What early 20th-century figures or writings influenced the New World Order idea?
Executive summary
The phrase and idea of a "New World Order" in the early 20th century grew from two intertwined currents: high-level statecraft that sought international institutions after mass war, and popular or propagandistic reactions that cast those institutions as evidence of secret elites reshaping the world. Key figures ranged from Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill, who used the language of remaking international politics after the world wars, to interwar conspiracy authors like Nesta Helen Webster and Edith Starr Miller, who popularized a clandestine-elite narrative [1] [2].
1. Woodrow Wilson and the institutional New World Order
President Woodrow Wilson is widely identified as a foundational early-20th-century proponent of a reconstructed international order because his advocacy for the League of Nations framed a collective-security, rules-based alternative to nineteenth-century great-power rivalry; historians and educational overviews trace the "New World Order" lineage directly to Wilsonian efforts to prevent future global conflict [3] [1].
2. Churchill, grand rhetoric, and a postwar imagination
Winston Churchill, like other statesmen, used the language of a transformed world after the world wars, helping normalize the idea that extraordinary historical rupture could — and should — produce a reordered international system; contemporary summaries of the term's history note Churchill among the political figures who framed postwar reconstruction as a qualitative new phase [2] [1].
3. Interwar conspiracists: Nesta Webster, Edith Starr Miller and the Illuminati myth
Running alongside elite diplomacy was a vociferous interwar literature that turned internationalist projects into proofs of hidden plots; British revisionist historian Nesta Helen Webster and American socialite Edith Starr Miller were prominent in popularizing an Illuminati-style conspiracy that linked Jewish elites, finance capitalism and communism as instruments of global control — a strand documented in surveys of the New World Order conspiracy tradition [2].
4. Financial dynasties, popular suspicion, and the emergence of "globalists" tropes
Longstanding anxieties about powerful banking and industrial families fed the New World Order narrative: sources tracking conspiracy themes point to the Rothschilds and Rockefellers as recurring signifiers of elite influence in 20th-century accounts, a motif that moved between legitimate discussion of private capital's power and outright conspiracism in popular outlets [4] [5].
5. Eugenics, public-health fears and the darker intellectual residue
Scholars and skeptics link contemporary fears about population control and technocratic governance back to the early-century eugenics movement in the United States, arguing that its "war against the weak" created a durable template for interpreting public-health programs and social policy as components of an overarching plan to reshape societies — a connection highlighted in overviews of the conspiracy’s intellectual roots [2].
6. Cold War reframing and the plural scholarly view of "world orders"
By mid-century the New World Order idea bifurcated: on one hand, diplomats and academics described shifting global balances and institutional architectures (the UN, Bretton Woods) as new orders; on the other hand, Cold War ideological conflict and later political rhetoric turned those transformations into contested narratives about who would set rules for the planet — a scholarly literature traces these shifts and the multiple meanings attached to "new world orders" over time [6] [7] [8] [9].
7. What the early-20th-century record supports — and what remains interpretation
Primary early-20th-century influence is twofold and well-documented: statesmen who promoted multinational institutions and public intellectuals who narrated those institutions as either necessary reforms or proof of malign elite designs [1] [2]. Beyond those core lines, explanations diverge and scholarship warns against conflating normative policy debates about global governance with conspiratorial accounts that weaponize elite names and anti-Semitic tropes; many modern summaries and critiques explicitly make that distinction [10] [2]. Available reporting establishes the actors and writings that seeded both the diplomatic and conspiratorial strands, but assessing their later mutation into contemporary New World Order conspiracies requires tracing mid- and late-20th-century amplifications that fall partly outside the early-20th-century record cited here [11] [12].