Andrew Carnegie's Peace Mission, May 1913

In last month’s post on The Humanitarian Cult, I wrote about the pacifist leanings of cult-leader Mischa Appelbaum— and more importantly the pacifism of his sponsors like Jacob Schiff, Teddy Roosevelt and the Seligman family— prior to the end of 1917, when Mischa suddenly flipped to a pro-war stance. I also wrote about Otto Kahn’s personal, and probably musical, support of the organization after its political about-face. Kahn was not the only culture-maker to support the cult, however. In 1915 and 1916 Carnegie Hall was used as the venue for the cult’s free music concerts. Andrew Carnegie owned the hall until his death in 1919.

Carnegie and Kahn’s period of musical patronage was an exciting time for many reasons, one of which was scientific innovation in concert-hall architecture which improved sound quality for the audience. (George Fabyan’s Riverbank Laboratories— birthplace of the NSA— was notable for developing acoustical knowledge during this period.) Carnegie Hall (1891) was built long prior to the establishment of Riverbank Labs and its Theater District building in NYC is famous for its excellent acoustic properties. From CarnegieHall.org:

At Andrew Carnegie's request, Carnegie Hall’s architect William Burnet Tuthill (a gifted amateur cellist) toured and studied European concert halls famous for their acoustics. He also consulted with architect Dankmar Adler—of the Chicago firm Adler and Sullivan—a noted acoustical authority who was responsible for Chicago's recently completed Auditorium Building, itself known for superb acoustics.

Everyone in the musical world understood that Carnegie Hall was the place in NYC to appreciate sound, so when Andrew Carnegie allowed his hall to be used (and widely advertised!) as the venue for The Humanitarian Cult’s recruiting concerts, he lent a substantial amount of prestige to Mischa’s organization. By 1918 Carnegie’s support appears to have waned: when William Wesley Young’s editorship of the cult’s magazine was announced its accompanying concert was held at the less prestigious Academy of Music. (The Metropolitan Opera, Otto Kahn’s project, was still backing Mischa in 1918.) [Author’s note: since writing this I have located one instance of a Humanitarian Cult meeting held in Carnegie Hall in 1918.]

Carnegie Hall, a Renaissance Revival-style building, designed by William Burnet Tuthill.

When still a pacifist organization, The Humanitarian Cult joined forces with Henry Ford to lobby for a peaceful US foreign policy. While Henry Ford’s work for pacifism is widely known, and often derided, Andrew Carnegie’s efforts were equally important. His most lasting contribution was another Renaissance Revival building, the Peace Palace at the Hague, which is now home to the embattled ‘World Court’, the only principal United Nations organ outside of New York City. The Peace Palace was originally designed to house the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a League of Nations-era idea intended to preemptively prevent war by offering a neutral place to legally work out conflicts. Its legacy is overshadowed by the subsequent progression of WWI in Europe.

The winning design for Carnegie’s Peace Palace, by Louis M Cordonnier. Courtesy vredespaleis.nl

The Peace Palace as actually constructed. Image by Pieter Musterd.

The inauguration of the Peace Palace was the highlight of Carnegie’s European tour promoting pacifist/international law ideas that were first put forward by the Imperial Russian diplomat Fyodor Fyodorovich Martens. Part of this tour included meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had a great deal to gain by preventing war while at the same time was hostage to hawkish advisors since the 1907 fall of his former friend and anti-war councilor, Philipp, Prince Eulenburg.

Berliner Tagblatt, May 29th 1913 reports:

The inauguration of the Peace Palace.
Telegram from our correspondent.
Hague, August 28th.

The ceremonial inauguration of the Peace Palace donated by Carnegie took place in the Dutch capital, which is richly flagged and visited by countless foreigners. The Queen, Queen Mother, Prince Consort and Andrew Carnegie and his wife, who had previously been received by the Queen in the palace, were present. The Diplomatic Corps and the members of the International Court of Arbitration, many of whom had appeared, including Privy Councilor von Martitz and President von Staff from Germany, were also invited to the celebration. Well-known figures of the peace movement were noted in the meeting, such as Lord Weardale, the chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the former American envoy Hill, Dr. Alfred Fried, a number of parliamentarians, the civil authorities, the university teachers and the architects of the building, Cordonnier and von der Steur. The celebration began with the choir singing the song “Wilhelmus von Nassouwen”. Then the President of the Carnegie Foundation von Karnebeek gave the inauguration speech. He said the establishment of the permanent Court of Arbitration was an important step towards a peaceful solution to the conflicts that might cause war. In English, the speaker thanked Carnegie, whose name will always be associated with the institution of the Court of Arbitration and will live on in history as the name of the founder of the Temple of Peace. The speaker then handed the large key donated by Germany to the main building's main entrance to the chairman of the board of directors. This key was accepted by the former Minister of Foreign Affairs Van Swinderen. In his speech he remembered the deceased members of the Arbitration Court, then thanked the Board of Directors of the Carnegie Foundation and Andrew Carnegie himself for their work in the interests of the peace cause. The Minister also paid homage to the peaceful work of his diplomatic colleagues; he praised the European Concert, which had survived in difficult times. Thanks to the work of men like Gray, Safonow, Berchtold and Majorescu (a strange selection! The editors), he could enjoy the inauguration of this Temple of Peace with high feelings and full of hope. More choir singing closed the ceremony. This was followed by a tour of the building, which now also houses the gift of the South American Peace League, a bronze copy of the mighty “Christ of the Andes” standing on the Chilean-Argentine border. As Carnegie drove through the streets of the city, the crowd greeted him eagerly.

Carnegie's appeal to the German Kaiser.

In the newly inaugurated Peace Palace, a bust of the deceased Nobel Prize laureate Sir Randall Cremer, the founder of the English Arbitration League, will be unveiled today. Andrew Carnegie will also speak at the ceremony. In this speech (the text of which has been made available to the newspapers beforehand), in line with similar statements that he made earlier, he calls on the German Kaiser to initiate a new peace initiative. In this part of the address, Carnegie says:

“I believe I may be allowed to say: the only means that are necessary today to maintain world peace would be agreements between three or four great powers (the more the better), to the effect that they should join forces against any disruptor of world peace.

History will remember the Tsar of Russia as the first ruler to summon civilized powers to end the barbaric war. If we look at the world today, the most striking personality at the moment is a different emperor, namely the German emperor. His hands are free of human blood, a rare event in which Germany's astonishing progress in teaching, in industry and in the world trade is attributable. A striking proof that the greatest of all national blessings is peace.

Let us suppose that the German Kaiser invites the greatest civilized powers to deliberate on the best means which will secure world peace. I think the result would be successful. Most of the really great advances have suddenly surprised us in their perfection, and it will likely be the same with the shift from barbaric war to civilized peace; a small spark often ignites the flame. The German Kaiser is holding the torch of peace in his hand and should provide the missing spark.

We were hoping to see Mr. Andrew D. White among us today, who was the chairman of the American commission for the first international Hague conference. Like Cremer through his visit to Washington, he played a large and unique role in his trip to Berlin, which made him famous. When at a critical moment the German delegate threatened to withdraw at the conference, White went to Berlin, and he managed to persuade the Kaiser to issue an order to the contrary. Perhaps, if we were to invite White, he would repeat his pilgrimage today to obtain the emperor's approval of the proposal that he invite the civilized powers of the world to form a peace organization as previously described. Once this step has been taken, the last hour of the war has come. The twenty-five years of peace, which must now be regarded as the merit of the emperors, would then expand into a greater triumph of world peace over war.”

The speech closes with the expression of certain confidence that the day of general world peace will soon come.

Andrew Carnegie and Baron Weardale: “Photo shows Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and Philip James Stanhope, 1st Baron Weardale (1847-1923), members of the Anglo-American Peace Centenary Committee, standing in front of City Hall in New York City, May 1913. (Source: Flickr Commons project, 2009) “ Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Germany-focused portion of this politicking was necessary, at least in part, because of the 1907 sea-change in Imperial German leadership. The scandal that unseated Eulenburg was organized by the then-ousted Bismark and a cabal of merchant-class potentates through the newspaper of Maximillian Harden (born Felix Ernst Witkowski)— hardly a proponent of moral orthodoxy himself. A newspaper-prompted expose of Eulenburg’s homosexual relationships and interest in the occult forced the emperor to distance himself from Eulenburg; the press campaign was loaded with hypocritical anti-aristocrat messages, from Norman Domeier’s The Eulenburg Affair:

Once again the editor of Die Zukunft was able to produce Bismark as a key witness, since the former chancellor had once referred to spiritualism as the glue holding the Eulenburg camarilla together: “They are dreadful people, completely different from us— sentimental, they believe in ghosts and are afraid of spirits. Eulenburg discovered that, in addition to his other magic gifts, the great man [Wilhelm II] has the second sight of the Stuarts.” Harden continued to use the metaphor of occult phenomena in his press campaign, mentioning “visible or invisible places” where “webs were spun” that extended over the whole empire. The Eulenburg camarilla, he told his readers, deployed its spirit messengers not just in the “private sphere,” but also in German politics.

Bismark had lost power when Eulenburg gained political prominence in 1890. Bismark’s reference to “the second sight of the Stuarts” relates to the Scottish dynasty’s deep interest in the occult— typical of social elites of their time— which I look at in Cosmo’s Spooky Aunt: Lucie Duff Gordon. Why powerful men like Bismark and Harden wanted war is an interesting question, Germany’s newly-acquired shipping supremacy (at the expense of Britain) was vulnerable to British attack. More on that in a minute.

The clipping below reports on Carnegie’s pending April 1913 trip to Postdam to meet Kaiser Wilhelm II in an attempt to counter the Emperor’s pro-war advisors. The paper, Pester Lloyd, was an Austro-Hungarian broadsheet; Vienna had a love/hate relationship with its northern neighbor and a desire to supplant both Britain and Imperial Germany as the preeminent power in international trade:

Pester Lloyd (Budapest), May 31st 1913. While Austro-Hungary had big ideas of naval supremacy, its shipping industry was behind that of Imperial Germany and the U.K.

The above reads:

“The well-known billionaire Carnegie arrived in Plymouth yesterday and will go to Potsdam next month to see the German Kaiser in order to present him with fifty petitions, which call for the prevention of possible future war in Europe. At the same time, a British delegation to Berlin was on a similar mission to the German Kaiser. Carnegie said that he considered the German Kaiser to be the appropriate person to abolish war.”

The existence of a British delegation to Berlin is particularly interesting to me; my experience is that this corner of British history is neglected. There were British subjects who had misgivings about fighting in 1913, even if it meant that Imperial German dominance of the once-British international carrying trade went unchallenged. Certainly the consequences of WWI for the majority of British subjects should make historians view this Berlin delegation with sympathy. However, Herbert Asquith, the UK Prime Minister at that time was strongly opposed to such appeasement. (Asquith is a name we met before with reference to Lady Duff Gordon; his wife was a prominent patron of the designer.)

In April 1909, when Lady Duff Gordon was marketing bordello-chic to London’s nouveau riche and her sister was tweaking the nose of those annoying occult-pacifists in Imperial Russia, Herbert Asquith was busy setting up his personal intelligence agency, which would become known as “MI-6”. The name of Asquith’s 1909 bureau was “Secret Intelligence Service” (SIS)— not to be confused with the “Bureau of Secret Intelligence” that an equally war-hungry US State Dept head named Robert Lansing set up in the early 1910s.

Asquith delegated staffing the SIS to one Commander Mansfield Cumming, born Mansfield George Smith, who would “organise a scheme of permanent correspondents both at home and abroad, who will furnish information from within the enemies [sic] lines in time of war”. Cumming’s first hire was an Austrian man code-named “B” who already worked for the British War Office in Europe. From MI-6 official historian Keith Jeffery’s The Secret History of MI-6:

The meeting went well. B ‘seemed to think that he should have no difficulty in getting us the information we wanted, as he said all the TRs [Cumming’s diary term for Germans— short for ‘Tariff Reformers’] were open to bribes and could not resist the sight of a gold piece’…. When Cumming raised the question of ‘the 4 Dreadnoughts[battleships], supposed to be about to commence building at Pola and elsewhere in Austria’, B ‘jibbed at this immediately and said he was an Austrian and could do nothing that could hurt his native country’.

Jeffery/Cumming make a mistake here that should not have been made: “Tariff Reformers” were not Germans, but the name given to British subjects who were part of a British political movement and who, like the British delegation to Berlin, were not uniformly convinced war with Germany was in the best interests of their country nor their empire. The leader of the Tariff Reformers, Joseph Chamberlain (father of Neville), tried for decades to foster economic and political ties between Great Britain, the USA and Germany in the face of competing European powers. This peace would not have been in the economic interests of those London merchants whose business suffered as the Imperial German shipping fleet prospered. Unfortunately, like many modern national intelligence services, MI-6 was founded to influence political developments domestically, rather than to protect domestic interests abroad.

Carnegie’s peace mission, and his efforts to work for peace in New York City, are a valuable reminder that the past needn’t necessarily have unfolded in the way that it did, there is nothing inevitable about the state of affairs we live under today and change is a constant.