Here is an answer I found to the question asked in the last post, "If the original foreign policy of America was based on nonintervention, how did this nation forsake it and become interventionist?"
You may remember the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) from my earlier posts relating to Carroll Quigley's 1966 book Tragedy and Hope. The following includes an account of its origin that is in general agreement with what Quigley had to say about it.
What now follows is quoted from my copy of Dan Smoot's 1962 book The Invisible Government. Dan Smoot was one of the first to expose the role of the CFR to the public. -----
"President George Washington, in his Farewell Address to the People of the United States on September 17, 1796, established a foreign policy which became traditional and a main article of faith for the American people in their dealings with the rest of the world.
Washington warned against foreign influence in the shaping of national affairs. He urged America to avoid permanent, entangling alliances with other nations, recommending a national policy of benign neutrality toward the rest of the world. Washington did not want America to build a wall around herself, or to become, in any sense, a hermit nation. Washington's policy permitted freer exchange of travel, commerce, ideas, and culture between Americans and other people than Americans have ever enjoyed since the policy was abandoned. The Father of our Country wanted the American government to be kept out of the wars and revolutions and political affairs of other nations.
Washington told Americans that their nation had a high destiny, which it could not fulfill if they permitted their government to become entangled in the affairs of other nations.
Despite the fact of two foreign wars (Mexican War, 1846-1848; and Spanish American War, 1898) the foreign policy of Washington remained the policy of this nation, unaltered, for 121 years–until Woodrow Wilson's war message to Congress in April, 1917.
Wilson himself, when campaigning for re-election in 1916, had unequivocally supported our traditional foreign policy: his one major promise to the American people was that he would keep them out of the European war.
Yet, even while making this promise, Wilson was yielding to a pressure he was never able to withstand: the influence of Colonel Edward M. House, Wilson's all-powerful adviser. According to House's own papers and the historical studies of Wilson's ardent admirers (see, for example, Intimate Papers of Colonel House, edited by Charles Seymour, published in 1926 by Houghton Mifflin; and, The Crisis of the Old Order by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published 1957 by Houghton Mifflin), House created Wilson's domestic and foreign policies, selected most of Wilson's cabinet and other major appointees, and ran Wilson's State Department.
House had powerful connections with international bankers in New York. He was influential, for example, with great financial institutions represented by such people as Paul and Felix Warburg, Otto H. Kahn, Louis Marburg, Henry Morgenthau, Jacob and Mortimer Schiff, Herbert Lehman. House had equally powerful connections with bankers and politicians of Europe.
Bringing all of these forces to bear, House persuaded Wilson that America had an evangelistic mission to save the world for 'democracy.' The first major twentieth century tragedy for the United States resulted: Wilson's war message to Congress and the declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917.
House also persuaded Wilson that the way to avoid all future wars was to create a world federation of nations. On May 27, 1916, in a speech to the League to Enforce Peace, Wilson first publicly endorsed Colonel House's world-government idea (without, however, identifying it as originating with House).
In September, 1916, Wilson (at the urging of House) appointed a committee of intellectuals (the first President's Brain Trust) to formulate peace terms and draw up a charter for world government. This committee, with House in charge, consisted of about 150 college professors, graduate students, lawyers, economists, writers, and others. Among them were men still familiar to Americans in the 1960's: Walter Lippmann (columnist); Norman Thomas (head of the American socialist party); Allen Dulles (former head of C.I.A.); John Foster Dulles (late Secretary of State); Christian A. Herter (former Secretary of State).
These eager young intellectuals around Wilson, under the clear eyes of crafty Colonel House, drew up their charter for world government (League of Nations Covenant) and prepared for the brave new socialist one-world to follow World War I. But things went sour at the Paris Peace Conference. They soured even more when constitutionalists in the United States Senate found out what was being planned and made it quite plain that the Senate would not authorize United States membership in such a world federation.
Bitter with disappointment but not willing to give up, Colonel House called together in Paris, France, a group of his most dedicated young intellectuals–among them, John Foster and Allen Dulles, Christian A. Herter, and Tasker H. Bliss–and arranged a dinner meeting with a group of like-minded Englishmen at the Majestic Hotel, Paris, on May 19, 1919. The group formally agreed to form an organization 'for the study of international affairs.'
The American group came home from Paris and formed The Council on Foreign Relations, which was incorporated in 1921.
The purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations was to create (and condition the American people to accept) what House called a 'positive' foreign policy for America–to replace the traditional 'negative' foreign policy which had kept America out of the endless turmoil of old-world politics and had permitted the American people to develop their great nation in freedom and independence from the rest of the world." (pp.12-14)
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