[CTRL] The Pilgrim Society & English-Speaking Union

[William Shannon]

http://www.watch.pair.com/pilgrim.html


The Pilgrim Society & English-Speaking Union

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The following report was received from Eric Samuelson in response to our
inquiry as to whether the Pilgrim Society of the United States and the
English-Speaking Union were formed by Cecil Rhodes' Milner Round Table Group
as part of its purpose to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring
all habitable portions of the world under control of a British and American
Commonwealth. Another report by Mr. Samuelson is a profile of George Louis
Beer, American correspondent for The Round Table from 1915-18, who was also
one of the originators of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
London and its American branch, The Council on Foreign Relations.
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WHAT ABOUT THOSE PILGRIMS?

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Courtesy of Timothy Aho, the remarks of Hon. J. Thorlkelson, U.S. Congressman
from Montana, follow (a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on August
20, 1940): Mr. THORKELSON. Mr. Speaker, under leave to extend my own remarks
in the RECORD, I include a pamphlet by John J. Whiteford. This pamphlet
should be of interest to every Member of Congress because it deals with a
subject that will soon confront us, as it did in 1917: In the past it has
been largely responsible for drawing this country into the World War at a
cost of thousands of our young men and billions of dollars and a long period
of depression. It does not work openly and it is not generally recognized by
the public. It does not yell from soap boxes in Union Square, call strikes,
picket or hold parades. It operates from the top down and so it reaches into
every juncture of American life. It is the far reaching power of British
propaganda to make this country subservient to Great Britain and the British
Empire. The scene is a banquet held at the Hotel Plaza, New York City,
October 25, 1939. This banquet was given by the Pilgrim Society of America in
honor of the Marquess of Lothian, British Ambassador of the United States. It
is an old custom of the American Pilgrims to extend this honor to every
newly-appointed British Ambassador, the same as the British Pilgrims invite
every new American Ambassador to their midst at a banquet in London. There
are several curious things about these Pilgrim functions. In the first place
there is present a these dinners an array of notables, such as it would be
difficult to bring together under one roof for any other purpose and by any
other society. The Lothian dinner was no exception. Presiding over this
affair was Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, and
chairman of the American Pilgrim Society. Among the guests were John D.
Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, Thomas W. Lamont and other members of the House
of Morgan. Frank L. Polk, Jeremiah Milbank, James W. Gerard (former American
ambassador to Germany), the French Ambassador to the United States, Lt. Gen.
Hugh A. Drum, U.S.A. Maj. Gen. John O. Harbord (chairman of the Radio
Corporation of America), the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and
many other leading figures in government, diplomacy, politics, finance,
banking, shipping, law, industry, insurance and education. These men had come
especially to honor Lord Lothian and to hear him speak. Before this important
audience Lord Lothian's speech could not merely be a light after-dinner talk
of clever stories and witticisms. It was an important as front-page news.
* * * * * *
A few prominent Pilgrim members, past and present, are listed below: J.P.
Morgan, Russell Leffingwell, Henry P. Davison, John W. Davis, John D.
Rockefeller, Harry Rockefeller, Ogden Mills Reid, Henry Morgenthau, Otto
Kahn, Robert Fulton Cutting, James B. Clews, John B. Trevor, William Fellowes
Morgan, Henry W. Taft, Adolph Ochs, James Speyer, Charles H. Rabin, Sir
Ashley Sparks, George F. Trewbridge, Phillip Rhinelander, Andrew W. Mellon,
Albert H. Wiggin. J. W. Hill, John F. O'Ryan, Frank L. Polk, George R. ??,
Julius Ochs Adler, Alfred I. Aiken, Herbert I. Aldrich, John Whitney, W.B.
Whitney, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vincent Astor, Julius S. Bache, Robert Lew
Boron, Ancell H. Bail, David H. Biddle, Robert W. Bigelow, Irving T. Bush,
Newcomb Carleton, Joseph H.... In the nature of their exclusive membership
and... the Pilgrims may be termed the wholesale agency for promoting the
interests of Britain in this country. It is strictly a Tory organization. The
retail outlet is the more widely known English-Speaking Union, which has for
its avowed purpose: "To draw together in the bond of comradeship the
English-Speaking people of the United States and of the British Empire by the
disseminating knowledge of each in the other and by reverence for their
common institutions." It is interesting to note that the English-Speaking
Union originated in London in the fateful year of 1917 when America bared her
strong arm in defense of democracy. Like the Pilgrims, the English-Speaking
Union has a British organization with headquarters in London and an American
branch with central offices in New York. The purposes of the two
organizations are virtually the same and there is an interlocking directorate
and membership. The patron of the English-Speaking Union (London) is His
Majesty the King. The honorary president of the American English-Speaking
Union is the prominent Pilgrim, John W. Davis, successor to the late Walter
Hines Page as America's wartime Ambassador to the Court of St. James,
Presidential Candidate in 1924, and member of J.P. Morgan & Co. As treasurer
of the American English-Speaking Union is listed Harry P. Davison, also a
Morgan partner whose father was instrumental in having J.P. Morgan & Co.
appointed exclusive purchasing agents for the British Government in America
during the World War....
***
COMMENTS ON THE CONGRESSMAN'S SPEECH Congressman Thorlkelson's speech was
based on Sir Uncle Sam, Knight of the British Empire! by John J. Whiteford
(1940). This book was described: "The history of a little known society
promoting the aims of world government (covert British Empire) and how they
pushed us into World War II in an effort to bring us back under the control
of the Crown! A look at the leadership of the infamous Pilgrim Society which
included the Rockefeller, Cecil Rhodes, Andrew Carnegie, and many, many more
of our elitists!" Antony C. Sutton wrote: "The Order does not show up
directly on the Executive Committee of the Pilgrim Society, but only through
family names, i.e., Aldrich and Pratt. The Pilgrim Society is probably a
rather harmless social club using its annual dinners to cement ties between
the British and American establishment."(1) Sutton also negatively contrasted
Hegelianism with British empiricism: "It is as different from the British
empirical school of John Stuart Mill as night and day."(2) Pilgrim Hall,
built in 1824, is America's first and oldest public museum in continuous
operation. Owned and operated by the Pilgrim Society, Pilgrim Hall preserves
the largest collection in the world of Pilgrim artifacts from over 350 years
ago. The Pilgrim Society is said not to be "a lineage organization." Sir
Harry Brittain's Pilgrim Partners: Forty Years of British-American Fellowship
(1942) was once described by a bookseller (who was asking $85): "House
publication of the mysterious, super-elite Pilgrim Society, the interface of
the American and British Anglophile elites...very, very rare. The author's
letters were: KBE, CMG, DL, LLD. Aside from those listed by Thorlkelson, two
other Pilgrims can be identified: Illuminati prince Professor George Edward
Gordon Catlin, a Pilgrim Society member, who was on the British Fabian
executive committee.(3) Arthur Hobson Dean (BB/CFR). Vietnam War hawk. Member
of Committee for An Effective and Durable Peace in Asia. Committee Chairman,
CFR. CFR Director (1955-1972). Wall Street Lawyer. New York Social Register.
Century Club. Pacific Union Club. Links. Attended 1957 BB meeting. John
Dulles Law Partner. Sullivan & Cromwell. Member, Foreign Policy Association
and Pilgrim Society. Director, UN Association and Lazard Funds, Inc. Special
Ambassador to Korea (1953-1954). Chairman, U.S. Delegation on Nuclear Arms
Testing, Geneva, Switzerland (1962). Trustee, Carnegie Foundation.

THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING UNION Dr. William Allen Nielson, President of Smith
College, addressed the English Speaking Union at a dinner (date not stated)
at the Hotel Astor in New York City. He deplored that fact that there were
still men and women in America whose patriotism could not be purchased with
English gold.(4) The English-Speaking Union's "Books-Across-the-Sea" Program
was detailed on September 26, 1997: The 50th anniversary of the
English-Speaking Union's "Books-Across-the-Sea" program, originally chaired
by T.S. Eliot and now chaired by George Plimpton, will be celebrated in New
York and London in a landmark symposium, "A Life Illumined: The Art of
Biography" via live satellite on Thursday, October 16. The event will be held
in the McGraw-Hill Building...Dr. Arthur M. Schlesinger, the distinguished
historian and biographer, will moderate in New York with three prize-winning
American biographers. The three British biographers will be speaking from
London...American panelists will be Robert A. Caro, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson; David Levering
Lewis, an American historian best known for his biographies of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and W.E. B. DuBois; and Carl Rollyson, a professor whose
biographies focus on women with theatrical personalities and legendary lives,
such as Marilyn Monroe and Lillian Hellman. British panelists will be Lady
Antonia Fraser, Michael Holroyd and Philip Ziegler. Segments of the symposium
will be included in a future issue of The Paris Review. The
"Books-Across-the- Sea" program is currently chaired by George Plimpton and
includes a distinguished group of writers, publishers, and scholars,
including Brendan Gill, staff writer for The New Yorker; Vartan Gregorian,
President of The Carnegie Corporation of New York; Thomas H. Guinzburg,
former President of Viking Press; Drue Heinz, Publisher, The Paris Review;
Barbara Hoffert, Book Review Editor of Library Journal; Richard Howard,
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet; Jeanne McCulloch, Editor-at-Large of The Paris
Review; Alan Pryce-Jones, former editor of The Times Literary Supplement
(London); John T. Sargent, former CEO of Doubleday & Co.; writer and
historian Arthur M. Schlesinger; novelist Mona Simpson and William Wadsworth,
Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. Books-Across-the-Sea
originated during World War II when a group of Americans in war torn England
recognized that American books had been lost in the chaos of war. At their
request, a group of book-minded Americans rushed 70 American books to the
U.K. In exchange, 70 books were shipped from London to the U.S.; as the
Anglo-American alliance grew closer, Books- Across-the-Sea became a well
organized agency. Officially incorporated as a national program office
English-Speaking Union in 1947, under the chairmanship of T.S. Eliot, it has
expanded to include exchanges with other English-speaking countries. Today,
the Books-Across-the-Sea program selects the annual Ambassador Book Awards,
presented to those books which have made an exceptional contribution to the
interpretation of the life and culture in the United States; conducts a
series of book and author lunches in New York; sponsors the Authors on Tour
Program for the E-SW's 81 branches around the country; administers the Ruth
M. Shellens Memorial Library at the ESU headquarters in New York, which
contains more than 8,000 volumes on the history and culture of the
English-speaking nations and is open to the general public for research
purposes.

CONTROVERSIAL EXCERPTS FROM MY RESEARCH ON THE U.S.-BRITISH "SPECIAL
RELATIONSHIP" Aside from the two books previously mentioned, I am not aware
of any expose of either the Pilgrim Society or the British-Speaking Union. On
January 28, 1994, I was informed by a thirty-second degree Mason that the
Grand Lodge of Texas is under orders of the Grand Lodge in Washington, D.C.
which is under the Grand Lodge of England. The Larouche position on "the
English" was stated recently: "The most important constant in the history of
the United States of America has been the implacable hostility of the British
Empire and the London-centered British oligarchy. This hostility generated
the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, in addition to many
lesser clashes. But after Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, the reality of US
military and naval superiority forced London to come to terms with the
inevitable persistence of the United States on the world scene as a great
power for another century and more. By 1895-1898, galloping British
decadence, expressed as industrial decline combined with a looming inability
to maintain global naval domination, suggested to the circles of the
soon-to-be King Edward VII the advisability of harnessing the power and
resources of the United States to the British imperial chariot. Thus was born
the London-Washington Special Relationship, under which the United States was
established as London's auxiliary, proxy, and dupe through such stages as the
1898 Anglo-American rapprochement before Manila Bay, Edward VII's sponsorship
of Theodore Roosevelt's aspirations to "Anglo-Saxon" respectability and, most
decisively, Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war on Germany in April, 1917.
Under the Special Relationship, London has parlayed its financial and
epistemological dominance over the United States into profound and often
decisive influence over US directions in foreign policy and finance." In the
past I have personally attended a number of Larouche meetings in Austin. I
would not describe myself as a follower-particularly since at the last
meeting the overt "Communist" philosophy of the lecturer became apparent; he
stopped speaking in the middle of a prepared speech. However, the
anti-British rhetoric of the Larouchites does, in my opinion, have a firm
basis in historical fact. George Washington, to his credit, accomplished much
for this country and his "Farewell Message" is no more timely today. However,
it has also been asserted that: "The confession of General Cornwallis to
General Washington at Yorktown has been