“What the hell was a partner in the Morgan Bank doing starting a “pinko” journal like The New Republic in the first place?”
Jim Martin
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The New Republic magazine has once again been trotted out to play the Trojan-Horse role for which it was hired.
Los Angeles Times readers were recently lambasted with yet another shrill diatribe against the Palestinian people from New Republic editor-in-chief Martin Peretz (see “Traveling With Bad Companions; Western supporters of the Palestinian cause are morally blind”, June 23, 2003, Commentary) . Such hysterical obloquy would be simply tiresome were it not for the pernicious effect of such drivel on generations of innocent lives.
Those who support the Palestinian cause against Israel, are, at best, in Peretz’s condescending estimation, “myopic romantic{s}”, but more aptly designated as “deluded folk”, “certified kooks”, or by the almost quaintly anachronistic “fellow travelers.”
Some of these “certified kooks”, are genuinely mystified by such irrational invective coming from the helmsman of the most venerable flagship for thoughtful liberalism.
Deliciously tempting though it may be to pick apart Peretz’s logic or his lack thereof, it is more enlightening to assess by what right the New Republic’ arrogated to itself the moral authority to pontificate through its blow-hard editor-in-chief.
The truth is, there is no such moral authority. The New Republic is the cynical creation of self-serving men whose moral mandates seldom rise above the maxim “he who has the gold makes the rules.”
One of the most complete expositions of this little-told story is found in Professor Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World In Our Time (Macmillan, 1966). The eminent Dr. Quigley was professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University, and had previously taught at Princeton and Harvard—certainly no academic slouch, he.
Quigley was also the favorite professor of little Bill Clinton. In fact, in his first presidential nomination acceptance speech, Clinton went out of his way to thank above all others two gone-but-not-forgotten influences who shaped his self-professed belief in the duty of public service: President John F, Kennedy and Professor Carroll Quigley. Clinton attended Georgetown when his professor’s 1300+page tome was probably required reading. Author Jim Martin conjectures that this is probably where the ambitious little suck-butt learned how power really works in the world.
The short of it is, the New Republic was founded in 1914 with J.P. Morgan Banking Money (specifically by Willard Straight who had married heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney) to manipulate the political left. In Quigley’s analysis on pages 936-956, this infiltration had a threefold purpose:
(1)To keep informed on Left-wing thinking; (2) to provide these liberal groups with a forum which would act as a safety-valve to “blow off steam”; and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity, and possibly on their actions, if they ever went “radical”.
Before launching this Trojan Horse, Cornell graduate Willard Straight had served as Far East expert for the Morgan Banking interests of which he was a partner, living in the region 1902-1910. He also was an assistant to Sir Robert Hard , Director of the Chinese Imperial Customs Service, who was lead man, according to Quigley in the European Imperialist penetration of China.
As her name indicates, Willard Straight’s wife, Dorothy Payne Whitney, was the product of an alliance between two of America’s richest families, with giant interests in New York utilities, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now Exxon), and much else. One of her brothers married into the equally aristocratic Vanderbilt dynasty, the other wed the daughter of Secretary of State John Hay, who articulated the so-called “open-door” policy in China.
Quigley sees the New Republic as the best example of the alliance between Wall Street and Left-wing publications. The original purpose of this particular alliance was “to provide an outlet for the progressive left and to quietly guide it in an Anglophile” direction. The author goes on to say that this task was given to a smug young man just out of Harvard, Walter Lippman, who would be the towering figure in American Journalism until his death in 1974. Lippman was one of the few American members of the mysterious Round Table Group (more on this later), which had been a dominant force in British foreign policy since its formation in 1909. Lippman’s bi-weekly columns appeared in hundred’s of papers over six decades. As a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, and an editor of New Republic, Lippman in 1918, still in his 20s, was given the opportunity to be the official interpreter of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I.
Guiding the American Left in an Anglophile direction is a goal that absolutely mystifies most modern Americans, who have lost touch with American democracy’s long history of opposing the philosophy and exploitive designs of the British Empire. After decades of “disneyfication” and tabloid celebrity mongering, few Americans see Monarchy as the bloodline worshipping cult of greed clung to by those who believe they are born to rule over others.
Quigley cites Willard Straight’s official biography by Herbert Croly, the first editor of the New Republic, who wrote in 1924, six years after Willard’s untimely death, that “Straight was in no sense a liberal or progressive, but was, indeed, a typical international banker and that the New Republic was simply a mechanism for advancing certain designs of such international bankers, notably to blunt the isolationism and anti-British sentiments so prevalent among many American progressives, while providing them with a vehicle for expression of their progressive views in literature, art, music, social reform, and even domestic politicséthe chief achievement of the New Republic, however in 1914-1918 and again in 1938-1948, was for interventionism in Europe and support for Great Britain.
So the great journal of liberal democracy’s crowning glory was to shed blood on behalf of the Empire the nation had broken away from.
Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight was to support the paper until well in the 1950s. A few years after Willard’s death, she acted upon her true feelings for America’s democratic experiment with a new republic by marrying into British nobility and becoming Lady Elmhirst of Dartington Hall. She took her three young children from America and brought them up English. Once again demonstrating her true devotion to the liberal principles professed by the New Republic, Lady Elmhirst renounced her American citizenship in 1935. Her youngest son, Mike Straight, stood for Parliament, as was his right as a British subject. This situation proved to be no obstacle, however, when he returned to America at age 22 and was immediately appointed to the State Department. Paving the way for her son in America, Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, transferred her sole ownership of the New Republic to a dummy corporation with her son Mike as president.
From this position, Mike Straight may have, in Quigley’s view, “pulled off the most skillful political coup in twentieth century American politics. ” Quigley is referring to the complete removal from the American scene of the Communist Party and Socialist organizations as the serious forces to contend with they had been for several decades.
