The King-Crane Commission of 1919, a diplomatic delegation sent by members of the Paris Peace Conference to ascertain the political desires of ex-Ottoman Empire inhabitants, has been the subject of controversy in modern Middle Eastern history. The Commission wrote a final report which scholars, especially of the Israel-Palestine conflict, have appropriated for their favoured historical narrative. These often reductive interpretations of the Commission’s well-known findings range from ‘prophetic’ and ‘accurate’ to ‘biased’ and ‘ill-informed’. The Commission members themselves have frequently been the subject of either denigration or praise because of their findings, being labelled as disparately as ‘wise’, ‘naïve’, and ‘anti-Semitic’. Less well known than the Commission’s official report are the dissenting opinions by two of the Commission’s ‘technical experts’, George Montgomery and William Yale. When these dissenting opinions, along with the generally ignored personal papers of Commission members, are taken into account, a more complex picture of the Commission, and of American thinking about the Middle East in 1919, begins to emerge. In hopes of creating a more accurate, fair, and useful assessment of the King-Crane Commission, I believe that a deeper understanding of its participants’ mindsets and the discursive pool from which they drew their ideas is needed. In this paper, I aim to elucidate the dominant discourses governing the thinking of the main King-Crane Commission members. Specifically, I will compare the writings of George Montgomery and William Yale with the text of the King-Crane Commission report and carry out a closer reading of their differences of opinion than has yet been done. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor and Ernesto Laclau, I will focus on the dissent within the Commission not as an end in itself, but as a point of departure for an analysis of the competing discourses which governed the members’ thinking. Discourses that are reproduced to varying degrees in these texts include those concerning the comparative qualities of the region’s races and religions, as well as the Middle East’s place in the Commission members’ differing conceptions of modernity and proper governance. The varied opinions within the Commission are an excellent window into the range of American attitudes towards a region in which the United States would slowly become more embroiled during the ensuing 90 years. In a sense, it is an event from which a historian can gauge the competing ideas within an emerging geopolitical force in the early days of empire.