The Decline of the Great Rapprochement

This chapter examines the activities of the Pilgrims Society against the backdrop of official international relations in the immediate post-war years, in particular during the presidency of Warren Harding. It analyses the Pilgrims Society’s role in many of the most pressing issues in the Anglo-American relationship, for example the US refusing to join the League of Nations, the war debt question, and naval disarmament. It focuses on a banquet held in London in 1921 for the US Ambassador George Harvey, whose remarks at the event about the League of Nations caused controversy and resulted in significant levels of press coverage. This chapter also looks at the growing anti-Britishness in the US in this period and examines how this impacted upon the Pilgrims Society. The chapter ultimately establishes that the Pilgrims Society consolidated its position as a semi-official public diplomacy actor while at the same time coming under increasing public scrutiny.

Earl Grey’s Public Diplomacy

This chapter focuses on the banquet held by the New York branch of the Pilgrims Society in March 1906 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for Earl Grey, the Governor General of Canada. This dinner provides a case study of the ways in which the Society served as a network for British and American diplomats and provides one of the clearest examples of its public diplomacy activities. The banquet was held during a dispute between Britain, Canada, and the United States over fishing rights in the North Atlantic and the speeches given at the dinner by Earl Grey and Elihu Root, the US Secretary of State, were designed to mobilise public opinion in an effort to bring the dispute to an amicable end. Part of this public diplomacy effort was Earl Grey’s heavily-publicised gift to the US of a portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been in his family’s possession since the American Revolution. The rhetoric surrounding this gift provides evidence about the cultural assumptions underpinning the Pilgrims’ public and cultural diplomacy.

Introduction

The introduction provides a grounding in the diplomatic history of Anglo-American relations and surveys the main events of the so-called ‘Great Rapprochement’ between the two countries, including the Alaskan Boundary Dispute, Britain’s response to the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the US’s subsequent attitude to Britain’s war with the Boers. The introduction analyses the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ and discusses the ways in which it was important both to the Pilgrims Society and to official Anglo-American relations. The introduction also provides a chapter by chapter breakdown of the rest of the book and outlines the argument that while the Pilgrims never set the agenda for official Anglo-American relations it nevertheless played a leading role in public diplomacy and, by extension, in how people have thought about how Britain and the United States have related to each other.

Public Diplomacy Conceptualised

This chapter outlines the theoretical rationale behind the book’s argument that the Pilgrims Society’s activities during the first half of the twentieth century were a nascent form of public diplomacy and that they contributed to the development of later, more official, public diplomacy organisations like the British Council, the Division of Cultural Relations, and the United States Information Agency. In so doing, this chapter analyses the historical orthodoxies surrounding public diplomacy and offers a definition of the concept that will applied across the rest of the book. The chapter also establishes how concepts of public diplomacy, cultural diplomacy, associational culture, and elite networking intersect and why this intersection is important to the Pilgrims Society.

The Founding of the Society

This chapter provides an analytical narrative of the precise details of the Society’s founding and sheds light on the network of elite Britons and Americans who established the organisation. It examines the Society’s stated aims of improving Anglo-American relations and introduces the Society’s membership and principal characters, including people like the British Pilgrims’ hyperactive organiser and first secretary, Harry Brittain. It also explains that the Pilgrims was the most significant of all the Anglo-American clubs and societies formed around this time (including the Anglo-American League) because it managed to combine exclusivity with its advantageous locations in the British political and diplomatic capital, London, and the American commercial capital, New York. The Pilgrims was a part of the elite social scene of both cities and benefited from existing social, cultural, and associational links between its members and other influential individuals. As a result, the Pilgrims Society was able to act as a conduit between official and unofficial elements in Britain and the US.

Conclusion

The conclusion summarises the book’s argument that the Pilgrims acted in the realm of public diplomacy in an attempt to influence foreign and international relations by engaging with foreign publics. These actions characterise public diplomacy as it is understood today and, indeed, the Pilgrims’ activities helped formulate that characterisation in the first place. By the end of the period covered by the book other public diplomacy actors had become more important than the Pilgrims, but the Society’s history up until the 1940s demonstrates how it laid the groundwork for focused governmental public diplomacy programmes. The book concludes with the contention that the Pilgrims Society was an elitist mouthpiece for an interventionist and imperialist Anglo-American world order.

Public Diplomacy Ascendant

This chapter traces the Pilgrims Society’s contribution to the history of public diplomacy across the later 1920s, the 1930s, and the early 1940s. It does so in part by analysing the content of a speech given to the Society in 1925 by the new US Ambassador in London, Alanson Houghton. This speech paved the way for the Locarno Conference and provides evidence of a senior diplomat using a Pilgrims’ event to make a major intervention in European diplomacy. In addition, the chapter examines how further developments in American nativism continued to impact upon the Society. The chapter also analyses other significant Pilgrims’ events at which diplomats used the Society as a vehicle for public diplomacy, including Ambassador Charles Dawes’ speech in 1929 about naval disarmament, and a number of events during the Second World War at which figures including Winston Churchill sought to manage the relationship between Britain and the United States during the tense period leading up to the latter’s entry into the conflict. The chapter also demonstrates how the US Pilgrims sought to mobilise American sentiment in favour of the Allied cause and that it did so alongside the Committee to Defend America and the Century Group.

The Pilgrims and the First World War

This chapter demonstrates that the First World War created circumstances in which state-private cooperation in public diplomacy was able to flourish more than ever before. In so doing, this chapter analyses the Pilgrims’ activities during the conflict, with a particular focus on the period after the US’s entry into the conflict in April 1917, a moment regarded by the Pilgrims as the culmination of all the work it had done since 1902 in support of UK-US international cooperation. This chapter analyses the ways in which the Pilgrims Society sought to consolidate what it regarded as significant progress towards lasting British-American friendship. It does so by providing an analytical account of the Pilgrims’ creation in autumn 1917 of the American Officers’ Club; the link between the Pilgrims and the official British propaganda body the National War Aims Committee; and the Society’s involvement in the large-scale public celebration of Britain’s Day, which took place across the US in December 1918. The chapter argues that the First World War resulted in greater cooperation between the Pilgrims and official propaganda bodies, meaning that the Society contributed in new ways to the development of public diplomacy.