2 PARIS, 1937: COLONIAL QUESTIONS AND PEACE 125been anxious to ensure that as an exercise in international intellectual
cooperation, the 1937 session of the ISC yielded real results. To this end
and at the suggestion of Bonnet, a preparatory meeting of experts was
convoked by the Geneva Research Centre (GRC) ‘to consider proposed
solutions for the problem of peaceful change for the purpose of mak-
ing a synthesis of such solutions and discussing their feasibility in exist-
ing circumstances.’^145 The ‘Conference on Solutions,’ as this meeting
was called, was held between May 21–22 at the Villa Rigot offices of the
GRC, which were located at 14 avenue de France in close proximity to
the LON Secretariat at the Palais des Nations and to the ILO.^146
The GRC had began life as an American institution, established in
order to inform Americans when at home and when in Geneva about
the workings and activities of the LON. In 1936, however, the GRC
was reconstituted as an international research centre. The initiative for
this development came from the committee of Americans who directed
the GRC from July 1935 to September 1936. During this period, the
committee was able to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation and the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace to support their pro-
posal to transform the GRC into a centre for international research.
Among the Americans on this committee were Malcolm W. Davis, the
GRC’s director from 1932 to mid-1935 after which he became asso-
ciate director of the European Centre of the Carnegie Endowment in
Paris; Benjamin Gerig, member of the LON Secretariat’s Information
Section and of its Mandates Section; Lewis L. Lorwin, staff member
of the Brookings Institution from 1925 to 1935, economic adviser to
the ILO dating from 1935, former member of the American unit of the
IPR and observer on behalf of the ILO at the 1936 conference of the
IPR; Herbert L. May, member of the LON’s Central Opium Board;
Laura Puffer Morgan, associate secretary of the National Council for
the Prevention of War; Felix Morley, the GRC’s director until 1932,
the year in which his study The Society of Nations: Its Organization and
(^145) Report by the Director to the Governing Board, December 14, 1936, Geneva
Research Centre (correspondence concernant la C.H.E.I [Conférence permanente des
hautes études internationales] jusqu’au-1er juin, 1939), AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA.
(^146) Persons Participating in the Conference on Solutions, May 21 and 22, 1937,
AG-IICI-K-I-16.a, U16.a; John Boardman Whitton to Bonnet, 23 April 1937, AG 1-IICI-
K-I-16.a, UA, and Geneva Research Centre, Report by the Director to the Governing
Board, December 14, 1936, AG 1-IICI-K-I-16.a, UA.