From Wikipedia

Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope,             Carroll Quigley (November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977) was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is noted for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, for his academic publications, and for his research on secret societies.^[1][2]

Quigley was born in Boston, and attended Harvard University, where he studied history and earned B.A, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees. He taught at Princeton University, and then at Harvard, and then at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University from 1941 to 1976.^[1]

From 1941 until 1969, he taught a two-semester course at Georgetown on the development of civilizations. According to the obituary in the Washington Star, many alumni of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service asserted that this was "the most influential course in their undergraduate careers".^[1]

In addition to his academic work, Quigley served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Navy, the Smithsonian Institution, and the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration in the 1950s.^[1] Quigley served as a book reviewer for the Washington Star and was a contributor and editorial board member of Current History.^[2]:94 His work emphasized "inclusive diversity" as a value of Western Civilization long before diversity became commonplace, and he denounced Platonic doctrines as an especially pernicious deviation from this ideal, preferring the pluralism of Thomas Aquinas.^{[citation needed]} Quigley said of himself that he was a conservative defending the liberal tradition of the West. He was an early and fierce critic of the Vietnam War,^{[citation needed]} and he was against the activities of the military-industrial complex which he saw as the future downfall of the country.^{[citation needed]}

Quigley retired from Georgetown in June, 1976, and died the following year.^[1]

Clinton named Quigley as an important influence on his aspirations and political philosophy in 1991, when launching his presidential campaign in a speech at Georgetown.^[2]:96 He also mentioned Quigley again during his acceptance speech to the 1992 Democratic National Convention, as follows:

As a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship. And then, as a student at Georgetown, I heard that call clarified by a professor named Carroll Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest Nation in history because our people had always believed in two things–that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so.^[3]

One distinctive feature of Quigley’s historical writings was his assertion that secret societies have played a significant role in recent world history. His writing on this topic has made Quigley famous among many who investigate conspiracy theories.^{[2]:96, 98} Quigley’s views are particularly notable because the majority of reputable academic historians profess skepticism about conspiracy theories.^[4]

Quigley’s claims about the Milner Group

In his book The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, written in 1949 but published posthumously in 1981, Quigley purports to trace the history of a secret society founded in 1891 by Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner. The society consisted of an inner circle (“The Society of the Elect”) and an outer circle (“The Association of Helpers”).^{[5]:ix, 3} The society as a whole does not have a fixed name:

This society has been known at various times as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. ... I have chosen to call it the Milner group. Those persons who have used the other terms, or heard them used, have not generally been aware that all these various terms referred to the same Group. It is not easy for an outsider to write the history of a secret group of this kind, but, since no insider is going to do it, an outsider must attempt it. It should be done, for this Group is, as I shall show, one of the most important historical facts of the twentieth century.^[5]:ix

Quigley assigns this group primary or exclusive credit for several historical events: the Jameson Raid, the Second Boer War, the founding of the Union of South Africa, the replacement of the British Empire with the Commonwealth of Nations, and a number of Britain’s foreign policy decisions in the twentieth century.^[5]:5

In 1966, Quigley published a one-volume history of the twentieth century entitled Tragedy and Hope. At several points in this book, the history of the Milner group is discussed. Moreover, Quigley states that he has recently been in direct contact with this organization, whose nature he contrasts to right-wing claims of a communist conspiracy:

This radical Right fairy tale, which is now an accepted folk myth in many groups in America, pictured the recent history of the United States, in regard to domestic reform and in foreign affairs, as a well-organized plot by extreme Left-wing elements.... This myth, like all fables, does in fact have a modicum of truth. There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the Radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other group, and frequently does so. I know of the operation of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies... but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.^[6]:949-950

According to Quigley, the leaders of this group were Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner from 1891 until Rhodes’ death in 1902, Milner alone until his own death in 1925, Lionel Curtis from 1925 to 1955, Robert H. (Baron) Brand from 1955 to 1963, and Adam D. Marris from 1963 until the time Quigley wrote his book. This organization also functioned through certain loosely affiliated “front groups”, including the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations.^{[6]:132, 950-952}

In addition, other secret societies are briefly discussed in Tragedy and Hope, including a consortium of the leaders of the central banks of several countries, who formed the Bank for International Settlements.^[6]:323-324

Citations of Quigley by conspiracy theorists

Soon after its publication, Tragedy and Hope caught the attention of authors interested in conspiracies. They proceeded to publicize Quigley's claims, disseminating them to a much larger audience than his original readership.^{[2]:96, 98}

This began in 1970, when W. Cleon Skousen published The Naked Capitalist: A Review and Commentary on Dr. Carroll Quigley’s Book “Tragedy and Hope”. The first third of this book consists of extensive excerpts from Tragedy and Hope, interspersed with commentary by Skousen. Skousen quotes Quigley’s description of the activities of several groups: the Milner Group, a cartel of international bankers, the Communist Party, the Institute of Pacific Relations, and the Council on Foreign Relations. According to Skousen’s interpretation of Quigley’s book, each of these is a facet of one large conspiracy.^[7]

In 1971, Gary Allen, a spokesman for the John Birch Society, published None Dare Call It Conspiracy, which became a bestseller. Allen cited Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope as an authoritative source on conspiracies throughout his book. Like Skousen, Allen understood the various conspiracies in Quigley’s book to be branches of one large conspiracy, and also connected them to the Bilderbergers and to Richard Nixon.^[8] The John Birch Society continues to cite Quigley as a primary source for their view of history.^[9]

Quigley is also cited by several other authors who assert the existence of powerful conspiracies. Jim Marrs, whose work was used as a source by Oliver Stone in his film JFK, cites Quigley in his book Rule By Secrecy, which describes a conspiracy linking the Milner Group, Skull and Bones, the Trilateral Commission, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Knights Templar, and aliens who posed as the Sumerian gods thousands of years ago.^[10] Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order cites Quigley as an authority on a powerful conspiracy.^[2]:98 Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly has asserted that Bill Clinton’s political success was due to his pursuit of the “world government” agenda he learned from Quigley.^[2]:98 G. Edward Griffin relies heavily on Quigley for information about the role Milner's secret society plays in the Federal Reserve in his book The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. ^[11]

Quigley was later dismissive of some of the authors who used his writings to support theories of a world domination conspiracy. Of W. Cleon Skousen's The Naked Capitalist he stated:

Skousen’s book is full of misrepresentations and factual errors. He claims that I have written of a conspiracy of the super-rich who are pro-Communist and wish to take over the world and that I’m a member of this group. But I never called it a conspiracy and don’t regard it as such. I'm not an “insider” of these rich persons, although Skousen thinks so. I happen to know some of them and liked them, although I disagreed with some of the things they did before 1940.^[12]

On Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy he said:

They thought Dr. Carroll Quigley proved everything. For example, they constantly misquote me to this effect: that Lord Milner (the dominant trustee of the Cecil Rhodes Trust and a heavy in the Round Table Group) helped finance the Bolsheviks. I have been through the greater part of Milner’s private papers and have found no evidence to support that. Further, None Dare Call It Conspiracy insists that international bankers were a single bloc, were all powerful and remain so today. I, on the contrary, stated in my book that they were much divided, often fought among themselves, had great influence but not control of political life and were sharply reduced in power about 1931-1940, when they became less influential than monopolized industry.^[13]

Criticism

In Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, the Hoover institution scholar Antony Sutton stated:

Quigley goes a long way to provide evidence for the existence of the power elite, but does not penetrate the operations of the elite. Possibly, the papers used by Quigley had been vetted, and did not include documentation on elitist manipulation of such events as the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler's accession to power, and the election of Roosevelt in 1933. More likely, these political manipulations may not be recorded at all in the files of the power groups. They may have been unrecorded actions by a small ad hoc segment of the elite. It is noteworthy that the documents used by this author came from government sources, recording the day-to-day actions of Trotsky, Lenin, Roosevelt, Hitler, J.P. Morgan and the various firms and banks involved.^[14]

F. William Engdahl, in an overview of financial imperialism entitled The Gods of Money, criticized Quigley for stating that the power of international bankers declined in the 1930s, and insofar as the influence of international bankers in America was concerned, suggested that Quigley was confusing "international finance" with Morgan interests. He suggested, like Sutton, that Quigley's papers had been vetted. Engdahl argued that it was not the case that the power of "international finance" declined, but rather, Morgan interests fell and were replaced by Rockefeller interests.^[15]

Quigley stated that the intentions and objectives of the group he profiled, associated with Wall Street and the City of London and Cecil Rhodes' super-imperialism, were "largely commendable". Members of the group, in statements recorded by the New York Times in 1902, proclaimed that they formed their society for the purpose of "gradually absorbing the wealth of the world".^[16]

Quigley argued that the Round Table groups were not World Government advocates but super-imperialists. He stated that they emphatically did not want the League of Nations to become a World Government. Yet Lionel Curtis, who according to Quigley was one of the leaders of the Round Table movement, wished for it to be a World government with teeth, writing articles with H.G. Wells urging this.^[17][18]

Although Quigley did not overtly condemn the Anglo-American financial coterie that he wrote about, he, according to an interview he gave,^[19] and letters of his that were later published by the magazine Conspiracy Digest, had the plates of his book destroyed against his will by MacMillan, and believed that his work was being suppressed. One of the published letters stated the following:

The original edition published by Macmillan in 1966 sold about 8800 copies and sales were picking up in 1968 when they "ran out of stock," as they told me (but in 1974, when I went after them with a lawyer, they told me that they had destroyed the plates in 1968). They lied to me for six years, telling me that they would re-print when they got 2000 orders, which could never happen because they told anyone who asked that it was out of print and would not be reprinted. They denied this until I sent them xerox copies of such replies to libraries, at which they told me it was a clerk's error. In other words they lied to me but prevented me from regaining the publication rights by doing so (on OP [out of print] rights revert to holder of copyright, but on OS [out of stock] they do not.) ... Powerful influences in this country want me, or at least my work, suppressed.^[20]}

According to Gary North, in Conspiracy: A Biblical View, Gary Allen received a letter from a friend of Quigley's who stated that Quigley had begun to view the group he profiled as a malevolent influence in political affairs by the end of his life.^[21]

External links

• Carroll Quigley: A site dedicated to Professor Quigley

Bibliography

Books written by Quigley

• The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis. First edition, 1961, New York: Macmillan, 281 pp.
• Translated into Spanish as La Evolucion de las Civilizaciones. Mexico City: Hermes, 1963.
• Translated into Portuguese as A Evolucao das Civilazacoes. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundo de Cultura, 1963.
• Second edition, 1979, Indianapolis: LibertyPress / Liberty Fund, 444 pages, ISBN 0913966568 (hardcover), ISBN 0913966576 (paperback). Full text.

• Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time. 1966, New York: Macmillan, 1348 pages. Reprinted by Rancho Palos Verdes: GSG & Associates, 1975, ISBN 0913022144 and ISBN 094500110X. Full text.(pp. 62–63 missing)
• The World Since 1939: A History. (A reprint of the second half of Tragedy and Hope.) 1968, New York: Collier Books, 676 pp.

• The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden. 1981, New York: Books in Focus, 354 pages, ISBN 0916728501 (hardcover and paperback). Reprinted by Rancho Palos Verdes: GSG & Associates, date unknown, ISBN 0945001010 (paperback). Full text.

• Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History. 1983, Washington DC: University Press of America, 1064 pages, ISBN 081912947X. Full text.