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ThePilgrims Society, founded on 16 July 1902[1] bySir Harry Brittain KBE CMG, is a British-American society established, in the words of American diplomatJoseph Choate, 'to promote good-will, good-fellowship, and everlasting peace between the United States and Great Britain'. It is not to be confused with the Pilgrim Society ofPlymouth, Massachusetts.
Over the years it has boasted an elite membership of politicians, diplomats, businessmen, and writers who have includedHenry Kissinger,Margaret Thatcher,Caspar Weinberger,Douglas Fairbanks Jr.,Henry Luce,Lord Carrington,Alexander Haig,Paul Volcker,Thomas Kean,George Shultz, andWalter Cronkite among many others. Members of the immediate Royal Family, United States secretaries of state and United States ambassadors to theCourt of St. James's are customarily admittedex officio to membership in the Society. The Pilgrims of Great Britain and the Pilgrims of the United States have reciprocal membership.
Executive Committee members are and have included:
Amy Thompson is the Executive Secretary, and successor to Tessa Wells.
The Society is notable for holding dinners to welcome into office each successiveU.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. The patron of the society isKing Charles III.[citation needed]
Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a speech to the Society on March 18, 1941.[2]
The first informal meeting of the Pilgrims of Great Britain included GeneralJoseph Wheeler, Colonel (later General Sir)Bryan Mahon, the HonCharles Rolls andHarry Brittain. The first meeting of the Pilgrims of the United States was at theWaldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on 13 January, 1903. Towards the end of the 19th century, the two English-speaking nations had agreat rapprochement. Closer coordination between elites on both sides of the Atlantic was necessary, with the Pilgrims Society able to act as a semi-official channel between the two governments. The Pilgrims connected influential families in the US, such as theAstors,Du Ponts,Rockefellers,Carnegies,Morgans andVanderbilts, with the British nobility and royal family. In addition to the British aristocracy and politics, important British banks and media houses were also represented. Almost all the early American members wereWhite Anglo-Saxon Protestants from theeast coast and were connected through their shared socialization in thefraternities and sororities of universities such asYale orHarvard. It was similar on the British side, with the corresponding equivalents beingOxford andCambridge. The Pilgrims Society also had strong overlaps with other important social clubs and associations on the east coast of the United States, bringing together thewho's who of society.
The Pilgrims Society held opulent banquets between the American and British branches, which in turn also held regular meetings of their members. The centers of activity were New York City and London. Ideas to found further branches of the exclusive club in cities such asLiverpool were ultimately not implemented. DuringWorld War I, the Pilgrims Society supported the U.S. entry into the war through “public diplomacy.” In 1921, allies of the Pilgrims Society families Morgan,Warburg and Rockefeller founded theCouncil on Foreign Relations. In the followinginterwar period, the activities of the Pilgrims were limited by America'sisolationism and theGreat Depression. Many American and British Pilgrims supported theappeasement policy towardsHitler's Germany, and in some cases even sympathized with the idea of seeingfascism as a “bulwark” againstcommunism. This changed with the onset ofWorld War II and thebombing of Britain by the Germans, which led to expressions of solidarity from American Pilgrims with the British. In March 1941,Winston Churchill delivered a speech before the Pilgrims in London in which he tried to present the Americans' entry into the war and victory over theAxis powers as inevitable.
With the end of the Second World War and the beginning of theCold War, the focus of the Pilgrims' meetings changed. Now, the main priorities becamecontaining communism and creating aunified Europe. The Pilgrims also became more dominated by their American offshoot, which was at the same time not as much dominated by the old protestant east coast elite. In 1977, women were allowed to attend for the first time. During the Cold War, many important conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic were present at the Pilgrims' meetings. On the American side, these included Henry Kissinger, Caspar Weinberger, Alexander Haig and George Shultz, who played important roles in theNixon andReagan administrations. On the British side, members included Margaret Thatcher and NATO Secretary GeneralPeter Carington, 6th Baron Carrington, underlining the network's importance forAnglo-American relations during the Cold War. In 2002, the Pilgrims Society celebrated its 100th anniversary atSt James's Palace in the presence ofQueen Elizabeth II andPrince Charles.[3]
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