1 Dwight Morrow, “Speech to Japanese audience visiting the United States during the Great War,” undated, box 2.1, folder 2, Dwight Morrow Papers, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.

2 Thomas W. Lamont to Thomas S. Lamont, Oct. 16, 1917, box 283, folder 3, Thomas W. Lamont Papers, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts (emphasis mine).

3 Roberts, Priscilla, “The First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany: Henry P. Davison,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 18 (June 2007): 315–50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Gerstle, Gary, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (Oct. 1994): 1043–73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 For recent scholarship on the importance of the Great War to world order making and global economic governance, see Clavin, Patricia, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slobodian, Quinn, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Martin, Jamie, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022)Google Scholar. For earlier scholarship, see Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (London: Verso, 1984); Roberts, Priscilla, “The First World War and the Emergence of American Atlanticism, 1914–20,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 5 (Nov. 1994): 569–619 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Martin, Meddlers.

7 I am taking a Wallerstein world systems view of global capitalism. See Wallerstein, Immanuel, World-systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

8 Many, following Alfred Chandler, minimize the role of finance capitalism in U.S. economic development and instead emphasize managerial capitalism. In his focus on industrial management, Chandler said little about where and how the money for industrial ventures was obtained. See Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. There is renewed attention to the role of business actors in global governance. See Sabine Pitteloud et al., “Capitalism and Global Governance in Business History,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 22–081, June 2022.

9 Scholars have emphasized the Morgans as quasi-official U.S. financial diplomats during and following the First World War. Morgan bankers feature in scholarship on the Paris Peace Conference and European Reconstruction, especially discussions of German reparations, Republican war debt and lending policies, and the Dawes and Young Plans. See Parrini, Carl P., Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Joan Hoff, American Business and Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971)Google Scholar; Costigliola, Frank, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations With Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Hogan, Michael J., Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Diplomacy, 1918–1928 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Kent, Bruce, The Spoils of War: The Politics, Economics, and Diplomacy of Reparations, 1918–1932 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Leffler, Melvyn P., The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar; McNeill, William C., American Money and the Weimar Republic: Economics and Politics on the Eve of the Great Depression (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schuker, Stephen A., The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Silverman, Dan P., Reconstructing Europe after the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Van Meter, Robert Hardin Jr. , “The United States and European Recovery, 1918–1923: A Study of Public Policy and Private Finance” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971)Google Scholar; Meyer, Richard Hemming, Bankers’ Diplomacy: Monetary Stabilization in the Twenties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Trachtenberg, Marc, Reparation in World Politics: France and European Economic Diplomacy, 1916–1923 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ahamed, Liaquat, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin, 2009)Google Scholar.

10 On the “radical novelty” of the post-Great War period in global history and world order making, see Tooze, Adam, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014), 19–20 Google Scholar.

11 Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 99 (original emphasis).

12 Chandler, Visible Hand; Chandler, Alfred, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962)Google Scholar; North, Douglass, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar On moving from exchange based on relationships of kith and kin to impersonal relationships between people who do not know one another, see , John Joseph Wallis, , “Institutions, Organizations, Impersonality, and Interests: The Dynamics of Institutions,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 79 (June 2011): 48–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On how network relationships embedded in a social structure could serve some of the same functions that can be provided by formal hierarchical structures within an organization or written contractual relationships enforced by neutral third parties, see Granovetter, Mark, “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness,” American Journal of Sociology 91 (Nov. 1985): 481–510 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Morgan networks, see Pak, Susie J., Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917–1933, 2nd ed. (1979; Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1997), 5.

14 See Clavin, Patricia, “Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation,” Contemporary European History 14 (Nov. 2005): 465–92 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Decorzant, Yann, “Internationalism in the Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations,” in Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. Laqua, Daniel (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 115–34 Google Scholar.

15 On how the Morgans encouraged more active state policies than Herbert Hoover’s associationalism in trying to end the early Great Depression, see Martin, Horn, J.P. Morgan & Co. and the Crisis of Capitalism: From the Wall Street Crash to World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 154–206 Google Scholar.

16 Jonathan Zasloff, “Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy: The Twenty Years’ Crisis,” Southern California Law Review 77 (Mar. 2004): 583–682.

17 For a division between a concert of Europe mentalité of power politics and multilateral visions of international governance, see Mazower, Mark, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 2012)Google Scholar.

18 Patricia Clavin writes, “From the vantage point of the 2020s, it’s become abundantly clear that global governance is hugely path-dependent with consequences that are not fully appreciated.” Patricia Clavin, “Histories and Futures of Business in a Turbulent World” in Pitteloud et al., “Capitalism and Global Governance in Business History,” 13, 15. On path dependency and U.S. business, see Perrow, Charles, Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Roy, William G., Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 On merchant banking, see Stanley Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking (London: Routledge, 1984). On the importance of unwritten expertise as “tacit skills” learned on the job and embedded in the reputation of key individuals within organizations, see Morrison, Alan D. and Wilhelm, William J. Jr. , Investment Banking: Institutions, Politics, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15, 88 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Morrison, and Michael Polanyi, Wilhelm, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1966)Google Scholar. Tacit skills contrast with technical skills that are codifiable. In the U.S. context, scholars have examined the privileged social ties that made up the trusted “old-boy networks” of New York finance that Davison, Morrow, and Lamont joined. On the social ties among New York financial elite, see Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pak, Gentlemen Bankers. “Old-boy networks” comes from Chernow, Ron, The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance (New York: Grove Press, 1990), 124 Google Scholar.

20 Coates, Benjamin, Legalist Empire: International Law and American Foreign Relations in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wertheim, Stephen, “The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920,” Diplomatic History 35 (Nov. 2011): 797–836 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; On the gold standard, see Eichengreen, Barry, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

21 Morgan biographer Jean Strouse writes highly of Davison, but she minimizes the importance of Davison and the banking generation that followed J. P. Morgan’s 1913 death. I disagree with the sentiment. Strouse, Jean, Morgan: American Financier (New York: Random House, 2014)Google Scholar.

22 Lamont, Thomas W., My Boyhood in a Parsonage: Some Brief Sketches of American Life Toward the Close of the Last Century (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1946), 22–23 Google Scholar; Lamont, Thomas W., Across World Frontiers (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1951), 186 Google Scholar

23 “Davison’s Life Story Reads Like Fiction,” New York Times, May 7, 1922; Lamont, Thomas W., Henry P. Davison: The Record of a Useful Life (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1933), 30–45 Google Scholar.

24 Biographer Harold Nicolson writes that Morrow identified his own origins “not in the shape of West Virginia or of Allegheny, but in the lovelier New England shape of Amherst College. He would constantly render thanks to the destiny which had led his footsteps to that academic grove.” Nicolson, Harold, Dwight Morrow (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935), 23 Google Scholar.

25 Beckert, Sven, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122 (Oct. 2017): 1137–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Clavin, Patricia, “Men and Markets: Global Capital and the International Economy” in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, ed. Sluga, Glenda and Clavin, Patricia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 85–109 Google Scholar; Slobodian, Globalists; Martin, Meddlers.

27 On how Wall Street ideas of racial hierarchy informed Caribbean lending practices, see Hudson, Peter, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On East Coast educational institutions as the “breeding ground” for the emerging national establishment’s social reproduction, see Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 63. On social exclusion within elite U.S. financial networks, see Pak, Gentlemen Bankers, 80–106. On the continued importance of educational and social pedigrees among financial elites, see Rivera, Laura, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 On deliberative democracy among the pragmatic progressives, including a reading of Woodrow Wilson in this sense, see Throntveit, Trygve, Power without Victory: Woodrow Wilson and the American Internationalist Experiment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Throntveit, Trygve, “Philosophical Pragmatism and the Constitutional Watershed of 1912,” Political Science Quarterly 128 (Dec. 2013): 617–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dryzek, John, Deliberative Democracy and Beyond: Liberals, Critics, Contestations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

29 Again, this emphasizes the importance of path dependency to both U.S. governance structures and global governance structures.

30 Martin, Meddlers, 5, 14–15.

31 Here I am influenced by Gary Gerstle and his readings of liberalism. I, too, see neoliberalism as “descendent of classical liberalism” and read the Morgan bankers as very aware of state power and its abilities to help create and shape markets. Gerstle, “Protean Character of American Liberalism”; Gerstle, Gary, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 6, 73–106 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Mary O’Sullivan, “Finance Capital in Chandlerian Capitalism,” Industrial and Corporate Change 19 (Apr. 2010): 549–89; Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism.

33 Bensel, Richard Franklin, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).Google Scholar

34 Slobodian, Globalists.

35 Thomas W. Lamont to Thomas S. Lamont, Oct. 16, 1917, box 283, folder 3, Lamont Papers.

36 White, Richard, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 19–43 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Meltzer, Allan H., A History of the Federal Reserve: Volume 1, 1913–1951 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Broz, J. Lawrence, The International Origins of the Federal Reserve System (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

38 Carosso, Vincent, Investment Banking in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 165–73 Google Scholar.

39 Letter dated Dec. 11, 1916, box 37, folder Investment Bankers Association of America 1916–1921, Martin Egan Papers, Archives of The Morgan Library. The IBA’s Chairman of the Foreign Securities Committee, considered having “a place where up-to-date financial data is on file” vital to sound decision-making. Barrett Wendell, Jr. to Members, Feb. 2, 1917, box 37, folder Investment Bankers Association of America 1916–1921, Egan Papers. Barrett Wendell Jr. was from Lee, Higginson & Co.

40 See box 100, folder 7 and box 140, folders 28–29, Lamont Papers.

41 I am using Margot Canaday’s concept of legibility. She uses the work of James C. Scott, Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, and Hugh Heclo on bureaucratic learning and how the state comes to know that which it seeks to regulate. See Canaday, Margot, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For examples of private lenders categorizing states as creditworthy, see Flandreau, Marc and Zumer, Frédéric, The Making of Global Finance, 1880–1913 (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2004)Google Scholar.

42 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 112.

43 Lamont wrote in the 1930s, “Yet they [the people of the U.S.] will never come to the root of the evil until they realize that no banking system can function adequately when it comprehends within Itself only a limited portion of the banking community.” Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 111.

44 Lamont Diary, 1919, box 272, Lamont Papers.

45 J. P. Morgan Jr., who headed the bank during the Great War and its aftermath, was staunchly anti-democratic in his thinking and quite critical of the spread of universal suffrage. That said, according to Martin Horn, while Jack Morgan had “real” power within the banking house through its partnership agreement, Morgan preferred to “operate consensually” instead of through an authoritarian manner. Writing about the dynamics of J.P. Morgan & Co., Horn writes “there was debate, discussion, and difference” though those on the outside would never know it because of the firm’s discretion. See Horn, J.P. Morgan & Co. and the Crisis of Capitalism, 29–30, 40.

46 Harold Nicolson used the phrase to describe Morrow’s work as a corporate lawyer for fifteen years before he joined the House of Morgan. The phrase applies to all three of these Morgan bankers. Nicolson, Dwight Morrow, 87.

47 Burk, Kathleen, Britain, America, and the Sinews of War, 1914–1918 (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1985)Google Scholar; Kathleen Burk, “A Merchant Bank at War: The House of Morgan, 1914–1918.” in Money and Power: Essays in Honour of L. S. Pressnell, ed. P. L. Cottrell and D. E. Moggridge (London: Macmillan, 1988), 155–72; Dayer, Roberta, “Strange Bedfellows: J.P. Morgan & Co., Whitehall and the Wilson Administration during World War I,” Business History 18 (July 1976): 127–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horn, Martin, Britain France, and the Financing of the First World War (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Horn, Martin, “A Private Bank at War: J.P. Morgan & Co. and France, 1914–1918,” Business History Review 74 (Spring 2000): 85–112 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Stephen A. Schuker, “Money Doctors between the Wars: The Competition between Central Banks, Private Financial Advisers, and Multilateral Agencies, 1919–39,” in Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising, 1850–2000, ed. Marc Flandreau (London: Routledge, 2003), 63. On investor democracy, see Ott, Julie, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

49 Corporatist literature, in particular, tends to portray capitalists as masters of “state capture.” Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

50 Dudziak, Mary L., War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

51 Hawley, Great War and the Search for a Modern Order.

52 Martin Egan to Seward Prosser, May 2, 1917, box 62, folder “Red Cross 1917–1920,” Egan Papers. Ivy Lee was close to all three of these bankers, especially Morrow. See Hiebert, Ray Eldon, Courtier to the Crowd: The Story of Ivy Lee and the Development of Public Relations (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1966), 297, 344 Google Scholar. Egan resigned his post with the IBA’s Publicity Committee to focus on the Red Cross work. He would return to this position in 1922. See Martin Egan to Warren S. Hayden, June 2, 1917, box 37, folder “Investment Bankers Association of America, 1916–1921,” Egan Papers. Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 347–62.

53 Roswell Francis Easton, The Class of Eighteen Ninety-Eight, Princeton University, Twenty-Fifth Year Record, 1898 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 176–77.

54 Quoted in Jonathan Auerbach, Weapons of Democracy: Propaganda, Progressivism, and American Public Opinion (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015), 157. After Davison’s untimely death in 1922, Lee would accent the book-lined walls of his personal office with busts of Marshal Foch and Henry Davison; no doubt this symbiotic relationship influenced both men greatly. See Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 346.

55 Scholarship on Davison usually emphasizes his bold vision in fundraising. Davison shocked the War Council during its first meeting when he called for a $100-million target in a few weeks. Most members had made suggestions ranging from five million to fifty million dollars. Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 348.

56 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 284–85. Otis Cutler, chairman of the American Brake Show & Foundry Company led this fourteenth division; he later helped Davison organize the League of Red Cross Societies.

57 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 10.

58 Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 352–53.

59 Ivy Lee to Henry Davison, Aug. 27, 1918, Red Cross Archives, Washington D.C., as found in Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 354–355.

60 Davison, Henry P., The American Red Cross in the Great War (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Davison, American Red Cross in the Great War, 23.

62 Davison, American Red Cross in the Great War, 69–70.

63 Davison, American Red Cross in the Great War, 70. Davison’s recounting of Red Cross work is filled with references to “mental processes,” understanding others, and the connection of these soft skills to the success of Red Cross leaders in their prior business lives.

64 On emotions in developing interwar internationalism, see Scaglia, Ilaria, The Emotions of Internationalism: Feeling International Cooperation in the Alps in the Interwar Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65 Egan Memo to Thomas Lamont, Jan. 11, 1918, box 42, folder “Thomas W. Lamont, 1914–1922,” Egan Papers; Henry Davison, “Just What Red Cross Does with the Money,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 4, 1917; Henry Davison, “The Work of the American Red Cross,” The Spur, Jan. 15, 1918.

66 Mock, James and Larson, Cedric, Words that Won the War: The Story of the Committee on Public Information (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939), 118 Google Scholar.

67 Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 355.

68 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 274–75.

69 Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 349.

70 W. Ewing to Martin Egan, Aug. 15, 1917, box 34, folder “George W. Hunter 1917,” Egan Papers. Ewing and Egan exchanged letters on the trustworthiness of George W. Hunter, a former railroad president and now receiver of the Louisiana & Northwest Railroad from St. Louis who had offered his services to the Red Cross and was willing to “to shut up his firm in St. Louis, move to Washington and give practically his entire time to the Red Cross work.” Also see Aug. 9, 1917 letter from Ewing to Egan in this folder.

71 Quoted in Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 356.

72 Quoted in Hiebert, Courtier to the Crowd, 355.

73 For the importance of Davison’s war experience to triggering his desire for a proto-World Health Organization and an early Marshall Plan for Europe, see Roberts, “First World War as Catalyst and Epiphany.” On the development of the League of Red Cross Societies, see Buckingham, Clyde E., For Humanity’s Sake: The Story of the Early Development of the League of Red Cross Societies (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

74 Henry Davison to Harvey D. Gibson, Nov. 22, 1918, as quoted in Buckingham, For Humanity’s Sake, 23.

75 See Waqar Zaidi, “Liberal Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology in the Interwar Britain and the United States”; Katharina Rietzler, “Experts for Peace: Structures and Motivations of Philanthropic Internationalism in the Interwar Years” in Internationalism Reconfigured, 17–65.

76 Julia Irwin has argued that humanitarian efforts could serve as “a form of propaganda, a means of social control, and a tool of statecraft.” Julia F. Irwin, “Taming Total War: Great War-Era American Humanitarianism and its Legacies,” Diplomatic History 38 (Sept. 2014), 763; Irwin, Julia F., Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 On coercion and Red Cross volunteerism, see Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 83–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 9.

79 Lamont, Henry P. Davison, 8.

80 Henry Davison, “Red Cross Chief Answers Critics,” New York Times, Dec. 23, 1917.

81 Martin, Meddlers, 32–35; Yann Decorzant, cited in Patricia Clavin, “Histories and Futures of Business in a Turbulent World” in Pitteloud et al., “Capitalism and Global Governance in Business History,” 14.

82 Martin, Meddlers, 32.

83 Willard Straight to Dorothy Straight, May 12, 1918, reel 6.2, Willard Straight Papers, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, New York.

84 Salter, Arthur, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in International Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), xiii.Google Scholar

85 Morrow to Lamont, May 7, 1918, box 1.30, folder 29, Morrow Papers.

86 Morrow, Dwight W., “The Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in the City of New York 8, no. 3 (1919), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Morrow to Lamont, May 7, 1918, box 1.30, folder 29, Morrow Papers.

88 Martin portrays the AMTC as the brain child of the French who convinced a navally superior, but hesitant Great Britain to cooperate; together they worked to bring in a stubborn United States. Martin, Meddlers, 34.

89 Churchwell, Sarah, Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “the American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018)Google Scholar.

90 See Epstein, Katherine C., Torpedo: Inventing the Military-Industrial Complex in the United States and Great Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Martin, Meddlers.

91 Morrow, “Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” 8.

92 Morrow, “Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” 4–6.

93 Morrow, “Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” 7–8.

94 There is a growing literature on how twentieth-century governments came to gather information and use systems of information to shape policies. For seminal examples, see Tooze, J. Adam, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Mitchell, Timothy, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Morrow, “Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” 7 (emphasis mine).

96 Morrow, “Relation of the Covenant to Recent International Cooperation,” 9.

97 On the importance of duty and obligation to U.S. society during the Great War, see Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You.

98 Dwight Morrow, “Undated Speech,” most likely 1918, box 2.1, folder 2, Morrow Papers.

99 On the racist origins of international relations as a discipline, see Vitalis, Robert, White World Order, Black Power Politics: The Birth of American International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

100 Costigliola, Awkward Dominion; Nolan, Mary, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Link, Stefan J., Forging Global Fordism: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Contest Over the Industrial Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020)Google Scholar; Michele d’Alessandro “Global Economic Governance and the Private Sector: The League of Nations’ Experiment in the 1920s,” in The Foundations of Worldwide Economic Integration: Power, Institutions, and Global Markets, 1850–1930, ed. Dejung, Christof and Petersson, Niels P. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 249–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

101 Stephen A. Schuker, “Money Doctors between the Wars,” 63–64. Schuker identifies Dillon, Read & Co., Harris, Forbes & Co., and Halsey, Stuart & Co. as repeatedly cutting into Morgan business through “easier conditions” on foreign loans.

102 Hudson, Bankers and Empire; Grandin, Greg, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Making of an Imperial Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

103 Morrow to Florence Lamont, July 11, 1918, box 113, folder 13, Lamont Papers; also found in box 1.30, folder 29, Morrow Papers.

104 U.S. foreign relations historians have used “business internationalism” to characterize the 1920s, challenging old, inaccurate depictions of the decade that emphasized “isolation” from European affairs. See Parrini, Heir to Empire; Hogan, Informal Entente; Leffler, Elusive Quest; Costigliola, Awkward Dominion. Scholars of “classical legal ideology” such as Jonathan Zasloff have emphasized the importance of Dwight Morrow’s legal background over his financial background. Like Benjamin Coates, I believe that not all international lawyers subscribed to classical legal ideology and even lawyers who assumed some of its major principles did not always adhere to them in practice. Morrow, like Lamont and Davison, was devoted to what was “workable” at any given moment for the preservation of “civilization.” Zasloff, “Law and the Shaping of American Foreign: Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy”; Coates, Legalist Empire.

105 Zasloff, “Law and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy,” 643.

106 Morrow, Dwight W., The Society of Free States (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1919), 55 Google Scholar. Morrow devotes a whole chapter to “Jurists and Diplomatists” in his study on the history of world organization.

107 For an overview of nineteenth-century internationalism, see Mazower, Governing the World, 3–115.

108 Corporatist literature emphasizes this collaboration. Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism; Weinstein, Corporate Ideal; Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109 “Thomas W. Lamont Buys the Evening Post,” Wall Street Journal, Aug. 2, 1918.

110 On Lamont’s role on the Economic Commission and the Reparations Commission at Versailles, see Glaser, Elisabeth, “The Making of the Economic Peace,” in The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years , ed. Boemeke, M. et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 371–400 Google Scholar.

111 Lamont to Morrow, Feb. 15, 1919, box 165, folder 29, Lamont Papers.

112 Morrow, Society of Free States, 239.

113 Morrow, Society of Free States, 141.

114 Morrow, Society of Free States, 143.

115 Morrow, Society of Free States, 143.

116 Bensel, Yankee Leviathan.

117 Morrow, Society of Free States, 186.

118 I am influenced by Bourdieu and his understanding of free action. Though people “voluntarily” act and exhibit agency they also reproduce “coercive” social structures. Interested agents often eliminate any trace of other choices, resulting in common understandings of “universality” and “rationality.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12 (Mar. 1994): 1–18.

119 Lamont, “The World Situation Today.” On the varied and widespread internationalist impulses in the U.S. at this time, see Throntveit, Power without Victory.

120 Unknown writer, June 4, 1919, box 1, folder 54, Morrow Papers.

121 “Statement of Lamont with reference to the Treaty with Germany as it appeared in the public press on Monday, September 8, 1919,” Scrapbook of Lamont’s speeches, Lamont Papers.

122 The Shantung clause refers to Japan’s withdrawal of a racial equality clause in the Treaty of Versailles in return for Great Power approval of their takeover of the Shantung peninsula in northeastern China (the site of a former German naval base). Wilson approved this compromise fearing that the Japanese would walk out of the conference if they did not get Shantung, and fearing the U.S. Senate would reject a racial equality clause.

123 Hall, Linda B., Oil, Banks, and Politics: The United States and Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1917–1924 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Smith, Robert Freeman, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Smith, Robert Freeman, “Thomas W. Lamont: International Banker as Diplomat,” in Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898–1968 , ed. McCormick, Thomas J. and LaFeber, Walter (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 101–25 Google Scholar.

124 “Diplomatic Age” comes from Chernow, House of Morgan to describe the period 1913–1948. Though J. P. Morgan Jr. led the banking house, Davison and Lamont, as Chernow writes, “would enjoy day-to-day executive control.” Chernow, House of Morgan, 167.

125 The Morgans are well known in scholarship for their bias towards strengthening Anglo-American ties. See Roberts, Priscilla, “The Anglo-American Theme: American Visions of an Atlantic Alliance, 1914–1933,” Diplomatic History 21, no. 3 (1997): 333–64 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

126 Thomas W. Lamont to Thomas S. Lamont, May 25,1944. box 284, folder 4, Lamont Papers.

127 Thomas W. Lamont to Thomas S. Lamont, June 26, 1944, box 284, folder 4, Lamont Papers.