On the night of 20 July 1917, thousands of miles from the mudand blood-splattered reality of war on the Western Front, over 11,000 people crammed into New York's Madison Square Gardens for a rally to encourage Americans, and Britons living in the US, to enlist for military service. Three months after American entry into the war, and with conscription having already been introduced in Britain and the US, the British Recruiting Mission and the Mayor's Committee on National Defense used the Madison Square Garden event to tap into feelings of English-speaking patriotism. With British, Scottish, Canadian, and American flags flying, the 236th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force marched around the hall accompanied by a pipe band. The Marine Band of the Brooklyn Navy Yard also performed, and the American singer Sophie Braslau urged everyone to ‘Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag’. Representatives of the Pilgrims Society were amongst the attendees, with the Society having paid $25 for tickets to listen to two of their own – Lord Northcliffe and James Beck – address the audience.

Northcliffe was in the US between May and November 1917 as head of the official British War Mission, in which capacity he toured various cities in an effort to improve political, military, and economic cooperation between Britain and the US. Beck – a conservative Republican who went on to become President Warren Harding's solicitor general – also had experience of undertaking international tours in support of the war effort. Unlike Northcliffe's official visit to the US in 1917, however, Beck's trip had been a semi-official one coordinated by the Pilgrims Society. He was a long-standing supporter of the Pilgrims and an Anglophile who in 1914 had published The Evidence in the Case, a book outlining his interpretation of why Germany was to blame for starting the world war.