Skilluminati Research

The Rosetta Stone of US History: Quigley’s “Tragedy and Hope”

Posted Jul 23, 2007 4 comments

As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy's summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things -- that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.

Yeah, that's Bill Clinton, remembered fondly by millions of people who never googled "mena arkansas CIA." He's referring to his "mentor", Carroll Quigley, who had been teaching at Georgetown since 1941, after moving on from both Princeton and Yale. Quigley was a genius in multiple fields of study, one of the most respected minds of his generation, and in 1966, he wrote a book hardly anyone has read: "Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time". I've known about it for probably ten years and only picked up a copy in January of this year. Having recently finished it -- and yeah, it's 1348 pages -- I'd like to share the most interesting passages with you.

Not because it's any great pain in the ass to actually read the book: it's probably the most complete picture of US history, and the chess game behind our foreign policy, I've ever read. It's also 1348 pages, so here's the fresh meat:

Honestly Assessing Hiroshima

The decision to use the bomb against Japan marks one of the turning points in history of our times. The scientists who were consulted had no information on the status of the war itself, had no idea how close to the end Japan already was. Some people like General Groves wanted it to be used to justify the two billion they had spent.

After it was all over, Director of Military Intelligence for the Pacific theatre of War Alfred McCormack, who was probably in as good position as anyone to for judging the situation, felt that the Japanese surrender could have been obtained in a few weeks by blockade alone. The Japanese had no longer enough food in stock, and their fuel reserves were practically exhausted. We were mining all their harbors and if we had brought this operation to its logical conclusion, the destruction of Japanese cities with incendiary and other bombs would have been quite unnecessary. But General Norstad declared at Washington that this blockading action was a cowardly proceeding unworthy of the Air Force. It was therefore discontinued.

It was equally clear that the defeat of Japan did not require the A-bomb just as it did not require the Russian entry into the war or an American invasion of the Japanese home islands. But again, other factors involving interests and nonrational considerations were too powerful. However, if the U.S. had not finished the bomb project or had not used it, it seems most unlikely that the Soviet Union would have made its postwar efforts to get the bomb.

The Russian leaders would almost certainly not have made the effort to get the bomb if we had not used it on Japan. On the other hand, if we had not used the bomb on Japan, we would have been quite incapable of preventing the Soviet forces from expanding wherever they were ordered in Eurasia in 1946.

No Future for Democracy

The growth of the army of specialists destroys one of the three basic foundations of political democracy. These three bases are:

1) that men are relatively equal in factual power;

2) that men have relatively equal access to the information needed to make a government's decisions;

3) that men have a psychological readiness to accept majority rule in return for those civil rights which will allow any minority to work to build itself up to become a majority.

It is increasingly clear that in the 20th century, the expert will replace the industrial tycoon in control of the economic system even as he will replace the democratic voter in control of the political system. This is because planning will inevitably replace laissez-faire in the relationships between the two systems. Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another.

But in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number, through his educational training, his required military and other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits.

Of Course There's a Conspiracy

Behind this unfortunate situation lies another, more profound, relationship, which influences matters much broader than Far Eastern policy. It involves the organization of tax-exempt fortunes of international financiers into foundations to be used for educational, scientific, and other public purposes. Sixty or more years ago, public life in the East was dominated by the influence of Wall Street referring to international financial capitalism deeply involved in the gold standard, foreign exchange fluctuations, floating of fixed-interest securities and shares for stock-exchange markets.

This group, which in the United States, was completely dominated by J.P. Morgan and Company from the 1880s to the 1930s was cosmopolitan, Anglophile, internationalist, Ivy League, eastern seaboard, high Episcopalian and European-culture conscious. Their connection with the Ivy League colleges rested on the fact that large endowments of these institutions required constant consultation with the financiers of Wall Street and was reflected in the fact that these endowments were largely in bonds rather than in real estate or common stocks.

As a consequence of these influences, J.P. Morgan and his associates were the most significant figures in policy making at Harvard, Columbia and Yale while the Whitneys and Prudential Insurance Company dominated Princeton. The chief officials of these universities were beholden to these financial powers and usually owed their jobs to them.

The significant influence of Wall Street (meaning Morgan) both in the Ivy League and in Washington explains the constant interchange between the Ivy League and the Federal Government, and interchange which undoubtedly aroused a good deal of resentment in less-favored circles who were more than satiated with the accents, tweeds, and High Episcopal Anglophilia of these peoples. Poor Dean Acheson, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his remarkable qualities of intellect and character, took the full brunt of this resentment from McCarthy and his allies. The same feeling did no good to pseudo-Ivy League figures like Alger Hiss.

In spite of the great influence of this Wall Street alignment, an influence great enough to merit the name of the "American Establishment," this group could not control the Federal Government and, in consequence, had to adjust to a good many government actions thoroughly distasteful to the group. The chief of these were in taxation law, beginning with the graduated income tax in 1913, but culminating above all else with the inheritance tax.

The Left-Wing Liberal Puppet Show

More than fifty years ago, the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements of the United States. This was relatively easy to do since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate or take over but was really three-fold:

1) to keep informed about the Left-wing or liberal groups;

2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so they could blow off steam;

3) to have a final "veto" on their actions if they ever went radical. There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier.

The best example of the alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was "The New Republic" a magazine founded in 1914 by Willard Straight using Payne Whitney money. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to Walter Lippmann.

The Echo Chamber of History

The Eighty-third Congress set up in 1953 a Special Reece Committee to investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. It soon became clear that people of immense wealth would be unhappy if the investigation went too far and that the most respected newspapers in the country, closely allied with these men of wealth, would not get excited enough about any revelations to make the publicity worthwhile.

An interesting report showing the Left-wing associations of interlocking nexus of tax-exempt foundations was issued in 1954 rather quietly.. Four years later, the Reece Committee's general counsel, Rene A Wormser, wrote a shocked, but not shocking, book on the subject called "Foundations: Their Power and Influence."

Jerome Green is a symbol of much more than the Wall Street influence in the IPR. He is also a symbol of the relationship between the financial circles of London and those of the eastern U.S. which reflects one of the most powerful influences in 20th century American and world history. The two ends of this English-speaking axis have sometimes been called, perhaps facetiously, the English and American Establishments. There is, however, a considerable degree of truth behind the joke, a truth which reflects a very real power structure.

It is this power structure which the Radical Right in the U.S. has been attacking for years in the belief they are attacking the Communists. These misdirected attacks did much to confuse the American people in 1948-1955. By 1953 most of these attacks had run their course. The American people, thoroughly bewildered at the widespread charges of twenty years of treason and subversion, had rejected the Democrats and put into the White House a war hero, Eisenhower. At the time, two events, one public and one secret, were still in process. The public one was the Korean War; the secret one was the race for the thermonuclear bomb.

In Closing

Remember who wrote all this: an eminently respected and successful historian and political science intellectual. This is not an outside perspective on The Way Things Really Work, either: he grew up in the middle of the US-European power structure and knew it intimately. He refers to this presumably benign conspiracy as both "the Round Table Groups" and "the Anglo-American Elite," both of which tacitly acknowledge the power and influence of the British establishment here in the United States. As Quigley states in Tragedy and Hope:

I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960's, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. --page 950

So clearly, this is not an effort to expose some vast, evil conspiracy on his part. He has a genuine admiration for them, which makes lines like this even more chilling:

The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

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