Re: Round Table Movement, by Wikipedia
Posted: Sun Oct 13, 2019 9:10 am
Wickham Steed
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/13/19
Henry Wickham Steed
Wickham Steed in 1920
Born Henry Wickham Steed
10 October 1871
Long Melford, Suffolk, England
Died 13 January 1956 (aged 84)
Wootton, England
Occupation Journalist, editor, and historian
Henry Wickham Steed (10 October 1871 – 13 January 1956) was an English journalist and historian. He was editor of The Times from 1919 until 1922.
Early life
Born in Long Melford, England, Steed was educated at Sudbury Grammar School and the universities of Jena, Berlin and Paris. While in Europe, he demonstrated an early interest in social democracy and met with a range of left-wing figures, including Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and Alexandre Millerand. His encounters formed the basis of his first book, The Socialist and Labour Movement in England, Germany & France (1894).[citation needed]
Foreign correspondent
Appointed by Joseph Pulitzer as Paris correspondent for the New York World, Steed joined The Times in 1896 as a foreign correspondent, working briefly out of Berlin before transferring successively to Rome (from 1897 until 1902) and then Vienna (1902–13). In 1914, he moved to London to take over as foreign editor of The Times. During his time in Vienna he acquired a deep contempt for Austria-Hungary.[1] An anti-Semite and a Germanophobe, in an editorial published in The Times on 31 July 1914, Steed labelled efforts to stop the impending war as "a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality".[2] From 22 July 1914 on, Steed, in close agreement with The Times' proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, took a very bellicose line and in editorials written on 29 and 31 July, Steed urged that the British Empire should enter the coming war.[3]
Seen as a leading expert on Eastern Europe, Steed's views had much influence with decision-makers such as high-level bureaucrats and Cabinet politicians in the First World War and its aftermath. During the war, Steed befriended anti-Habsburg émigrés such as Edvard Beneš, Ante Trumbić, Tomáš Masaryk and Roman Dmowski and advised the British government to seek the liquidation of Austria-Hungary as a war aim. In particular, Steed was a very strong advocate of uniting all of the South Slavic peoples such as the Croats, the Serbs and the Slovenes into a federation to be called Yugoslavia. The British Ambassador to Italy claimed in a diplomatic dispatch that Steed's fondness for the Yugoslav concept derived from a relationship he maintained for a number of years "filially I believe rather maritally" with a Slavic woman from the Balkans.[1] In October 1918, Steed met with the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić to gain his support for the Yugoslav concept; Steed was deeply angered when he learned that Pašić saw the new state as merely as extension of Greater Serbia and had no intention of sharing power with the Croats or the Slovenes.[1] Steed charged Pašić with being a new "sultan" and severed his friendship with him.[1]
Editor of The Times
When the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, resigned from his post in February 1919, Steed was Northcliffe's first choice to succeed him. Steed had worked closely with Northcliffe during the war, becoming an adviser to him on foreign affairs. Steed was forced to contend with Northcliffe throughout most of his tenure as editor, as the press baron retained considerable control over the affairs of the newspaper.[citation needed]
After the war, Steed strongly disapproved of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. In an editorial written in another Northcliffe paper, the Daily Mail on 28 March 1919, Steed accused the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Steed detested, of betraying the White Russians because of a plot by "international Jewish financiers" and the Germans to help the Bolsheviks stay in power.[4]
In 1920, Steed endorsed as genuine a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, writing in an editorial in The Times, where he blamed the Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime, and called them the greatest threat to the British Empire. However, he retracted his view on the Protocols in 1921, when his paper's Constantinople correspondent proved them a forgery.[5]
Although Steed was Northcliffe's personal choice for the editorship, by 1922 the press baron was increasingly frustrated by Steed's failure to return The Times to profitability. After Northcliffe's death in August 1922, the new owners, John Jacob Astor and John Walter, dismissed Steed on 24 October and brought back Dawson as editor.[citation needed]
Final years
In 1923, Steed became editor of Review of Reviews (1923–30), the journal established by William Thomas Stead in 1890. In the early 1930s, he was one of the first English speakers to express alarm about the new German dictatorial chancellor, Adolf Hitler. In 1934, he caused sensation with an article claiming to have evidence of secret German experiments in airborne biological warfare.[6] The British government was sufficiently alarmed to start stockpiling vaccines,[7] although a retrospective analysis by the epidemiologist Martin Hugh-Jones has suggested that Steed's evidence could not have amounted to much.[8] On the title page of his 1934 work, Hitler Whence and Whither?, Steed is described as a lecturer in Central European History at King's College London.
He died in Wootton, West Oxfordshire.
In media
Steed, played by actor Andrew Keir, appears in the 1974 miniseries Fall of Eagles, bringing a rumour of the impending Bosnian crisis to the attention of King Edward VII, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexander Izvolsky.
Works
• The Habsburg Monarchy (1913)
• A Short History of Austria-Hungary and Poland (1914)
• Through Thirty Years, 1892-1922: A personal narrative (1924)
• Journalism (1928)
• The Real Stanley Baldwin (1930)
• The Antecedents of Post-war Europe (1932)
• A Way to Social Peace (1934)
• Hitler Whence and Whither? (1934)
• The Meaning of Hitlerism (1934)
• Vital Peace: A study of risks (1936)
• The Doom of the Habsburgs (1937)
• The Press (1938)
• Our War Aims (1939)
See also
• Robert William Seton-Watson
References
Notes
1. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 114f.
2. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 32, 195.
3. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 217.
4. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 80.
5. Andre Liebich: "The Antisemitism of Henry Steed", Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2002. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
6. H. Wickham Steed, "Aerial warfare: secret German plans", Nineteenth Century and After 116 (1934), 1–15.
7. Brett Holman, Airminded: The Wickham Steed affair in popular culture, 17 February 2007
8. Martin Hugh-Jones, 'Wickham Steed and German biological warfare research', Intelligence and National Security 7 (1992), 379–402.
Bibliography
• Ferguson, Niall The Pity of War, London: Basic Books, 1999.
• Macmillan, Margaret Paris 1919 New York: Random House, 2002.
External links
• Works by or about Wickham Steed at Internet Archive
• The Habsburg Monarchy (1913)) eLibrary Austria Project (eLib Projekt) full text
• A Short History of Austria-Hungary and Poland (1914) Historical Text Archive full text
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Works written by or about Wickham Steed at Wikisource
• Newspaper clippings about Wickham Steed in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 10/13/19
On May 8, 1920, an article[56] in The Times followed German translation and appealed for an inquiry into what it called an "uncanny note of prophecy". In the leader (editorial) titled "The Jewish Peril, a Disturbing Pamphlet: Call for Inquiry", Wickham Steed wrote about The Protocols:What are these 'Protocols'? Are they authentic? If so, what malevolent assembly concocted these plans and gloated over their exposition? Are they forgery? If so, whence comes the uncanny note of prophecy, prophecy in part fulfilled, in part so far gone in the way of fulfillment?".[57]
Steed retracted his endorsement of The Protocols after they were exposed as a forgery.[58]
-- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, by Wikipedia
Another well-known author in the 1920s, Henry Wickham Steed describes in the second volume of his Through 30 Years 1892-1922 (p. 302) how he attempted to bring the Jewish-conspiracy concept to the attention of Colonel Edward M. House and President Woodrow Wilson. One day in March 1919 Wickham Steed called Colonel House and found him disturbed over Steed's recent criticism of U.S. recognition of the Bolsheviks. Steed pointed out to House that Wilson would be discredited among the many peoples and nations of Europe and "insisted that, unknown to him, the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia." [1] According to Steed, Colonel House argued for the establishment of economic relations with the Soviet Union.
-- Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony C. Sutton
THE STORY OF JOEL BRAND
Mr. Wickham Steed, columnist for the Manchester Guardian in England, states: "Two Nazi or Hungarian agents called on the Allies with a certain extortion proposal, which the Allies scorned with indignation."
This mysterious item about Joel Brand and his desperate mission was reprinted in Ben-Gurion's newspaper Davar on July 28, 1944. This and no more ... before Joel Brand's Banquo-like appearance in Judge Halevi's court room nine years later.
The mysterious item was on view in the government press after emissary Joel Brand had been handed over to the British, and after Hungarian Jewry had been dumped into the German ash barrels....
Ben-Gurion's Davar reportage quoting the illusive "Wickham Steed" did not even mention the B.B.C. broadcast, made in London on June 20, 1944, on which the item was based. Communist dictators, too, consider it correct procedure to keep their constituencies uninformed about what the wretched world outside is saying. This outside world is usually saying things of a derogatory nature. But what is there derogatory about the B.B.C. broadcast? Why is it cut down to unintelligibility by Ben-Gurion's paper? Here is the broadcast:
"Two emissaries of the Hungarian Government arrived in Turkey to present the Allied representatives with the following offer from the Hungarian Government -- all the Jews remaining alive in Hungary will receive exit permits in return for a certain quantity of medical supplies and transport trucks from England and America. The promise was also made that these materials would not be used on the Western Front.
"At this time, the names of the emissaries cannot be revealed.
"Authoritative British circles consider this offer as a crude attempt to weaken the Allies, whose sympathy for the Hungarian Jews is well known; also to create dissension among the Allies.
"There is not the slightest possibility that the British and American governments will agree to enter into any negotiations of this short, although they would like to help the Hungarian Jews."
This was not entirely bad reporting. The emissaries were from the Germans, not the Hungarians. And there was only one emissary, sent out to the world's Jews, not to the Allies. The objective cited, "a crude attempt to weaken the Allies," was one of the possible reasons involved. And the British, speaking for the Allies, do not quite "scorn with indignation" as Davar states. Instead they make a cool and cautious statement that cannot be nailed as a lie. They "would like to help the Hungarian Jews."
Who wouldn't "like to help" a million human beings about to be tortured and murdered? The myriad of men, women, and children entering the death houses in Auschwitz don't know about this Christian wish "to help" them, but it is there, spoken with true British restraint by the B.B.C. announcer.
The princes of Israel are so efficient in their silence technique that Tamir, in Judge Halevi's court room, has never even heard of the Joel Brand story.
But the Joel Brand Story comes now to Tamir.
It comes as the whisper of a nightmare. A friend brings him word that there is a certain man in Tel Aviv who has a story to tell about the slaughter of the Hungarian Jews and the connivance of Israel's leaders in it -- a story that might fit into the trial.
-- Perfidy, by Ben Hecht
The Milner Group did not own The Times before 1922, but clearly controlled it at least as far back as 1912. Even before this last date, members of the innermost circle of the Milner Group were swarming about the great newspaper. In fact, it would appear that The Times had been controlled by the Cecil Bloc since 1884 and was taken over by the Milner Group in the same way in which All Souls was taken over, quietly and without a struggle. The midwife of this process apparently was George E. Buckle (1854-1935), graduate of New College in 1876, member of All Souls since 1877, and editor of The Times from 1884 to 1912. (2) The chief members of the Milner Group who were associated with The Times have already been mentioned. Amery was connected with the paper from 1899 to 1909. During this period he edited and largely wrote the Times History of the South African War. Lord Esher was offered a directorship in 1908. Grigg was a staff writer in 1903-1905, and head of the Imperial Department in 1908-1913. B. K. Long was head of the Dominion Department in 1913-1921 and of the Foreign Department in 1920-1921. Monypenny was assistant editor both before and after the Boer War (1894-1899, 1903-1908) and on the board of directors after the paper was incorporated (1908-1912). Dawson was the paper's chief correspondent in South Africa in the Selborne period (1905-1910), while Basil Williams was the reporter covering the National Convention there (1908-1909). When it became clear in 1911 that Buckle must soon retire, Dawson was brought into the office in a rather vague capacity and, a year later, was made editor. The appointment was suggested and urged by Buckle. (3) Dawson held the position from 1912 to 1941, except for the three years 1919-1922. This interval is of some significance, for it revealed to the Milner Group that they could not continue to control The Times without ownership. The Cecil Bloc had controlled The Times from 1884 to 1912 without ownership, and the Milner Group had done the same in the period 1912-1919, but, in this last year, Dawson quarreled with Lord Northcliffe (who was chief proprietor from 1908-1922) and left the editor's chair. As soon as the Milner Group, through the Astors, acquired the chief proprietorship of the paper in 1922, Dawson was restored to his post and held it for the next twenty years. Undoubtedly the skillful stroke which acquired the ownership of The Times from the Harmsworth estate in 1922 was engineered by Brand. During the interval of three years during which Dawson was not editor, Northcliffe entrusted the position to one of The Time's famous foreign correspondents, H. W. Steed.
-- The Anglo-American Establishment: From Rhodes to Cliveden, by Carroll Quigley
Henry Wickham Steed
Wickham Steed in 1920
Born Henry Wickham Steed
10 October 1871
Long Melford, Suffolk, England
Died 13 January 1956 (aged 84)
Wootton, England
Occupation Journalist, editor, and historian
Henry Wickham Steed (10 October 1871 – 13 January 1956) was an English journalist and historian. He was editor of The Times from 1919 until 1922.
Early life
Born in Long Melford, England, Steed was educated at Sudbury Grammar School and the universities of Jena, Berlin and Paris. While in Europe, he demonstrated an early interest in social democracy and met with a range of left-wing figures, including Friedrich Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, and Alexandre Millerand. His encounters formed the basis of his first book, The Socialist and Labour Movement in England, Germany & France (1894).[citation needed]
Foreign correspondent
Appointed by Joseph Pulitzer as Paris correspondent for the New York World, Steed joined The Times in 1896 as a foreign correspondent, working briefly out of Berlin before transferring successively to Rome (from 1897 until 1902) and then Vienna (1902–13). In 1914, he moved to London to take over as foreign editor of The Times. During his time in Vienna he acquired a deep contempt for Austria-Hungary.[1] An anti-Semite and a Germanophobe, in an editorial published in The Times on 31 July 1914, Steed labelled efforts to stop the impending war as "a dirty German-Jewish international financial attempt to bully us into advocating neutrality".[2] From 22 July 1914 on, Steed, in close agreement with The Times' proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, took a very bellicose line and in editorials written on 29 and 31 July, Steed urged that the British Empire should enter the coming war.[3]
Seen as a leading expert on Eastern Europe, Steed's views had much influence with decision-makers such as high-level bureaucrats and Cabinet politicians in the First World War and its aftermath. During the war, Steed befriended anti-Habsburg émigrés such as Edvard Beneš, Ante Trumbić, Tomáš Masaryk and Roman Dmowski and advised the British government to seek the liquidation of Austria-Hungary as a war aim. In particular, Steed was a very strong advocate of uniting all of the South Slavic peoples such as the Croats, the Serbs and the Slovenes into a federation to be called Yugoslavia. The British Ambassador to Italy claimed in a diplomatic dispatch that Steed's fondness for the Yugoslav concept derived from a relationship he maintained for a number of years "filially I believe rather maritally" with a Slavic woman from the Balkans.[1] In October 1918, Steed met with the Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić to gain his support for the Yugoslav concept; Steed was deeply angered when he learned that Pašić saw the new state as merely as extension of Greater Serbia and had no intention of sharing power with the Croats or the Slovenes.[1] Steed charged Pašić with being a new "sultan" and severed his friendship with him.[1]
Editor of The Times
When the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, resigned from his post in February 1919, Steed was Northcliffe's first choice to succeed him. Steed had worked closely with Northcliffe during the war, becoming an adviser to him on foreign affairs. Steed was forced to contend with Northcliffe throughout most of his tenure as editor, as the press baron retained considerable control over the affairs of the newspaper.[citation needed]
After the war, Steed strongly disapproved of the Bolshevik regime in Russia. In an editorial written in another Northcliffe paper, the Daily Mail on 28 March 1919, Steed accused the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, whom Steed detested, of betraying the White Russians because of a plot by "international Jewish financiers" and the Germans to help the Bolsheviks stay in power.[4]
In 1920, Steed endorsed as genuine a notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, writing in an editorial in The Times, where he blamed the Jews for World War I and the Bolshevik regime, and called them the greatest threat to the British Empire. However, he retracted his view on the Protocols in 1921, when his paper's Constantinople correspondent proved them a forgery.[5]
Although Steed was Northcliffe's personal choice for the editorship, by 1922 the press baron was increasingly frustrated by Steed's failure to return The Times to profitability. After Northcliffe's death in August 1922, the new owners, John Jacob Astor and John Walter, dismissed Steed on 24 October and brought back Dawson as editor.[citation needed]
Final years
In 1923, Steed became editor of Review of Reviews (1923–30), the journal established by William Thomas Stead in 1890. In the early 1930s, he was one of the first English speakers to express alarm about the new German dictatorial chancellor, Adolf Hitler. In 1934, he caused sensation with an article claiming to have evidence of secret German experiments in airborne biological warfare.[6] The British government was sufficiently alarmed to start stockpiling vaccines,[7] although a retrospective analysis by the epidemiologist Martin Hugh-Jones has suggested that Steed's evidence could not have amounted to much.[8] On the title page of his 1934 work, Hitler Whence and Whither?, Steed is described as a lecturer in Central European History at King's College London.
He died in Wootton, West Oxfordshire.
In media
Steed, played by actor Andrew Keir, appears in the 1974 miniseries Fall of Eagles, bringing a rumour of the impending Bosnian crisis to the attention of King Edward VII, Georges Clemenceau, and Alexander Izvolsky.
Works
• The Habsburg Monarchy (1913)
• A Short History of Austria-Hungary and Poland (1914)
• Through Thirty Years, 1892-1922: A personal narrative (1924)
• Journalism (1928)
• The Real Stanley Baldwin (1930)
• The Antecedents of Post-war Europe (1932)
• A Way to Social Peace (1934)
• Hitler Whence and Whither? (1934)
• The Meaning of Hitlerism (1934)
• Vital Peace: A study of risks (1936)
• The Doom of the Habsburgs (1937)
• The Press (1938)
• Our War Aims (1939)
See also
• Robert William Seton-Watson
References
Notes
1. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 114f.
2. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 32, 195.
3. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 217.
4. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 80.
5. Andre Liebich: "The Antisemitism of Henry Steed", Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2002. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
6. H. Wickham Steed, "Aerial warfare: secret German plans", Nineteenth Century and After 116 (1934), 1–15.
7. Brett Holman, Airminded: The Wickham Steed affair in popular culture, 17 February 2007
8. Martin Hugh-Jones, 'Wickham Steed and German biological warfare research', Intelligence and National Security 7 (1992), 379–402.
Bibliography
• Ferguson, Niall The Pity of War, London: Basic Books, 1999.
• Macmillan, Margaret Paris 1919 New York: Random House, 2002.
External links
• Works by or about Wickham Steed at Internet Archive
• The Habsburg Monarchy (1913)) eLibrary Austria Project (eLib Projekt) full text
• A Short History of Austria-Hungary and Poland (1914) Historical Text Archive full text
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Works written by or about Wickham Steed at Wikisource
• Newspaper clippings about Wickham Steed in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW