A War Time Love Affair:The Round TableandThe New Republic, c.1914–1919

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the Great War a seemingly unlikely transatlantic romance blossomed between the deeply imperialist Round Table journal founded by “Milner’s Kindergarten,” a cadre of young former colonial administrators in Great Britain, and the American progressive standard-bearer The New Republic. The rhetoric of The New Republic in these years was deeply influenced by political Anglo-Saxon thought, as exemplified in The Round Table. Political Anglo-Saxonism was the belief that Anglo-Saxons were uniquely prepared for both self-governance and colonial governance. Adherents judged others’ capacity to self-govern against idealized Anglo norms. Both The Round Table (1910) and The New Republic (1914), from their inaugural issues on, sought national solutions for national problems utilizing a shared rhetoric of national efficiency. During the Great War this shared nationalist-progressivism drew the two groups together facilitating The New Republic’s founders’ early (1915) embrace of American intervention in the war. These connections are illuminated here through the interactions of The New Republic founders: Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and Walter Weyl with key members of the British Round Table set, including Lionel Curtis, Philip Henry Kerr, Alfred Zimmern, and the prominent American “imperial school” historian George Louis Beer.