to these terms, but Wafd leaders divided. Britain finally imposed its terms on Egypt in 1922. " Conservatives attacked Milner's recommendations as a retreat from empire, although he did not propose to give up British control in any matters that were strategically vital. * Privately, however, Milner conceded the failure of British imperialism to remake Egypt itself. He had written in 1892 that under British tutelage Egypt was emerging from a despotic government. In a 1920 letter to Lloyd George, Milner could find in that country only "avarice and corruption, which permeates every class of society." The Round Table endorsed the Milner-Zaghlul agreement. But Kerr was skeptical; in an inde­ pendent Egypt, he wrote Lloyd George, "Zaghlul will begin to create a PanIslamic-Sinn Fein machine making mischief everywhere. . . ," " 1

8

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Kerr saw a sinister link behind opposition to British power in different parts of the world. The most violent opposition was closest to home, in Ireland. Following British suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, the Irish Nationalist party lost popular support to the more radical Sinn Fein move­ ment, which wanted complete Irish independence instead of Home Rule. In February 1917, the worried Nationalists demanded Home Rule in an undi­ vided Ireland. Kerr urged the prime minister to sound conciliatory but yield nothing. "In the long run," Kerr wrote, "the only possible settlement is 'a united Ireland in a United Kingdom, in a united Empire.'" In March 1917, Lloyd George declared the right of Ulster to stand out from the rest of Ireland, prompting the Irish Nationalists to walk out of Parliament and appeal to the United States and the Dominions for support. " 203

21

American support was especially important for Britain that spring, and shortly before entering the war President Wilson privately urged Lloyd George to expedite some form of Irish autonomy. " The prime minister's sec­ retariat began in March to plan a convention of Irish leaders to this end. In July 1917, Irish Nationalists and Irish Unionists began meeting in Dublin in closed session under the chairmanship of Sir Horace Plunkett. Nine months later, on April 5, 1918, a narrow majority of delegates agreed to federate an undivided Ireland with Britain. The Ulster Unionists opposed the majority, though, as did many of the Nationalists. 2

5

206

Most of the Nationalists rallied to Sinn Fein when Lloyd George announced on April 8, 1918, that wartime conscription would extend to Ireland, which had until then been exempt. The Second Battle of the Marne Was raging in France and C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, noted the determination of the prime minister and Kerr to enforce conscrip­ tion on Ireland. Speaking of Lloyd George, Scott recorded in his diary: "He knew there would be trouble—rioting, bloodshed, but it was better to face all that and get it over. . . . If men were to be shot they were to be put up against

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a wall and shot on the spot, as happened in the Paris Commune." With this sentiment, Scott added, "Kerr concurred. The executions after the Dublin ris­ ing, spread out day after day, a fresh batch every morning for breakfast, had been intolerable." For Ireland to resist conscription would be tantamount to secession. "Lincoln had the same difficulty to meet," Kerr averred, "and had met it by force." Kerr tried to make a more principled case against Irish sep­ aratism in the June Round Table: "If self-determination means that all edu­ cated citizens ought to share in the rights and responsibilities of the village, of the county, the state, and the empire to which they belong, it is a sound doc­ trine. If it means that every community has a right to think only of itself and to set up on its own . . . whenever it chooses, it is the apotheosis of selfishness and the highway to war." "" 207

2

Britain in fact made no attempt to conscript troops from Ireland. But the crisis enabled Sinn Fein to sweep the Irish Catholic seats in the general elec­ tion of December 1918. Refusing to take their seats in London, the Sinn Fein members constituted themselves an Irish Parliament, the Dail Eireann, and proclaimed an Irish Republic on January 2 1 , 1919. Over the next year, resist­ ance intensified into guerrilla warfare. President Wilson, who now needed British support for his League of Nations, ignored Irish Catholic appeals, and many Irish-Americans consequently saw the League as a scheme to preserve the British Empire. Irish-American groups backed Wilson's opponents in the U.S. Senate and helped defeat the Treaty of Versailles. "" On December 22, 1919, Lloyd George introduced a new Home Rule bill that, according to Hankey, owed its conception to Kerr. The bill provided for two parliaments, one for Ulster and one for the rest of Ireland. " Ulster Protestants formed a government in the north but Sinn Fein fought on. 2

21

On April 14, 1920, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning Britain for its policy in Ireland of imprisonment without trial. " Kerr dismissed the resolution as an election-year appeal to the Irish-American vote. But he could not so easily dismiss public opinion in Great Britain, which also turned against the policy of repression as reports mounted of bru­ tal killings on both sides. Even The Times and The Round Table condemned British countermeasures. " Kerr continued to back repression but he began to have doubts. "I don't think we can beat Sinn Fein by force," he wrote Lloyd George in July 1920, "with the resources we have at present or with public opinion as it is to-day." That month, Kerr welcomed an offer by Colonel House to mediate, but House met with no Irish response. An offer of media­ tion by Catholic Archbishop Clune of Perth, Australia, broke down in December when Kerr, on Lloyd George's instructions, demanded that the Irish Republicans first surrender their arms. 2

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Kerr almost to the end saw Ireland through a Round Table lens. "The fight is really the same as in South Africa and in the case of the war of the North and South," he wrote at the end of 1920 to Edward Lascelles, a British

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official. "It is a fight between a narrow but intensely sincere particularist nationalism and the larger idea of a union of self-governing communities for which the American Federation and the British Empire stand." Kerr over­ looked the fact that the United States was itself the creation of a particularist nationalism in 1776. But he finally began to talk less of common citizenship and more of simply retaining control over Irish foreign relations and defense. "Great Britain cannot and will not admit Ireland's international status," he wrote to Lloyd George in 1921, conjuring a fantastic image of foreign troops and warships arriving in southern Ireland if it became independent. But for a settlement short of that, he conceded, "Great Britain will withdraw . . . and leave Ireland absolutely alone." The settlement ending the war in December 1921 gave Dominion status to southern Ireland. 216

217

Although Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom, the loss of southern Ireland antagonized much of the Unionist party. The fiasco of British efforts to impose a harsh peace on Turkey damaged Lloyd George's political standing at home still further. In his memoirs, Lloyd George described the postwar Ottoman Empire as "a wilderness of decay and ruin, the result of centuries of misrule. . . ." At Paris in July 1919, the Turkish Grand Vizier did nothing to improve this opinion when he tried to excuse the wartime murder of Christians in huge numbers by pointing out that his immediate predecessors had also murdered a huge number of Muslims. Lloyd George saw no countervailing reasons of expediency to mitigate the imposition of harsh terms on Turkey, and with this view Kerr agreed. In their single-minded effort to bring Turkey to jus­ tice, however, the two lost sight of what was just or even possible. 2IS

219

Kerr warned the prime minister not to withdraw British troops stationed in the Caucasus in August 1919. "The evidence is overwhelming that there will be another frightful massacre of Armenians. . . ." But Kerr acknowledged the limits to British power: "The Americans are getting very excited, and are pressing us to delay our withdrawal. . . . I reply that it is impossible for Great Britain to police the world. . . ." ° When America finally backed out of the League of Nations, Lloyd George and Kerr found a new partner in the Near East, Greece. 22

Under Premier Eleftherios Venizelos, the Greeks had joined the Allies in 1917 and had occupied eastern Thrace and the Smyrna (Izmir) region of Asia Minor in the spring of 1919. These areas of prewar Turkey had narrow Greek majorities. British naval and military officers objected, however, when the Allies awarded the two areas to Greece in February 1920. The British High Commissioner in Constantinople (Istanbul), Admiral John de Robeck, argued that Turkey would fight to recover the two regions, which had large Turkish populations. If the Turks were guilty of wartime atrocities, he added, so too were the Greeks. The British War Office warned that Allied forces in the area were not sufficient to impose a settlement on the Turks. Commitments in Ireland and elsewhere tied down the peacetime British army. 221

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Kerr responded to de Robeck and the War Office with a forceful note of his own. "I can only suppose that the Admiral means," Kerr wrote, "that Great Britain entered the war in order that Turkish rule with its hideous record of massacre and stagnation should be perpetuated over Greek, Armenian, Arab and other majorities." Kerr excused Greek atrocities as the byproduct of com­ bat and he added, "If it comes to a competition in atrocities, I don't think it will be difficult to prove the Turk superior in the game." With the Greek army, he noted. Allied forces in the region had a two-to-one superiority in troops over the Turks." Kerr repeated these points in reply to a memorandum by the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, who faced Muslim opposition in India to the partition of Turkey. 2

221

The Allies presented peace terms to the Turkish government in April 1920, demanding the Sultan's recognition of the Greek claims to Thrace and Smyrna, a French mandate over Syria, and British mandates over Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. In June, Greek forces routed the Turkish nationalist army of Mustafa Kemal, who had formed a government in Angora (Ankara) opposed to the Sultan in Constantinople, and in August 1920, the Sultan's government signed the Allied terms in the Treaty of Sevres. Kemal rejected the treaty, though, and the British position deteriorated sharply thereafter. The young pro-Allied King Alexander I of Greece died after being bitten by a pet monkey. Venizelos lost an election and the pro-German King Constantine I recovered the Greek throne that he had lost in 1917. After purging Venizelists from the Greek army, Constantine launched an ill-executed offensive against Angora in the spring of 1921, which disintegrated over the summer and fall. 224

Over events in Turkey, Kerr soon found himself in the crossfire of tensions between Lloyd George and the foreign secretary. Lord Curzon. The latter had pressed for peace terms that took Constantinople away from the Turks but gave back eastern Thrace and Smyrna. In March 1921, at an Allied confer­ ence in London, Lloyd George had called for an armistice between the Greeks and Turks. Intercepted Greek telegrams from London to Athens, however, informed Curzon that Lloyd George had secretly encouraged the Greeks to undertake their offensive in Asia Minor. The cables named Kerr as the British leader's secret go-between with the Greeks. Unlike Kerr's secret mission to Switzerland in March 1918, the Foreign Office had now been kept in the dark. 225

226

The British position against Turkey collapsed when the French, who had also intercepted the Greek telegrams, struck a separate peace with Kemal's government. This freed Turkish nationalist forces in eastern Asia Minor to eject the Greeks from the west by mid-1922. The British Dominions declined an invitation to reinforce a screen of British troops guarding the Dardanelles and Britain had to withdraw. By the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the Allies gave back eastern Thrace, Smyrna, and Constantinople to Turkey, which became a republic with Kemal as its president.

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Curzon joined other prominent figures in British political life who saw Kerr as a dangerous influence. Kerr had incurred the displeasure of Winston Churchill in February 1919 for helping to thwart the latter's attempt to orchestrate a war on Bolshevik Russia. In a June 1920 conversation with Lord Riddell, proprietor of the News of the World and a friend of Lloyd George, Churchill observed the following of the prime minister and his secretary: At present the RM. is conducting the business of the Foreign Office with Kerr's assistance. I don't think that any man who does not hold a leading position in the State should be permitted to exercise so much influence on important questions as Kerr does. I told him so the other night. I said to him, "You have no real responsibility. If things go wrong, others have to take the consequences. All you have to do is walk out of Downing Street." They are formulating schemes which affect the lives of millions and the destinies of the world, and all this is done behind the scenes." 7

There is no record of Kerr's response, if he had one. Churchill's real objec­ tion was not so much to Kerr as to the prime minister's reliance on personal staff, but this reliance was now becoming a liability. Sir Maurice Hankey recognized the need to move policy back into the departments traditionally concerned with making it. In letters to Kerr, who had begun a four-month rest in September 1920, he observed that Kerr's supe­ rior drafting had for too long relieved the Foreign Office of writing papers that should have been its responsibility to produce." For his own part, Kerr saw the Foreign Office as an obstacle to the new diplomacy that he and his Round Table colleagues wanted. In the December 1918 Round Table, Curtis had articulated the group's view of traditional international relations: 8

A diplomacy whose principal motive lay in upsetting or maintaining a bal­ ance between two opposite groups, of necessity tended to intrigue. . . . The relations of states were normally discussed through a network of embassies on the basis of written messages and reports . . . meetings of principals were the rarest of events. Now in all affairs the surest antidote of local intrigue is the intercourse of principals face to face. The way was now open, Curtis declared, for "the conduct of international affairs by frank conference instead of by intrigue."" Echoing Curtis, Kerr warned the prime minister in July 1919, "The . . . Foreign Offices of all the chief powers are trying to get the control of diplo­ macy back into their own hands so that they may revert once more to the ancient and hopeless practice of presenting separate notes through their ambassadors about everything.'""' In a July 1920 talk with Lord Riddell, Kerr faulted the outlook as well as the methods of the British Foreign Office, whose professional diplomats had "no conception of policy in its wider 9

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s e n s e . . . ." Lord Milner had complained in 1917 that the professional train­ ing of the soldier did not provide the larger vision to conduct modern war. Kerr believed that the professional training of the diplomat did not provide a grasp of the interdependent problems of peace. Like waging war, however, making peace bogged down in the details. Instead of the promising world order that had seemed possible in early 1919, Lloyd George and Kerr found themselves two years later fighting a brutal war in Ireland and conducting secret intrigues to recreate old-fashioned spheres of influence in the Near East. The hollowness of Lloyd George's imperial and foreign policy helped persuade the Unionist party to withdraw from the coali­ tion in October 1922, bringing the prime minister's downfall. The Unionists became known again as the Conservative party and formed a government under Andrew Bonar Law. By September 1920, Kerr himself had collapsed under the strain of settling the peace treaties, managing an empire, and seeing the prime minister through nine international conferences in as many months. " Kerr's physician, Sir Bertrand Dawson, now Lord Dawson of Penn, ordered him to take an extended rest. Kerr had become weary in his political outlook too. "Great Britain must deliberately draw in its horns in the matter of foreign policy," he wrote his chief, urging that Britain concentrate on domestic recovery and imperial problems. Lloyd George seems to have decided that fall to let go of Kerr. In November 1920, he arranged for his secretary to become political director of The Daily Chronicle, a newspaper owned by supporters. Kerr took up the post in May 1921, only to resign from the Chronicle after six months to withdraw to private life. 2

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During the years from 1917 to 1921, Kerr's principal role was to make sure that important matters came to his chief's attention. The prime minister praised his service in this capacity: "I could not have kept fully in touch with events abroad without Mr. Kerr's intelligent and informed vigilance." Philip Kerr's influence on policy is more difficult to assess. Lloyd George could brusquely dismiss his secretary's advice when it did not serve his needs of the moment, and Kerr failed in his larger ambitions to recentralize the British Empire and establish a peacetime partnership with the United States. But he helped manage events and he had a hand in some of the key decisions of war and peace. His distinctive contribution was to encourage a moral emphasis in the prime minister's public statements and policies. But his effort to follow a moral direction eventually ran him aground, and his unconventional role as a confidential adviser and intermediary ended in controversy. 236

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The war catapulted Lord Milner and his disciples to the pinnacle of power, and its aftermath destroyed most of their hopes and plans. The more conser­ vative members drifted out of the Round Table Moot after the war. Milner retired in March 1921 and died in July 1925, still convinced that the British Empire was the highest form of community to which its self-governing

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peoples could aspire. Kerr realized that the British Empire had to become something more universal. By working together with the United States, he believed that a reformed British Empire could anchor and extend a wider lib­ eral civilization. For the rest of his life, he worked to improve AngloAmerican relations and encourage U.S. involvement in the world. But Kerr's war and postwar experience also deepened his sense that ordinary diplomacy was not adequate to the needs of world order. During the 1920s and 1930s, he tried to influence events informally on his own.

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4 RENEWED HOPES, 1921-1930

At the end of 1921, Philip Kerr returned to private life to devote himself to religious study and practice. His interest in world affairs eventually revived but with a new and more universal sense of purpose rooted in faith. As secre­ tary to the Rhodes Trustees from 1925, Kerr administered the Rhodes Scholarship program and worked to improve the academic calibre of the Scholars. His goal was to produce Rhodes Scholars who would someday reach positions of influence imbued with the ideals of liberal-democratic civilization. From private life, Kerr also tried in the 1920s to influence British colonial policy in Africa, reduce international tensions, and reconcile capital and labor at home. In these three fields, he tried to serve as an informal medi­ ator. Unfortunately, the solutions he urged proved impractical, either because he did not think deeply enough about the difficulties he confronted or because others did not want to think as deeply as he did.

CHRISTIAN

SCIENCE

After leaving the Daily Chronicle at the end of 1921, Kerr went to the United States, where he lived for a year on the farms of several families belonging to the Christian Science church. Kerr had converted in 1914 to the new faith. His doubts about his family's Roman Catholicism had grown in the years since he had left Oxford, but he did not embrace a secular rationalism; instead, he turned inward. In a 1909 letter to Robert Brand, he wrote, "I believe in the eye of the soul . . . as something quite different from the eye of reason. I am coming more and more to form judgments by instinct—to trust to what I feel to be the right thing to do—not merely in the moral order but in politics or similar affairs—and not to trust to reason." Kerr did not dis­ pense with logic but he defended the primacy of intuition and feeling. In a 1910 letter to Katharine Oliver, wife of F. S. Oliver, he wrote, "The brain is 1

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but a minister to the heart—a good servant but a terrible master." In later life, Kerr reasoned increasingly from the heart. Kerr's developing inner life had a practical bent. He accepted reports of paranormal phenomena and an article on telepathy appeared in The State under his editorship/ To a skeptical Brand, he defended the possibility of miracles. "I do believe that the human w i l l . . . can act on matter without muscular action e.g. table turning, telepathy and similar manifestations." Kerr vaguely associ­ ated these things with Christian Science. "Well believing as I do . . . in the power of faith . . . to affect matter e.g. Christian Science . . . I do believe in most of the magic which people believe in as miracles." His interest in other sorts of miracles seems to have ended, though, as he turned to the new faith. 5

The founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, organized the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston in 1879. Several hundred branch churches, including fifty-eight in Britain, had formed by 1910.'' Mrs. Eddy held that sec­ ular paranormal claims were false, but she taught that physical and emotional healings were possible through faith. In her textbook, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy wrote that human suffering was not the result of an intrinsic condition of sin but was an illusion of "mortal mind," a false state of consciousness engendered by material existence. The healing of physical and mental illness, and ultimate salvation, lay in a person knowing and feeling a sense of oneness with an antimaterial God. This oneness could be cultivated through faith and good conduct in life. To Mrs. Eddy, such prac­ tice was a "Science" of which Jesus was the prime teacher and exemplar. To heal themselves, Christian Scientists tried to rely on religious faith rather than on modern medicine, and literalists refused all medical treatment for them­ selves and their families. The new religion did not limit its concerns to per­ sonal health. Mrs. Eddy urged her followers to heal the world through positive thinking and conduct. 7

During his Asian journey of 1911-12, Philip Kerr explored Hinduism and Buddhism but did not find either satisfying. Nor did he find solace on a visit to the Catholic retreat of Lourdes, France, while traveling home from his Alpine vacation with the Astors in early 1913. During his visit to India the following winter, he read the Bible twice a day and but came home in March 1914 still troubled by doubt. During an April visit to Rest Harrow, the seaside house of the Astors, Kerr had appendicitis and only the quick action of a nearby doctor prevented complications that could have proved fatal. Nancy Astor, who had converted to Christian Science after an illness in February, gave Kerr a copy of Science and Health. Although orthodox medical attention had just saved his life, the faith of Mrs. Eddy appealed to Kerr and he con­ verted. "It was on the sofa in the drawing room one sunny morning in April 1914," he recalled on a later visit to Rest Harrow. " In a 1922 letter to former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, who never fully recovered from a stroke in October 1919, Kerr tried to explain his conversion: 8

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"Before the war I was a mental & nervous wreck. The doctors made me take a complete rest cure for two years, & thought I would never be able to work hard again. I then looked into Christian Science, & though it took some time, I was able to carry on as Mr. Lloyd George's secretary—no easy job I can tell you!"" Wilson graciously declined Philip Kerr's invitation to explore Christian Science. Kerr's conversion did not relieve him of intermittent bouts of fatigue, but Christian Science gave new meaning to his life by transforming his illness from a condition to be endured into a challenge to be overcome. There is no evidence of any other private aspect of his life that Kerr wanted through faith to deny or defeat." He never married, though. Before embark­ ing for Asia in 1911. he fell in love with Lady Beatrice Cecil, the daughter of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, to whom Nancy Astor had introduced him." The Cecils were Anglican, however, and religion was a barrier to their engagement. Kerr postponed forcing the issue, and on his return to England in 1912, he discovered that Lady Beatrice no longer wanted to marry him. He wrote dejectedly to Nancy Astor, referring to Lady Beatrice by the first letter of her nickname, Mima: 12

Its all over. I had a talk with M. today &, as I feared, religion was a bar to further meetings. If that was all I should not despair. But we never got on common ground at all. I once touched her soul. I have lived in the memory ever since. I could not find it t o d a y . . . . Whether she has changed or 11 don't k n o w . . . . There is only one consolation. I'm sure she is not now in love with me. It makes all the difference that I have not spoiled her l i f e . . . . The world seems very empty and cold. Thank you so much for all you have done. There is nothing more to be said—a year's dream has come to an end. 15

As he recovered from his surgery in the spring and early summer of 1914, Kerr deepened his friendship with Nancy Astor, with whom he shared a sense of inner renewal through Christian Science. "I only feel really well after read­ ing C. S. for a bit and your daily letter," he wrote her in April. "Sin and pain are like lies, they cease to affect you directly you know they are lies." " He and Nancy Astor gradually became each other's best friend. Later, Kerr found companionship with a young American woman he met in 1919 through a Christian Science church in Paris. But the friendship with her ended in 1920." Philip Kerr knew that for him to leave the Roman Catholic faith would devastate his family, and at first he kept his Christian Science conversion to himself, especially after the death of his younger brother David in October 1914. But he could conceal his true feelings no longer after a November 1915 visit to Ampleforth, a leading Catholic public school. Here he was cel­ ebrated as an accomplished Catholic ex-schoolboy, albeit from the rival Oratory School. * Shortly afterward, he disclosed his new faith to his family, throwing his parents into anguish. "You know I would do anything to spare 1

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you," he wrote to his mother in May 1916. "But our Lord said himself that no man was worthy of him who was not willing to leave all, father and mother & friends, to follow him, and that is what is happening now. Of course it does not mean leaving in the sense of separation in anything but belief.'"'' Lady Anne Kerr became a widow in September 1916, and from then until her death in January 1931 she was unable to accept her son's departure from the Catholic Church. Following a row in 1921 between Nancy (now Lady) Astor and her own son by her first marriage, Philip counseled Lady Astor, "he is not your son but God's, and your responsibility is to help him to recognise that he is a free being." " Kerr might have been speaking as well of himself. "Someday we will talk about all these things, mother," Kerr wrote in 1923, "and you will be wonderfully reassured. Meanwhile I have to go my way to God, and you have to go yours, knowing t h a t . . . we shall all one day awake 'in his likeness' & be united forever, Paw & David, & all the rest of us." Besides giving him a new sense of control over his health, Christian Science enabled Kerr to feel that he now belonged to the stream of Protestant Christianity that he associated with the rise of modern democracy and indi­ vidual freedom. In a 1926 article on Italian Fascism for The Christian Science Monitor, he wrote: 2

21

The Protestant, liberal and democratic civilization, which is the basis of the modern world, grew out of the conviction that individual judgment was more important than obedience to the authority of the church; that the citi­ zens were more important than . . . the state. . . . The Fascist philosophy is exactly the opposite. It represents the older Roman Catholic as opposed to the Protestant ideal. It does not believe that the state exists for the individ­ ual but that the individual exists for the state. 22

Kerr's negative view of Catholicism was his own and not that of Christian Science. But his use for Protestant analogy was not absolute and he deeply opposed separatism in the political sphere. In his goal of a democratic world state, Kerr envisioned a future with roots in the two Western Christian tradi­ tions: the Protestant idea of resting authority with individuals, and the Catholic idea of giving institutional form to a universal human community. Before the war, Kerr had divided the world into two contending camps, and afterward he continued to see a sharp distinction between democracy and authoritarianism. But he now saw a more general condition, national sover­ eignty, as the deeper problem of world order. Interrupting his farm life, he accepted an invitation from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to speak at the annual Institute of Politics that the College began holding in July 1922. He presented his new view in three lectures.

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Kerr observed that the danger of world war now seemed remote. "The men­ ace today is . . . local fighting about frontiers. . . ." But a deeper cause of war remained: "It is not race, or religion, or color, or nationality, or despotism, or commercial rivalry, or any of the causes usually cited. It is the division of humanity into absolutely sovereign states." Human civilization had advanced with the rise of the modern nation-state, but relations between nations were still unregulated and prone to violence. "The peoples of the world today are neither sovereign nor free. . . . Their only power is to fight," he declared. "The only way in which they can become free and become sov­ ereign is to pool their sovereignty. . . ." Only a universal state could put an end to the anarchy among nations. Kerr held up the American Union as an example of federation that the world as a whole could follow. He restated his views on a return visit to Williamstown in the summer of 1923. Interviewed on an October 1922 trip to Toronto, Kerr acknowledged that he no longer believed in the possibility of imperial federation. But far from retreating to a more limited view of the politically possible, he now believed more strongly in the larger goal of world federation. Kerr also thought that only a religious movement could bring about this goal. In a letter to his Round Table friends, he declared: "1 am increasingly convinced that Christian Science is the real key to all our problems, political and economic, no less than personal. You can imagine the choice before a young Roman in the early days—should he throw himself into the Christian movement or into reform­ ing and stabilising the Roman political structure!" * In a letter to Brand declining an offer to become foreign editor of The Times, Kerr wrote, "So long as nations are dominated by hatred and greed and a materialist philoso­ phy . . . day to day politics consists . . . in adjusting the effects of causes which it cannot reach." " Kerr thought that he could remove these larger causes. 21

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Kerr eventually returned to the task of trying to influence the world through smaller and more practical increments of change. But although nothing in Christian Science specified the stands on particular issues that he would later take, the faith supported his general view that world tensions were the result of misguided ideas and not the consequence of intractable interests and feel­ ings. Christian Scientists could heal the world, he later wrote, by seeing other human beings "not as held in bondage by narrow nationalisms, by class jeal­ ousies and race feuds . . . but as they are in reality, as one family . . . living together in unity, peace, prosperity, and good will." " During the 1920s and 1930s, Kerr would treat nationalisms, class jealousies, and race feuds as symptoms that an effort to reconcile differences could cure. In identifying national sovereignty as the underlying world problem, though, Kerr made into a defect the fundamental attribute of all nation-states. His new sense of what was wrong in the world implied less of a moral differ­ ence among nations than the contrast between freedom and authority that he 1

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had drawn before and during the First World War. When evil regimes came to power or strengthened their power in the 1930s, sharper moral distinctions among nations would become unavoidable.

THE R H O D E S

LEGACY

In July 1925, the Rhodes Trustees selected Philip Kerr to be their secretary. The principal work of the secretary was to administer the Rhodes Scholarships, the premier international scholarship program in the world. The Scholarships had their origins in a romantic vision of Anglo-Saxon unity. In 1877, in the first of seven wills, Cecil Rhodes had dedicated his future min­ eral fortune to endow a "Secret Society" that would have as its goal ". . . the extension of British rule throughout the world . . . the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inau­ guration of a system of colonial representation in the imperial Parliament. . . and finally the foundation of so great a power as hereafter to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity."" In his later wills, Rhodes provided for scholarships to bring young men from the Englishspeaking world together to study at Oxford. Early histories of the Rhodes endowment treated the secret society as a youthful enthusiasm that the founder replaced in his later wills with the Rhodes Scholarships.' 2

In fact, Rhodes never abandoned his original vision, which he confided in 1891 to the crusading London editor William Thomas Stead, and to Alfred Milner. who had been Stead's assistant in the early 1880s. But the secret soci­ ety that the three appear to have formed broke up during the Boer War, when Stead defended the Boers against Rhodes and Milner." After the death of Rhodes in 1902, Milner joined the Rhodes Trustees, who affirmed the founder's intention to promote closer ties between the English-speaking peo­ ples. However, the early Trustees made public service, not allegiance to a political creed or goal, the ambition sought in a Rhodes Scholar.' The Trustees continued subsidies to political parties and newspapers in South Africa that Rhodes had made in his lifetime, and their provision of matching funds to The Round Table after 1909 marked a wider commitment to the goal of imperial federation. But as hopes of imperial union faded after the First World War, the Trustees ended these political involvements and thereafter devoted the Trust to educational purposes." 4

The Rhodes Trust afforded a home to members of the Round Table Moot after the First World War. Geoffrey Dawson succeeded George Parkin as sec­ retary to the Trustees in 1919 and held this position, in addition to those of Estates Bursar of All Souls and editor of The Round Table, until John Dove began editing the journal two years later. Edward (now Sir Edward) Grigg replaced Kerr as secretary to Lloyd George in 1921 and succeeded Dawson as Rhodes secretary when the latter resumed the editorship of The Times in

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December 1922. On his appointment as governor of Kenya in 1925, Grigg relinquished the post of Rhodes secretary to Kerr." In his last will, Rhodes established sixty scholarships to Oxford University for eighteen British colonies and two scholarships for each American state. He also gave fifteen to Germany. One-third of the Scholars were to be chosen each year for three years of study. The German emperor nominated his coun­ try's Scholars and committees of university and college presidents in each British colony or American state nominated the rest. The Trustees restricted the Scholarships to graduate students, and the first British Empire and German Scholars arrived at Oxford University in the autumn of 1903. The first Americans arrived a year later. The German Scholarships continued until the outbreak of war in 1914, when Parliament revoked them. 18

In addition to intellect, athletic ability, and moral character, Rhodes demanded that each Scholar "esteem the performance of public duty as his highest aim."- Although careful to remove the Scholarships from a partisan purpose, the Trustees hoped and expected that a significant number of Scholars would reach positions of leadership in the public life of their countries. In the early years, candidates of the desired quality did not come forward in sufficient numbers from the United States. " Parkin reported why after touring America in the summer of 1918. Oxford University required Greek as well as Latin of its incoming students, which severely limited the pool of American candidates. Most U.S. secondary schools also did not compare favorably with the English public schools that supplied Oxford with most of its students. To make matters worse, university and college officials within each American state often horsetraded Rhodes Scholars, nominating each other's graduates in alternate years. At Parkin's recommendation, the Rhodes Trustees reappointed the American selection committees in 1918 to consist of former Rhodes Scholars, with only the chairmen of each committee drawn from outside. Oxford in 1920 dropped its entrance requirement in Greek. 9

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The reforms of 1918-20 went only part of the way to improve the American program. Rhodes had stipulated that each state could have only two Scholars at Oxford at a time, so to allow each American Scholar to complete three years of study, states took turn making no nominations in one year out of three. Good students were thus excluded in some states every year and those nominated from smaller states often did not match in ability those from larger ones. ' In 1918, the Rhodes Trustees appointed Frank Aydelotte to give closer attention to the American program. An American Rhodes Scholar himself, Aydelotte had taught English at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and became presi­ dent of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 1921. He made several visits to England in the early 1920s, where he discussed reform of the American program with Lord Milner. Aydelotte proposed and Milner agreed to a grouping of states into eight districts of six states each. The selection committees already function­ ing in each state could nominate a Scholar every year, but district committees 4

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would decide a final four choices from the district. In August 1925, the Rhodes Trustees approved the Aydelotte plan pending a determination of its legality. In September 1925, Kerr visited the United States and Canada to evaluate the Scholarships in North America. After conferring with the American sec­ retary, Kerr reported, "Aydelotte put his finger on the strategic point of the whole Scholarship system." '' This point was the need to select exceptional Scholars who would play leading roles in later life. The present system pro­ duced too many men who would not. In his 1926 Report to the Trustees, Kerr explained, "Half a dozen men of real influence and ability in public life, in education, in journalism, in law or in business can do a thousandfold more than hundreds of average men who never attain to any position of influence outside their own immediate circle of acquaintances." " Finding such men was not an end in itself, though, but the means to a wider goal of public service: 44

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Rhodes . . . hoped and expected that his Scholars would be fired with the zeal to help in extending and consolidating . . . English-speaking standards of law, administration and government which are essential to the unity, peace, and prosperity of the world, and that being so fired they would be able to obtain during their Scholarship period the education, the experience and the contacts that would enable them to work effectively for this cause in their own countries in after life. 47

The goal of "extending and consolidating . . . English-speaking standards" echoed the language of the 1877 Rhodes will, which called for extending and consolidating an Anglo-Saxon empire. But instead of an inner circle of initi­ ates working to advance an ethnocratic imperium, Kerr defined the Rhodes Scholars as leaders dedicated to preserving and extending a broader kind of civilization. In this way, he helped complete the transition of the Rhodes legacy from a narrow political purpose to a larger public service aim, which paralleled his own pilgrimage from imperial federalism to a wider notion of liberal-democratic community. The Rhodes Scholarships, he hoped, would strengthen and extend such a community by helping to launch the careers of public-spirited leaders dedicated to its values. Aydelotte's reform plan was crucial to the kind of program that Kerr envi­ sioned. The American secretary polled former Rhodes Scholars, college pres­ idents, and academic professional associations in the United States for their view of the proposed reform. A majority of returned Rhodes Scholars, private colleges, and association members supported the district plan, but state uni­ versity leaders were divided. Sir Douglas Hogg, attorney-general of Britain and a Rhodes Trustee from 1925, ruled that Aydelotte's proposal was not in the original discretion of the Trustees and would alter the terms of the Rhodes will. Amending a will required an Act of the British Parliament. '' Rhodes bit­ terly regretted the loss of the American colonies in 1776, and amending the 48

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Rhodes will threatened to place the British Parliament in the position of again passing legislation that would be unpopular in many American states. On his autumn visits to the United States in 1927 and 1928, Kerr visited universities and colleges to explain and defend the reform plan. In addresses to students, he also underlined the qualifications for a Rhodes Scholarship in terms that tried to be both elevated and inclusive. Intellectual ability came first, he declared, followed by manhood that included the qualities of sympa­ thy and kindness. Leadership was next and this a candidate revealed through moral courage, not by winning elections to student office. Athletic ability was still a strength, but sportsmanship and effort on the playing field were enough to meet the physical qualification for a Rhodes Scholarship. 50

51

Kerr discussed the new plan with Sir Esmé Howard, the British ambassa­ dor to Washington, and with Frank Kellogg, the American secretary of state, neither of whom objected. In a report to the Rhodes Trustees, though. Kennoted the political risk of alienating those American states with smaller pop­ ulations: "A Rhodes Scholarship means very little in the life of big states like New York or Illinois. It means a great deal in the life of small states like Idaho or Mississippi, and each state, be it remembered, returns two Senators to the United States Senate irrespective of its size and population." Kerr urged the Trustees as a practical matter to ensure that some Scholarships be awarded to the smaller states under the new system, especially when candidates from big­ ger states were not greatly superior. Parliament enacted the Rhodes Trust Act in the spring of 1929. The Act preserved the total number of Scholarships allotted to each participating country but freed the Trustees to amend the selection process as they saw fit. K e n circulated a memorandum that summer to explain the new procedures. 52

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The American Oxonian, journal of the American Rhodes Scholars, pub­ lished in the spring of 1930 an exchange between two Rhodes Scholars over the new system. James Winston argued that Rhodes "desired to make a con­ tribution to better international understanding through the medium of bring­ ing together, at Oxford, representatives of each of the states for association with Englishmen." " Since the existing system fulfilled this purpose, he ques­ tioned the need to change it. Henry Allen Moe argued that "the unique signif­ icance of the Rhodes Will is due to the exceptional qualities which he demands for appointment to the Scholarships which he founded." To Moe, Rhodes had intended to stress the exceptional and not the representative qual­ ity of those Americans sent to Oxford. In a 1930 statement approved by the Trustees. Ken, now Lord Lothian, pointed out that a Rhodes Scholarship did not confer automatic admission to Oxford colleges. The university had removed its Greek requirement, but its general standards for admission were rising and Rhodes Scholars had to meet these standards. " 55

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The British Empire Scholarships did not require such drastic reform. But the Dominions presented Kerr and the Rhodes Trustees with other difficulties in

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the 1920s. While Kerr found "the warmest feelings for Oxford" among returned Rhodes Scholars in the United States, in Canada he found "in places a certain feeling that it was a mistake for returned Scholars to avow themselves as Rhodes Scholars, and that the best thing would be that they should merge themselves in the population and forget their unhappy past!" '' Kerr attributed this lack of "corporate feeling" in Canada in part to the smaller number of Canadian Scholars. In 1925, there were only 102 returned Canadians com­ pared with more than 600 Americans. But Kerr also cited "other reasons" com­ mon to all of the Dominions, in which he probably included the sensitivity of Dominion Scholars to the charge of having been Anglicized. Kerr urged the recruitment of a junior professor to assist James Macdonnell, a Montreal banker and son-in-law of George Parkin, who served as Rhodes secretary for Canada."' Macdonnell had struggled to run the Canadian program without the paid office and assistant that the Trustees had given Aydelotte in the United States. An annual dinner and greater participation in the selection process, Kenthought, would help instill the sense of esprit de corps among returned Canadian Scholars that the Americans had achieved. ' 5

6

A more serious problem was the allocation of Canadian Scholarships. Ontario and Quebec each sent one Rhodes Scholar to Oxford annually. But French Canadian universities resented the fact that, since 1920, four out of five Scholars sent from Quebec had been English. - The French curriculum placed French Canadian applicants at a competitive disadvantage against English Canadians, but there was no easy way to adjust for this difference. To favor a French student from Quebec in alternate years would contravene the Rhodes will, which prohibited racial or religious discrimination in the selec­ tion of Scholars. ' To give a second Scholarship to Quebec that would go informally to French Catholics, K e n noted, "would rouse difficulties from Orangemen and also between Ontario and Quebec." 6

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Kerr's solution was to give the Prince Edward Island Scholarship to Quebec. The Trustees had the discretion to do so, because the Rhodes will had given Canadian Scholarships only to Ontario and Quebec. The Trustees on their own authority had awarded an annual Scholarship to each of the other Canadian provinces. Kerr also recommended a second Scholarship for Ontario, which on grounds of population deserved as many Scholarships as Quebec. This would raise Canada's total from nine to ten Scholarships per year, making it necessary for the Trustees to grant compensatory Scholarships to Australia and New Zealand. The Trustees had already authorized a new Scholarship for the latter, giving it two per year. K e n recommended and the Trustees granted two more to Australia, bringing its annual total to eight. Rhodes Scholarships in the three Dominions then stood at a ratio of approxi­ mately one per 1.25 million inhabitants." 5

The early Trustees divided the Rhodes estate into a scholarship fund and a residual fund. These yielded a combined income of some £128,000 in 1925.

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The Scholarships that year took up £89,000, and educational grants from the residual fund (mainly to schools in South Africa) came to £18,000. Kenexpected these school grants to decline in the years ahead. The administrative expenses of the Rhodes Trust required an additional £8,000 (including Kerr's own salary of £2,000) per annum. This left a surplus of £ 11,000. enough to pay the £1,200 per annum needed to fund each of the four new British Empire Scholarships and to provide the £5,000-8,000 that would be needed each year to maintain Rhodes House at Oxford, scheduled for completion in 1930. Rhodes House was to contain a library, meeting rooms, and a residence for the supervisor of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. Certain Rhodes family properties in England would revert to the Trust in the future, supplementing its income.'* By 1930, most of the Rhodes Scholars were too young to have reached positions of eminence in public life. Instead of public service, the largest number of Scholars pursued academic careers, a result that should have been expected of an outstanding graduate program." In the United States, Rhodes Scholars influenced higher education in two distinctive ways. Aydelotte and others introduced the honors degree to American colleges during the 1920s. The honors track injected a new elitism but also a new seriousness into American undergraduate life. Rhodes Scholars on the faculties of American colleges and universities also defended liberal arts education against the pull of vocationalism and specialization." Philip Kerr helped reform the Rhodes Scholarships, with the aim of pro­ ducing leaders who would be dedicated to preserving and extending the lib­ eral civilization of which they were a part and who would be capable of reaching its highest levels. With respect to race relations, however, the ideals and realities of liberal civilization were far apart, nowhere more so than in Africa, the continent on which Rhodes had made his fortune. 7

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A F R I C A A N D T H E SETTLER

QUESTION

Following a second Rhodes visit to North America in September-October 1926, Kerr traveled to South Africa, his first visit back to that country in sev­ enteen years. He stayed until February 1927. Under the Rhodes will, the Union of South Africa received five Rhodes Scholarships: four granted to four schools in the Cape and one granted at-large to Natal. The Trustees had added one at-large Scholarship each for the Transvaal and Orange Free State. After the revocation of the German Scholarships in 1916, the Trustees had added another at-large Scholarship to each of these two provinces plus one to the Cape, bringing the total to ten." Local selection committees in each province chose Dutch as well as English white candidates, and Kerr found no hostility to the program. Rhodes Scholar Jan Frederik Hofmeyr had become adminis­ trator (chief executive) of the Transvaal in 1924. "The more Dutch Rhodes Scholars we have," Kerr wrote, "the better." " 9

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With the tacit consent of the Trustees, however, South African selection committees chose Rhodes Scholars only from the country's white minority of 1.5 million. In doing so, they reflected the country's exclusion of black Africans from public and much of private life. Except on the Cape, where a tiny number of educated Africans could vote (until 1936), black people were denied the franchise. The 1913 Natives Land Act had confined black African landholding to one-twelfth of the country, and Africans working for the white minority lived in segregated areas subject to pass laws. A further step in racial discrimination followed the electoral victory of the Nationalist coalition in 1924. The Mines and Enterprises Act of May 1926 legalized the color bar in industry, restricting skilled work to whites. Kerr observed the new racial leg­ islation with alarm. In an April 1926 letter to Patrick Duncan in South Africa, he wrote: 71

I am afraid you are only too right in what you say about the future of the colour problem in Africa. Experience all over the world seems to me to prove that the one fatal method of dealing with inter-racial problems is to create legal discrimination against any colour or race. People will stand administrative discrimination because . . . as the backward race rises in the scale of civilisation it will be able to claim and establish an equality which is recognised in the fundamental law. But as soon as you make legal dis­ crimination the rule, it stirs a totally different kind of animosity. . . . The Negro problem is manageable in America because the Constitution makes no discrimination between black and white, though, as everybody knows, there is an immense amount of discrimination in practice. 72

Kerr should have known that racial discrimination in the United States was, in fact, embodied in many laws and judicial rulings as well as enforced by custom. But he recognized the danger of making discrimination more entrenched and he tried to imagine a more inclusive future for British Africa. During his visit, Kerr prepared a memorandum for the Rhodes Trustees on the future of the British African highlands, the plateau stretching from Cape Town to Nairobi. He argued that British settlement of the areas north of South Africa would continue and that settlers would achieve self-government as they had in the Union. But referring to the tiny white minorities already set­ tled in central and eastern Africa, he asked, "Is it possible or right to hand over the control of some 10,000,000 natives and a million square miles to some tens of thousands of whites?" Kerr believed that as Africans rose to a civilized level, they deserved to share in any self-government achieved by white set­ tlers. "The idea should be combated from the very outset," he declared, "that [legislatures] can ever represent the white man alone." Appointed British offi­ cials should fill seats in colonial legislative councils until Africans were ready to elect and serve as legislators themselves. In the event of disagreement

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between white and black legislators, Kerr favored giving London the final say. Tensions were particularly acute in the East African colony of Kenya, where British settlers demanded greater power and an Indian community pressed for greater representation. In May 1923, Stanley Baldwin replaced Andrew Bonar Law as Conservative prime minister. The government affirmed the paramountcy of native interests in Kenya, a policy that the first Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald upheld after taking office in January 1924. A change came, however, after the Conservatives returned to power under Baldwin in November 1924. Leo Amery took the Colonial Office port­ folio and secured the appointment of Sir Edward Grigg as governor of Kenya in 1925. Amery and Grigg favored a union of the British East African territo­ ries of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda and backed British immigration in the hope that a self-governing Dominion of East Africa would emerge in which white settlers would be the dominant group. 71

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The Round Table had called in 1923 for a freeze on both European and Indian immigration to East Africa. " In a letter to Lionel Curtis, John Dove opposed yielding power there to a "small autocracy of white settlers" and he warned that "if the whites were allowed to increase beyond a certain point it would be impossible to keep the scales in Downing Street." In a memoran­ dum to the Moot, Kerr favored white immigration and looked forward to set­ tler self-government in the central and eastern highlands, but he argued again for black Africans (and also Asians) to share in this rule. The Moot approved his memorandum, which appeared as an article in the June 1927 Round Table. Kerr endorsed a union of East Africa but called for native representation, which the settlers opposed. 7

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Kerr's sympathy for both sides in East Africa commended him to Joseph Oldham, secretary to the International Missionary Council and a leading advo­ cate of native rights. In the autumn of 1927, the British government sent out a Royal Commission under Sir Edward Hilton Young that consulted local opinion of an East African union. Oldham served on the Commission, which found intense opposition from black Africans and Indians. In January 1929, Oldham asked Robert M. Barrington-Ward, deputy editor of The Times, if Kerr could write the Commission's report recommending against closer union. Oldham thought that Kerr "will certainly have Grigg's point of view well pumped into him," but for that very reason Kerr's opposition to a whites-only union would strengthen the report's standing among moderates."" Kerr did not write the report, which came out that month. But he did help Oldham write a letter to The Times that urged a Parliamentary Joint Committee to study closer union. The letter, in effect urging delay, appeared in February 1929 under the signatures of the Archbishop of Canterbury and six other peers. The Times approved the letter. 79

81

The second Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald took office in June 1929 and opposed a closer union of East Africa. In 1931, a Joint Select

88

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Committee of Parliament upheld British rule and the paramountcy of native rights. Grigg returned home in 1930 and threatened to resign from the Moot a year later when an article he wrote in favor of East African union failed to obtain the group's assent. To Grigg, the need to back fellow whites in East Africa was self-evident. ' While its own position did not question white supremacy where it already existed, the Moot declined to back a new whiteruled Dominion in Africa. Grigg, loyal to his friends, did not in the end resign. 82

8

In his 1927 memorandum on Africa, Kerr returned to the theme of eco­ nomic development that he had stressed in his 1907 Transvaal Report. He approved the strategy of Booker T. Washington in the United States, which emphasized industrial training and economic self-sufficiency for black Americans rather than the pursuit of political civil rights. But Kerr again warned in his June 1927 Round Table article, as he had in his 1907 Report, that to protect poor whites from the competition of skilled blacks was a mis­ take. He urged a policy of economic development that would raise the wages of all unskilled work, so that all who were paid such wages could achieve a modern standard of living. 84

Kerr's call for African economic development was questioned by Margery Perham, a fellow and tutor of St. Hugh's College, Oxford. In 1929 the Rhodes Trustees had authorized an annual Rhodes Travelling Fellowship to enable a scholar to study conditions in the colonial world and the United States first­ hand. Kerr recommended Perham, who had just returned from a visit to Somalia. In July 1929, Perham accepted and began a round-the-world tour with a visit to the United States to study American race relations. She went on to Samoa, New Zealand, and Australia, spent October to March in South Africa, and ended her trip in East Africa in the spring of 1930. 85

During the interwar period, Britain administered much of central and east­ ern Africa according to a policy of "indirect rule," exercising authority in rural areas through traditional chiefs and preserving the traditional social order in these areas as much as possible. Kerr wrote to Perham in February 1930 to criticize the humanitarian justification for this policy. "Whether we like it or not," he argued, "Africa is going to undergo the same kind of economic rev­ olution in the next hundred years that North America did after the advent of the Anglo-Saxon." Kerr painted a bright African future of air and rail travel, modern cities, and air conditioning. He reported his own recent soundings in America: "The American negro is naturally and rightly deeply suspicious of South Africa, but under cross examination he is even more suspicious of the people who want to preserve African tribalism and culture . . . because he believes that that is to perpetuate the subordination of the negro to the white man, and that the only way forward is that the African should become 100 per cent Europeanised or Americanised so that he can take his place as an equal in a machine age." Rapid development of Africa by Europeans, Kerr argued, was the best way to promote this assimilation. 86

81

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Perham doubted the possibility or desirability of modernization. In South Africa, she argued, the native did not assimilate. "He feels the call of the tribe, the tribal land, wives, and cattle." Mine workers were people "whose reaction to six or nine months in the mines is the acquirement of a Trilby hat, and the handful of store-goods in the gaudy little coffer that goes back to the kraal." In Kenya, outside Nairobi, the "half naked Masai . . . live in dung hovels," while the Kikuyu "dress dance and circumcise," little affected by civilization nearby. Perham praised indirect rule in Uganda, where British policy excluded white settlement, as a policy that allowed Africans to flourish in a tribal setting. South Africa and Kenya, on the other hand, were places where whites had dis­ possessed black Africans and now ruled and exploited them as cheap labor. "I did talk to some industrial leaders in South Africa," she added. "And I noticed that, in so far as they did not defend their policy as being in the best interests of the African, they professed themselves the agents of irresistible economic forces. I distrust this economic fatalism. It paralyses criticism and lulls con­ science. I do not see why laisser-faire which is losing its domination in England should cross the ocean to find a new kingdom in Africa." If Kerr too readily accepted the state of race relations in the more devel­ oped parts of Africa, Perham too readily accepted a primitive future for its undeveloped areas. Perham took a more progressive view of Africa after 1945. Kerr himself foresaw that the racial order on the continent would become untenable as black Africans in modernizing areas advanced econom­ ically. In a May 1930 letter to Duncan, he wrote: 88

m

South Africa certainly has the most difficult problems of all self-governing portions of the Empire. For the course of repression . . . is bound to lead to revolution while the course of allowing the native to become a citizen as he becomes civilised must destroy the possibility of maintaining a white South Africa in the ordinary sense of those words. These problems are, however, what make South Africa and South Africans interesting. They are in essence only a part of what is going to be the central problem of the twentieth cen­ tury. The emergence of internationalism, of the League of Nations, etc., means that the old system in which peoples were allowed to develop civil­ isation of their own. inside racial water-tight compartments, is disappearing and a new world civilisation, and the embryo of a world government is being born. . . . 9 0

Kerr posed the choice for South Africa but shrank from taking a position on it. Turning to international relations, he foresaw the key choices that faced British diplomacy. But here he did not see a contradiction in the positions that he took. Toward Europe, Kerr urged that Britain remain as free as possible of binding obligations, while in Anglo-American relations he called on both sides to bind themselves to a definition of belligerent rights in time of war.

Lothian

90 UNREAL WAR, UNREAL

PEACE

After his return home from America in early 1923, Kerr resumed attending the Round Table Moot in London. By the following November, he was feel­ ing some of his old enthusiasm for world affairs. "On Tuesday I had lunch with Baldwin . . . He listened with great patience to what I had to say!!" he wrote his mother after meeting with the prime minister. "On Wednesday I saw Smuts at dinner. He was very pleased with himself & was busily engaged in intrigue all over Europe!! Thursday I had lunch with the moot & also dinner, & settled the affairs of nations & on Friday I came down here and played golf."" Kerr resumed writing for The Round Table a year later. MacDonald's Labour government of 1924 considered a proposal, known as the Geneva Protocol, to empower the League of Nations to enforce the arbitration of international disputes." Recalling his advice to Lloyd George in 1919, Kerr objected in the December 1924 Round Table to any commitment to go to war in advance of knowing the circumstances involved."' He also saw the Protocol as a means to guarantee an unjust French domination over Germany. In January 1923, to collect unpaid war reparations, the French had occupied for a year the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr, an action that outraged many in Britain. "Europe is a continent," Kerr wrote angrily, "and its nations have the characteristics, the interests and the traditions of Powers with only land frontiers between themselves and their neighbours. Great Britain is an island and the centre of a world-wide Commonwealth . . . having problems and interests and traditions entirely different from those of Europe." 2

94

In the March 1925 Round Table, Kerr sharpened his opposition to a binding obligation to go to war. Did Britain intend, he asked, "automatically and per­ petually, to guarantee the existing Polish-Russian frontier . . . ?" What would happen if the United States went to war with a League member? Britain could not automatically side with America's enemy. Kerr also thought that any new agreement to keep Germany down would be unjust and untenable: 95

Germany will never submit to her present position of subordination forever. She would not be the great nation she is if she did. Eventually she will demand the right to the free control of all her own territory, and to deal with her neighbours on equal terms. She will demand the evacuation of the Rhineland and that she be allowed either to bring her own armaments up to the level of those of France or that France bring her armaments down to the German level. And if these demands are . . . denied her, she will begin to prepare to recover her equality and independence by force of arms, as she did a century ago.* These words marked a striking change from Kerr's assurances to the French at the Paris peace conference in March 1919. Then he had spoken of the

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French having behind them an Anglo-American counterweight. Now he spoke of the need for Germany to equal France. Kerr's thought may not have shifted as much as it seemed. In his letter cov­ ering the Allied Reply to the German Observations in June 1919, he had insisted that Germany accept moral guilt for the war and make some restitu­ tion. But peace terms that required Germany to admit guilt and pay repara­ tions, however harsh they appeared to critics at the time, implied that at some point, when the terms had been fulfilled, Germany would have the right to return to the community of nations. To Kerr, French action in the Ruhr marked instead a policy of vengeance and domination that repudiated the idea of reconciliation. Unfortunately, he did not ask whether Germany had renounced a desire of its own for vengeance and domination. In March 1925, the Baldwin government vetoed the Geneva Protocol. But the tension between France and Germany had to be relieved. After meeting in Locarno, Switzerland, in October 1925, the three powers finally signed secu­ rity treaties to guarantee the German western border." Kerr was still skeptical in the December 1925 Round Table: "Frankly we are profoundly concerned at the possible consequences of an arrangement under which Great Britain will abandon her freedom of choice and the advantages of her geographical position to the extent now proposed." 7

98

Kerr did not ask what freedom and geographical advantage Britain had pos­ sessed when German troops crossed the Belgian frontier in August 1914. But he defended the Locarno agreements against Dominion criticism. On a visit to London in November 1925, Loring Christie, the former secretary to Prime Minister Borden of Canada, read and objected to a draft of Kerr's Locarno arti­ cle on the grounds that Britain's interests in the world were maritime and not continental. In reply, Kerr wrote, "the more I think about the Pact, the less I like it." But the treaty brought Germany into the League of Nations, and "if Britain now rejects it, it will produce a situation both in our relations with France and Germany and on the politics of Europe which is quite incalculable." Kerr thought that the United States could not remain isolated from world affairs, and what was true of the United States was "much more true of the British Empire.""" 99

The United States had begun to emerge from isolation to the extent of join­ ing negotiations with League of Nations members to limit warships. At the Washington naval conference in February 1922, the United States. Great Britain, Japan, France, and Italy had agreed to limit their respective numbers of aircraft carriers and other warships of 10,000 tons or more. But the powers did not limit lighter warships and submarines, and when British and American negotiators met again at Geneva between June and August 1927, they could not agree to a definition of parity in cruisers under 10,000 tons. Britain wanted a large number of lighter warships that could be based throughout a far-flung empire. To guard its fewer and more distant outposts, the United States wanted a smaller number of heavier vessels.""

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The failure of the Geneva naval conference set back Anglo-American rela­ tions. Philip Kerr tried privately over the next two years to persuade educated opinion in both countries that the naval dispute required a deeper political solution. In the March 1928 Round Table, he wrote, the dispute over naval parity presupposed the possibility of an Anglo-American conflict that ought itself to be prevented. There would be a risk of conflict in any future war over freedom of the seas if one or the other power was neutral. "The basic issue is not what are the rights of a belligerent at sea," Kerr argued, "but the question of when belligerents should be allowed to interfere with neutral commerce." If both sides agreed in advance on the circumstances in which one or the other could rightly close the seas, Kerr thought, then neither power would come into conflict. 102

Kerr circulated offprints of his article to a number of Americans prominent in politics, business, journalism, and the law."" In an editorial of April 4, 1928, The New Republic in New York praised Kerr's article. "For a while," the magazine observed, "[a quest for naval supremacy] seemed to The New Republic the most reasonable explanation of British behavior. We are con­ vinced . . . by the explanation in the Round Table . . . that the British did not harbor any such intention." This was a generous reading of British inten­ tions, but it responded in kind to the purpose urged privately on Kerr by James Garvin, editor of The Observer, to "improve feeling by the considerate inter­ pretation of American action." On March 22, 1928, Kerr delivered the sub­ stance of his article in an address before a London meeting sponsored by the National Council for the Prevention of War."* The Times reported Kerr's talk the next day, as did The New York Times."" 104

105

In his speech, Kerr also endorsed the idea of a treaty to outlaw war, which American Secretary of State Frank Kellogg had floated in December 1927. On April 13, 1928, Kellogg formally invited all nations to sign a pact to renounce war as an instrument of policy. The secretary of state proposed no machinery to enforce the pact, but in the June 1928 Round Table, Kerr still welcomed the idea: "Peace exists inside the State because the right to use vio­ lence . . . is absolutely and entirely denied to every individual and group within it. . . . So in the international sphere: if there is to be peace, the right to use 'war as an instrument of national policy' must be absolutely renounced by nations." Against a violator, he added, nations should be "automatically released" from their own obligation to refrain from war. 108

109

Kerr sent offprints of his June Round Table article to most of the Americans who had received his March naval article."" Secretary Kellogg wrote back, "It is an excellent article and analyzes the negotiations and the proposed treaty with great accuracy." Kellogg agreed that "there could not be the least doubt" that nations could use force against a violator of the pact, but he opposed say­ ing so explicitly. "My objection to . . . making reservations is that they weaken the moral effect of a simple declaration. . . Senator William

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Borah, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also com­ mended Kerr but noted (without specifying) "one or two inferences with which I would be inclined to disagree."" Norman H. Davis, a New York attor­ ney and a leading Democrat, confided to Kerr that he hoped to persuade his party to endorse the pact in their 1928 platform so that it would not be an issue in the U.S. presidential election that autumn. Davis noted, however, that "it is futile to assume that . . . treaties making war illegal will enforce them­ selves."" A Republican, Allen W. Dulles, who had recently left the State Department to work as an attorney in New York, thanked Kerr for the article and expressed the hope that the peace pact would create "a better psycholog­ ical atmosphere."" The major powers signed the pact in Paris on August 27, 1928, and America ratified it in January 1929. Kerr hoped that the United States had finally realized that "its old policy of trying to preserve its own peace by maintaining neutrality . . . is impossible." ' 2

1

4

11

To reduce Anglo-American friction in the future, Kerr had urged in his March 22 speech, "Go slow on conferences and treaties for the next few years." He called instead for informal talks among bankers, business leaders, and journalists on both sides of the Atlantic. " As venues for such contacts, he no doubt had in mind the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and its American counterpart, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, which had begun as offshoots of the Paris peace conference of 1919. Members of the American and British delegations had agreed to form the two organizations to continue research on world problems. With money from the Astor family, Lionel Curtis had organized the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which became known by its building as Chatham House, while sev­ eral partners of the J. P. Morgan bank in New York together with some attor­ neys and scholars had organized the Council on Foreign Relations." 1

7

In April 1928, Kerr wrote to Francis Bourdillon, secretary of Chatham House: "The greatest obstacle to good Anglo-American relations to-day is the ignorance and therefore the misunderstanding and suspicion between the political classes on both sides of the Atlantic. Official conferences . . . tend to take place in an atmosphere of suspicion and propaganda."" Charles P. Howland, an attorney and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote Kerr in a similar vein: "Most people don't take up issues until a good many people begin to clamor about them. If before that stage is reached discussion has taken place, ideas been made fairly public and the air clarified, the mod­ erately sincere among the politicians—and they are in the majority—will have learned a good deal and not go off on mistaken instinct and nationalis­ tic emotion." " The breakdown in naval talks in 1927 alarmed the Institute and the Council, and each formed a study group on Anglo-American relations in response. " Newton D. Baker, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war and now an attorney in Cleveland, captured the spirit of this joint effort. "Both nations," he wrote to Kerr in December 1928, "are governed by gentlemen." 8

1

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121

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Circumstances did not prevent gentlemen on each side from discreetly con­ sidering what an Anglo-American war would actually involve. War plans pre­ pared by the U.S. Army and Navy expected the British to win temporary control of the seas and burn Washington, as they did in the War of 1812. British plans for such a war do not seem to have existed, but the Chatham House group also slipped into the language of 1812. In a November 8 mem­ orandum to his group, Kerr complained that current American policy encour­ aged "desertion from British ships," a reference to subsidized U.S. merchant marine wages. 122

123

Anglo-American tensions worsened in the autumn of 1928 as a result of the Anglo-French naval compromise negotiated between June 28 and July 28 of that year. In an exchange of notes, France agreed to limit heavy cruisers but not light ones, in return for British agreement to exclude trained reserves from the calculation of army strengths in negotiations to reduce land forces. Britain circulated these terms to the United States, Italy, and Japan. On September 28, the United States delivered a sharp reply rejecting the compromise. 124

Kerr also denounced the Anglo-French accord. "The root of the whole trou­ ble about disarmament since 1920," he wrote in the December 1928 Round Table, "has been the . . . failure to realise that no nation can make itself secure by armaments without making its neighbours insecure." Whatever Britain had intended, Americans had seen the Anglo-French agreement as an effort by London to cling to its naval supremacy. Kerr also worried about any agree­ ment with France that did not include Germany. The Labour party leader, Ramsay MacDonald, asked Kerr's advice before delivering a speech in Paris in December. Kerr replied, "British statesmen ought continuously to press upon the French . . . that they can get the security they want through AngloFrench-German a g r e e m e n t . . . and that they cannot get security by trying to draw Great Britain into an entente which has an anti-German point." " MacDonald delivered this message at the Sorbonne on December 10. 125

12

127

Kerr believed a basis now existed, though, for Anglo-American agreement. In a letter to Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary to the Cabinet, Kerr argued that under the Kellogg Pact there would either be illegal "private wars" or legal "public wars" against Pact violators. Kerr thought that America could no longer remain neutral in cases of the latter. Hankey, who had entertained a similar distinction earlier, urged Kerr to back away from such categories. " American action would depend on the circumstances at the time of a crisis, he noted, a point that Kerr himself had argued in opposition to British mili­ tary commitments to continental Europe. 128

12

To break the naval deadlock, Allen Dulles wrote an article in the January 1929 issue of the Council on Foreign Relations' journal. Foreign Affairs. Dulles called on America and Britain to seek parity in combat strength, not in tonnage or in numbers of warships. He suggested that "100,000 tons devoted exclusively to eight-inch gun vessels would count as 100,000 tons,

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but 100,000 tons devoted . . . to six-inch gun vessels might . . . count as 90,000 tons." Under this definition, Britain could build more of the light cruisers that it wanted. But Dulles added a warning: "If unrestricted building is carried on in both countries, who can predict whether the United States will be disposed to accept an agreement on the basis of parity ten years hence?"" The British Foreign Office took notice of the Dulles article because of his prior work with the U.S. State Department. " The head of the Foreign Office's American department, Robert Craigie, asked Sir Austen Chamberlain, the foreign secretary, if Kerr could be induced to publish a reply. "From the point of view of influencing public opinion in the United States, I believe that this would be more effective than . . . an official note."" Chamberlain observed: "Mr. Philip Kerr might write a useful article and I would think get a fair cir­ culation for it; but would he be content to correct misapprehensions? Might he not wish to propound policies e.g. the distinction between 'public' v. 'pri­ vate' wars against which Sir Esmé recently warned m e ? " " Kerr had dis­ cussed his ideas about war with Sir Esmé Howard, the British ambassador, during his autumn 1928 Rhodes visit to America.

0

1

2

1

Chamberlain overcame his doubts and authorized Craigie to approach Kerr, who declined. In a letter to Craigie commenting on the Dulles article, Kerr wrote, "most of the points are of no interest to the general public. They relate to arguments which really only concern the people actively engaged in nego­ tiations and a few experts outside." Kerr recommended that a technical expert reply in the journal of Chatham House instead. "It would be quite easy to see that it was quoted by the American press and that it reached the hands of the necessary people in the United States."" This exchange with Craigie revealed the ambivalent role that Kerr had cut out for himself as a potentially useful but independent-minded private intermediary. The Foreign Office's guarded interest in him was matched by his guarded response. 4

One of Kerr's American contacts, the journalist Walter Lippmann, believed that the best course was for both sides to declare victory and end the dispute. A bill for fifteen new heavy cruisers would soon reach a vote in the U.S. Congress. "I don't know whether the new cruisers will give us 'parity' or not," Lippmann wrote Kerr in December 1928. "But I'm sure that the public will think they do, and that's all that matters."" Kerr agreed: "I think that if Congress passes both the Cruiser Bill and the Peace Pact we shall have the basis upon which to get Anglo-American relations straightened out."" Britain could, Kerr believed, arrange by 1931 to have fewer heavy cruisers to com­ pensate for a greater number of lighter ones. 5

6

Lippmann and Kerr could not agree, however, on how to prevent AngloAmerican conflict in the future. In the New York Saturday Review of Literature, Kerr wrote in January 1929 that Britain and America stood for the same political values and ought to support each other if one of them went to war." In a February response, Lippmann disputed the idea that peace was a 7

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matter of like-minded nations working together. Cooperation on such a basis would exclude countries that did not share the same values. "The true prob­ lem in international affairs . . . is to find a modus vivendi among diverse peo­ ples," wrote Lippmann. "We must not argue, as I think Mr. Kerr does, that the diversity in philosophies must be cured.""" Kerr replied that the issue of neu­ tral rights would cause Anglo-American conflict sooner or later unless both sides could agree when neutrality was or was not justified. He added, "The last thing I would propose . . . is a uniformity in culture, or patriotism, or what is called civilization. None the less there are certain truths which are univer­ sal in their validity." If Britain and America stood for liberty, democracy, and the rule of law, then these values called out for a common defense. Great Britain and the United States would defeat their common purposes if they did not reach agreement ahead of time on when a war was just."' Kerr's tendency to set problems in a larger and more difficult context did not serve the needs of the moment. He backed away from his earlier distinc­ tion between public and private wars, but in the September 1929 Round Table he insisted on a more basic point. "Peace begins within the State, not when the community organizes legal and political machinery for the pacific settle­ ment of disputes, but when it prohibits and prevents recourse to violence. It is exactly the same in the international sphere." " Instead of meeting this need, the British and American governments simply looked for a way out of their imme­ diate dispute. The American Senate ratified the Kellogg Pact on January 15, 1929, and the Cruiser Bill passed Congress on February 13. On April 22, with the approval of a new president, Herbert Hoover, the American disarmament negotiator in Geneva announced that the United States would take a more flexible view of naval parity and would seek reductions. The British welcomed the American statement. 14

141

Following a general election in May 1929, MacDonald returned to office as British prime minister. He asked Kerr's advice before meeting with President Hoover in October. Kerr advised MacDonald merely to urge Hoover to send men of "first-class calibre" to future disarmament conferences in Europe. On October 5-7, MacDonald and Hoover met in Washington and agreed to convene a naval conference in London, which met from January 21 to April 22, 1930. A five-year treaty renewed the 1922 limits on aircraft carriers and battleships. America and Britain also obtained the right to build the cruisers each wanted. ' 142

14

A future American secretary of state, Christian Herter, thanked Kerr for his efforts to relieve Anglo-American tension: "It is a curious fact that you seem to be doing more toward bringing an intelligent realization of the situation to our people than anyone else." In Britain, figures to the left of center, such as MacDonald, sought his advice. Conservatives and diplomats treated Kenas someone who might be used, if not fully trusted. In 1920, Kerr had faulted professional diplomats for having "no conception of policy in its wider sense. . . ." But his aversion to another European war 144

145

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and his desire for Anglo-American partnership prevented him from seeing a wider difficulty in his own efforts during the middle and late 1920s. He argued against a British commitment to the defense of Europe on the grounds that his government could not commit itself to go to war in advance of know­ ing the circumstances of the conflict. But in relation to the United States, he asserted the necessity for Britain and America to agree in advance on what circumstances defined a just war. Neither Great Britain nor the United States were ready to define their future behavior in this way.

THE INDUSTRIAL

DILEMMA

The election of a Labour government in May 1929 settled two problems for Philip Kerr. One was Anglo-American relations, which improved markedly when MacDonald and Hoover set aside the naval dispute. The other was the future of the Liberal party, which thereafter declined as a factor in British poli­ tics. During the 1920s, Kerr tried to help the Liberals develop a domestic pro­ gram that could distinguish them from the Conservative and Labour parties. His recommendations did not help the Liberals avoid political eclipse, but he and other Liberal thinkers proposed some ideas that spoke to a later generation. In a 1916 Round Table article, Kerr endorsed the idea that "national pros­ perity must be judged not by banking returns, national wealth, or armaments, but primarily by the conditions and standards of life and work of all the peo­ ple." Conditions and standards suffered badly after the First World War. The advanced industrial nations had expanded agriculture and industry to meet wartime demand, and the surplus capacity after the war had caused prices to fall and unemployment to go up. Postwar Britain also faced new foreign trade competition and owed immense war debts to the United States. Conservatives demanded tariffs to prop up ailing industry, while Labour wanted to prop up industry with direct subsidies. Liberals believed in the working of a free mar­ ket that wasn't working to restore prosperity. 146

After his departure from Downing Street, Kerr advised Lloyd George from time to time. "Capital and Labour are fighting like blazes," he wrote the prime minister during a coal strike in the spring of 1921, "for the distribution of a bone which does not exist." ' Kerr urged labor and industry at home to set aside their differences for the common good. During his postwar regime, Lloyd George had encouraged a degree of labor/management cooperation in the form of voluntary factory councils. But the prime minister spent most of his domestic political energy after the war settling strikes, and he yielded eventually to Conservative policies that worsened his relations with labor. The Conservative government that replaced Lloyd George went to the country in December 1923 calling for a tariff. The Lloyd George and Asquith wings of the Liberal party closed ranks in defense of free trade and helped Labour take office for ten months. But the Liberals split again after the election. 14

148

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"It strikes me that you are too absorbed in the 'game' of politics," Kerr wrote his former chief in 1924, urging him to find an answer to the problems of unemployment and industrial strife. Lloyd George challenged him to come up with a practical program. Kerr recommended that the Trades Union Congress and the Federation of British Industries, representing labor and cap­ ital, work together. The problem with the British economy, he argued, was that the parochial interests of one union adversely affected other unions. The same was true of industries. Kerr called for all unions to unite and for all industries to do the same. Each side could then negotiate and reach agree­ ment. " Similar ideas were already in the air, part of an impulse to protect capital and labor by suppressing microeconomic competition. Kerr also called for British industry to increase its productivity by embrac­ ing new technology, and he called for labor to receive a generous share of the resulting benefits. In July 1926, he addressed the Liberal Summer School, an annual gathering of party thinkers and activists meeting that year at Oxford. He cited the United States as an example of how labor and capital could work together for the common good. Kerr had recently visited the American auto­ mobile works of Henry Ford, who in 1914 had doubled the wages paid his workers from the profits of assembly line production. Kerr charged that in Britain, by contrast, labor believed profit was evil, business saw low wages as a good thing, and both resisted the use of new technology. Kerr called for the British government to force capital to be more efficient and he looked forward to the day when labor would own capital directly. 149

15

151

152

Kerr's admiration of Ford's wage policy came in for criticism in the United States. "It was easy for Henry Ford to practice this philosophy," wrote The New Republic, "for the automobile industry was capable of rapid expansion to fill a new want—a want which will someday become stabilized at least to the growth of population. Has Mr. Kerr carefully examined our shoe industry, our cotton and woollen industries, our coal industry?" Kerr argued sensibly that economic life could not improve without increases in productivity that led to benefits widely shared. The New Republic pointed out, however, that adding efficiency to industries with saturated markets would drive down prices and raise unemployment. Asquith's retirement in 1926 left the Liberal party to Lloyd George. The Welshman threw his private campaign funds into a new effort to hammer out an industrial policy. The Liberal Industrial Inquiry, launched in the spring of 1927, brought together several dozen people, including the economist John Maynard Keynes; business leader Seebohm Rowntree; Walter Layton, editor of The Economist; and others in the Liberal orbit, such as Philip Kerr and the banker Robert Brand. These figures divided into committees on finance and industry, the role of the state, trade unions, wages, and unemployment, and produced a report, Britain's Industrial Future, in February 1928. The "Yellow Book," as it was called from its cover, anticipated the economic thinking 153

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of the middle twentieth century by proposing countercyclical government spending to stabilize employment. Kerr chaired a subcommittee that debated Labour proposals to nationalize the coal industry. Britain's Industrial Future called for public ownership of the mines but proposed to eliminate inefficient mines and either to entrust the management of those remaining to public experts or lease them to private managers. The idea of forcing efficiency may have been Kerr's, whose fam­ ily coal mine near Edinburgh was among the most modern in the United Kingdom. The Yellow Book also called for a national council to represent capital and labor, with government holding a swing vote. 154

155

The chief intellect behind the Liberal Industrial Inquiry was John Maynard Keynes, who exchanged views with Kerr in the summer of 1927. Kerr warned Keynes that the draft report did not go far enough to appeal to labor. Kenenclosed a letter that he had written to Layton, arguing that the interest of labor was not to take control of the state but rather to take action privately to improve productivity "in order that there may be a larger cake to distribute between capital and labour" and "to win the confidence of the investor in its business ability . . . so that it will gradually take a larger and larger part, first in influencing, and later in managing business." If it was willing to seek effi­ ciency with the help of outside experts, Kerr argued, labor could and should manage industry itself. He looked forward to the overthrow in this manner of the "adventurers, buccaneers, and all sorts of worthy people" who presently ran economic life. 156

157

Keynes wrote in reply, "I don't exactly disagree with your line of approach, though personally I think there is a great deal more to be done than you by direct State action." But he added astringently: "My real difficulty lies in the impracticability, or uselessness, of inscribing pious ideas on a political ban­ ner of a kind which could not possibly be embodied in legislation. No doubt things would be much better if various classes of individuals suffered a change of mind and heart and became more sensible; and it is important for everyone to beseech them to be as sensible as possible. But a political pro­ gramme, I think, must go rather beyond this." * Keynes perceived and found inadequate the kind of private cooperation that Kerr urged between business and labor.' " But that was not Kerr's only point. "You and I may not be entirely agreed as to the extent to which the State can directly intervene to assist industry," K e n replied. "But we are agreed that it cannot do everything, and that the greater part of the prosperity of the nation must come from the enter­ prise and energy and creative ability of its citizens." In other words, the pri­ vate relations of business and labor were a matter on which a political party could and should offer some vision.' 15

5

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Kerr and Keynes agreed that economic behavior was at root psychological, but the two understood economic psychology to mean very different things. Kerr treated it as an independent variable: the willingness of business owners

Lothian

wo

and workers to cooperate for the common good. Keynes was coming to see the psychology of economic behavior instead in terms of expectations and propensities that reflected conditions as well as shaped them. Keynes emphasized the relative existence of the private sector to government, while Kerr underlined the extent to which the private sector had an independent existence of its own. Britain's Industrial Future fell flat with the public; even The Times was unimpressed. Liberals also needed positions on other public issues ranging from foreign policy to health and education. Over the summer of 1928, Lloyd George asked Kerr to produce a Liberal campaign manifesto, and Kerr sub­ mitted a thirty-nine page outline in early Auguste ' A few days later, though, Lloyd George wrote back, "No one knows better than I do what you are capa­ ble of at your best. You will forgive me for saying that this effort is by no means your best." Kerr had written more of a catalogue than a manifesto, briefly visiting the issues of peace, arms control, the empire, industrial reform, trade, education, housing, agriculture, coal, unemployment, temper­ ance, and electoral reform. In all of these, he hewed to a moderate line that took the value of moderation for granted. In March 1929, Lloyd George declared a manifesto of 114 pages from Kerr "full of excellent material," but he urged a document of one-third the length. " It is not clear who wrote We Can Conquer Unemployment, which Lloyd George published under his own name in April. The pamphlet called for public spending to put people to work on projects intended to repay their cost. In the May 1929 election, though, Lloyd George and the Liberals won only twenty-three percent of the popular vote and fifty-nine seats, less than ten per­ cent of the House of Commons. The Liberals went into eclipse and within a few months, the Great Depression had begun. After leaving public service in May 1921, Philip Kerr grew more strongly to believe that false ways of thinking were ultimately at fault for tensions at home and abroad. Through the Rhodes Trust, he promoted an idea of liberaldemocratic civilization as a set of intangible values that a new meritocratic elite could defend and extend. But he was unable to change the thinking of others in his efforts to have a more immediate influence on policy. He took inconsistent positions regarding British relations with Europe and the United States, and the solutions he urged for race relations in Africa and for eco­ nomic life at home were not taken up. During the 1930s, his search for com­ promise would serve him well in India. It would prove his undoing in relation to Germany. 161

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5 APPEASEMENT, 1 9 3 0 - 1 9 3 9

On the death of his cousin on March 16, 1930, Philip Kerr became eleventh Marquess of Lothian, a month short of age forty-eight. He inherited Ferniehirst castle, Monteviot house, and Newbattle Abbey near Edinburgh, and Bückling Hall, a Jacobean mansion in Norfolk, England. The new Lord Lothian chose Bückling as his residence. In addition to farmland from whose tenants he received rent, he inherited the Lothian Coal Company, which stayed in business through the Great Depression that began in 1929.' To pay death duties, however, he had to sell most of the art and book collection that came with Blickling Hall. The sale preserved the rest of the estate, leaving Philip Lothian still a wealthy man. He entered the House of Lords and in a letter to Lady Astor wrote of his new position, "It's damnable and as Waldorf once said, the awful thing is that you begin to like it!" 1

2

4

5

However, Lothian was acutely aware that his rise in position occurred as millions of his fellow countrymen were losing their livelihoods in the Depression. Two million people in Britain had lost their jobs by 1931, some ten percent of the workforce. In June 1930, Lloyd George, Lothian, and the Liberal manufacturer Seebohm Rountree proposed a recovery program at the invitation of Prime Minister MacDonald. Unfortunately, the plan they submit­ ted, calling for tax cuts to encourage modernization, would have done little to relieve excess capacity." As the Depression deepened in 1931, Lothian became intrigued by the pos­ sibilities of state planning. In a letter to E. F. Wise, a Labour MP, he urged, "you must do exactly what the Russians have been driven to do, make a 'Gosplan' which, if carried into effect, will solve the unemployment prob­ lem." To see Russia for himself, Lothian accompanied Lord and Lady Astor and the playwright George Bernard Shaw on a bizarre visit to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov's English wife. With the Astors' son David, the party arrived by train in Moscow on 7

Lothian

102

July 2 1 , 1931, and stayed for ten days. The group toured a model prison camp, visited a Palace of Rest and Culture with a shooting gallery that fea­ tured pictorial targets of foreign statesmen, saw a ballet performance, and had a visit with the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the Kremlin." After the group's return home on August 2, Shaw proclaimed the moral and intellectual superiority of Soviet leaders over those of the West. Speaking to the Liberal Summer School at Cambridge three days later, Lothian declared more guardedly that the ideas behind the Russian Revolution would have a great impact on the world. In a note to the Soviet ambassador in London, he wrote, "I hope to be able to come back . . . in about two years time and see the progress you have made in developing Communism." " To Sir Arnold Wilson, he added, "I was impressed in Russia by the superior moral appeal to the individual which Communism is able to make despite its ruthlessness. . . ."" Winston Churchill observed the visit less charitably. "The Russians have always been fond of circuses and travelling shows," he wrote. "Since they had imprisoned, shot, or starved to death most of their best come­ dians, their visitors might fill for a space a noticeable void." Soviet-style planning proved only a passing infatuation of Lothian's and he never returned to the Soviet Union. "He is apt to be the victim of his most recent experience," wrote Thomas Jones, deputy secretary to the Cabinet, in 1932. "I remember him coming back from U.S.A. full of American mass-production; then before going to Russia as so convinced of property as the root of all evil that he was hardly distinguishable from a communist; then last Sunday I walked with him . . . and he was certain the world could not get on without capitalists and captains of industry. . . ."" Lothian's impression of the exhibitions of pub­ lic spirit arranged for him to see in Soviet Russia prefigured his later response to similar exhibitions arranged in Nazi Germany to impress foreign visitors. In August 1931, the Labour Cabinet split over whether to reduce unem­ ployment compensation to close a budget deficit. To enforce austerity, MacDonald formed a National Government on August 25. Conservatives and Liberals joined but almost all of the Labour MPs refused, and the Labour party expelled MacDonald and the few who did. The expelled members formed a National Labour group. Lloyd George also opposed the coalition and broke with Sir Herbert Samuel, who joined and took most of the Liberal party in the House of Commons with him. MacDonald wanted to include a prominent Liberal peer in the Cabinet but not as head of a major department. Lord Lothian agreed to accept such a role as chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a Cabinet-level office that oversaw the estates of the k i n g . For someone who a few weeks earlier had found things to praise about Stalin's Russia, the j o b of overseeing the monarch's property was an incongruous appointment, but it was perhaps no odder than for the socialist Ramsay MacDonald to head a largely Conservative government. 9

1

12

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Appeasement,

1930-1939

103

Lothian worried that the National Government would deepen social class antagonism as it cut spending. "I cannot imagine anything more calculated to destroy the Liberal Party," he wrote Samuel, "than the gradual and growing conviction . . . that it has been manoeuvered . . . into taxing the poor and let­ ting off the rich." Lothian approved higher taxes on wealth if these were ded­ icated to public investment rather than to the operating expenses of government.' But despite his reservations, he supported the new government and criticized Lloyd George privately for standing out. In a general election on October 27, 1931, the Liberal and Labour parties lost most of their seats. MacDonald reconstituted the National Government, which now depended on a Conservative majority. Lothian stepped down. * He agreed, however, to accept appointment as under-secretary to the Conservative Sir Samuel Hoare, the new secretary of state for India. The chance to play a direct role in India policy appealed to Lothian even though the new post meant a demotion in ministerial rank. Lothian asked for direct access to the prime minister on matters of India reform, to which MacDonald a g r e e d . B u t subordinate officials did not normally have such access to a prime minister and Lothian's request leaked to the press, requiring him to reassure Hoare that there was no condition to his accepting the appointment. To India reform Philip Lothian now turned. l,

6

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20

THE INDIAN

FRANCHISE

The 1919 India Act provided for a Statutory Commission to report the work­ ing of the Act after ten years. The Baldwin government began the Commission ahead of schedule in November 1927 under the chairmanship of Sir John Simon. The government appointed only British officials to the Commission, though, prompting Indians to boycott its work. At the urging of Gandhi, the Indian National Congress called for India to be a self-governing Dominion by 1930. In response, the viceroy of India, Lord Irwin, announced on October 31, 1929, that the goal of British policy was Dominion status for India. Irwin invited Indian leaders to a Round Table Conference in London to negotiate constitutional reform. The British ruled out an immediate grant of Dominion status, however, and Gandhi responded with a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience, causing British authorities to arrest him and other Congress members. 21

In June 1930, the Simon Commission recommended that Britain make provincial governments in India fully responsible to provincial legislatures and that these legislatures be elected on a wider franchise. The Commission proposed that India's central legislature be selected by the provincial legisla­ tures, however, rather than by the small electorate allowed under the 1919 Act. The central legislature would have no authority over the central execu­ tive, which would remain under British control. In the September 1930 Round 22

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Table, Lothian defended the proposed reform as if only the principle of responsible government, and not its extent, was at issue. Lothian changed his mind, however, at the first session of the Round Table Conference, which met in London from November 12, 1930, to January 19, 1931. Congress refused to participate, but leaders representing Muslims, Hindu Liberals, and the three major British parties attended, as did rulers or delegates of the Indian princely states. The rulers of the latter governed onethird of the Indian continent under British paramountcy. The Marquess of Reading, Lord Lothian, and two Liberal MPs, Sir Robert Hamilton and Isaac Foot, formed the four-member British Liberal delegation. 21

24

The Round Table conference had planned to discuss only the reform of directly ruled British India. But the unelected princes feared for their position in a more democratic India and proposed to federate themselves with British India if they could be strongly represented at the center. Having the princes as a counterweight made reform of India's central government more attractive to British Conservatives. But the Conservative delegation opposed the demand of the other Indian groups that the representatives of British India to the central legislature be directly elected. Reading and his Liberal colleagues broke the impasse by proposing to give India responsible central government subject to certain conditions called "safeguards." These reserved key functions, such as command of the Indian army, to Great Britain and imposed certain financial and other obligations on an Indian center. The conference adopted the Liberal formula. British and Indian delegates disagreed, however, about important details such as the fran­ chise. Indian Liberals asked for full adult suffrage, while the British preferred a more limited electorate. The Indians themselves split over representation of minorities, with Muslims in favor of separate electorates and reserved seats in provinces where Muslims were in the minority. The Round Table Conference adjourned with these details unresolved. 25

1

In a March 1931 Round Table article, Lothian commended the work of the conference but observed the dilemma that minorities posed. "All are afraid," he wrote, "of what confident and arrogant majorities may do in a country in which caste and religious loyalties are stronger than patriotism or social soli­ darity." At the same time, he warned, minority claims challenged the idea of a common citizenship. "The essence of nationalism is that citizenship takes precedence of every other kind of loyalty so far as politics is concerned." Lord Lothian shared with his generation of British leaders an understanding of history in which the development of self-governing institutions required a long period of incremental change and the growth of a public spirit. In his dealings with Indians over the next four years, Lothian defended the need for reform in stages. However, to his own government, he stressed emphatically the idea that responsibility was impossible for Indians to develop without actual power. 26

27

Appeasement,

1930-1939

105

On March 4, 1931, Viceroy Irwin agreed to release nonviolent Congress members in return for Gandhi's agreement to end civil disobedience. Sir Tej Sapru, the Indian Liberal leader at the first Round Table Conference, wrote Lothian to commend the agreement. * Lothian assured him that the British public wanted a new advance in responsible government for India, if it came with the proposed safeguards. "The Egyptian leaders made the mistake . . . of trying to hold out for a little more," Lothian cautioned, "and so lost a really good settlement." ' In a July 1931 letter to Lloyd George, Lothian predicted that Indian opposition to a new reform would not be an obstacle: "There will no doubt be a non-cooperation party as in 1921, but if enough Indians come forward to work the constitution as they did in 1921, the luck of the non-cooperators will gradually come to heel. . . .'"" British policy depended, however, on Indian moderates coming forward. It would also depend on British moderates, such as Lothian, serving as a bridge to Indian ones. 2

21

As part of his agreement with Irwin, Gandhi pledged to attend another ses­ sion of the Round Table Conference that met from September 7 to December 1, 1931. This session again failed to agree on how to represent minorities, and the Muslim princes began to back away from federation. Nevertheless, on December 3, the House of Commons resolved in favor of responsible govern­ ment with safeguards by a vote of 369 to 4 3 . " Five days later, Lothian intro­ duced a similar resolution in the House of Lords: "It is the uniform verdict of our Imperial history," he declared, "that the one way to convert rebels and rev­ olutionaries into constructive statesmen is to thrust responsibility for govern­ ment upon them, and so make them responsible for the consequences of their own acts." Lothian's uncle, Lord Fitzalan, and his former patron, Lord Selborne, opposed the motion. But on December 10, Lothian's resolution car­ ried when the House of Lords defeated by 106 to 58 a motion to declare that it was too soon for the Lords to take a position.' 2

Congress resumed civil disobedience, though, and a new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, imposed ordinances that sent Congress leaders to jail." Against this backdrop, three committees authorized by the Round Table Conference embarked for India to investigate certain aspects of reform and report back their findings. One committee under Lord Eustace Percy, a Conservative, set out to examine the financing of an Indian federation, while another commit­ tee under J. C. C. Davidson, a Conservative MP, was to examine financial relations between a federation and the Indian princely states. The third com­ mittee was to recommend a new franchise for the provinces of British India and for the central government of an Indian federation. Lord Lothian accepted the nomination of MacDonald and Hoare to chair the Franchise Committee. In a letter giving its terms of reference, the prime minister charged the com­ mittee "so to widen the electorate that the legislatures to which responsibility is to be entrusted should be representative of the general mass of the popula­ tion, and that no important section of the community may lack the means of 34

Lothian

106

expressing its needs and its opinions."" The Round Table Conference had agreed to raise the electorate from three percent to at least ten percent of the population, with an upper limit of twenty-five percent. MacDonald instructed Lothian also to ensure the representation of women and minorities. Lothian and Hoare appointed ten Indian and eight British members to the Franchise Committee. Two attorneys, R. R. Bakhale and C. Y. Chintamani, rep­ resented Indian Liberals, while S. B. Tambe represented the Hindu Mahasabha. a Hindu nationalist movement. The Indian Liberals and the Mahasabha drew their leaders from the Hindu Brahmin caste. Diwan Bahadur A. Ramaswami Mudaliyar represented the non-Brahmin Justice party of Madras, while Sir Sundar Singh Majithia represented India's three million Sikhs. Radhabai Kudmal Subbarayan, wife of the recent chief minister of Madras, was chosen to represent Indian women. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, leader of the All-India Depressed Classes Congress, represented India's Untouchables. Sir Mohammad Yakub, secretary of the Muslim League, represented Indian Muslims, as did Khan Bahadur Maulvi Aziz ul-Haque and Sir Zulfiqar Ali Khan. British members of the committee included a National Labour MP, Sir Ernest Bennett, and a Labour MP, Major James Milner (no relation to Lord Milner). Two Conservative MPs, Mary Pickford and Richard Austen Butler, also belonged, as did an oil executive, Sir Ernest Miller, who represented the European business community in India. Lothian included as his secretary the twenty-three-year-old fourth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. Sir John Henry Kerr (no relation to Lord Lothian), British governor of Assam from 1922 to 1927, served as deputy chairman. Lothian and the British authorities in India also recruited advisory franchise committees in each Indian province. 16

Arriving in Bombay on January 29, 1932, the Indian Franchise Committee began a whirlwind three-month tour. The Committee visited seven of British India's nine provinces, interviewed the provincial franchise committees, and heard over three hundred witnesses." To focus testimony, Lothian had circu­ lated a questionnaire to each provincial committee in advance, asking opin­ ions on how to enfranchise ten percent of the population. The questionnaire also unfortunately asked, "Do you consider that such an electorate will be capable of casting an intelligent vote?" The Indian press responded with barbed humor: 38

Profound and extensive committees Have made a most excellent start And conclusively proved that our cities Are a deuce of a distance apart. . . Who knows? By the time that they've travelled From Cochin far north to Nepal They'll conclusively prove that the Indian Can never be franchised at all. 39

Appeasement,

1930-1939

107

Indians were understandably skeptical at a time when their country was under emergency rule. Lothian approved Willingdon's ordinances but also saw their ultimate futility. "Strong measures may . . . smash the civil disobedience movement for four or five years," he wrote to Hoare in early February 1932, "but it will not kill Congress or lessen the Nationalist movement." " The viceroy wanted to enlarge the number of Indians on his Executive Council as an interim step forward. Sir Tej Sapru asked Lothian instead to transfer more powers to existing legislative councils and to withdraw the appointed members of these councils. Lothian rejected these proposals, which amounted to reworking the 1919 constitution. "The existing system . . . has been under sentence of death for two or three years," he wrote to Lord Reading, "and you cannot revivify it." ' A correspondent for the British Daily Herald reported Lothian as having said in an interview that a deal with Gandhi was essential. "I feel that . . . you have been misrepresented." cabled an alarmed Sir Samuel Hoare. Lothian replied the next day, acknowledging the interview but calling its reported content false. But Lothian believed that India needed provincial and central government directly responsible to Indian electorates of much larger size, and he looked forward to the prospect that these electorates would vote Congress into office. "Responsibility will sober them as it has sobered others," he wrote Hoare, "and there are probably more men of drive and energy and character . . . in Congress than in any other group." 4

41

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In the last week of March, the three committees assembled at the Viceroy's Lodge in the mountain resort of Simla. The Indian States Committee chair­ man, J. C. C. Davidson, accused Lothian of wanting to give up India to Congress in the same way that Lloyd George had given up Ireland to Sinn Fein. The Indian princes were now reluctant to join an all-India federation with democratically elected Indian leaders; and Hoare warned Lothian that without the princes, Parliament would fall back on the Simon Report. Lothian seems to have argued at Simla that if the princely states agreed to inclusion in a federal India, a new India Act could go through, and the princes could decline to join afterward if they did not obtain the terms they wanted. To Davidson, this sounded duplicitous. "Lothian is an L. G. product," he wrote to Hoare on March 25. "I think that Lothian might be inclined, in order to get a quick success, to be willing to wink at difficulties." Davidson made clear that Parliament would enact no India reform to which the princes were not firmly committed. Two days later, though, he wrote, "I am now glad to say that Lothian is now absolutely with m e " on the need to obtain a firm commit­ ment from the princes. 46

47

48

R. A. Butler reported the progress of the Franchise Committee in letters to Hoare. Butler commended Lord Lothian's tact but wondered "how he pro­ poses to feed at once the lions here and at home." In mid-March, Butler reported from Bombay, the Franchise Committee found itself stuck in the

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mud near some villages outside the city. "We stand as in a cow-byre," he wrote, "and discuss the definition of an intelligent voter." The intensive sched­ ule wore down the Franchise Committee by April. "Lothian has been ill on and off for a week . . . but will not give in," wrote Butler. "Milner is also ill . . . Sir John Kerr has now recovered but is occasionally seen nodding in the afternoon session and so competes with Yakub and Sir Ernest." '' On May 2, 1932, the Committee finally submitted a report of its findings. The 1919 franchise had given ten percent of men and one-half of one percent of women the vote. The Lothian report recommended giving forty-three per­ cent of adult men and ten percent of adult women the right to vote in provin­ cial elections. Most of these voters had to meet various property or income requirements, or had to have completed English-language primary school or its vernacular equivalent. The Lothian Committee proposed using the more limited 1919 provincial franchise for the federal electorate. The new stan­ dards for provincial and federal voters were a great improvement over the qualifications under the 1919 Act, but they still excluded a majority of Indian men and a huge majority of w o m e n * 4

Under the 1919 Act, the same property test applied to women as to men. Because few women owned property in their own right, male voters outnum­ bered women by more than twenty to one. The Lothian Committee took tes­ timony from women in every province, including some in strict purdah (seclusion), and every woman witness demanded equality with men." The All-India Women's Conference, the largest women's organization, called for either a universal adult franchise or an indirect system in which all adults could vote in a primary election. The Lothian Committee called instead for an electorate qualified by property and education. In addition, the Committee recommended enfranchising the wives of male voters or the senior wife in cases where a man had more than one. The Committee also proposed includ­ ing all women who could pass a literacy test, whether or not they had attended school, and urged the reservation of up to five percent of seats in provincial legislatures to women. 52

51

Some of the Indian members of the Franchise Committee objected to these proposals. Sir Mohammad Yakub charged that an educational qualification for women would favor the better-educated Hindus over Muslims. Enfranchising the senior wives in polygamous households would also be an affront to the other wives. Mrs. Subbarayan protested that not enough women would receive the vote. The Committee had heard testimony that women were reluc­ tant to enter polling places where they would be conspicuous by their small numbers. The Hindus Tambe, Chintamani, and Bakhale objected to the reservation of seats for women. ' The Lothian Committee also divided over how to represent the lowest caste of Hindus, the Untouchables or "Depressed Classes" as the British referred to them. The Committee estimated these to number some thirty-five million of 54

55

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Appeasement,

1930-1939

109

British India's 257 million people." The Committee defined Untouchables as those denied entry to ordinary Hindu temples and whose touch or approach ritually defiled caste Hindus above them. Besides any who could meet the new qualifications for the franchise, the Lothian Committee recommended that village watchmen and all literate members of the Depressed Classes receive the vote. Messrs. Tambe, Chintamani, and Bakhale objected and also protested the grouping of Untouchables in separate electorates. Dr. Ambedkar defended separate electorates but objected to a uniform defini­ tion of Untouchability. In many places, he pointed out, high-caste Hindus did not wash themselves after contact with Untouchables. Yet the latter suffered oppression all the same. Ambedkar called for more than one definition of Untouchability to reflect varying local conditions.'"' 58

59

In a note to Lord Lothian, his secretary, Lord Dufferin, warned that repre­ senting Untouchables and other minorities separately would unite the rest of the Hindu population in opposition." But the Lothian Committee did not challenge their terms of reference, which called for the separate representa­ tion of certain groups. Lothian helped draft the Communal Award in August 1932 that apportioned seats in the reformed provincial and federal legislatures to various groups. The Award indeed antagonized higher-caste Hindus, not only because it affirmed separate electorates for Muslims and smaller minori­ ties, but b-cause it recognized Untouchables as an electorate apart from other Hindus. Ambedkar and Gandhi reached a compromise, however, that gave a number of seats to Untouchables within those reserved for Hindus in return for restoring them to the Hindu electorate. 1

62

Geoffrey Dawson commended the Franchise Committee's report in The Times and Lothian returned home in mid-May. But the report's call for larger Indian electorates provoked a blast from Winston Churchill, who had led opposition in the House of Commons to Prime Minister MacDonald's call for responsible government with "safeguards" in December 1931. In a speech to the Carleton Club in London on May 25, 1932, Churchill declared that Lothian had been wrong about Bolshevism in 1919 and was wrong about India today: "Lord Lothian is misleading the country again, supported, as he is, by Geoffrey Dawson and other members of a partisan press, who act as the fuglemen of Imperial surrender." 63

64

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Lothian's service as under-secretary ended abruptly in September 1932. Under pressure from Conservatives, the MacDonald government had negoti­ ated a system of Anglo-Dominion trade preferences at the Ottawa Conference the month before. Lothian had supported the Liberal decision to remain in the government following the British adoption of import duties in January 1932. These had repealed the historic policy of free trade adopted by Britain in 1846. But the Ottawa agreements fixed tariff rates for five years, which in Lothian's view risked breaking up the empire in the event economic condi­ tions changed. On September 28, 1932, Lothian resigned from the National

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Government with Samuel and half of the Liberal MPs, leaving the other half in the government under Simon." Sir Samuel Hoare regretted Lothian's departure in a letter to Lord Willingdon: "I am very sorry to have lost Lothian. I think myself that he was extremely silly . . . not dissociating himself from Samuel and Samuel's crowd."" But Lothian's decision was not frivolous. "I had signed the Liberal Manifesto to the electors along with my colleagues," he explained to Willingdon. "The position of an Under Secretary unsupported in the Cabinet and detached from his supporters would have been one of singular weakness and ineffectiveness and I am not sure that it is not more important to be free to fight Winston and his friends than to remain silenced or half-silenced inside.""'' Lothian had also lost his enthusiasm for government service. "I am sure I am not a practical politician," he told Thomas Jones. "I had a group of leading people from the India Office for a conference at Bückling . . . and I felt quite out of it. My approach is an intellectual one." ' That autumn, Lothian attended a third Round Table Conference, which reaf­ firmed the formula of responsible government with safeguards. In March 1933, the British government published its constitutional vision for India as a White Paper. The British plan called for provincial governments to be fully account­ able to the larger electorates urged in the Lothian report. A new bicameral fed­ eral legislature would be created at the center on a more restricted franchise, and the princes would appoint close to one-third of each house. Great Britain would retain control of key central functions, such as defense and finance. Lothian regretted the reduction in the ratio of women to men voters from his own proposal of one in four to a ratio of one in seven. Without more women as voters, he declared, "there will be no hope of their escaping from the age-old bondage in which they live." But he defended the rest of the White Paper by stressing the principle that it tried to advance as far as it did. "It is the core of British experience that what turns people into practically minded and sensible people is responsibility," he declared of Indians, "and the longer we deny them responsibility the more difficult it will be to create responsible men." ' 7

8

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Lothian served on a Joint Select Committee of the Lords and Commons to hammer out a Government of India Bill. Over Liberal objections, the Committee rejected an amendment to make the federal legislature more dem­ ocratic. But Lothian restored the ratio of women to men voters at the provin­ cial level to about one in five and struck out a clause that required two-thirds of women voters in some areas of India to apply for the vote rather than receive it automatically. In other areas of the country, he arranged for women to apply by letter rather than in person." The Joint Select Committee invited Indian moderates to testify, and Lothian extended his sympathy to a group whose exasperation was growing. "Unless there is a strong and competent moderate delegation from India," he wrote to Dr. M. R. Jayakar of Bombay, a leading nonparty moderate, "there 74

Appeasement,

1930-1939

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is little chance of getting the Bill on the Statute Book at all." Jayakar testi­ fied in London and Lothian credited him with helping to persuade uncommit­ ted Conservatives. Sir Tej Sapru did not testify but commended Lothian for his efforts. * The India reform was still a disappointment to Indian moderates. But Lothian assured Sapru that if Indians elected stable ministries under the new constitution, "power will inevitably and inexorably pass into their hands exactly as it has here and in the Dominions." " 77

7

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On December 12, 1934, Lothian called on the Lords to approve the Joint Committee's report. "I confess that after years of deliberation," he spoke wearily, "it is difficult to maintain that attitude of enthusiasm . . . with which many of us entered into consideration of the new Indian Constitution.""" But the choice before Britain in India could not be more stark: "The issue is going to be between the present proposal and naked repression. If these proposals are rejected . . . all those who have been cooperating with us will refuse to cooperate with us. . . . We shall inevitably be driven to repression from top to bottom in India." Holding India by force would be enormously costly and would require drastic methods. In five or ten years, Lothian added, a Liberal or Labour government could reverse the policy. "You can only prevent [that]," he warned, "by introducing a Fascist constitution in this country."" The India bill passed both Houses of Parliament in July and became law on August 2, 1935.* The federal provisions were never implemented because the princes did not join. But the rest of the Act went into effect and preparations began for provincial elections that would be held two years later. 1

2

Recent assessments of the 1935 Act have examined the intentions of the British Conservative leaders who managed the reform. Although it was by no means their only motive, Hoare and his Conservative colleagues intended the federal provisions of the Act to keep India firmly under British control.*' British intentions were not just those of Conservatives, however, and those of British Liberals also belong in any larger assessment of India reform in the 1930s. The influence of British Liberals receded after the first Round Table Conference but their role in that gathering was crucial. Without the coopera­ tion of Indian Liberals and other Indian moderates in the years that followed, the 1935 Act would never have become law, and Lothian was a critical bridge to moderate India." Lothian favored gradual change but he looked forward to a fully selfgoverning India. He saw the 1935 Act as a step toward Dominion status that he assured his Indian friends was on the horizon, and after 1931 such status amounted to independence. Although he did not point it out, Lothian's argu­ ment in the Lords against a policy of repression, that it would not survive a change of party in London, also applied to the policy embodied in the 1935 Act itself. Conservative hopes of maintaining British control of India rested on the assumption that there would be no fundamental change of policy in the event a different party came to power in the United Kingdom.

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As an independent democracy after 1948, India disproved British reserva­ tions about a universal adult franchise. But Lothian's worry about the divi­ sions in Indian society came true when Pakistan and India separated in 1 9 4 7 ^ 8 . The Communal Award of 1932 may have reflected Indian realities, but the decision, and Lothian's effort to limit the franchise to the "intelligent" voter, contradicted his own rationale for reform. In defending the 1935 Act on the grounds that responsible government would make Indians responsible people, Lothian defended provisions to protect various groups that implied exactly the opposite. He found himself unable to concede more fully what he had earlier faulted Lord Milner for not conceding at all: the principle "that it is better for men to govern themselves badly and to learn from their mistakes than to be administered with supreme wisdom by somebody else. . . ." Nevertheless, Lothian backed a policy that may have averted a more vio­ lent clash with nationalist India. Anthony Low has argued that British rule in India stands in contrast both to American policy in the Philippines and to the colonial regimes in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina." Although the Americans crushed an uprising after their acquisition of the Philippines in 1898, the United States soon moved the islands on a path to independence. The Dutch and French instead forcibly repressed movements for self-government in their Asian dependencies. The British in the 1930s resisted letting go of India but could not bring themselves to use lethal force against nonviolent agitation. Unlike Conservative reformers, for whom this predicament remained a dilemma, Lothian looked forward to a Dominion status for India that conceded the right to independence. 8S

6

THE RECOIL F R O M

FREEDOM

While helping to move the India bill through Parliament, Philip Lothian turned his attention increasingly to international affairs. Here his vision was more clouded. The Depression deepened in the early 1930s and Lothian tried privately to work for Anglo-American cooperation to end it. He also helped avert an Anglo-Japanese agreement in 1934 that would have antagonized the United States. But his efforts did not bring Anglo-American action to end the economic crisis or to meet the growing political and military threats of Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. In the support that he gave for appeasing Hitler's demands after 1933, in the belief that doing so was both just and expedient, Lothian gravely undermined the liberal and democratic civilization that he otherwise worked to preserve. President Herbert Hoover had declared a moratorium on war debts and reparations in July 1931, preventing a chain reaction of Allied defaults on debts owed to the United States. But the moratorium expired in December 1932. Having in effect cancelled German reparations at the Lausanne Conference the previous summer, neither Britain nor France could keep up

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their own debt payments to the United States. In January 1933, President­ elect Franklin Roosevelt agreed to meet Prime Minister MacDonald in Washington after the former's inauguration on March 4. To prepare for the visit, Lothian made a three-week trip to America in January, during which he tried to persuade influential Americans of the need to cancel Allied war debts. Lothian's principal meeting was with Colonel House, now a Democratic party elder statesman with access to Roosevelt. Lothian and House agreed that there was no possibility of a debt agreement by June 15, the scheduled start of a World Economic Conference in London. But the two agreed that debts should be part of larger Anglo-American discussions on ending the Depression. On his return home in early February, Lothian secured MacDonald's agreement to these points. He reported back to House that the British prime minister was reluctant to visit Washington in the absence of some prior agreement over how to end the Depression. Lothian urged meet­ ings of experts from each side before bringing the two leaders together. In an Observer article of February 19, 1933, Lothian argued that lower tariffs and the remission of debts were essential to reviving the world trade on which America's own recovery depended. '' In the March Round Table, he wrote in hope, "an increasing number of thinking people in the United States are com­ ing to recognize that world peace means . . . the assumption by the United States of genuine responsibility for steering the world.'"'" 87

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In a memorandum to British officials, Lothian again urged preliminary meetings at a lower level. "Public opinion in the U.S.A. is still so unedu­ cated," he wrote, as if the problem was one of education, "that the new Congress cannot be expected to ratify an agreement transferring permanently a burden of some $250,000,000 a year to the backs of American taxpayers." The memorandum obtained the approval of Baldwin and two leading civil servants, Sir Warren Fisher, permanent secretary of the Treasury, and Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet secretary. But the chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, preferred to risk a summit meeting in the hope of avoid­ ing a breakdown. MacDonald embarked for Washington in April 1933. The United States went off the gold standard while he was at sea, and his talks with Roosevelt were inconclusive. At the World Economic Conference in London, from June 15 to July 27, 1933, the United States announced that it would not return to the gold standard or act to stabilize currency exchanges. America, Roosevelt signaled, placed its national interests first. Britain made a final reduced debt payment on June 15 and then defaulted on its war debts to America. In April 1934, Congress passed the Johnson Debt Default Act, barring countries in default from raising new war loans in the United States. 91

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At the Liberal Summer School in August 1933, Lothian blamed the Depression on the anarchy of national sovereignty. Wars and tariffs were not transient disturbances, he argued, but inevitable events in a world of

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self-seeking nations. Only under a world government would market forces have the stable conditions necessary to return supply and demand to equilib­ rium. In common with earlier Liberals, Lothian assumed that the synchronic world of classical modern economic theory existed, in which unimpeded mar­ kets always cleared in the short run, and his faith in the curative power of a world state was no less theoretical. But he challenged conventional liberalism by asking whether liberal ideals could be reconciled in principle as well as in practice with a multitude of states that were each a law unto itself. Lothian's supra-nationalism took a less defensible turn in the realm of mil­ itary security. He had resisted British commitments to the security of Europe in the 1920s on the grounds that these would be redundant if the League of Nations and the Kellogg Pact were in force. In the June 1930 Round Table, he called for a new effort to give teeth to the Kellogg Pact. "But if the effort fails," he warned, "and Great Britain is forced to choose between . . . a Europe drifting back to the balance of military power on the one hand, and the United States on the other, she will inevitably choose the latter." In December 1932, Lothian called for a policy of Anglo-American detachment from continental Europe, "so that a regional European structure may come into being, with an interior stability of its own [that] would represent general consent and would no longer rely for its stability on outside guarantees, beyond the general guar­ antee afforded to all States, members of the League and signatories of the Pact.'""' By an "interior stability of its own," Lothian meant a Europe in which the Germans would have military parity with France. 94

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Lord Lothian was in the United States when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany on January 30, 1933. Lothian reflected on this event in an article, "The Recoil from Freedom," in the June Round Table: No doubt, the Nazi revolution in Germany represents to some extent a healthy national resurgence against the defeatism engendered by the defeats of 1918 and later years, and a desire to purify and discipline the national life from some of the corruption which has been manifest since the war. But the corruption and inner decay caused by a dictatorship based on racialism and violence are far more subtle and far reaching in their effects than the corruption engendered by freedom, and far more difficult to remove. The undiscriminating brutality of the "Brown terror," especially its inhuman persecution of the Jews . . . cannot make for the greatness or independence . . . of the German people. Lothian urged the liberal democracies to be on guard. "For history warns us that dictatorship and brutality and the worship of force at home tend in due time to express themselves also in foreign affairs." But Lothian still urged giving the Germans equality as part of a general reduction in armaments. In December 1932, Britain and France had conceded 97

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the principle of parity in land forces with Germany. Over the following year, the Allies had second thoughts, and in October 1933 they asked Germany to accept an inferior position for the next four years. Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations in response. To Lothian, the German action did not seem unreasonable. In a letter to The Times on November 15, he wrote that France and Germany both had legitimate security needs. "In these circumstances it is essential that we should understand . . . both sides, however much we may dis­ like the Nazi regime." " In the December 1933 Round Table, he wrote: "It was one of the supreme merits of the diplomacy of Castlereagh and Wellington that they did not make the mistake of trying to 'repress' France after the Napoleonic wars. And the best way to help restore a more liberal regime in Germany is to remove the legitimate grievances by the exploitation of which the Nazis have so largely risen to power." The principal German grievance was military inferiority. "Either Germany's neighbours . . . must bring their arma­ ments down," Lothian declared, "or Germany's will come up.'" 1

w

Hitler didn't wait for permission to rearm. Evidence of German rearma­ ment forced the British Cabinet to review its defense needs in February 1934. This review concluded that Great Britain could not fight Germany and Japan at the same time, and senior civil servants believed that Nazi Germany was a greater threat. Britain needed to build up its air defenses against Germany and could not at the same time rebuild its fleet to keep up with Japan, which chafed under the 5:5:3 ratio in capital ships that the 1922 and 1930 naval agreements had imposed respectively on America, Britain, and Japan. Tokyo demanded parity with America and Britain when the 1930 agreement expired in 1936. Japan had already demonstrated its capacity for unilateral action by occupying the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931 The Anglo-Japanese alliance had ended in 1922, but the United States feared that Britain might try to renew it. Lothian therefore opposed any British move to appease Tokyo. During his autumn visit to North America in 1934, he obtained an interview on October 10 with President Roosevelt. In response to a Japanese naval buildup. Lothian told the president, Britain could increase its fleet at Singapore, form a common front with the United States, or seek a new arrangement with Japan. The first choice was too expensive and the third was undesirable. Roosevelt sidestepped an American commitment to Britain by arguing that even if he agreed informally to back London against Tokyo, his successor might not. The president did say that "under no circum­ stances" would he agree to Japanese naval parity. Congress would authorize a massive naval-building program if Japan tried to achieve parity. America could not, however, guarantee British security in the Pacific. "The President's attitude," Lothian observed with unintended irony, "was fundamentally not unlike the attitude which Great Britain takes to France.""" Lothian's interview with Roosevelt came to the attention of the British Foreign Office. "Lord Lothian, to say the least of it, does not seem to have

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converted the president to his 'front line' views," wrote a clerk in the Far Eastern Department. "American assurances about eventual co-operation with ourselves are refreshingly honest and completely discouraging." " This com­ ment missed the substance of Roosevelt's message, though, which was that the United States would not accept Japanese domination of the Pacific. Lothian's three alternatives drew criticism from another official: "Lord Lothian . . . does not mention a fourth possible 'alternative,' namely, a joint non-aggression pact between the United States, Japan, and ourselves—which as a matter of fact is that now being explored.""" 1

2

British diplomats began separate talks with the Japanese at the end of October 1934. Reports began appearing in the press that Britain and Japan were explor­ ing a three-way pact by which Japan would obtain naval parity but would not actually build up to this level. On November 11, President Roosevelt warned the Times correspondent in Washington of his opposition to any such agreement or any separate Anglo-Japanese deal. The next day, Prime Minister MacDonald denied that Britain sought any separate agreement with Tokyo. That evening, General Smuts declared in a dinner address before the Royal Institute of International Affairs that the future of the British Commonwealth lay in close association with the United States. Smuts opposed any concessions to Japan that would antagonize America. The Times applauded Smuts, and the American gov­ ernment welcomed the statements of the prime minister and the general. "'' 104

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On November 18, 1934, Lothian published an article of his own in The Observer underlining Smuts' point. William Phillips, the American under­ secretary of state, conveyed Secretary of State Cordell Hull's approval of Lothian's article. " In a letter to Colonel House on November 20, Lothian wrote, "There is everything to be said for getting Japan once more committed to the collective system in the Pacific not only on its own merits but because to do so will make it all the more likely that Germany will in turn become a good European . . ." As an inducement to Tokyo, Lothian suggested recogniz­ ing a Japanese role in Manchuria comparable to the British role in Egypt. House did not comment on the idea. "" But at a private lunch with Lothian and Baldwin on November 2 1 , 1934, Neville Chamberlain, who favored agree­ ment with Japan, conceded that it was not practical at least for the moment."" On November 29, in a note to Harry Hodson, a recent Oxford graduate recruited to succeed John Dove as editor of The Round Table, Lothian wrote, "the work which Smuts and some others have done killed the pro-Japanese movement before it had seriously complicated Anglo-American relations." " 107

1

8

1

1

Lothian's enthusiasm for America was not shared by the British Foreign Office. "Lord Lothian told me recently and repeatedly that we had 'a tiger in the White House' who 'would do our fighting for us in the Far East,'" wrote Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary in the Foreign Office. "I replied that I had personally known quite a number of tigers in white houses, and that I still thought hutch might be a safer and more accurate word."" In 2

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a letter to The Times on February 18, 1935, Lothian warned that unless the Western powers took a stand, Japan would seize the rest of China as it had Manchuria. Sir Robert Clive, the British ambassador to Tokyo, reassured the Japanese that Lord Lothian did not speak for the British government. " But on December 29, 1934, Japan denounced the 1922 and 1930 naval agree­ ments, and in July 1937, Japan began to invade the rest of China. Unable to restrain the Japanese, British leaders began to explore agreement with the Germans. In contrast to his hard line with Japan, Lothian backed a more conciliatory approach to Germany. But his Rhodes work made clear how difficult it would be to work with the Hitler regime. The Rhodes Trustees had reestablished two Scholarships for Germany in 1929 and had appointed a committee of distinguished Germans and former German Scholars to make nominations. But with the Nazis in power, the future of the German Scholarships was uncertain. One of the German Rhodes committee members, Dr. Walter Simons, had been a leader of the centrist Democratic party, and German conservatives had criticized the committee before 1933 for its dem­ ocratic orientation. The Nazis objected to another committee member, Professor Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who was Jewish. " 1

1

The Rhodes Trustees appointed all of the selection committees and approved all nominations for Scholarships. In August 1933, Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, a 1909 German Rhodes Scholar and member of the German committee, urged the Trustees to keep this control firmly in British hands. Lothian told Bernstorff that "there must be no conditions of any kind imposed on candidates by the regime" and he added that "the Trustees would refuse to remove a member of the German Committee just because he was a Jew." Rotation on the committee was normal, though, and Lothian expressed his opinion that someone "in reasonably friendly relations" to the regime might be desirable at some point to include. " A 1905 German Scholar, Count Johann Schwerin von Krosigk, joined the German Rhodes committee in 1932 and served as a link to the regime until the Second World War. Schwerin was Hitler's finance minister." 1

6

In October 1933, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy lost his chair at the University of Hamburg, although a place was quickly found for him at Balliol College, Oxford. The following January, one of the two German Rhodes Scholars for 1931 found himself unable to find employment at home because his grand­ mother was Jewish. Lothian advised the Rhodes Trustees against making a grant to the young man for study in England, "because it opens up an uncharted sea of possibilities if the Trustees are to begin to support Rhodes Scholars in after life."" But privately one of the Rhodes Trustees found a position for him with a London banking firm later that year. Then in July 1934, the Gestapo arrested German Rhodes committee mem­ ber Adolf Morsbach, director of the German Academic Exchange Service. German students applied for Rhodes Scholarships through his office and 7

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Count Bernstorff and the American Rhodes secretary Frank Aydelotte, who was in Berlin at the time, warned Lothian that the service was now under Nazi control."* Morsbach was released in August but did not return to his post. Applicants forwarded by the Exchange Service thereafter did not exclude nonNazi students and the German Rhodes committee reciprocated by approving one or two avowed Nazis. But until it ended in 1939, the program maintained a precarious independence that it owed mainly to the influence of former German Scholars. Nazi leaders may also have been reluctant to sever a presti­ gious connection with Britain or to offend Lothian, whose social position and support for appeasement soon counted in Berlin."" Although he defended the independence of the German Scholarships, Lothian accepted the need for the program to be on terms with the regime that were cordial enough to allow it to continue. He visited Berlin from January 25-29, 1935, to convey the support of the Trustees for the German Rhodes committee, and at a dinner for the German Scholars he commended them on their accomplishments in life. Under the circumstances, this was more of a tribute to their survival. During his Berlin visit, Lothian sounded out Nazi leaders on their larger intentions. He had consulted British Foreign Secretary Simon before his trip and had made arrangements to meet Hitler in the company of a footloose English academic and peace activist, T. P. Conwell-Evans, who at the time was lecturing at the University of Königsberg in East Prussia. Two years earlier, Lothian had accepted an offer by Conwell-Evans to report on conditions in Germany. Lothian approved a magazine article published by Conwell-Evans in January 1934 that condemned anti-Semitism but credited the Nazis with a spirit of service and self-sacrifice. The German embassy in London urged that Lothian be given access to Nazi leaders on his 1935 visit to Berlin. ' 120

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At noon on Tuesday, January 29, 1935. Lord Lothian had an interview with the Führer. Conwell-Evans and a German Foreign Office interpreter attended, as did Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the future Nazi foreign minister, who at the time held the ironic position of Reich Commissioner for Disarmament. The interview was mostly a monologue by Hitler, who dwelled on the Russian menace. The Führer called communism a "world-conquering idea" that had to be fought by an idea of equal power. More immediately, Hitler demanded a three-way agreement that treated Germany, France, and England as military equals. Lothian asked if Germany would sign a general agreement to stabilize Europe for ten years. Otherwise, he pointed out, war between Germany and France was possible and then "communism would have its chance." Hitler agreed. Lothian then raised three points to which Conwell-Evans recorded the Führer's responses: Lothian: ( 1 ) Germany would never endeavour to settle the Polish question except by peaceful means . . . Hitler: Certainly, I agree.

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Lothian: (2) Frontiers with France settled. No more resort to force here. Hitler: Certainly. Most absolutely correct. Lothian: (3) No intention of settling Austrian question by force, though this did not rule out eventually changing the situation by a free plebiscite. Hitler (passionately): Force absolutely ruled out. Hitler expressed the hope that Germany and Britain could together keep the peace. Lothian replied that Cecil Rhodes had envisioned a partnership between Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, but that Germany's intentions were still unclear. Lothian expressed the hope that meetings such as this one would help remove misunderstanding. Lothian returned to London on January 30, 1935, and reported his meeting to Simon. Lothian urged direct talks with Germany on the grounds that Berlin wanted to be an equal party to arms negotiations from the start and not just be given terms by London and Paris. Lothian also advised, "1 think Hitler gen­ uinely means peace on its merits." In two articles in The Times, on January 31 and February 1, 1935, Lothian argued that a ten-year peace agreement between all of the European powers was possible if Germany was treated as an equal. ' Lothian may have anticipated the Anglo-French declaration on February 3 that conceded German arms equality on land and called for a pact to outlaw air attack at the start of a new war. 124

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During his Berlin trip, Lothian met separately with other Nazi officials.' In a letter to Ribbentrop after his return home, Lothian wrote, "I have seen Sir John Simon and Mr. Baldwin and pressed my view as to the importance of direct Anglo-German discussions." Lothian urged Germany to respond in a "friendly and helpful way" to British disarmament proposals, even if they did not go as far as the Germans wanted. He repeated the words that he said he had used to describe Hitler to reporters who had met him on his return from Berlin: "I found the Führer in good health and . . . he seemed to me to have the qualities of a prophet, which in this country is a term of respect. . . . He is indeed the prophet of the new Germany." In a letter to Conwell-Evans, Lothian wrote of Ribbentrop: "I have written to our friend in Berlin saying that if his friends accept the declaration . . . I am confident that a high person­ age would go to Berlin. If he gets fussy, make it clear to him that I am not in an official position. . . . I think we have created a real opportunity and it is now for the official world to take advantage of it." 128

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The British Foreign Office did not see any advantage to Lothian's visit, nor to the visit on January 30 of Clifford Allen, the First World War antiwar leader whom the second Labour government had created Baron Allen of Hurtwood. Ralph Wigram, head of the Central European department in the Foreign Office, commented that the Germans wanted approval of their rear­ mament in return for guarantees that they had already given in the Locarno treaties and in a German-Polish nonaggression pact of 1934. "What a 'marché 130

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des dupes'," wrote Wigram of Hitler's two visitors, "and how it recalls the similar methods of duplicity which our state papers show that Germany prac­ tised towards us before the war."" In his Times article of January 3 1 , 1935, Lothian had characterized National Socialism as a movement based on "national self-respect." Leonard Montefiore, a British Jewish leader, wrote to ask how the degradation of oth­ ers could give any nation self-respect. Lothian replied: "In some degree the brutality of National Socialism is the reaction to the treatment given to Germany herself since the war. 1 believe the best way of restoring reasonable rights to the Jews in Germany is not to counter hate with hate but to under­ mine the source of the evil aspects of National Socialism by giving Germany her rightful place in Europe."" Lothian soon received encouraging words from moderates in the two countries whose goodwill he sought most. Norman H. Davis, now a confidant of President Roosevelt, commended Lothian on his Times articles, although Davis wondered whether Hitler was sincere. Joachim Stresemann, son of Germany's chancellor in the 1920s, Gustav Stresemann, objected to Lothian's view that Germany had acquiesced to an inferior posi­ tion under his father. But the younger Stresemann called for revision of Germany's eastern frontier and approved Lothian's diplomacy." 1

2

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On March 4, 1935, the British government published a White Paper on defense that pointed to a rearming Germany to justify modest British rearma­ ment. The French then extended their period of military conscription from one to two years. In response, Germany announced on March 9 the existence of its air force, which was prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. On March 16, Hitler instituted conscription and enlarged the standing German army from one hundred thousand to half a million men. Hitler thereby ripped to shreds the military clauses in the Treaty of Versailles. Lothian signaled Ribbentrop on March 20 of British alarm: "If Great Britain comes to the con­ clusion that Germany is genuinely willing to work the original concept of the League . . . British public opinion will once more move in the German direc­ tion. . . ." But "if Great Britain comes to the conclusion that Germany in her heart rejects the League thesis and prefers a military balance leading to power diplomacy and war, 1 have no doubt that British opinion will come down on the anti-German side. . . ." To restore British trust, Lothian advised, Germany had to accept "without qualification" the independence of the present nationstates of Europe, return to the League of Nations, and join a disarmament agreement. 114

After a second warning from Lothian, Ribbentrop on April 23 sent a non­ committal reply. British concessions soon justified Ribbentrop's evasion. On May 2, 1935, France and Soviet Russia signed a pact of mutual assistance, fulfilling Lothian's fear of a return to the armed camps of 1914. On May 2 1 , Hitler proposed a naval agreement with Britain that would limit the German navy to thirty-five percent of the British fleet. On June 18, Britain and 115

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Germany signed an agreement on the basis of this ratio. Lothian objected to the inclusion of British Commonwealth forces in the calculation of British naval strength, but he endorsed the Anglo-German agreement in the House of Lords on June 2 6 . Ribbentrop visited London to sign the naval agreement. Accompanied by Conwell-Evans, he paid a visit to Lothian at Bückling, the latter's mansion in the Norfolk countryside. Conwell-Evans wrote Lothian afterward, "I shall never forget the awe which fell upon von R . . . as the car turned and came upon Bückling Hall." " Lothian regarded his Nazi visitor with disdain. "Ribbentrop was staying with me at the last week-end," he wrote to Loring Christie in Canada. "He is now putting on the airs of an Ambassador Plenipotentiary. . . . He is a pleasant-mannered fellow but mentally a light weight.""" 1,6

1

During the visit, though, Lothian tried to impress on Ribbentrop how deeply the brutality of the Nazi regime had strained Anglo-German relations. Lothian had attempted to intercede on behalf of victims of Nazi persecution, and he accepted the chairmanship of the German Refugees Assistance Fund, an umbrella organization of groups that helped victims of the regime to emi­ grate."" He might have begun a new career when James MacDonald resigned in January 1936 as League of Nations High Commissioner for German Refugees. Sir Orme Sargent of the British Foreign Office consulted Norman Bentwich, a British Jewish leader, about a replacement: "Mr. Bentwich felt strongly that the High Commissioner should be a man of international repu­ tation," wrote Sargent, "and . . . the candidate he preferred was clearly Lord Lothian. The latter, however, on being sounded had declared himself too busy to undertake the work. Mr. Bentwich hinted, however, that he might yield if pressed by His Majesty's Government." His Majesty's Government unfor­ tunately did not press Lothian to take the job. 140

In a June 1935 reply to the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Lothian wrote: "I had a long talk with Ribbentrop . . . and pressed on him the points you memorandum as strongly as I could. I told him that . . . it was essential that the persecution of individuals by an omnipotent Government should be ended. Ribbentrop listened very well but . . . did not commit himself." In July, Lothian declined to sign a public statement against Nazi brutality circu­ lated by Lord Noel-Buxton, "not because I do not sympathise with it but because . . . to sign it would lessen any influence I have for the very purpose you have in view." But as private entreaties to Berlin met with ominous silence, Lothian saw little point in persisting with them. "I do not believe that individual protests . . . will have any effect except to salve our consciences," he wrote to Lord Allen of Hurtwood in October. Lord Lothian declined an invitation to visit Germany in August 1935. On September 25, Conwell-Evans wrote him after having attended the 1935 Nazi party congress in Nuremburg: 141

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I had a thrilling week at Nürnberg, and was greatly honoured . . . by being invited to ride in the car immediately following the Führer as he drove at walking pace standing up in his car through the streets of Nürnberg to the castle, where we sat down to luncheon. I gave him your greetings. He smiled warmly in remembering you. . . . All this before the announcement of the Jewish legislation. On this I lectured Ribbentrop till I was black in the face. It had no effect. 145

The "Nuremburg L a w s " of September 15, 1935, deprived German Jews of their remaining rights of citizenship and took Germany a step closer to the Holocaust. Lothian had expressed doubts about the Nazi regime in 1933 but had set these aside to give Hitler a chance to show his intentions. Lothian also tried to use his standing in Berlin to intercede with the regime on behalf of some of its victims. But as the Nazi regime grew more violent and as its armed forces grew stronger, Lord Lothian grew more detached. After 1935, he per­ sisted in appeasement of Germany in the belief that justice demanded remov­ ing the conditions imposed on Germany in 1919. But as reality grew more menacing, his hopes would depend increasingly on faith.

LOTHIAN'S GAMBLE

Philip Lothian took a stand when the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini invaded the African kingdom of Ethiopia on October 3, 1935. In the December 1935 Round Table, he called on Britain to sever Italian communi­ cations with Ethiopia if economic sanctions failed.' The threat to the British Empire no doubt motivated his concern, but he saw the crisis more deeply as a challenge to the League of Nations. At a time when German power was growing, though, the French and British governments did not want to antag­ onize Italy, and the British also worried that Japan might take the opportunity of a Mediterranean crisis to attack in the Far East. Sir Samuel Hoare. who replaced Simon as British foreign secretary in June 1935, resigned when a public uproar followed the leaking of an agreement he was seeking with France that would have ceded parts of Ethiopia to Italy in return for peace. The agreement never went through, although France and Britain acquiesced in the Italian conquest of the entire country the following spring. O n March 7, 1936, Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland with German troops, in violation of the 1925 Locarno treaties that prohibited Germany from remilitarizing the area. Hitler cited the French ratification of the Franco-Russian pact on February 28 to justify his move, and the Führer proposed a twenty-five-year peace pact to soften the blow. 46

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The Rhineland crisis broke as Lord Lothian hosted a number of friends over the weekend of March 7 - 8 at Bückling. The guest list included the new

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Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and his wife, Lord and Lady Astor, and Thomas Jones, a confidant of Stanley Baldwin, who had replaced MacDonald as prime minister in June 1935. But the Edens cancelled and Jones recorded how the rest of the gathering reacted to the events of March 7: "Immediately after dinner we listened to the news on the wireless and then, at my request, resolved ourselves into a Shadow Cabinet with this agendum: 'Draft of Prime Minister's Speech on Monday.'" Jones telephoned the group's conclusions to Baldwin the next morning. The group urged him to welcome Hitler's peace proposal "wholeheartedly" and to treat the reoccupation as an "assertion . . . of recovered status of equality and not as [an] act of aggression." The group added, almost as an afterthought, "Go on with our rearmament pro­ gramme." " Lothian and his social circle presumed in this crisis to think for the government; but in doing so, they were not far from its actual thinking. Baldwin and Eden initiated military staff talks with France but acquiesced in Hitler's move. 14

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In an address to Chatham House on April 2, 1936, Lothian defended the German move into the Rhineland as a response to the Franco-Russian pact. He neglected to mention that Hitler had rebuffed a French invitation to join the pact and that it was German rearmament that had prompted it. Looking ahead, Lothian declared: "I would give without the slightest reserve an absolute guarantee to France and Belgium against unprovoked aggression of their frontiers and soil; but 1 would make it absolutely clear that the casus foederis could never occur as a result of war arising from treaties between France and other countries." " Two years earlier, though, Lord Robert Cecil had asked Lothian what would happen if France went to war with Germany to defend an eastern European country and Germany then invaded France and threatened to overwhelm it? Could Britain remain neutral? To this question, Lothian still had no answer. 15

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A reason for Lothian's silence lay in his 1936 address. In it he observed that an alliance of the United States and the British Commonwealth would have a preponderance of naval power in the world and would be "a real nucleus round which a League of democratic nations could exist in security." Two obstacles stood in the way of such a grouping: commitments to the con­ tinent of Europe that the United States was unwilling to share, and the fact that America "has yet to realise . . . that her own security and peace may be made more certain by partial than by total isolation." In other words, Lothian suggested, British detachment from Europe might draw the United States halfway out of its own isolation. In a June 3 letter to Eden, Lothian urged a policy of British abstention from the European continent to make an Anglo-American partnership more attractive to the United States.' In the June 1936 Round Table and in the October 1936 Foreign Affairs, Lothian called on the English-speaking nations to combine to keep regional wars in Europe and Asia from spreading into world wars. 152

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Lothian's strategy was still ambiguous. If a new Franco-German war was a "regional" war and not a "world" one, then for America and Britain to stand aside would give Germany a free hand to dominate its continental neighbors, depriving an English-speaking bloc of vital allies in the event Hitler decided afterward to venture farther afield. However, if an Anglo-American group could not remain indifferent to a German invasion of France, then Lothian's distinction between regional wars and world wars carried little force. A more united English-speaking world might also have been more isolationist than Britain alone. But such a powerful bloc might still have given pause to poten­ tial aggressors in the 1930s. Lothian seems to have received no encouragement from Americans, though, and he accepted the risk of allowing Germany to grow stronger while he waited for America to take a greater role in the world.' 55

Moderating Germany remained Lothian's other aim and hope. Here, the urge to conciliate collided with his own doubts. On July 14, 1936, he was the keynote speaker at a London dinner of the Anglo-German Fellowship, an elite social group with members in both countries. "Germany now has both equal­ ity and strength," he declared before an audience of Nazi and British digni­ taries. "Reparations have gone. Part V [the military clauses] of the Treaty of Versailles has gone. The demilitarization of the Rhineland has gone, and the sooner that recovery of her natural right of self-defence is accepted without further discussion the better." But "if Britain makes this contribution to appeasement . . .," Lothian added, "Germany has also her contribution to make. Let me speak plainly. There are aspects of the internal policy of the National Socialist State which are a serious obstacle to the establishment of cordial relations between the British and the German people. Everyone knows what they are. And the speed and extent of Germany's rearmament has caused a not unnatural anxiety as to the ultimate intentions of German policy." Lothian called on Britain to rearm, declaring that "whether for defense or in negotiation we must play our cards from strength and not from weakness." Regrettably, he did not see how appeasement had already undermined the British strength that he now called for new armaments to shore up. 156

Lothian's views nevertheless distanced him from the British peace move­ ment. On May 28, 1935, he gave a memorial lecture in London for the Bürge Trust, a small endowment to promote Christian understanding of world affairs. In his talk, he faulted peace activists for seeking the benefits of a law­ ful world without the hard work of creating a universal government to make and enforce the rule of law. Shortly after Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland in 1936, a British pacifist leader asked Lothian to help organize and lead a mass demonstration in support of the Fiihrer's call for a twentyfive-year peace pact. Lothian declined, writing, "I agree with your general view but think that Hitler ought to add agreement to limit armaments."' " The Round Table Moot usually followed Lothian on international relations, but the group divided over Germany. Robert Brand objected to Geoffrey 157

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Dawson's editorial support for appeasement in The Times. In a July 1936 let­ ter to Dawson, Brand reported a recent moot with Lothian: I wish you had been present at our discussion with Philip last night. We were all unanimous that he was going too far in the direction of trying to appease Germany. I would not encircle Germany [and] I would make it absolutely clear that as regards the whole of Western Europe we should fight and as regards Central and Eastern Europe we keep a free hand. . . . But I believe it is quite a hopeless policy . . . to do what Philip does too much, namely, keep on saying that [Germany] is hemmed in. . . . He was unable to answer last night what he meant by being hemmed in.' w

But if Brand and the others were more skeptical of Nazi Germany, they too wanted somehow to treat western and eastern Europe differently. " The abdication of King Edward VIII temporarily pushed international rela­ tions aside at the end of 1936. Following his annual Rhodes visit to North America that autumn, Lothian involved himself in efforts to resolve the crisis provoked by the king's desire to marry an American divorcée, Mrs. Simpson. When the king's intention finally became public on December 3, Lothian tried quietly to press the compromise solution of a morganatic marriage. He dined several times with Mrs. Simpson and he encouraged Thomas Jones to urge the compromise on Baldwin. Churchill, who stood against Lothian on most issues, joined him in defending the king, but Baldwin opposed the marriage, as did Dawson and the archbishop of Canterbury. On December 10, King Edward abdicated the throne to his brother Albert, who became King George VI. Lothian's sympathy for Edward perhaps reflected something of his own situation in life. Although for quite different reasons, Lothian too could not find happiness in conformity to the church in which he was raised. 16

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Indian affairs summoned Lord Lothian again in the spring of 1937. Provincial elections in February of that year gave Congress majorities in six provinces and pluralities in three more. But Congress refused to take office on April 1, when provincial autonomy under the 1935 Act was to begin. The Act gave British governors certain reserve powers that allowed them, at their dis­ cretion, to make policy on their own. Gandhi believed that these powers were incompatible with true autonomy, and the leader of the younger and more militant Congress members, Jawaharlal Nehru, demanded full independence for India. Lothian had invited Nehru to Bückling in February 1936, where he found the Indian leader "a most intelligent and attractive man." But Nehru resisted Lothian's appeal to work the 1935 Act. On March 30, 1937, Gandhi publicly demanded "a gentlemanly understanding" that governors would not use their reserve powers to interfere with a provincial ministry. ' Sir Findlater Stewart, permanent under-secretary in the India Office, asked Lothian to write a letter to The Times urging Congress to reconsider. In a 162

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letter published on April 6, Lothian argued that under responsible government elsewhere in the Commonwealth, governors did not normally refuse the advice of elected ministries. He reiterated this point in the House of Lords on April 8; in private letters the next day, he urged Gandhi and Nehru to cooper­ ate. Gandhi made a public reply to Lothian on April 11, calling on Great Britain to institute three-judge panels that would arbitrate in instances in which elected ministries and governors did not agree. Lothian responded with another letter to The Times on April 13 to observe that judges should not have the power to overturn an elected government. The real arbiter in such situa­ tions, he declared, should be the Indian electorate itself."" Lothian's call for recourse to the Indian electorate went too far for Lord Linlithgow, who had replaced Lord Willingdon as viceroy in 1936. Lord Zetland, who had replaced Hoare as secretary of state for India, also stood opposed. Lothian wrote to Lord Halifax (the former Lord Irwin) that "the real safeguards are not the Governor's powers but the fact that inexperienced Ministries will have to formulate their proposals with the assistance of the Civil Service which will certainly bring them down to earth, will then have to pass them through the Legislature, and it will only be after these immensely moderating processes . . . that the question of. . . the special responsibilities of the Governor will arise." Lothian tried to reassure British officials that under the new Indian constitution they had less to fear from Indian elec­ torates, and he tried to reassure Indians that they had less to fear from British governors, than either were inclined to believe. 1

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In a private reply to Lothian's private letter of April 9, Gandhi pointed out that India did not have the same history of freedom as the British Dominions. British refusal to give the assurance Congress demanded had revived all of nationalist India's suspicions, and Gandhi warned that the violence he so much deplored was possible. He invited Lothian to pay a visit back to India to see conditions for himself. Lothian replied on June 10 that the 1935 con­ stitution was based on "a dualism which cannot last indefinitely." Power would inevitably go from the British to the Indian electorate. It would be "far easier to secure alterations in the Constitution than would appear from the text," he added, "eventually even to . . . independence under the Statute of Westminster." Congress finally relented and accepted office on July 7. Gandhi had not anticipated Muslim objections to his demand for a "gentle­ manly understanding" and Congress moderates persuaded themselves that the British were now less likely to invoke their reserve powers. Lothian's sympa­ thetic response to Congress may have helped defuse the crisis. British policy toward Nazi Germany now became Lord Lothian's principal focus until the outbreak of war in 1939. Neville Chamberlain, who wanted to continue appeasement, became prime minister on May 28, 1937. He came increasingly into conflict with Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, who was more troubled by concessions to Hitler and who finally resigned over them 169

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and other issues in February 1938. In a June 1938 letter to Lothian, Lionel Curtis remarked: We are now passing through the most critical epoch in British history. Your knowledge of foreign affairs and influence on policy is greater than that of anyone outside the Cabinet and of most Ministers in it. Your long and per­ sistent efforts were largely responsible for the displacement of VansittartEden . . . by Halifax. Though Chamberlain and Halifax may have diverged from your lines you still exercise the most powerful influence on their pol­ icy outside the Cabinet.'" Lord Halifax had replaced Eden as foreign secretary, and Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent under-secretary in the Foreign Office and an antiappeaser, was pushed into a powerless advisory role. Did Lothian in fact arrange Eden's downfall? Lothian had congratulated the thirty-eight-year-old Eden on his appoint­ ment as foreign secretary in December 1935. But to Lord Linlithgow, Lothian doubted "that Anthony is a big enough man for the job." In a speech to the House of Lords on November 17, 1936, Lothian called for a new state­ ment of British foreign policy. His call may have prompted Eden to give an address in his constituency of Leamington and Warwick three days later. At Leamington on November 20, Eden endorsed British rearmament and stated that England would go to war to defend the British Empire and its treaty allies of Egypt and Iraq, and would also defend the Low Countries and France from unprovoked attack. Eden pointedly did not commit Britain to defend eastern Europe. He may have intended to imply that Britain retained a free hand there and elsewhere. But his words signaled to Lothian that Britain had a lesser interest in countries beyond the ones that Eden had chosen to mention by name. 171

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Lothian paid a second visit to Hitler on May 4, 1937, during which he called the attention of the Führer to Eden's Leamington address. Lothian sug­ gested that Germany recognize the independence of its smaller eastern neigh­ bors in return for economic and political ties similar to those that Great Britain had with its Dominions. For Germany to recognize the independence of eastern Europe in this way, Lothian argued, would make an "immense dif­ ference" in England. Hitler was evasive. In a memorandum of his visit that he sent to Chamberlain, Lothian again proposed the British Commonwealth as the model for German relations with eastern Europe, but he also advised against a British commitment to the defense of Germany's eastern neighbors. He also sent his memorandum and transcripts of his interview with Hitler to Norman Davis for President Roosevelt. To the annoyance of the British Foreign Office, he also sent copies to the Dominion prime ministers attend­ ing the Coronation of King George VI on May 12, 1937. 178

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Lothian's proposal to Hitler of a German Commonwealth may have been his own rephrasing of a suggestion by Vansittart, who noted, "Lord Lothian seems to have made the point which I suggested to him—that the negotiation of agree­ ments in regard to Central Europe would be much facilitated, and probably facilitated in a way satisfactory to Germany, if she could reassure her smaller neighbours of her determination to respect their independence and integrity." But Vansittart observed, "It appears . . . that this suggestion has evoked a some­ what mediocre response, and Lord Lothian, conscious of this, is . . . now tend­ ing to take refuge again in some form of British abstention from interest on the continent beyond its western marges. This of course is not practical politics." " 18

Lord Lothian's second visit to Hitler was more somber than his first, in part because the Führer was upset with recent British press coverage of the Spanish Civil War. The Times and other British newspapers had reported the terror bombing of Guernica in Spain by Nazi warplanes in April. In a letter to his former Paris correspondent, Dawson defended the Guernica report, "which is confirmed in every detail." But Dawson tried to show consideration to the Germans in "small things," such as extending sympathy after the explo­ sion of the airship Hindenburg. ' In a letter to Lothian about the Nazis, Dawson confessed: "I simply cannot understand why they should apparently be so much annoyed with The Times at this moment. I spend my nights in tak­ ing out anything which I think may hurt their susceptibilities and in [drop­ ping] in little things which are intended to soothe them." What incensed the Nazis, though, were not little things but big things, such as the occasions when The Times saw fit to tell the unsoothing truth. 181

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The quasi-official character of The Times caused Eden to object when Lothian asked if he could write another set of articles for the paper on Germany in June 1937. At that moment Eden was anxious to explore German intentions and wanted to avoid provoking anti-appeasers at home and abroad. But Eden's lack of enthusiasm for appeasement increasingly irri­ tated Chamberlain. Things reached a breaking point when, without consult­ ing Eden, the prime minister rebuffed a secret proposal from Roosevelt in January 1938 to call a world conference to discuss ways of reducing interna­ tional tension. Roosevelt did not mean to engage the United States in any for­ eign commitment, but Eden believed that Chamberlain had passed up a chance to bring American influence to bear in the world. Because the U.S. initiative had been secret, Eden did not feel that he could resign over it. On February 24, 1938, though, he resigned in opposition to Chamberlain's pro­ posal to recognize formally the Italian conquest of Ethiopia. 184

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It is unlikely that Lothian played the role in Eden's departure from office that Curtis asserted. Lothian and Eden opposed the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, and both men were friendlier to the United States than Chamberlain. Eden and Vansittart did stand in the way of German appeasement, and Lothian was a presence in the high-level world of private dinners and opinion journalism

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that played a role in the making of policy. But biographers of Eden have not credited his downfall to Lothian, and the rest of the June 1938 letter from Curtis was a plea for his friend to attend an academic conference in Australia that autumn, which Curtis claimed would be of world-historic importance. Curtis exaggerated Lothian's influence out of admiration; less admiring observers exaggerated it in an effort to discredit the policies Lothian urged. In November 1937, a left-wing journalist, Claud Cockburn, attacked the social circle of Lady Astor, dubbing it "The Cliveden Set" after the Astor country estate, Cliveden. Cockburn accused Nancy Astor, Philip Lothian, Geoffrey Dawson, and other members of this circle of trying to negotiate with Germany behind Eden's back. It turned out that on the weekend of October 2 3 - 2 4 , 1937, when a gathering to plot this activity allegedly took place, Eden was himself the guest of honor at Cliveden. " The left-wing press missed again when it accused the Cliveden Set a few months later of having plotted in January 1938 to remove Eden. In fact, at the time, the Astors were visiting America and Lord Lothian was in India.'"" But the charges of a Cliveden Set struck a popular chord and pointed to a convergence of political, intellectual, and social influence that did help keep the policy of appeasement going. The Round Table, The Times, and The Observer were a powerful combination within the upper reaches of the British establishment, and Lothian's access to all three, at a time when print media were the major source of news and com­ mentary in Britain, gave prominence to his views. Is

The attack on Lady Astor's circle was also indirectly an attack on the Round Table Moot. Events might have gone very differently, though, had the Moot really possessed the influence over policy attributed to its leading mem­ bers. If British, American, and Dominion leaders had followed Round Table advice in the 1920s and 1930s, an English-speaking super-bloc would have existed with the will to enforce the League of Nations Covenant and the Kellogg Pact. Lothian and the Moot played a supporting role in policies that had the backing of others at the top; apart from Japan, they were not an influ­ ence in urging policies that were more distinctly their own. William E. Dodd, the American ambassador to Berlin, ran into Lothian there in May 1937 and wrote of him in his diary, "He seemed to be more a Fascist than any other Englishman I have met." "'' Dodd was a temperamental figure who had praised Lothian's Times articles on Germany in February 1935. But did Lothian have any sympathy for fascism? The Reverend A. G. Fraser, to whom Lothian lent his property of Newbattle Abbey for use as an adult college, recalled their feelings on an August 1936 visit to a national service camp in Germany from which young men built highways and helped bring in the harvest: 1

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There we found people from all classes, lads from eighteen upwards, work­ ing together, dressed alike, under the same regulations. . . . Hitler's energy,

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his desire for unity in Germany, the skill with which he set out to break down class distinctions . . . appealed greatly to Lothian. He was strongly repelled by the dragooning of the mind as seen in the camps, but I agreed with him that the Labour Camps were doing excellent works, except for that one serious objection, and we would both of us have been glad had it been possible to have a similar system in Britain. Lothian was deeply dis­ tressed by the condition of Germany after the war, and Hitler's optimism and energy in reconstruction appealed to him.' 91

Fraser's account is confirmed by a letter from Philip Lothian to Nancy Astor reporting the visit with Fraser. "You never saw a healthier body of men," he wrote. "The trouble . . . is that they are not taught to think for themselves. They are cheerful. . . but when the word of command is given, they will obey it without much question." Despite his annual visits to the United States, Lothian seems to have taken no interest in the work camps of the American New Deal, which gave young men public service employment without demanding such regimentation. His 1936 visit to a Nazi youth camp was in fact his second. ' Lothian had no sym­ pathy with the violent side of fascism. But he may have felt in these visits the emotional pull of a physical energy, unfettered by rational thought, that his religious faith and liberal convictions denied him. 192

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In a May 1935 diary entry, Dodd also accused Lothian of trying to turn Nazi Germany against Soviet Russia: "That this might lead to a war between Russia and Germany does not seem to disturb him seriously. In fact, he seems to feel this would be a good solution. . . ."' The American ambassador to Paris, William Bullitt, wrote in the same vein to President Roosevelt in January 1937: "Philip Kerr, that is to say, Lord Lothian, is convinced that Hitler will not accept peace except at the price of domination of Eastern and Central E u r o p e . . . . Kerr personally would like to see Germany get that domination and is absolutely opposed to any armed interference by England to prevent it." In July 1936, Lothian had written to the Duchess of Atholl, "I am not sure that Russia is not more dangerous than Germany," and in a November 1937 letter to J. L. Garvin, he hoped Germany would get "a free hand for herself in dealing with Russia.'"* 94

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In his May 1937 interview with Hitler, though, Lothian seems to have expressed a different view, which he restated in a published article addressed to Germany later that month, calling for a German role in eastern Europe analogous to Britain's role in the Commonwealth. Sir Alexander Cadogan. deputy under-secretary in the Foreign Office, commented that a "free hand" for Germany would not amount to much if it preserved the independence of eastern Europe. " Lothian never clarified his meaning. From the record of his views, it would appear that he wanted Germany to have a benign relationship with its smaller eastern neighbors, but that he was not prepared to stand in the way of a more aggressive one. 197

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As reality darkened, Philip Lothian came to rely more and more on religious faith to sustain his hope of peace with Germany. An edict of December 12, 1936, had banned Christian Science activity in that country, and at the end of his 1937 interview with Hitler, Lothian protested the Nazi harassment of German Christian Scientists. The ban ended after his return home and Lothian credited spiritual effort with the change. In a letter to the Christian Science Board of Directors, the governing body of the church in Boston, he wrote, "Clearly everybody concerned had done good metaphysical work. . . ." ° The Americans appear to have joined him in prayer to influence Berlin before and during his visit. IW

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Lothian attended a world conference on "Church, Community, and State" that met at Oxford from July 12-26, 1937. The conference brought together 300 clergy from 118 Protestant and Orthodox churches with 125 lay partici­ pants, including the Presbyterian layman and future American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. The conference resolved to form the body that after the war became the World Council of Churches. Lothian and Dulles served on a plenary committee that explored "The Universal Church and the World of Nations." The panel reached no agreement on the role of the churches in inter­ national affairs but affirmed that the division of humanity into nation-states was incompatible with the idea of the faithful as one body. In a message to the churches of the world, the conference condemned in a general way ide­ ologies and states that deified race, class, and nation, and the gathering sent a message of support to the German Lutheran delegation, whose attendance the Nazis had cancelled at the last minute. ' In his own conference paper, Lothian affirmed that Christians had a duty higher than allegiance to the nation-state. But he blamed the failings of nations on the general condition of national sov­ ereignty, not on particular governments. " 202

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Lothian shared some of the religious sensibility of his friend Lionel Curtis, whose 1934 book Civitas Dei brought to a climax three decades of writing on the mission of the English-speaking nations. Curtis now argued that these nations had a divine purpose to absorb the rest of the world and form a single federal commonwealth. Lothian preferred to argue in more secular terms for a world government and he stressed the more personal and timeless nature of reli­ gion in articulating its relevance to the modem world. But Lothian and Curtis shared a sense of vocation rooted in faith (although Curtis was an Anglican). Where Curtis saw himself as a political missionary, Lothian preferred the role of a political pilgrim. Lothian was not averse to religious evangelism: he believed that more Christians would be good for India, and he chaired a fundraising appeal for Indian Christian colleges in the mid-1930s. " However, he also recognized the vital need in any democracy for religious differences to be tempered and for faith to be animated by a spirit of religious and civil tolerance. Over the winter of 1937-38, he visited India one last time and explored common spiritual ground with Gandhi. Congress was threatening to resume 205

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civil disobedience if Britain implemented an all-India federation without imposing democracy on the princely states. In a statement to the Associated Press on January 24, 1938, Lothian appealed to Congress to work the exist­ ing federal scheme, but he also agreed with the need for democracy in the Indian princely states. The viceroy thought Lothian wanted to move too fast but this time did not disavow him. During his visit, Lothian stayed with Gandhi in the latter's ashram at Segaon. "I lived in a mud & wattle hut, scrupulously clean, was fed a vege­ tarian food of excellent & ample quality, had an hour's talk a day with the Mahatma . . . & slept out under the stars every night," he wrote to his sister, Lady Minna. "' Lothian admired the simplicity of Gandhi's life, which he compared to the life of George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. Lothian also saw a parallel between Christian Science and Hinduism, in which both agreed that sin and illness were illusions of false mind. He could not go so far as to agree with Gandhi on the need for pacifism; to the latter's appeal for a non­ violent approach to European tensions a year later, he restated his view that peace could only come with a world state. " On his return home from India in February 1938, Lothian backed a private Christian effort to break the growing tension in Anglo-German relations. Amy Buller, warden of women students at the University of Liverpool, had served as a secretary of the Student Christian Movement in Britain during the 1920s. In the autumn of 1936, Buller held a private discussion in Berlin attended by figures prominent in the political, religious, and educational life of Britain and Germany. After holding another discussion group in July 1937, she stayed on for the annual Nazi party congress at Nuremburg in September. "Externally the pomp and splendour of Nuremburg was greater than ever," she wrote Lord Lothian, "but below all the noise, physical and mental, I felt sensitive to both the degradation and disintegration of just those things which were arresting and interesting in the early days of Nuremburg and the Movement. . . ." " Lothian guardedly replied that "the position inside Germany is very depressing." But he consented to attend an Anglo-German discussion group in Berlin over Easter 1938. 208

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Buller notified the British Foreign Office that her group also included the dean of St. Paul's Cathedral, an Anglican bishop, and some public school mas­ ters and Liberals. Their German counterparts, headed by the rector of Hamburg University, consisted mostly of civil servants and professors. The Germans were approved by Ribbentrop. who became Nazi foreign minister in February 1938. Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, a counselor in the British Embassy in Berlin, expressed reservations about the proposed visit, to which Buller replied with a letter in January 1938 that dwelled on process rather than purpose: 215

To these informal parties I want to invite on one day about ten quite young and wholly convinced S.A. Leaders, who really find some inspiration in the

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ideology which will have been poured out on us in wearying length and pseudo-academic terms in the morning; on another day . . . I want in the evening if I can to get Herr Decker, a most interesting Labour leader, and some of the younger Arbeitsdienst people. On the third occasion I propose to invite some of the Nazi women and with these I have a direct link. ' 2 6

A spotter of top-notch people, keen to reach youth, tolerant of second-rate local beliefs, and well-connected: Buller grimly echoed the Round Table activist that Lord Lothian himself had been in the more hopeful years before 1914. A year later, she would join Lothian in a worthier activism on behalf of North Atlantic union, and after the war she would found a retreat center. But in early 1938, she (and he) clung to the hope that elite contacts could some­ how reconcile differences with the Third Reich. The Anschluss, Hitler's annexation of Austria on March 13, 1938, threw a wrench into their plans. Lothian greeted the Anschluss with a letter to The Times, in which he declared with faltering coherence that "at long last it ends the disastrous period when the League of Nations Powers attempted . . . to deny to the Germans, who were certainly not solely responsible for the Great War, their national unity. . . ." Remaining issues could now be negotiated but "only if we and the other democracies show not only physical strength but moral discipline and resolution" by instituting national service. Leo Amery, in a letter printed in the same column just below Lothian's, wrote more per­ ceptively of Austria: "She has fallen because she dared to assert not merely her external independence . . . but her right to decide for herself whether she is to be a Christian as well as German State. . . ." After some hesitation, Buller and Lothian decided to proceed with the trip, but the British Foreign Office persuaded Lothian in the end not to go. His withdrawal prompted Ribbentrop to cancel the visit. " 217

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In an address to Chatham House on March 24, 1938, Lothian called on Britain to negotiate remaining differences with Germany but to resist forcible changes in the status quo. " Czechoslovakia soon provided a test. On April 24, 1938, leaders of the three million Germans in the Sudetenland, the moun­ tains that fringed western Czechoslovakia, demanded autonomy. On May 19, German troops were rumored to be massing on the Czech frontier in support of this demand. France and Russia affirmed their alliances with Prague, and on May 20, Lord Halifax warned Ribbentrop that Britain would go to war if Germany invaded. At the same time, Halifax warned France that British firm­ ness did not mean Britain would defend the Czechs under all circumstances. Hitler backed down. A few days later, Halifax asked Lothian to write a firm but conciliatory letter to The Times that would be read in Berlin. Lothian sent a draft but wrote to the foreign secretary, "I confess that I do not think it will have any modifying effect in high quarters in Berlin because what has annoyed them is that we took action, wittingly or unwittingly, which made 22

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them realise that we had to be counted in on the other side in the event of resort to violence."" Lothian thought the moment for such a letter had passed. But the crisis had only begun. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador to Berlin, had written Lothian in April 1938, comparing Czech efforts to control the Sudetenland to earlier British efforts to rule Catholic Ireland. Lothian saw a better analogy between the Sudeten Germans and Irish Protestants. In July, he forwarded an anonymous memorandum he had received to J. L. Garvin of The Observer, which argued that if Great Britain had lost the 1914-18 War, and a victorious Germany had forced Protestant Ulster into a unified Ireland, Britain would have pressed a claim to the Protestant north as soon as it was strong enough to do so. Lothian described the analogy as "one of the best things I have read" on the Czech situation. Lord Milner had embraced the cause of the Ulster Protestants to uphold his idea of a moral British state; Lord Lothian now defended the Sudeten Germans to uphold his idea of a moral international order. Where Milner had resorted to German arms to defend Ulster in 1914, Lothian had helped prepare the way for the Sudeten crisis by his earlier acqui­ escence in German rearmament. 1

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To mediate the simmering Czech dispute, the Chamberlain government sent Lord Runciman to Prague in August 1938 to explore a compromise. Believing that moderates in Berlin could influence German policy, Lothian wrote him that "the most important thing is that you should provide good rea­ sons to enable the moderate elements in the army and the party to resist the wild men during the next critical year. . . ." In India, Lothian had declared that "the one way to convert rebels and revolutionaries into constructive statesmen is to thrust responsibility upon them. . . ." He had blamed Japanese aggression on the triumph of a "militarist school" over a "liberal and moder­ ate school." Now in Germany as well Britain had to shore up moderates against extremists. 224

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Lothian was out of the country when the Czech crisis broke in September 1938. He had accepted the invitation of his friend Curtis to attend the confer­ ence in Sydney, Australia, at which groups from Chatham House and the Dominion institutes of international affairs gathered from September 3-17 to debate Commonwealth foreign policy. " The conference was a wash and was overshadowed by events in Europe. Dawson, in his climactic moment as edi­ tor of The Times, called for the surrender of the Sudetenland to Germany on September 7. Lothian shared the general relief that Britain and France had averted war by giving Hitler what he wanted at Munich. 22

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After his return to London in October, Lothian learned of the bullying that Hitler had employed against Chamberlain. On the night of November 9-10, a nationwide pogrom erupted in Germany against the country's remaining Jews. Lothian at last awoke to the Nazi danger. In The Observer on November 20, 1938, he called for Allied firmness:

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Will |Germany, Italy, and Japan] . . . decide to be content with the new sit­ uation they have created? Or will they continue, alone or together, to try to alter the status quo by mobilising overwhelming superiority at particular points or with greater audacity decide to challenge that predominance in the oceanic world which the democratic Powers still unquestioningly possess, and which is the condition on which alone free institutions and democracy can survive? The answer will depend on whether the democratic Powers can oppose to such plans of expansion a sufficient force to make them unattainable. 228

In the June 1938 Round Table, Lothian had advocated a policy of containing revolutionary dictatorships, which he explained in a letter that autumn to Sir Tej Sapru: "The revolution itself throws to the surface men of force and ability, b u t . . . they proceed to kill all independence of mind so that when the original leaders become old or tired there is nobody to replace t h e m . . . . If the democracies can only hold out long enough, totalitarian systems will fall into decay." " This prophecy would come true of Soviet Russia in the decades after Stalin. But Hitler moved before such decay could begin in his own regime. In December 1938, Amy Buller asked Lothian to join another AngloGerman discussion that she planned for the spring. "We may need to arm suf­ ficiently to frighten the Nazi gangsters," she wrote, "but if we could also give a lead in showing some real belief in moral and spiritual value . . . we could call into play far more powerful forces in Germany than all of their boasted strength and unity." Lothian declined: "I am sure now that Germany has attained her essential desires . . . the next stage is to convince the gangsters that they cannot get more by the methods they have hitherto e m p l o y e d . . . ." Lothian embarked for the United States on December 17, 1938, to assess the damage of Munich and to solicit American support. He had another inter­ view with Roosevelt on January 2, 1939. The president recalled the conversa­ tion in a letter to a friend on the Harvard faculty: 22

2W

I wish the British would stop this "We who are about to die, salute thee" attitude. Lord Lothian was here the other day, started the conversation by saying he had completely abandoned his former belief that Hitler could be dealt with . . . and went on to say that the British had been for a thousand years guardians of Anglo-Saxon civilization—that the scepter or the sword or something like that had dropped from their palsied fingers—that the U.S.A. must snatch it up—that F.D.R. alone could save the world, etc., etc. I got mad clear through and told him that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving anyway. What the British need today is a good stiff grog, inducing not only the desire to save civilization but the continued belief that they can do it. In such an event they will get a lot more support from their American cousins. . . . 2,1

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But in a meeting with senators the next day, Roosevelt defended a proposed sale of warplanes to the French by arguing that America needed to take more responsibility in the world. " 2

THE G R A N D ALLIANCE AGAINST AGGRESSION

On March 14, 1939, Slovakia broke away from the Czech republic and Hitler occupied the latter in violation of the Munich agreement. On March 3 1 , Chamberlain pledged Britain to defend Poland against German attack, and on April 7, Mussolini invaded Albania. Five days later, Lothian denounced the two dictators in the House of Lords. Referring to Hitler's autobiography, he said, "I have only for the first time read the whole unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf." Then Lothian declared: One of Herr Hitler's great advantages has been that, for very long, what he sought a great many people all over the world felt was not unreasonable, whatever they may have thought of his methods. But that justification has completely and absolutely disappeared in the last three months. . . . Everything that has happened since then proves that what we are con­ fronted with is the most ruthless use of the most ruthless power to remake the world according to the plans which are set forth in Mein Kampf. .. . Lothian now endorsed the "Grand Alliance" of nations threatened by the fascist powers that Churchill had proposed a year earlier. Lothian called an Anglo-French alliance with Soviet Russia now "absolutely vital." With President Roosevelt's reaction to him in January no doubt in mind, he added that to merit the support of the Dominions and the United States, "it is absolutely essential that we should prove to the world that we are capable of giving an effective resistance to aggression." " The English edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf omitted many of the more aggressive passages. ' The Duchess of Atholl, a Conservative MP, had sent Lothian translated sections of the German original in 1936 that made Hitler's intentions perfectly clear. But the Duchess wrote Lothian now to congratulate him on coming around. " John W. Dafoe, editor of the Winnipeg Free Press and a skeptic of the Round Table movement for a quarter of a century, also approved, as did the American Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. ' To Sir Robert Vansittart, Lothian wrote, "You have certainly been proved right in your esti­ mate of the true nature of the National Socialist regime." ' 1

1 4

2

1 6

1 7

On April 24, 1939, the British Foreign Office announced Lord Lothian's appointment to succeed Sir Ronald Lindsay as British ambassador to the United States. Lord Halifax had invited Lothian to take the Washington embassy the previous August, but Lothian postponed accepting so that he could attend Curtis's conference in Australia in September and then visit the

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United States privately afterward. Halifax learned of Roosevelt's anger with Lothian in January, but Lindsay reported that the president had no objection to the appointment. ' Lothian stayed in England until August 1939 so that Lindsay could remain to oversee the visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to the United States in June. Lothian was not a professional diplomat and his relations with the British Foreign Office over the years had been marked by a degree of mutual reserve. But through his Rhodes work and private travels he had acquired an extensive network of contacts with opinion-molders in the United States. He also had an amphibious quality that British diplomacy now needed: "Withal he has the knack of moving about a great deal in an unobtrusive . . . "manner," wrote Lindsay. "This is a valuable quality in a British Ambassador in America, whose power to influence the United States Government will be impaired if he is presented by the press or the public as an influential man. He has anten­ nae and understands this." " Lothian's public abandonment of appeasement, just before his appointment was announced, reflected diplomatic necessity as well as the change in his views. Letters from friends in the United States con­ gratulated him on his appointment in words that also pointedly commended his new-found stance against Hitler. " 2 8

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24

Before his appointment, however, Lothian aroused controversy by endors­ ing a new movement for world government. Clarence Streit, an American Rhodes Scholar and former New York Times correspondent in Geneva, pub­ lished the book Union Now in March, in which he advocated a federation of democracies. Streit soon organized a movement across the United States to promote this aim. Coincidently, three young men in London, Patrick Ransome, Derek Rawnsley, and Sir Charles Kimber formed a group, Federal Union, to unite the democracies of western Europe. The three English feder­ alists approached Lionel Curtis and Philip Lothian for support. "I suggest that we should model our attitude towards these young men," wrote Curtis to Lothian, "on the way in which Lord Milner treated us when we were found­ ing the Round Table." 241

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Lothian endorsed Union Now in The Observer, and Harry Hodson in The Round Table followed suit. ' Curtis and Lothian recruited an array of British clergy, politicians, scholars, and peace activists to the new causes. The arch­ bishop of Canterbury replied to commend Streifs book, and the archbishop of York joined Federal Union. The trade union leader Ernest Bevin also joined Federal Union, as did William Beveridge, architect of the British welfare state in the 1940s. Amy Buller organized student discussions of Union Now at the University of Liverpool. Streit's movement and Federal Union did not mesh, though, and Lothian's enthusiasm became an embarrassment after his appointment as ambassador to Washington. At the request of the Foreign Office, he withdrew his name from lists of prominent backers of both organ­ izations. ' Enthusiasm for the two movements dwindled after the war broke 24

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out. But postwar British advocates of a federal Europe picked up where Federal Union left off, and Union Now awakened the Atlanticism of some of the Americans who helped create the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in the late 1940s. During the last three months of peace, Philip Lothian set his personal affairs in order. He made arrangements for the administration of his estates while he was gone, and an Oxford don, Godfrey Elton, took his place as sec­ retary to the Rhodes Trustees. Lothian's last Round Table article, "The Grand Alliance Against Aggression," appeared in June 1939 and called for the democracies to close ranks in opposition to the Axis powers. " At the same time, he made one last attempt in secret to prevent the outbreak of war. 246

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Lord Lothian spent the weekend of June 3-4, 1939, with the Astors at Cliveden, where he dined with Lord Halifax and other British political fig­ ures. The Astors' son David invited a friend from Oxford, the 1931 German Rhodes Scholar Adam von Trott zu Solz. Trott was now an official in the German Foreign Office and was visiting England on a mission to explore British intentions. Trott privately abhorred the Nazis but shared the opposi­ tion of other German moderates to the existence of the Polish corridor that separated Germany from East Prussia after 1919. Trott came to England to learn whether the British would agree to a German withdrawal from the Czech republic (but not the Sudetenland) in exchange for adjustments to the Polish frontier in Germany's favor. Trott raised the idea with Lothian, who opposed any trading of Polish territory. But Lothian allowed Trott to report as his the suggestion that Germany withdraw from the Czech Republic unilater­ ally as a way to restore British trust. " 24

Trott included this suggestion in a memorandum of his visit that became public after the war, making Lothian's repudiation of appeasement in the spring appear insincere. The historian A. L. Rowse wrote of Lothian's pro­ posal to Trott: "If Hitler had had the decency to hand back a simulacrum of independence to the Czechs, he would have had the British government eat­ ing out of his hand; he . . . would have had Poland at his mercy, and not only Poland, but all Europe." " This was unlikely. A Nazi withdrawal from the Czech Republic would have given the Czechs more freedom than Stalin gave them in 1948, and the Poles would have been no more tractable than before. Lothian's complicity in Trott's memorandum might have cast doubt on British firmness. But on Poland, the only issue that mattered to Hitler in the summer of 1939, even Lothian did not offer any British retreat. Trott sent his memorandum to Ribbentrop, who tossed it aside. 25

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The peace activist Corder Catchpool asked Lothian in May 1939 to visit Ribbentrop one last time. Lothian refused but wrote, "The tragedy is that if only Germany could now go liberal, she has permanently within her grasp everything that the most patriotic German could wish for. She would be the inevitable leader of Europe. She would have a kind of British Commonwealth

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of free independent nations about her, and she could certainly get a sound colonial deal in return for disarmament." " Lothian hoped for the impossible. Patrick (now Sir Patrick) Duncan wrote from South Africa in June 1939 to urge the continuation of appeasement. In reply, Lothian underlined how dif­ ferent Nazi ambitions were from the aspirations that he and his Round Table friends had tried to accommodate elsewhere: "National Socialist Germany . . . is clearly something quite different from the kind of nationalism which we have inside the British Commonwealth. . . . It seems to be utterly destructive of all the values we believe in. There seems to be no real reason for believing that it would be content with the division of the world into spheres of influ­ ence." Lothian still hoped that a policy of containment might work: "If Hitler's project of partitioning Poland . . . is stopped . . . it may lead to a change of policy or an evolution of regime in either Italy or Germany . . . which will make negotiation for a final settlement possible." But he added, "At this moment, however, I am convinced that negotiation is useless." To J. L. Garvin of The Observer, Lothian wrote of Chamberlain: "If he would put Winston [Churchill] into the Cabinet and mobilise the fleet as soon as any further sign of action . . . begins, there seems to me a good chance of Hitler shearing off a major crisis this autumn. If he does this because he is not prepared to face a general war, it will be a severe blow to the solidity of the Axis and its relations to Japan, and forces for moderation may be able to assert themselves in all three countries. . . . But the least sign of wobbling or of desire for more appeasement at this moment would I feel sure let the whole thing off this autumn." Lothian clung to the hope that moderates in the Axis powers still existed, but he was ready now to risk war. He arrived in the United States to take up his embassy on August 29, 1939. Three days later, Great Britain was at war. 2

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6 AMBASSADOR, 1 9 3 9 - 1 9 4 0

As British ambassador to the United States from September 1939 until his death in December 1940, Philip Lothian held the most important position in his life. The United States was again neutral in a war that Britain had to fight, and British survival depended on American aid. The ambassador's task was to convince Americans that their strategic interests and civilized values were as much in the line of fire as Britain's. During the 1930s, he had engaged in freelance diplomacy toward Germany with disastrous results. But Americans accepted his repudiation of appeasement and his independence now worked to Britain's advantage, as he reached out to the American people in a way that no regular diplomat could have done. The historian David Reynolds has given Lothian's ambassadorship the study that it has long deserved, concluding that Lord Lothian made a vital contribution to his country at a critical time. The present study agrees and would add that Lothian served the United States no less in helping Americans to understand the danger that faced their nation in the summer of 1940. His efforts also brought to a climax the Round Table and Rhodes Trust work to which he had dedicated his life. 1

Since Reynolds published his study, however, Lord Lothian's ambassador­ ship has been the subject of two controversies. Prime Minister Winston Churchill opposed negotiations with Adolf Hitler in the spring and summer of 1940. and Lothian has been charged with attempting secretly to negotiate peace with Nazi Germany on behalf of the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax. Another controversy is whether close Anglo-American ties were in Britain's real interest during and after the Second World War. ' The evidence does not substantiate the charge that Lothian went behind Churchill's back to negotiate with the Germans. American and British interests during and after the war were not always congruent, but recent arguments against the wartime and postwar British alignment with the United States rest on doubtful 2

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assumptions about Nazi intentions and about the long-term viability of the British Empire.

INITIAL TENSIONS

Controversy over Lothian's appointment was brief and his arrival set the British embassy on a new course. Traditionally, British diplomats had rarely dealt with Americans outside official Washington. But in the war that began in 1939, Britain needed a representative who could secure public as well as official American support. For this task Lothian was supremely fitted. He was perhaps the leading British advocate of good relations with the United States, and from 1919 onward he had befriended leading Americans in government, banking, business, law, journalism, and higher education. He strengthened these contacts as ambassador, often flying to New York City to dine with small groups of key men and returning to Washington the same night. In soliciting the views of these men and giving his own, he helped forge a sense of common purpose." 4

5

Although most of his contacts belonged to elite groups, Lord Lothian had visited forty-four states as Rhodes secretary. During these visits, he often arranged to give talks about international affairs to local audiences and he came to know many local newspaper editors. Lothian liked Americans and his demeanor toward them was friendly and unstuffy. Upon leaving the White House after presenting his credentials, he allowed a cat to sit on his shoulder while he answered questions from assembled reporters. An aide, John (later Sir John) Wheeler-Bennett, recalled that in dining at the British embassy under Lothian "one would be as likely to meet the Mayor of Kalamazoo as one of the famous dowagers of Washington, and the Ambassador would dis­ play an evident and genuine interest in talking to either." Such outreach to the American people was an innovation for the British embassy. 7

8

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Anglo-American relations had not been smooth in the interwar era. The United States had demanded naval parity with the United Kingdom in the late 1920s, and in the early 1930s each nation had tried to pursue its economic interests at the expense of the other. Those who favored Anglo-American partnership on each side had less influence than proponents of national inter­ ests or isolationism. Despite their differences, though, no deep antagonism had developed in the twentieth century between America and Britain, as did one between Britain and Germany. During the 1930s, most Americans recog­ nized the chasm that separated dictatorship from democracy. But just as few in Britain were ready to go to war before 1939, few Americans afterward saw a need to join the war on the Allied side. "The root of our problem," Lothian wrote Robert Brand in 1940, "lies in the fact that about 9 5 % of the American population is vehemently anti-Hitler, but 9 9 % is determined if it possibly can, 10

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to stay out of the war."" The United States would have to intervene in the Second World War if Britain was to survive and win. At the start of the war, political and legal obstacles stood in the way of U.S. aid to Britain. The president conducted foreign relations, but Congress provided the money, determined to a significant degree what the executive branch could do with it, and reserved the power to declare war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was anxious to aid Britain and France by means short of war, but Congress had limited the president's ability to do so. Three fed­ eral neutrality laws passed between 1935 and 1937 prohibited the sale of arms and ammunition to belligerent nations, required other purchases from these nations to be paid in cash and exported on foreign ships, and prohib­ ited loans to belligerents. 12

Behind in its rearmament and facing a militarily more powerful Germany, Britain urgently needed weapons and other war materials that America had the industry to produce. On September 13, 1939, the president asked Congress to amend the neutrality laws to permit British war purchases. After a bitter public debate. Congress agreed to a new law that Roosevelt signed on November 4, 1939, repealing the ban on private firms selling arms and ammu­ nition to belligerents but retaining the "cash and carry" provisions of the ear­ lier legislation. Britain promptly antagonized America by reducing nonessential imports from the United States, and relations soon worsened over American trade with other neutral countries." Lothian had warned in the late 1920s that a belligerent Britain and a neu­ tral America would clash." That warning now came true. At the start of the war, American Secretary of State Cordell Hull proposed a resumption of the Navicert program of the First World War, in which British officials examined cargoes before they left U.S. ports and certified them for navigation to neutral countries in Europe. In this way, Britain could prevent contraband from reaching the enemy through these countries. Hull suggested that this time American officials participate to resolve any disagreements that might arise." In subsequent talks, though, American negotiators attached conditions, chiefly that denials of certification be e x p l a i n e d . T h i s was to prevent Britain from giving preference to its own exporters or to blacklist U.S. firms whose foreign customers did business with Germany. Blacklisting firms that directly or indirectly aided the enemy was part of waging economic warfare, and London had no intention to forego the tactic. On November 25, Lord Lothian announced the resumption of the Navicert program, to take effect on December 1, 1939. To make them more palatable, Lothian credited Navicerts to the "perspicacity" of the American consul-general in London during the First World War, who had proposed them as an alterna­ tive to inspections at sea. British authorities afterward refused to certify some cargoes bound for neutral countries in western Europe and did not explain the denials of certification. 17

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Lothian defended the Navicert program to the point of denying to American officials that Britain maintained a blacklist. But privately he urged his government to be more considerate of the United States. In January 1940, Britain halted the diversion of uncertified American cargoes to British ports, which the United States regarded as a combat zone. This left Britain free to divert uncertified cargoes to Canada but, in fact, the Royal Navy diverted none there, and in March London agreed to explain each denial of certification. The fall of Denmark and Norway, the Low Countries, and France later that spring eliminated most of the neutrals that were near both Germany and the sea. The United States did not object to British restrictions on trade with remaining neutrals afterward. 18

19

THE CASE F O R BRITAIN

Lothian's real work in the United States was not to manage frictions but to win support. The early months of the war, in which the Allies waited for the German army to strike west, were months of relative quiet that gave him some time in which to make the case for U.S. assistance to the Allied cause. Lothian worked at first without a serious propaganda arm. After the First World War. many Americans took the view that both sides had distorted the truth in wartime, and British propaganda was thought to be more clever because the United States had entered the war on the Allied side. To answer inquiries from the press and the public, the British government in 1922 had converted its propaganda office in New York into a small British Library of Information. This office had strict instructions to engage in no propaganda and kept such a low profile that not a single American reporter or citizen called on the day the Second World War broke out. :(l

21

The German Library of Information in New York was less reticent. The leading figure in Nazi propaganda was a naturalized American citizen and writer, George Sylvester Viereck, who had promoted the German cause in the First World War and now resumed it in the Second. In 1940, he wrote Lord Lothian vs. Lord Lothian, a pamphlet that quoted some of Lothian's proappeasement statements in the 1930s alongside his more recent statements critical of Nazi Germany. Viereck persuaded some isolationist members of Congress to circulate thousands of copies of anti-British writings under the franking privilege that allowed federal legislators free use of the mails. He was eventually convicted of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. but his and other German efforts helped stoke American isolationism at the worst possible time for Britain. 22

23

Treading carefully, British officials in London tried to influence American attitudes with a low-key public relations effort that stressed factual informa­ tion favorable to the British cause. Lothian endorsed this approach and urged London to give American correspondents in Britain as much freedom as 24

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possible to report events to their own people. The heroic defense by the Royal Air Force in the summer of 1940 and the courage of British civilians through the terrible bombing in the autumn, reported live by Edward R. Murrow and other U.S. radio correspondents, moved Americans in a way that no filtered version of events could have done. Over the spring and summer of 1940, the younger staff of the British Library in New York pressed for a more assertive publicity, prompting the director to exclaim, "But this is Teutonic efficiency, this is what we are fight­ ing the war against!" Lothian finally let the younger staff create a separate British Press Service in New York in October 1940. The new service responded quickly to questions from the press and circulated the ambas­ sador's speeches and other official statements. With Lothian's support, the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) also enlarged its office in New York over the summer of 1940 under the Canadian businessman Sir William Stephenson. Taking the name "British Security Coordination," Stephenson's office recruited a mostly Canadian staff to prevent sabotage of British munitions purchases in the United States, combat German propaganda and influence, and assist pro-interventionist groups. 26

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But in the first year of the war, the burden of making Britain's case fell pri­ marily on the ambassador himself. In a series of speeches over the autumn and winter of 1939^10, Lothian emphasized the necessity of Britain's sur­ vival to America's own vital interests, although he defined these in terms of interests that both nations had in common. In drafting the letter covering the 1919 Allied Reply to the German Observations, he had rejected the idea that the First World War was an amoral struggle over territory and power. " In the early months of the Second World War, Lothian returned to this point and argued against the notion that America's interests were amoral, purely mate­ rial, or narrowly national. He stressed instead that the United States and Great Britain shared a heritage of liberal democracy and civilized values that needed a common defense. 2

Frank Aydelotte, the American Rhodes secretary and president of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, invited Lothian to address a gathering at the college on November 11, 1939. Lord Lothian took the occasion to restate his Round Table creed: "We of the liberal West are quite convinced . . . that the ultimate foundations of our civilization are sound. . . . These founda­ tions are the right to individual freedom and individual responsibility, both." But the democracies had failed to give these principles equal weight. "Democracy as it is practiced to-day makes endless promises of more com­ fort, less work, more pleasures—all quite right in their own way. But it sel­ dom makes an equivalent appeal for service and self-sacrifice." Lothian connected this failure to a larger one. "One inevitable consequence of that concentration on individual interests has been an equivalent concentration on selfish national interests with its resultant disregard for the well-being of

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humanity as a whole."' The democratic nations needed a stronger sense of community, he argued, if they were to be true to their own ideals. Lothian made this point again on November 28, when he deposited one of the four extant copies of the Magna Carta in the Library of Congress. The document, signed in 1215, had been the centerpiece of the British pavilion at the 1939 New York World's Fair. To avoid a dangerous return voyage home, the Library of Congress agreed to keep it for the duration of the war. In remarks at the ceremony, Lothian noted the common descent of American and British liberty from the great document. "We still have our liberties," he observed, "though at the moment they are being challenged by totalitarian imperialism, from both the right and from the left."" With the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 23, 1939, still fresh, Lothian spoke of totalitarianism that fall and winter as two sides of the same coin. Lothian addressed the Chicago branch of the Council on Foreign Relations on January 4, 1940. As he did in his first Round Table article in 1910, in his Chicago speech, Lothian again traced liberty back to the ancient Israelites and Greeks and then through the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the American Revolution and Constitution." He ranged beyond shared history, though, in going on to observe that economic inequality, unemployment, and war required domestic social reform and radical change in international relations. "The ideals which lay behind the League of Nations can only succeed," he declared, "if all its members are democracies." Even then, peace could not endure as long as nations remained separate and sovereign. "The idea of federation, applied no doubt in some new way, is, in the end, the only way out ofthat dilemma."" Lothian underlined the urgent need for Anglo-American partnership to pre­ serve control of the seas: Britain neither can nor ought to play by herself the dominant role she played in the last century. The rise of new naval stations and the advent of air power makes that impossible. And sea power, if it is to be used as police power, should be in the hands of democracies collectively and not of one power. Even at this moment, if we face the facts honestly, our present safety to-day rests upon the fact that we control the Atlantic and you control the Pacific. Neither we nor you nor the overseas republics and dominions would be anything like as secure if either of us had to shoulder the task of sea defence alone. Lothian concluded: "The British Government is not trying to drag you into this war. It knows that no democracy will accept the hideous consequences of war unless it is convinced that its own vital interests, which include its ideals, are at stake.'" But his message was that America's interests and ideals were indeed in the line of fire. No ordinary diplomat would have commented on social policy and certainly none would have proposed the abolition of national sovereignty in a public address. But the times were hardly ordinary.' 4

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Lothian spoke at a private lunch before his Chicago speech, and a surviv­ ing letter from his host, James Winston, reveals how Lothian took influential Americans into his confidence. Winston, a 1904 American Rhodes Scholar, was now an attorney in Chicago. The guests included Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News and a Republican whom Roosevelt would appoint as secretary of the Navy in June. Several other business lead­ ers and professors attended. After the meal, Lothian invited an informal dis­ cussion of what America would do over the coming year. He led off by recounting how Munich had disillusioned the Chamberlain government, and he confided that the British secret service had uncovered evidence in Africa that Germany, Italy, and Japan now intended to take turns against the Allies. The British Royal Navy, although the strongest in the world, could not with­ stand attack in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. The other guests agreed that the destinies of England and the United States were linked but all affirmed that the public would oppose entering the war. At a dinner hosted by Winston two days later, former Vice President of the United States Charles G. Dawes gruffly dismissed the prospect of a German attack in western Europe, pound­ ing the table and rattling the glasses and silverware. After eliciting the fact that Dawes hadn't followed events since October, Winston diplomatically observed that new developments had occurred, giving Lothian an opening to present a contrary view."' Events soon proved how dire the situation was.

T H E BATTLE F O R B R I T A I N

Lothian's appeal to higher ideals gave way to urgent requests for weapons as Hitler's armies swept over western Europe in the spring of 1940. Following the unsuccessful British attempt to defend Norway, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became prime minister on May 10. German forces opened a full-scale assault on the Low Countries and France the same day. On May 15, Churchill asked Roosevelt for forty to fifty obsolete destroyers and other arms. The president replied that he would need the permission of Congress. Lothian met the president two days later and again made a plea for destroy­ ers and arms. The ambassador pointed out that the United States would be hard pressed to defend against attack in both the Atlantic and Pacific and that Britain could hold the Atlantic with U.S. help. The president asked whether, if Britain fell, the Royal Navy would cross the Atlantic and fight on from American ports. Lothian answered that Britain's willingness to send its fleet to U.S. ports could not be assured if the United States remained neutral." German armored forces reached the English Channel at the end of May. The Dunkirk sealift evacuated British troops to England, but the British had to leave their heavy weapons behind. Roosevelt ordered his War Department to determine how much of the United States Army's own arms and ammunition could be declared surplus and thus legal to sell back to their manufacturers for

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resale to Britain. American officers reported that about one-quarter of certain stocks were "surplus." Over the next two months, 500,000 rifles, 80,000 machine guns, and 129,000,000 rounds of ammunition arrived in England, along with almost 900 field guns.'* These gave the British something more than pitchforks with which to defend their country from invasion. On June 4, 1940, Churchill delivered his "We shall fight on the beaches" speech, pledging to resist German invasion to the last.™ The speech rallied the British people and impressed Americans. By mid-June, however, French resistance had collapsed. On June 16, Lothian urged the American president to enter the war. Roosevelt refused. Two days later, Lothian asked the White House to present the facts of the disaster in Europe more forcefully to Congress and to the American people. On June 10, Roosevelt had attacked Hitler and Mussolini in a commencement address at the University of Virginia, but he did not respond to the British ambassador's appeal. The president had a number of reasons for hesitation. The year 1940 was an election year and Roosevelt had decided to run for a third term. Although not barred by the Constitution, no president had broken the custom dating back to George Washington of serving only two terms. Roosevelt also had to be renominated by the Democratic party in July. But the real problem was not the delicacy of the president's domestic position. It was American uncertainty over whether Britain would remain in the war. Ominously, the French had also requested arms shortly before surrendering. If Britain did fight on, a German invasion could be resisted only if the Royal Air Force retained con­ trol of the air, and the air Battle of Britain was just beginning. Any warships that America gave the British might be lost, or even turned against the United States, if Churchill fell and a new government in London made peace. 40

41

Lord Lothian knew, however, that for Great Britain to lose the war would be a far greater disaster to the United States than the loss of any destroyers America might send. In his June 4 speech, Churchill had concluded that if Britain fell, "then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle... ." The prime minister assured Lothian afterward that he did not mean to encourage the hope that America would get the British fleet if the home islands fell. But Lothian now decided, on his own, that America needed to be warned against believing that the British fleet would cross the Atlantic in the event Great Britain fell to a German invasion. Lothian was the scheduled speaker at an annual alumni gathering at Yale University on June 19, 1940, and in a short speech, the British ambassador stated matter-of-factly: 42

41

The outcome of this grim struggle will affect you almost as much as it will affect us. For if Hitler gets our fleet, or destroys it, the whole foundation on which the security of both our countries has rested for 120 years will have disappeared. Hitler . . . will then control the sea communications between Great Britain and its dependencies, which will be the end of the British

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Commonwealth as we have known it. . . . You will then have only one navy to protect a two-ocean front. It was an illusion to think that the British fleet could take refuge in North American ports if Britain were overrun, he added, for "apart from the difficul­ ties which would arise, if you were neutral, of handing over a fleet designed to protect the British Commonwealth to a power which could not use it for that belligerent purpose, there would be little left over for you." In trying to stand up to Germany and rally his own people, Churchill tried to emphasize British resolve. Lothian now made clear his country's need for arms, and Churchill wrote him afterward to approve. David Reynolds notes, however, that in calling public attention to the risk that any transferred destroyers might not come back, Lothian may have complicated Roosevelt's political ability to send them. The ambassador's speech may have stiffened the president's insistence in August that, in return for destroyers, Britain pledge not to sink or surrender its fleet in the event of a successful German invasion. 44

45

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Roosevelt won renomination at the convention of the Democratic party in Chicago on July 18. The Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, had been nominated already on June 28. Although a critic of isolationism, Willkie's need for isolationist votes made his position on aid to Britain that summer uncertain. To get aid to Britain quickly, the British ambassador believed he had to move Congress, and to do so he had to move public opinion. But speeches were not enough. Lothian needed and soon received the support of concerned American citizens. 47

William Allen White, a Republican and editor of The Emporia Gazette in Kansas, had formed a grassroots movement the previous autumn to support revision of the neutrality laws. Events in Europe prompted White to organize a new movement in May 1940, the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, that quickly made itself the leading advocacy group in favor of American aid to Britain. Public opinion was slow to change, though, and as France disintegrated in June, a smaller group of Americans led by Rhodes Scholars resolved to press for immediate U.S. intervention. 48

The summer of 1940 was the moment of truth for the Rhodes Scholarship program. The original Trustees had placed the Scholarships on a nonpolitical footing, but it was the hope and expectation of the Trustees that Rhodes Scholars would remain friendly to Britain on their return home. During the 1930s, a number of Scholars had embraced left-wing views at Oxford to the consternation of Rhodes House. " In the autumn of 1939. some American Scholars protested when Aydelotte circulated copies of Lord Lothian's Swarthmore address to the American Scholars in Rhodes Trust envelopes. Richard Goodwin, a 1934 Scholar, called the mailing an attempt to mobilize the Rhodes Scholars for a political purpose. 4

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Aydelotte himself had given a shock to the Rhodes Trustees on the war's outbreak. He had suspended the Scholarships with their agreement, but he had also imposed a ban on fund-raising for Oxford in the mistaken belief that sending money to the university would violate America's neutrality laws." In response to Goodwin, Aydelotte denied that the British ambassador or the Rhodes Trustees had authorized the mailing of Lord Lothian's Swarthmore address." But Goodwin's protest was not far from the truth: Aydelotte did want to help Britain in its moment of need, although he took care afterward not to involve the Rhodes organization. By May 1940, he had joined the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, and over the summer he began asking friendly American Scholars, as individuals, to help British speakers attract audiences around the United States. 51

But to some American Rhodes Scholars, the prospect of a Nazi invasion of England called for more immediate and drastic action. On June 2, 1940, Francis P. Miller hosted a gathering near Washington. A 1919 Rhodes Scholar, Miller worked for the Council on Foreign Relations and had joined the Committee to Defend America. His wife, Helen Hill Miller, was a correspondent for The Economist of London. Also attending were Whitney Shepardson, a 1910 Rhodes Scholar and businessman; Richard Cleveland, a Baltimore attorney and son of President Grover Cleveland; and several others. The group agreed that the United States had to enter the war immediately on the Allied side. 54

The group recruited thirty distinguished citizens to join them in signing a "Summons to Speak Out," drafted by Shepardson, that urged the United States to join the war alongside Britain and France. The group included Herbert Agar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editor from Louisville, Kentucky; Admiral William Standley, retired chief of naval operations; the Right Reverend Henry W. Hobson, Episcopal bishop of Cincinnati; Dr. Edwin Hubble, a 1910 Rhodes Scholar and astronomer; and Walter Millis, a writer for The New York Herald Tribune, who in a 1935 book had denounced U.S. entry into the First World War. Newspapers across the nation printed or reported the Summons on June 10, but news of Mussolini's invasion of France crowded out the story. 55

On July 4, 1940, Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, a professor at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, met on the group's behalf with Lord Lothian at the British embassy and asked how they could help. '' The ambassa­ dor replied that his country badly needed U.S. destroyers. A German invasion of England was expected to cross where the English Channel narrowed, and a supply of small and maneuverable warships was crucial to British defense. To document the need, Lothian requested a confidential memorandum from London detailing British naval strength. On receiving this, he gave an unsigned copy to the White House and leaked copies to Miller's group and other friends of Britain. The memorandum revealed that the Royal Navy had about 140 destroyers in home waters, of which only about one-half were serviceable. 5

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Miller's group formally organized on July 11 and became known as the Century Group from its later meetings at the Century Association, a private club in New York City. Although based in the northeast, the group expanded its membership to include attorneys, business executives, clergymen, and uni­ versity leaders from around the country. On behalf of releasing fifty obsolete U.S. destroyers to the British, the journalist Walter Lippmann wrote a radio address delivered on August 4 by retired General John J. Pershing, the com­ mander of American forces in France during the First World War. The colum­ nist Joseph Alsop wrote a radio address that Admiral Standley gave on August 10, and the Committee to Defend America took out newspaper advertise­ ments and held rallies for a destroyers transfer. * 5

As it became clear in July and August that Britain was holding its own in the air war, and as domestic support for a destroyer transfer began to grow, President Roosevelt became more receptive to releasing warships to the British. But he faced three obstacles. One was the fact that he needed to receive something in exchange. In September 1939, Britain had granted the United States leases to sites for air and naval bases on Bermuda, St. Lucia, and Trinidad. To avoid appearing to enter the war, the United States had not made use of them. On May 24—25, 1940, Lothian suggested to London that Britain offer leases on a larger number of its Atlantic and Caribbean islands, but he did not link these to destroyers and the Churchill government wanted something in return for more leases. 59

Finally, on August 3, Roosevelt offered Lothian fifty obsolete American destroyers in exchange for leases and a British pledge not to sink or surren­ der the Royal Navy. " Churchill and his War Cabinet at first resisted the exchange, partly because they felt that it was unequal, but mainly because of Roosevelt's demand for a public pledge concerning the fleet in the event the home islands fell. To Churchill, at the height of the air war over England, such a pledge would have implied that British prospects were still bleak. London offered the leases as a gift if the destroyers could also come as a gift. For legal reasons, however, Roosevelt could not give up the warships unless the United States received compensation of equal or greater value, and it stretched the law already to equate bases to ships. Lothian pressed the American view on his superiors at home and an exchange of notes on September 2, 1940, for­ malized the transfer. By an aide-memoire made public the next day, Lothian pledged that Britain would never sink or surrender its fleet. ' 6

6

Roosevelt overcame two other obstacles to the transfer in August. The attorney-general of the United States, Robert Jackson, gave an opinion that the president could negotiate the exchange by executive order and thus bypass Congress, and Congress did not move to block the transfer. The remaining problem, the attitude of the Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, pulled the Century Group into action. On behalf of the group, Russell Davenport, a former managing editor of Fortune magazine and now Willkie's 62

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campaign coordinator, persuaded the nominee to take no position. Word leaked out and Willkie retracted his commitment, but Davenport finally convinced him to renew it. On September 3, Willkie denounced the method of bypassing Congress but he did not oppose the exchange of destroyers for bases. Three days later, he declared that the transfer was "the most arbitrary and dictatorial action ever taken by any President," but he did not make it a further campaign issue. ' On November 5, 1940, Roosevelt won election to a third term. 6

It is difficult to assess how much of the destroyers-bases agreement owed to Lothian's influence, although it is clear that he played a vital role. Roosevelt and Churchill worked mostly through Lothian rather than through the American ambassador to London, Joseph P. Kennedy, who was pessimistic about British prospects and whose embassy had undergone a security breach in May 1940. Lothian and Kennedy had been friends since 1938, though, when their views on Germany coincided. In January 1940, Lothian met with the American ambassador's son, the future president John F. Kennedy, who later credited Lord Lothian with prompting the younger Kennedy to write his 1940 book, Why England Slept, warning Americans to rearm. 64

65

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Lothian's service as ambassador was not without occasional misjudgments. In the summer and fall of 1940, he urged his government to stop oil exports from the Dutch East Indies to Japan if the United States would join Britain to enforce an oil embargo. Such an embargo would have risked a war with Japan that neither Britain nor America wanted to provoke. Lothian was also prone to shifts in mood and exhaustion from overwork, and he proved willing to cut some diplomatic corners. At the end of the destroyers-bases negotiations, he realized that the transfer did not formally include motor torpedo boats and other arms that London had wanted to be part of the deal, but he ignored the omission to get the agreement signed. Britain eventually obtained the addi­ tional boats and weapons. 67

The destroyers came too late to make a difference to British defenses. The vessels needed extensive repairs and only nine had arrived in England by year's end. But the agreement was an enormous boost to British morale at a time when Britain's survival appeared to hang in the balance. Rhodes Scholars helped organize the Century Group, although they did not act as a formal Rhodes grouping and decisive roles in the group were later played by others. The activism of the Century Group also revealed the limits of elite influence, which failed to bring the United States into the war as a combatant. But the efforts of Lord Lothian and the activist American Rhodes Scholars fulfilled, as far as they could, the hopes of English-speaking unity that had inspired the Rhodes Trust and The Round Table. 68

The summer and autumn of 1940 also reconciled Lothian and Churchill. In his war memoirs, the prime minister wrote: "I had known Philip Kerr, who had now succeeded as Marquess of Lothian, from the old days of Lloyd

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George in 1919 and before, and we had differed much and often from Versailles to Munich and later. As the tension of events mounted, not only did Lothian develop a broad comprehension of the scene, but his eye penetrated deeply." " The ambassador in turn developed a new respect and admiration for Churchill. "Your speeches have been magnificent," he wrote in July 1940.™ Lothian returned to London on October 20 to confer with the prime minister and other officials. The ambassador was deeply moved by the bomb damage and by the courage of the British people." Events had transformed him as well. Churchill wrote: "Lord Lothian seemed to me a changed man. In all the years I had known him, he had given me the impression of high intellectual and aristocratic detachment from vulgar affairs. Airy, viewy, aloof, dignified, censorious, yet in a light and gay manner, he had always been good company. Now, under the same hammer that beat upon us all, I found an earnest, deeply stirred man." 6

72

During his autumn visit home, Lothian learned that Britain would exhaust its dollar reserves in a few months. American neutrality legislation still required payment for British war purchases to be made in cash, and Britain's default on its First World War debts had made new credits out of the question. With the U.S. elections over, Lothian persuaded his superiors that Americans needed a frank explanation of Britain's financial position. Churchill, dis­ mayed that greater U.S. aid did not quickly follow the president's reelection, reluctantly agreed to provide Roosevelt with a letter outlining British needs. Lothian still worried that nothing would result unless the American public was also informed. He departed by air for Washington on November 11, and after a delay in Lisbon, Portugal, he landed in New York on November 23, 1940. To waiting reporters, the ambassador declared that Britain's financial position was "becoming urgent." 71

74

Lothian's revelation provoked controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. American officials believed that Britain still had substantial dollar reserves, while Churchill worried that disclosure of British finances would encourage the enemy and demoralize public opinion at home. But Churchill finally cabled a letter that Lothian delivered to the State Department on December 8 outlining Britain's position." Roosevelt received it a few days later while resting in the Caribbean and now realized that the policy of "cash and carry" could not last much longer. Over the next three months, the president worked out the "Lend-Lease" formula by which America would lend or lease weapons and other war supplies to Britain for the duration of the conflict. 76

Lord Lothian's contribution to Lend-Lease was his last accomplishment as British ambassador. He died at his embassy in the early hours of December 12, 1940. from a urinary infection that he attempted unsuccessfully to cure through Christian Science prayer treatment. His health had deteriorated that autumn, but he had seemed to recover from bouts of illness and fatigue, and his unexpected death came as a shock to the American and British governments. The

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Americans buried him in the national cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. His remains were repatriated to Scotland after the war. The British missions in Washington and New York expanded after his death, especially after America entered the war on December 7, 1941. To oversee this activity called for an ambassador with a different personality and talent, one suited more to administration than to a less formal diplomacy. Lothian's successor. Lord Halifax, fulfilled this role. David Reynolds is right to conclude that Lothian died after having completed the work for which he had been uniquely qualified. His access to influential Americans did not move U.S. policy as much as he would have wanted, but his ability to win support in the heat of a presidential campaign testified to diplomatic skills of a high order. Lothian's attention to the importance of American public opin­ ion in freeing their leaders to act, and his determination to include the American people in his diplomacy, proved crucial to his success and served both countries at a critical time. 77

78

P H I L I P L O T H I A N : D I D H E W A N T PEACE I N 1940?

Lord Lothian's service as ambassador did not, unfortunately, settle doubts about the sincerity of his conversion to a hard line against Germany. These arose from evidence of wartime contacts between Germany and Britain in which Lothian was involved or is alleged to have been involved. During the relative lull in the war from September 1939 to April 1940, neu­ trals and belligerents probed each other's intentions.™ Following the outbreak of war, Lothian met again with the German Rhodes Scholar and diplomat Adam von Trott zu Solz. Trott had slipped through the British naval blockade on an Italian ocean liner and arrived in the United States at the end of September. His visit was ostensibly to do research as a guest of the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York, but his real hope was to persuade President Roosevelt to propose peace terms that would give anti-Nazis in Berlin an incentive to overthrow Hitler. " The American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placed him under surveillance. Trott was soon aware that he was being followed, but he mistakenly believed that the FBI agents watching him were Nazi spies. To enable Trott and Lothian to meet in secret, the director of the Institute of Pacific Relations in New York, Edward C. Carter, reserved a room in the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Trott arrived, asked for the room of a friend of Carter's who had also registered, and went to Carter's room instead. Five minutes later, Lord Lothian arrived. Carter left and the two talked. 8

81

There seems to be no record of their conversation, although Lothian dis­ cussed the meeting with one of his staff afterward and Trott wrote of it in a letter. The talk was discouraging. In a letter to Lady Astor's son, David Astor, Lothian wrote: "Our mutual friend, with whom we had discussions last summer, has just arrived in this country. Fundamentally, what he says is just 82

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the same as last summer; but the core of the problem is to convince the mod­ erate elements that there is a real future for their country, not under their pres­ ent leader.""' David Astor was trying to persuade British officials at home to do more to alienate the German people from the Nazi regime. Trott and his friends were willing to discuss Hitler's overthrow but were opposed to giving back all of his conquests, and Trott failed to reach President Roosevelt. After proceeding to Asia in January 1940, he returned to Germany and was exe­ cuted for complicity in the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. 84

85

The collapse of the western front in May 1940 began a new and more furtive round of peace feelers between Britain and Germany. In meetings of the British War Cabinet on May 2 6 - 2 8 , 1940, Halifax pressed Churchill to explore peace terms with Hitler while British forces on the continent were still intact. Churchill deflected Halifax and the prime minister made no men­ tion of their discussion in his war memoirs. But a majority of Conservatives in the House of Commons were loyal to Chamberlain, whose preference to wait and see may have helped prevent talk of peace from going any further than it did. On June 17, R. A. Butler, now Halifax's parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office, asked a Swedish diplomat to convey to Berlin a message that British actions would be governed by "common sense, not bravado." The Swedish foreign minister asked the British ambassador in Stockholm, Sir Victor Mallet, to confirm that Britain was asking for peace terms. The ambassador cabled London for instructions, alerting the prime minister to the feeler, which was not authorized. Butler claimed that his approach was misunderstood, and Churchill let both Halifax and Butler off with a warning. 86

87

In a speech on July 19, 1940, Hitler offered to make peace with Britain but did not specify terms. Malcolm R. Lovell, the director of a Quaker relief organization in New York, recorded meeting Lord Lothian at the British embassy that same day. Lovell offered to serve as an intermediary in peace negotiations between Britain and Germany. According to Lovell's recollec­ tion of the interview, Lothian received him graciously, indicated that some in the British Cabinet favored peace, and expressed an interest in terms that an undefeated nation could accept. According to Lovell, though, Lothian pointed out that Great Britain was also committed to the independence of the smaller European nations and could not negotiate without some guarantee that Hitler's word could be trusted. 88

Lovell reported his meeting to Dr. Hans Thomsen, the chargé d'affaires at the German embassy (the German ambassador had been recalled before the war and was not replaced). Thomsen cabled Berlin for instructions and Ernst von Weizsäcker, a senior official in the German Foreign Office, told him to welcome further contact. In his diary, Weizsäcker noted: "The British Ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, had proposed that contact should be made through a certain Quaker. This step, in the manner of British diplomacy,

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had to be specially authorised. We responded to this to the extent of agreeing to the Quaker arranging a meeting between Lord Lothian and our chargé d'affaires in Washington." ' Lothian cabled London on July 19 to report the contact with Lovell but noted that the initiative had come from the German side and that Lovell had met with his deputy, Nevile Butler, and not with himself."" In a telephone call to Halifax on July 22, however, Lothian urged the foreign secretary at least to find out what the German terms were.'" That evening, on Churchill's instruc­ tions, Halifax gave a radio broadcast that rejected the German peace offer. On July 24, the foreign secretary ordered Lothian to make no answer to the Germans, although he added that Lothian was at liberty to listen to Lovell and report back anything he wished." Lothian replied by asking if Britain truly intended to close the door to peace talks, and on July 26, Halifax sent a sec­ ond telegram instructing Lothian to express no interest in peace."' Over the following two days, Lovell shuttled back and forth between embassies but met only with Butler, who closed the door to further talks." 81

2

4

It is not clear who initiated the Lovell peace feeler. In a 1944 interview with the U.S. Navy, Lovell claimed that Lothian had contacted him after Dunkirk, while in his record of the actual meeting Lovell says that he himself had made the initial contact with Lothian." Lovell's veracity was not trusted by the FBI, which obtained evidence that he had received money from the Germans and had attempted to mislead FBI investigators as to its source." Weizsäcker was clearly unaware of Lothian's capacity for independent action when he assumed that a contact through Lovell, "in the manner of British diplomacy, had to be specially authorised." But it seems doubtful that Lothian had initi­ ated the contact. 5

6

Once the contact was made, however, it seems clear that Lothian and Halifax wanted to explore what terms the Germans might offer. This interest was dangerous in the extreme. If Great Britain had sought peace terms in the summer of 1940, American trust would have shattered. Britain would have been on its own if Hitler had made peace and then broken his promises yet again. Lothian broke off the contact as ordered, though, and at no point does he appear to have gone behind Churchill's back. On Halifax's instructions, Lothian shared with Roosevelt Britain's rejection of a new peace feeler that came through Sweden in September 1940. Roosevelt replied: "Thank you for letting me see the Stockholm messages. Halifax is right. I am glad he recog­ nizes attempted seduction when he sees it."" The sharing of these cables sug­ gests that Halifax and Lothian were now anxious to prove that Britain was not susceptible to peace offers. 7

The writer John Costello alleges, however, that Lord Lothian conducted secret peace efforts to the end of his life." Costello argues that the British ambassador was a silent partner in secret attempts by Sir William Wiseman to negotiate with Germany in the autumn of 1940. Wiseman had headed British 8

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Intelligence in the United States during the First World War and was now a private citizen and partner in a New York bank. Wiseman did not get the job of running the American operations of MI6 in the Second World War, but he assisted Sir William Stephenson with advice and with the carrying out of con­ fidential tasks. " According to Costello, Wiseman tried on Lothian's behalf to reach Nazi leaders through two intermediaries. The first was James D. Mooney, head of the General Motors Company's operations outside the United States. In 1938, Mooney had received from Hitler the Order of the German Eagle, the highest decoration in the Third Reich." " Following a visit to the capitals of the European belligerents in early 1940 by U.S. Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, Mooney went to Berlin to sound out Hitler's intentions privately. Before going, he consulted President Roosevelt, who encouraged him to write back what he learned. Mooney advised that Hitler's demands were reason­ able, but Roosevelt made no response to them. " 1

1

1

1

Mooney left an unpublished memoir in his papers, in which he recorded that he and Wiseman had met on September 3, 1940. and agreed on the need for peace between Britain and Germany. Wiseman proposed that Mooney make another visit to Germany after the American elections that fall. The lat­ ter contacted the White House in mid-November but learned in early January 1941 that the president opposed his going. In the record he made of his last meeting with Wiseman on January 8, 1941, Mooney observed that Sir William seemed disoriented. According to Mooney, Wiseman hinted that Lord Lothian had been behind their peace effort that autumn, and that Lothian's death had now left matters in disarray. Wiseman and Mooney had no further contact with each other. " 1

2

Wiseman opened a second contact that fall. In April 1940, the British embassy had received word from the British consul-general in San Francisco that the German consul-general there wanted to talk secretly to the British government. The German was Captain Fritz Wiedemann, who had been Hitler's commanding officer during the First World War. Wiedemann had served as Hitler's military adjutant in the 1930s but had fallen out of favor and was posted to San Francisco in early 1939. Lothian passed the matter to Sir William Stephenson, who asked Wiseman to meet secretly with Wiedemann."" On October 1, Wiseman went to San Francisco and met the German, who claimed that Hitler was undecided as to his next move in the war. On a second visit to San Francisco on November 26, Wiseman met with Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Wiedemann's mistress, and the three of them met together on November 27. In this last meeting, Wiedemann warned that Germany planned to move south into the Balkans and the Mediterranean in the spring of 1941, a warning that proved true. Wiseman left copies of reports of these meetings in his private papers; the originals presumably went to Stephenson.""

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Wiseman's reports left out important information. When he set up British Security Coordination in New York, Stephenson had assured FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he would inform the FBI of all British intelligence activ­ ity in the United States. According to the internally written history of his office, Stephenson notified Hoover that he intended to contact Wiedemann."" The FBI field office in San Francisco appears not to have been informed, though, and when the office learned of Wiseman's pending November visit through wiretaps on the Germans, FBI agents arranged to eavesdrop on the conversations in Wiseman's hotel room. The transcripts made by the FBI reveal that in their meeting on November 26, Wiseman and the princess agreed to launch a new peace feeler to Germany. Discussion of the feeler con­ tinued with Wiedemann the following evening. In the FBI transcripts of both meetings, Wiseman claimed to represent a group of Englishmen, led by Lord Halifax, who wanted peace."* Citing these transcripts, John Costello inferred that Wiseman was acting on behalf of Lord Lothian, who presumably was act­ ing on behalf of Halifax. However, Costello overlooked a relevant sentence. At the end of their November 26 talk, Wiseman and the princess agreed that their peace proposal should go "directly to Churchill," because if it went to Lord Halifax, he would refer it to Lothian. "The Princess and Wiseman agreed that Lothian should be left out of the entire plan," reads the FBI transcript. No reason is given for this exclusion. If Lothian had inspired the peace feeler, Wiseman might have been trying to conceal the ambassador's involvement. But the discrepancy between the FBI transcripts of Wiseman's conversations, and the versions that he prepared for MI6 to read (and possibly share with the FBI) in which there is no mention of peace talk, suggests that Wiseman did not think his conver­ sations with the princess were being overheard. It would seem that Wiseman and the princess anticipated genuine opposition from Lord Lothian to a peace feeler. 107

108

Upon learning of the peace talk, the FBI appears to have notified the State Department, which tried to have Wiseman deported in December. Stephenson managed to persuade the Americans that Wiseman's dealings with the two Germans had been authorized, but Hoover clearly did not expect the discus­ sions to include peace negotiations."" But was Wiseman in fact trying to negotiate peace? In the transcript of the November 26 meeting, speaking ot the British leaders to be approached, Wiseman remarked that "for any peace plan to be successful, they must first know Hitler's strategy in the Balkan states." The details of future German intentions in a particular theater of the war should not have been necessary for Britain to know in order to initiate peace talks. Wiseman appears to have been using talk of peace as a ruse to elicit useful intelligence. This interpretation is supported by the transcript of the November 27 meet­ ing that included Wiedemann. Wiseman abruptly dropped the idea of going to 110

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Churchill and Hitler with a peace plan. He now claimed that the peace group headed by Lord Halifax would only make peace with a German government no longer led by Hitler. Captain Wiedemann favored restoring the German monarchy and Wiseman played up to his hope. The problem with pretending peace, however, was that Wiseman could not offer it if put to the test. " Why he took this chance may perhaps also be found in the November 27 transcript. In a revealing aside, he observed, "propaganda and secret service agents of foreign countries, even our own, are fired with the idea of doing great things and, therefore, do many things which are not in keeping with the policy of their country."" Wiseman's encounter with the two Germans in San Francisco may shed light on what kind of game he was playing with Mooney. Wiseman's rattled state of mind in early January 1941, which Mooney attributed to Lord Lothian's death, was more likely an effect of Wiseman's recent escapade on the west coast. If Wiseman had hinted to Mooney that Lothian was behind their peace efforts that autumn, he might have been attempting to shift respon­ sibility from himself. In the event Wiseman had meant to explore peace with Germany, Lord Lothian's sponsorship of such an effort is most unlikely. After meeting with Wiseman on December 3, 1940, Mooney recorded Wiseman's hope that the White House would broker a peace between Britain and Germany, so as to conceal the initiative coming from the British side. Given what Lothian knew of Roosevelt's attitude in September, it is very doubtful that the ambassador would have encouraged Wiseman to think that this was remotely possible.'" The British embassy appears to have treated Wiseman with great suspicion in December, although the affair seems to have blown over by the end of January." The evidence available does not support the view that, through Wiseman, Lothian tried to negotiate with Hitler in the autumn of 1940. 1

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L O R D L O T H I A N A N D THE AMERICAN ALTERNATIVE

The charges against Lord Lothian in his last year have been part of a larger assault on the image of British resolution in 1940. Churchill in his memoirs underlined the unity of the British people that year and the inevitability of close Anglo-American ties. Recent critics have called attention to the tenuous nature of Churchill's political position at the time and to the efforts by Halifax and others to explore peace with Hitler as France was falling. A related criti­ cism is that Britain's decline as a world power after the war might have been less drastic, if not prevented, by a British policy that was less anti-German or less pro-American. After the Second World War, appeasement came under attack on moral grounds. Britain and France had the power to crush the Nazis in the mid1930s and postwar critics held that their failure to do so was a failure of nerve.

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"Weakness is not treason," wrote Churchill, "though it may be equally disas­ trous."" This judgment helped underpin the foreign policy of the United States and its allies during the Cold War. If concessions to Hitler had not been unnecessary and wrong, then the sacrifices to contain communism after the Second World War might have been open to serious doubt. " Historians soon challenged the moral critique of appeasement. The view of A. J. P. Taylor, that Hitler was an opportunist with whom peace was possible, did not win general acceptance." But Donald Cameron Watt argued more persuasively that the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments had fewer alter­ natives to appeasement than their postwar critics had alleged. In the December 1963 Round Table and in subsequent scholarship, Watt argued that Britain in the 1930s did not have the military strength to fight Germany, Italy, and Japan at the same time. The isolationism of the British Dominions, not to mention the United States, gave Britain added reason to seek agreement, first with Japan, then with Italy, and finally with Germany. Watt underlined the global context that the moral critique of appeasement, focused narrowly on Britain in Europe, tended to discount." Although debate continues between "moralist" and "realist" critiques, Watt's scholarship has compelled the debate over appeasement to take into account how British leaders viewed their choices at the time, and not just how their choices looked in retrospect. One point that needs to be acknowledged in this debate is that the strategic dilemmas of British policy in the 1930s were in a deeper sense still a matter of volition. Without having chosen to maintain a worldwide empire, Britain's need to defend interests in the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic would not have arisen in the first place. The argument that Britain had to defend a world position is true only in the prac­ tical sense that no interwar British government could have abandoned the empire and survived in office. It might be argued that the real alternatives for Britain in the 1930s were not between reaching agreements with Germany, Italy, or Japan, but between reaching them with Germany or India. Churchill wanted to repress both Germany and India. British leaders and figures such as Lothian tried to meet German and Indian nationalism halfway, and failed. Churchill's policy might have spared a devastating war in Europe only to begin a long and ultimately unwinnable one in southern Asia. Britain's real need in the 1930s was to be strong in Europe and to jettison its Asian empire, so as to compel the United States to fill the vacuum that would have resulted in the Pacific Ocean. Such an adjustment required the Second World War to accomplish and led to a dominant U.S. role in the Atlantic Ocean as well. After the fall of France in 1940, Britain's choices narrowed: to resume appeasement of Germany under more dangerous conditions, or to rely on the United States. In two books published in the 1990s, the historian John Charmley observed the pressure that America applied to break up the British 5

1

7

8

1

Ambassador,

1939-1940

161

Empire during and after the Second World War. Britain could have preserved more of its independence and world position, Charmley argued, if it had not switched from appeasing Germany to appeasing America." Reynolds has pointed out that peace, or even just a truce, with Hitler dur­ ing the crucial summer of 1940 would have been no guarantee of British secu­ rity. Great Britain would have lost its remaining friends abroad and would have depended again on Hitler's word. If Hitler had gone on to defeat Russia, or if Russia and Germany had preserved or renewed their separate peace, the evidence of Hitler's intentions suggests that the United Kingdom would have been in grave danger of German invasion or strangulation by sea. " As long as Britain adhered to civilized values, and as long as it remained an independ­ ent naval power, it remained an intolerable threat to the Third Reich. In a world dominated by the United States, the British knew that they would pre­ serve their way of life, and Churchill gambled the future of his country on eventual American support. It is true that the United States was hardly friendly to the European empires after the war, and the United States opposed Britain and France in the Suez cri­ sis of 1956. But America did little to prevent the French from trying to retain Indochina and Algeria by force, and it is doubtful that the United States would have done much to stop Britain from trying to hold its own dependencies in the same way. The historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher have pointed out the extent to which the British Empire rested on an accommodation between rulers and the ruled; when enough Indians decided to be independent, Britain had to depart. The British decolonized their empire primarily because the moral and material costs of holding it became prohibitive. Philip Lothian came full circle in 1939^40 as he returned to his outlook of 1914. He had set out in his youth to reshape the world and he had helped to define some of the great issues of his time, only to be humbled by the tragic flaws in his vision and methods. But he struggled throughout his life with a challenge of fundamental importance: how to convert the declining global hegemony of Britain into a more stable and inclusive world order. Lord Lothian's life and thought may contain some lessons. Today, the United States of America is the greatest power in the world, but it will not be dominant for­ ever. What America does (or fails to do) while it is still preeminent may deter­ mine whether the world order again falls into multipolar conflict or becomes a framework in which civilization can advance in peace. 9

12

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Ill P'l

CONCLUSION

Although he began as a conservative, Philip Lothian was a liberal for most of his adult life, and an assessment of his thought and activity must begin with the tradition of liberal thinking about war and peace to which he tried in his own way to contribute. Sir Michael Howard has traced modern liberal ideas of peace back to the late-eighteenth century, when thinkers such as Thomas Paine blamed warfare on closed societies and the aristocracies that ruled them. Paine's cure for war, democracy and free trade, have been the watch­ words of the liberal approach to world order ever since. 1

By the twentieth century, though, new and controversial aggregations of private power had arisen in the advanced industrial nations, and rivalries among these nations were dividing the world into hostile empires and alliances. Liberals tended to blame the new conditions on the excesses of a renegade few or on the vestiges of an illiberal past. Turn-of-the-century reformers in Great Britain and the United States pressed for a stronger regu­ latory role for government at home and for stronger (mainly naval) defenses against the outside world. These responses did not satisfy intellectuals prob­ ing for deeper causes, and many were drawn to violent thinkers who offered sweeping and deterministic theories of class conflict or ethnic and racial struggle. Philip Lothian did not abandon the liberal faith that a world of democracy and free trade would bring peace and prosperity. But he also knew that democracy and freedom required the rule of law, and the rule of law was only possible where governments existed to enforce it. "The basic cause of war," he wrote in his 1935 Bürge Lecture, "is that there is no authority to decide international problems from the point of view of the world community as a whole.'" The problem of war would not be solved without the spread of lib­ eral civilization, he believed, but this civilization could not fulfill its promise in a world that still divided into sovereign nation-states.

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Until the world was ready to form a single state, Lothian believed that bet­ ter external relations were the key to reducing tensions. His understanding of history taught him that territorial insecurity gave rise to authoritarian tradi­ tions, and during the interwar period he opposed the idea that the security of Britain and France could be maintained by keeping Germany down indefi­ nitely. Lothian was not wrong to see external insecurity as a historic problem that liberalism had neglected. After 1945, the Allies stabilized Europe not just by encouraging democracy there but by bringing Germany and its neighbors into a common alliance. In his zeal to undo the peace terms of 1919, however, Lothian did not perceive the danger of making Germany more secure without making its neighbors more secure as well. He discounted this danger partly as a strategic gamble but mainly as an act of contrition and faith. Although briefly intrigued by Stalin's Russia, Lothian saw its communism fundamentally as a threat, and he did not look with disfavor on the chance that Hitler and Stalin would be drawn into mutual conflict. Lothian also hoped that a policy of British detachment from the affairs of continental Europe would draw the United States partway out of its isolation. But in defending German claims in the 1930s, Lothian's principal motives were not primarily strategic. He began in the 1920s to believe that France stood for a kind of amoral power politics that the First World War had been fought to abolish, and from then on he saw equality for Germany as the way back to a moral world order. Although he hoped that concessions would moderate Nazi behavior, he believed through most of the 1930s that the 1919 peace terms had to be aban­ doned as a matter of principle. A moral and religious sensibility sustained this view. Before the First World War, Kerr had seen the world in terms of a fundamental conflict of principle between democracy and authoritarianism. In believing after the war that national sovereignty was the underlying cause of tension, he embraced a more general and timeless view of what was wrong in the world. Christian Science did not provide guidance on particular questions of policy. But Lothian inter­ preted its faith in the mutability of evil into good to justify his efforts to pla­ cate hostile nationalism. As appeasement dragged on without results, he associated himself with religious activists who believed that bearing witness to their own faith in dialogue would somehow make it work. His faith in appease­ ment was not absolute, though, and in the spring of 1939 he returned to a defense of liberal and democratic civilization against its enemies. The foundation of Lothian's political thought was The Round Table's "prin­ ciple of commonwealth," the idea that private freedom and public duty were two sides of the same coin. The idea stood in contrast to the principle of an authoritiarian state, in which there was duty with no freedom. It also stood in contrast to a suspicion of government (more common in America than in Britain) that yearned for freedom without duty. To Lothian, there would always be a struggle in democratic societies over the right balance of liberty

Conclusion

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and obligation, but the two ideas could not in principle be enemies. Lothian offered more freedom to Britain's adversaries in the hope that they would accept a higher duty to the empire or to the larger world order. Lothian's problem was that the "principle of commonwealth" could only work with people who felt a sense of common identity and belonging. None of the peoples to whom he tried to offer more freedom wanted to form a per­ manent community with Britain. Philip Kerr and his friends gave autonomy to white South Africa, excluding the country's black African majority without truly winning over the white Afrikaners. The other Dominions shared a com­ mon loyalty to the British Crown but did not want to merge their electorates with Britain's. Catholic Ireland waged war to secede from the United Kingdom, and India wanted more complete self-government and, eventually, independence. Hitler took advantage of British concessions and then declared war on liberal civilization. Lothian's approach was not always mistaken. During the 1930s, he fought for concessions to India that Churchill wrongly opposed, even as he pressed for concessions to Nazi Germany that Churchill rightly condemned. Lothian's problem was that he failed to grasp the basic difference between the two countries. One's own nation can shape the attitudes of hostile nations, and in hostile nations a potential for moderation may exist. But whether a policy of conciliation or confrontation is appropriate toward a country depends on a real knowledge of the nation and its situation. Toward nations of which he did have knowledge, and especially toward those of which he did not, Lothian tended to base his approach instead on moral judgment, or on an ideal picture of the nation's place in the empire or the world. Those with better knowledge of the world did not necessarily have a better understanding of its longer-term needs. With a few exceptions, such as Eden, British politicians and diplomats in the 1930s treated the isolationism of the United States as a reality to be accepted rather than as a problem to be over­ come. American leaders too were disinclined to challenge the isolationism of their people. If deeper knowledge of the world is necessary to a realistic for­ eign policy, it may not be sufficient when it takes the present as the only rel­ evant context. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain's underlying problem has been its need to belong to some larger international grouping. Sir Michael Howard has described how, from the end of the Boer War in 1902 until it joined NATO in 1949, Great Britain struggled to define the degree and direction to which it should commit itself to a common defense with other countries.' During the 1950s, Britain stayed out of the European Economic Community (EEC) to preserve special ties to the Commonwealth and the United States. But in 1973, the United Kingdom joined the EEC, and in 1993 this community became the European Union, a single market with quasigovernmental institutions. As the United Kingdom moves further into the

Lothian

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twenty-first century, the great question in its public life will be the degree to which it should continue to merge with its European partners. Proponents of a federal Europe have credited Lord Lothian as one of their founders. He favored a union with western Europe in 1939, and his writings helped inspire federalism on the European continent during and after the Second World War. But federalists acknowledge a limit to how far Lothian can be claimed on behalf of a movement to unite Europe today. He resisted an unqualified British commitment to a defense of continental allies until the end of his life, and he never embraced (nor would he ever have backed) any form of British union with Europe that left out the other English-speaking nations. After 1949, Britain and its European partners evolved a relationship with each other and with the United States and Canada that was European and North Atlantic at the same time, a position that Lothian would surely have approved if a full political union of the North Atlantic was not possible. European federalists are not isolationists. But there is danger in seeking a regional union, even as a means to something larger, for unless and until it becomes a true world federation, a federal Europe may only magnify the great power rivalry that Lothian intended his own federalism to overcome. 4

5

Lothian believed that the English-speaking world had a common heritage and formed a more natural grouping. This idea has revived in recent propos­ als that the advanced English-speaking nations today band together for trade and defense. Advocates of such ties see an Anglo-American group as the anchor of a liberal civilization open to the world. At the end of his life, though, Lothian realized the danger in drawing too sharp a distinction between an English-speaking bloc and the other countries of Europe that had not succumbed to dictatorship. A real separation of the English-speaking nations from continental Europe today might undermine the security of both groups in a world that may become more strongly multipolar. 6

Since 1945, the world has drawn closer together through new kinds of mul­ tilateral relationships. With the end of the Cold War, the future of these has become less clear. The world is still far from agreement that international insti­ tutions should be fully and directly accountable to multilateral electorates. Unless catastrophic events force change more rapidly, the world will need time to develop common ideas of law and policy before it is ready to form a common government. Until then, the world may continue to be an arena in which some nations rise and others recede. Like the British before them. Americans may face relative decline if they cannot convert their present world position into a larger and stronger framework of shared power. By forg­ ing a new consensus on its global role, and by opening itself to new nations that meet its conditions for membership, the NATO alliance might grow strong enough to keep the world at peace in the twenty-first century. The les­ sons of Lothian's lifetime will not have been learned in vain if the closer ties that followed the Second World War can be extended and improved. But for

Conclusion

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America and its allies to lead the way to a more inclusive world order will depend on whether and how well other nations understand the institutions of the liberal West to be the means to a common good. The politico-academic matrix of Lothian's activity reflected the growing importance of education in the modern world. Through the Round Table movement, Philip Kerr and his friends tried to achieve imperial federation, not by launching a public campaign for votes, but by organizing local semi­ nars linked to a central group and its journal. The study of world problems continued in the institutes of international affairs that the Round Table move­ ment and its American contacts helped set up after 1920. Lord Milner belat­ edly realized during the First World War that expert knowledge did not always lead to wisdom. But in a civilization of increasing complexity, the ascendancy of academic training proved inevitable. The Round Table's 1919 image of a world run by a new professional intelligentsia was a natural extension of its background and vision. Lothian's principal work for the Rhodes Scholars in the 1920s and 1930s was to raise their standards to ensure their participation and influence in this kind of world. 7

In such a world, however, there will always be a tension between demo­ cratic aims and meritocratic methods. In his Round Table and Rhodes work, Lothian tried to imbue meritocratic elites with a sense of responsibility for modern democratic civilization. He failed when he assumed that it was enough to identify and engage the key people of any country. As ambassador to the United States, he succeeded because he recognized that ideas also had to have popular support. The British "establishment" of the 1930s came under attack in the 1950s and 1960s, and some critics identified and condemned its Milnerite element. The Round Table Moot began as an arm of Lord Milner, a secretive figure whose efforts to save the British Empire went to the brink of destroying it in the spring of 1914, and whose more influential followers urged a foreign pol­ icy that nearly destroyed it again in the 1930s. Yet Milner's disciples defended the early steps toward decolonization, when their plans for a new imperial centralism failed, and they anticipated the post-1945 liberal world order anchored by America and Britain. Their vision of a confederal world may yet be vindicated by the long-term trend of modern history. 8

Certain details are now known about Rhodes and Milner that help explain their sense of alienation and penchant for secrecy: in a time when both things were unmentionable, Rhodes was homosexual and Milner was born out of wedlock.'' Philip Kerr seems to have carried privately a different burden related to his nervous condition. How far this condition affected his political judgment is not clear, because his principal views were shared by others not known to have been in similarly poor health. Hidden factors do not seem to have been an influence in the lives of Kerr's Round Table friends. What motivated them (and him) were the appeal of high ideas, the excitement of a

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fellowship on a quest, access to power, a youthful sense of superiority, and the burden in later life of an increasingly desperate and clouded sense of duty. Of all the Round Table fellowship, Philip Lothian was the most enigmatic. He rejected matter for spirit but was tempted for a time to seek peace with evil. In the end. he found his bearings in the material world at its moment of greatest darkness, only to die by the light of his faith. He ran aground when moral intuition overtook his judgment; but the same moral sense caused him to ask whether the true alternative to global hegemony wasn't a return to anarchy but an advance in accountability. If his life points to the danger of relying on intuition and ideal principle to achieve a better world in the short run, so does the failure of more practical politicians in his time warn against setting long-term ambitions so low that they take civilization for granted. The liberal imagination must still answer the challenge of primitive and violent ideas that appeal to the need for purpose.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr) (London, 1960). Butler did not have full access to Kerr's papers, which for the period of his service to Lloyd George (1917-21) were classified until 1972. Other important collections also did not become available until after 1960. 2. See, for example, Michael G. Fry, Illusions of Security: North Atlantic Diplomacy 1918-22 (Toronto, 1972); and two studies by B. J. C. McKercher, The Second Baldwin Government and the United States, 1924-1929: Attitudes and Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1984), and Transition of Power: Britain's Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930-1945 (Cambridge, 1999), which describe Anglo-American relations and mention Kerr as an early proponent of Atlanticism. For Lothian's role in appeasement, see Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, The Appease rs: The Decline of Democracy from Hitler's Rise to Chamberlain's Downfall (Boston, 1963). 3. Walter Nimocks, Milner's Young Men: The "Kindergarten" in Edwardian Imperial Affairs (Durham, NC, 1968); and John Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto, 1975). See also the doctoral dissertation of Alex May, "The Round Table, 1910-66" (University of Oxford, 1995) and the essays in Andrea Bosco and Alex May, eds., The Round Table: The Empire/Commonwealth and British Foreign Policy (London, 1997). 4. Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth: A Biography of Lionel Curtis (Oxford, 1995). 5. See Andrea Bosco, Lord Lothian: Un pioniere del federal ismo 1882-1940 (Milano, 1989); and Stefan Schieren, Vom Weltreich zum Weltstaat: Philip Kerrs (Lord Lothian) Weg zum Imperialisten zum Internationalisten, 1905-1925 (London. 1996). See also the essays in John Turner, ed., The Larger Idea: Lord Lothian and the Problem of National Sovereignty (London, 1988). On Lothian as ambassador, see David Reynolds, "Lord Lothian and Anglo-American Relations, 1939-1940," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 73, part 2 (Philadelphia, 1983). For an overview of Lothian's thought, see Priscilla Roberts, "Lord Lothian and the Atlantic World," The Historian, 66, no. 1 (April 2004), pp. 97-127.

170

Notes

6. See Robert Scally, The Origins of the Lloyd George Coalition: The Politics of Social-Imperialism, 1900-1918 (Princeton, 1975); and Norman Rose, The Cliveden Set (London, 2000). 7. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope (New York, 1966), and The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden (New York, 1981). 8. See David Irving, Churchill's War: The Struggle for Power (Bullsbrook, Western Australia, 1987). Irving appears to have stimulated other writers to investigate the conspiracy charge in more detail. See John Costello, Ten Days to Destiny: The Secret Story of the Hess Peace Initiative and British Efforts to Strike a Deal with Hitler (New York, 1991), published in the United Kingdom as Ten Days that Saved the West (London, 1991). 9. See John Pinder, "Prophet Not Without Honour: Lothian and the Federal Idea," The Round Table, 72, no. 283 (April 1983), pp. 207-20.

CHAPTER 1: PROVING GROUNDS 1. For Philip Henry Kerr (1882-1940), eleventh Marquess of Lothian, see Charles Mosley, ed., Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 106th ed. (Crans, Switzerland), p. 1763. For John Robert William Kerr (1794-1841), seventh Marquess of Lothian; Ralph Drury Kerr (1837-1916); and Kerr's brother and sisters, see ibid., p. 1763. For Henry Granville Fitzalan-Howard (1815-1860), fourteenth Duke of Norfolk, and Anne Fitzalan-Howard, see ibid., pp. 2095-96. Kerr also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), hereafter cited as the DNB. For information on his family and childhood, see J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 1^4-, 2. For William Schömberg Robert Kerr (1832-1870), eighth Marquess of Lothian; Schömberg Henry Kerr (1833-1900), ninth Marquess of Lothian; and Walter Talbot Kerr (1839-1927), see Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 106th ed., p. 1763; and for the Kerr family, see ibid., pp. 1758-64. Vicary Gibbs et al., eds. The Complete Peerage, 12 vols. (London, 1910-59), vol. 8, p. 157, provides the income of the Marquessate in 1883. Schömberg Henry Kerr, ninth Marquess of Lothian, has an entry in the DNB that gives his estate as £84,531 at his death in 1900. On the family coal mining interest, see Michael Stuart Cotterill, Investment and Management in the Lothian Coal Company 1890-1955 (Edinburgh, 1983). For the Fitzalan-Howard family, see Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, pp. 2090-2101; and John Martin Robinson, The Dukes of Norfolk: A Quincentennial History (Oxford, 1983). 3. Cecil Chetwynd Kerr (1808-1877). Marchioness of Lothian, DNB. 4. For Kerr's schooldays, see J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 2-4. On the Oratory School, see Brian Gardner, The Public Schools: A Historical Survey (London, 1973), p. 180. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), DNB. 5. On the teaching of chivalry, see Marc Girouard, The Return of Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, 1981), pp. 164—76. 6. First class or highest honors required some knowledge of modern political philosophy and economics as well as modern history. On the curriculum of Oxford in Kerr's time, see Norman Chester, Economics, Politics, and Social Studies at Oxford, 1900-1985 (London, 1986), pp. 1-7. On New College, see Alan Ryan, "Transformation, 1850-1914," in John Buxton and Penry Williams, eds., New College, Oxford 1379-1979 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 72-106. At Oxford, students met individually with faculty, who were known as the student's tutors. Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher (1865-1940) and Robert Sangster Rait (1874-1936), DNB.

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7. See J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 97-151. 8. [Philip Kerr], "Foreign Affairs: Anglo-German Rivalry," The Round Table, 1. no. 1 (November 1910), pp. 7^t0. Round Table articles were unsigned until 1966, but J. R. M. Butler, in Lord Lothian, identifies the articles by Kerr in the appendix on pp. 323-25. 9. See Vincent Alan McClelland, English Roman Catholics and Higher Education, 1830-1903 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 273, 400. 10. For Kerr's loss of faith, see J. R. M. Butler. Lord Lothian, pp. 7-9. 11. Father John Norris to Lord Ralph Kerr, undated February 1904, quoted in J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian, p. 9. John Norris (1843-1911) has an entry in Who Was Who (London, 1919—), hereafter abbreviated as WWW. 12. On Oxford and its ethic of service, see Gary McCulloch, Philosophers and Kings: Education for Leadership in Modern England (Cambridge, 1991); and Richard Symonds, •Oxford and Empire (London, 1986). 13. H. A. L. Fisher, An Unfinished Autobiography (London, 1940), pp. 86-88. 14. Gilbert Murray, "Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher," Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 26 (London, 1940), pp. 455-65. Quotes are from p. 465. 15. For his influence, see Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, Philosophy, Politics, ' and Citizenship: The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford, 1984). Thomas Hill Green ( 1836-1882), DNB. 16. On the founding of Toynbee Hall, see Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London, 1984), pp. 1-10. On the broader settlement house movement, see Standish Meacham, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880-1914: The Search for Community (New Haven, 1987); and Allen F. Davis, Spearheads of Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York, 1967). Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883) and Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889-1975), DNB. 17. For the social service of his later Round Table friends Patrick (later Sir Patrick) Duncan and Richard Feetham, see their entries in the DNB. For the service of Lionel Curtis, see Deborah Lavin, From Empire to International Commonwealth, pp. 15-16. Kencan be found on a 1928 lecture program at Toynbee Hall, reproduced in Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall, p. 109. The institutes of international affairs organized in London (Chatham House), New York (the Council on Foreign Relations), and the Dominions during the 1920s bear some comparison to settlement houses. Both had twotiered structures of patrons and staff, notions of socializing important groups (the under­ class in one, foreign policy elites in the other), ambitions of shaping policy, and in their early years some activists in common. 18. Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England, edited with an introduction by John Gross (London, 1883; reprint edition, Chicago, 1971). On Seeley (1834-95), see also his DNB entry. 19. On the career of the Imperial Federation League, see J. E. Tyler, The Struggle for Imperial Unity (1868-1895) (London, 1938), pp. 107-211. 20. For Kerr's years in South Africa, see J. R. M. Butler, Lord Lothian, pp. 11-34; Kenneth Ingham, "Philip Kerr and the Unification of South Africa," in 77i