MYSTERY MAN:
GEORGE LOUIS BEER
George Louis Beer (d. 1920)--Historian, Columbia University. Beer was the historian of the British colonial system before 1765.(1) The chief expert on colonial questions on Colonel House's "Inquiry," which was studying plans for the peace settlements. Regional Specialist for Colonial Problems. U.S. Round Table Member from about 1912 (the first member who was not a British subject).(2)
When the British Round Table Group, about 1911, began to study the causes of the American Revolution, they wrote to Beer, and thus began a close and sympathetic relationship. The Group's attention was first attracted to Beer by a series of Anglophile studies on the British Empire in the eighteenth century which he published in the period after 1893. A Germanophobe as well as an Anglophile, he intended by writing, if we are to believe The Round Table, "to counteract the falsehoods about British Colonial policy to be found in the manuals used in American primary schools." He wrote the reports on the United States in The Round Table for many years, and his influence was clearly evident in Curtis's The Commonwealth of Nations.
Beer served from 1915-18 as American correspondent for The Round Table. He gave a hint of the existence of the Milner Group in an article which he wrote for the Political Science Quarterly of June 1915 on Milner. Berr wrote: "He stands forth as the intellectual leader of the most progressive school of imperial thought throughout the Empire." Beer was one of the chief supporters of American intervention in the war against Germany in the period 1914-1917.
In 1916, Lionel Curtis, a traveling delegate for The Round Table, met Beer in New York and proposed setting up an American group to participate in Round Table discussions. Despite his own hope of English-speaking union, Beer turned down the idea on the grounds that Americans had no business belonging to a movement to federate the British Empire.
The secret-society used Beer to establish a mandate system for the territories taken from enemy powers as a result of the First World War. In The Anglo-American Establishment, Carroll Quigley wrote that the mandate "was first suggested by George Louis Beer in a report submitted to the United States Government on January 1, 1918, and by Lionel Curtis in an article called "Windows of Freedom" in The Round Table for December 1918.
Beer was the American expert on colonial questions at the Peace Conference in Paris. With Lord Eustace Percy, he drew up the plan for the History of the Peace Conference which was carried out by Harold Temperley. The British Round Table group served at the conference as advisers to Prime Minister David Lloyd George. [The real behind- the-scene experts at the Paris conference included M. (Georges) Mandel (real name Jereboam Rothschild) (France), Phillip Sassoon (1888-1939) (England) and Bernard Baruch (U.S.).] Beer was named head of the Mandate Department of the League of Nations as soon as it was established.
Beer was also one of the originators of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and its American branch, The Council on Foreign Relations. Thomas W. Lamont, Isaiah Bowman, George Louis Beer and Whitney H. Shepardson approached Robert Cecil about planning a strategy for future joint ventures. They arranged for a party for fifty at the Hotel Majestic in Paris on May 30. 1919. At Paris the Royal Institute for International Affairs was created after WWI. The rather loosely organized group in the U.S. included George Louis Beer, Walter Lippman, Frank Aydetlotte, Whitney Shepardson, Thomas W. Lamont, Jerome D. Green, Erwin D. Canham (Christian Science Monitor) and others.(3)
Beer's Round Table membership was revealed in the obituary published in The Round Table for September 1920.
The American Historical Association offers the GEORGE LOUIS BEER PRIZE in recognition of outstanding historical writing in European international history since 1895. This $1,000 prize was established in accordance with the terms of a bequest by Beer to be awarded annually for the best work on any phase of European international history since the year 1895 that is submitted by a scholar who is a United States citizen. The phrase "European international history since the year 1895" may be understood to mean any study of international history since the year 1895 with a significant European dimension. The American Historical Association has given the George Louis Beer Prize for European international history since 1895.(4)
William Cohen is currently the chair of the Beer prize.(5) Bernadotte E. Schmitt (RS 1905) (b. May 19, 1886) wrote The Coming of the War: 1914 published in 1930. It won the George Louis Beer Prize in 1930 and the Pulitzer in 1931.(6) Schmitt was with the University of Chicago (1925-1946).(7) Christine White, Associate Professor of European History (who received a Ph.D. at Cambridge, 1988) won the 1993 Beer Prize for British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia, 1918-1924 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).(8) Michael J. Hogan, chair of the Department of History at The Ohio State University, has also received the Beer Prize.(9) 1999 Beer Committee Members also include: Diane Clemens Department of History, UC Berkeley, Istvan Deak, Department of History, Columbia University, Paul Kennedy, Department of History, Yale University and Anson Rabinbach, Department of History, Princeton University.
OTHER BEERS: Nelly Beer (1886-1945) married Robert Philipe Rothschild (1880-1946). Samuel H. Beer was author of The Communist Manifesto. S.H. Beer, Rhodes Scholar (1932) (Michigan). No known relationships to Louis Beer....
1. http://theaha.org/prizes/BEER.htm
2. . Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment 168 (1981).
3. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope 950 (1966).
4. http://chnm.gmu.edu/aha/info/awards.html
5. http://theaha.org/prizes/BEER.htm.
6. http://funnelweb.utcc.utk.edu/~mklein/alum1.html.
7. http://funnelweb.utcc.utk.edu/~mklein/alum1.html.
8. http://www3.la.psu.edu/histist/faculty/WHITE.HTM
9. http://www.cohums.ohio-state.edu/history/people/hogan.htm.
