Founding date. September 1917, New York City; offices at 155th Street and Broadway, in the American Geographical Society building.
Founding figures. (MI6 station chief, NYC, 1915-21), through whom Inquiry deliberations and Round Table policy preferences were coordinated.Sir William Wiseman (28 years old, secretary of the Inquiry); David Hunter Miller (legal counsel); Isaiah Bowman (chief territorial expert; American Geographical Society director); James T. Shotwell (history; later Carnegie Endowment for International Peace); Charles Seymour (history; later Yale president). On the British liaison side: Walter Lippmann (organizing director under direct presidential commission from Woodrow Wilson); Sidney E. Mezes (House's brother-in-law; president of the City College of New York; nominal director); Edward M. House Colonel
Stated purpose vs structural role. Stated: to prepare the United States for the postwar peace conference by assembling territorial, economic, demographic, and legal data on the entire belligerent and neutral world. Structural role: in July 1921. Peter Grose's official CFR history Council on Foreign Relations the Inquiry's working papers became the substantive ground of the American delegation at Versailles; Wilson's Fourteen Points (January 1918) were drafted on Inquiry material; and the Inquiry-trained core (Lippmann, Bowman, Shotwell, Seymour, Mezes) became the founding membership of the Continuing the Inquiry: The Council on Foreign Relations from 1921 to 1996 AGR Ch 1 (BA-AGR-001), states the continuity explicitly: "The vision that stirred the Inquiry became the work of the Council on Foreign Relations over the better part of a century."Ben-Aharon (CFR Press 1996), quoted by
Cross-corpus triangulation. Documentary record. Osterrieder WiU II.2 documents the Inquiry's House-Wilson-Wiseman institutional nexus from German archival sources. Quigley AAE Ch 2-3 documents the Inquiry → CFR continuity from the Round Table side. Sutton ASE Ch 1 identifies the Inquiry as the principal node of the Wall Street + State Department interlock that the CFR institutionalized. Ben-Aharon AGR Ch 1 reproduces the founding-stage testimony from the CFR's own official history (Grose 1996), providing a fifth corroborator for the Inquiry → CFR thread. Lippmann's recruitment self-description — "We are skimming the cream of the younger and more imaginative scholars... What we are looking for is genius — sheer, startling genius, and nothing else will do" — is reproduced in Grose and quoted in turn by Ben-Aharon. Supersensible register. Steiner GA 175 (27 February 1917, Berlin) on Wilson's "shadow concepts" addresses the Wilsonian policy framework that the Inquiry would operationalize from September 1917 onward, but does not name the Inquiry as such; the identification is interpretive (anthroposophical-secondary register).
Load-bearing claims. WiU-22-008 (already in claims.jsonl) — The
Inquiry formally constituted September 1917 under House, with offices
at 155th Street and Broadway; staff including Lippmann, Mezes, Bowman,
Miller, Shotwell, Seymour (confirmed_multi). BA-AGR-001 — Inquiry
→ CFR institutional continuity documented from Peter Grose's
1996 official CFR history (confirmed_multi).
Evidentiary status. Inquiry existence, membership, working papers, and continuity into the CFR are uncontroversially documented; the question of whether the Inquiry was an autonomous academic project or a Round Table operating instrument is the contested interpretive weighting.
Minimum claim that survives skepticism. A research-and-planning body, organized under House and Wilson in September 1917, produced the substantive ground of the American Versailles delegation, drafted the Fourteen Points, and supplied the founding personnel of the Council on Foreign Relations in July 1921.
Cross-references. Persons: Edward M. House [→ dossier]; Walter Lippmann [→ dossier]; William Wiseman [→ dossier]; Woodrow Wilson (see Essay 1 + Essay 3). Events: September 1917 founding; January 1918 Fourteen Points; 1919 Paris Peace Conference; 30 May 1919 Hotel Majestic Anglo-American Institute proposal; 29 July 1921 CFR incorporation.