Armenian News Network / Groong
The
American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire before, during and after the
Turkish Genocide against the Armenians: Towards a detailed accounting of ‘who
was where and when.’ A list prepared for
Ambassador Henry Morgenthau by William Wheelock Peet, Bible House, Constantinople
dated 7 October 1914.
Armenian
News Network / Groong
July 4, 2015
Special
to Groong by Eugene L. Taylor and Abraham D.
Krikorian
LONG
ISLAND, NY
Many descendants of survivors of the genocide
against the Armenians by the Turks often find themselves searching for bits and
pieces of information, which have relevance for family histories preserved at
various levels of completeness and detail.
For example, sometimes a name of a missionary or a relief or orphanage
worker has been passed down but the precise form or pronunciation is not quite
accurate, especially when transliterated from Armenian. Or, precise time frame and sequences may be
only provided in a general or slightly inexact form etc. How nice it would be
for descendants to be able to start putting some things into a more precise
context by consulting a modern database to obtain facts that may be used for
comparison or verification.
We received some positive responses to our
posting “NINETY-SIX
YEARS AGO TODAY. The S.S. Leviathan leaves Hoboken, New Jersey on Sunday,
February 16th 1919 with nearly 250 early responder volunteers of the American
Committee for Relief in the Near East anxious and determined to help in
‘reconstruction.’” (see Groong 16 February 2015 - http://www.groong.org/orig/ak-20150216.html).
Those responses prompted us to wonder whether it
might be useful to provide a document dealing with missionaries, mostly
Americans but others as well who were in service in the Ottoman Empire in
October 1914. Even though the list is
only a beginning of what one can envision as a final product, we hope
individuals so inclined might take this up as a very worthwhile project and
keep it going and adding to it. This
centenary of the onset of the Armenian Genocide makes it ever more clear that
the torches must be passed on. The
personal face of the genocide is fast becoming faded or even lost.
It is in this spirit of “better to have access to
something incomplete than not at all” that we present the following
documentation. We do not pretend that others may not have made similar limited
efforts in various, possibly in more narrowly focused contexts and have even
published them some place or other, but we believe that seeing an archival copy
of an ‘original’ listing has its own advantages, and can provide a legitimate
starting point. [See Endnote1]
Without doubt, the information to carry out this
task is available and one indeed can generate a compact yet comprehensive data
base on the various missionaries serving in Turkey, their backgrounds, their
postings, relevant writings, their photographic legacies, their eye-witness and
hearsay accounts and experiences, date and place of death, burial etc. [2] There
are, of course, many convincing arguments that can be made urging comprehensive
assemblage of this material according to the regions and places where and when
the missionaries served, as well as relevant cross-referencing alphabetically
by surname, even by first name etc. Pulling such information together in a
single place is long overdue. While it might take time to accomplish, there is
no telling how much time it could save in the long run.
The crucial point is to make a start, no matter how
modest. Some might say that this is an
eleventh-hour effort – hardly worth bothering with. So be it. But with this modest ‘posting’ on Groong we feel we have done what we could to get such a project
underway. As senor citizens we feel an urgency to get on with other efforts
that have been started and need completion.
Besides, the younger generations are very tuned into modern methods of
communication and imaginative documentation. It might well be that with some
artful coordination such an effort might prove to be a today’s proverbial
“piece of cake.”
The name of Henry Morgenthau, praised by many for
his qualities “as a New Yorker, as an American, as a philanthropist, and as a
financier and lawyer” was put forward by President Thomas Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924) for the post of Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in August 1913 to
succeed William Woodville Rockhill (1854-1914) who had left Constantinople
after a farewell audience on November 20, 1913 with Sultan Mehmed Rashid
V. The U.S. Senate approved Mr.
Morgenthau’s nomination on September 4. He
was given an elaborate sendoff at the luxurious Astor Hotel in New York City. One can read about it in The New York Times,
October 31, 1913 pg.7.
Ambassador Morgenthau formally presented his
credentials to the Sultan on 12 December 1913. This was a grandiose affair held
at the opulent Dolmabaçe Palace (designed by Armenian architect Garabed Balian)
punctuated by the reading of a letter to the Sultan from President Wilson.[3] (See Appendix A for the published letter
excerpted from the New York Times.)
A key point is that there was sufficient concern and good sense to have
an accounting of the missionaries in the Empire and therefore should be viewed
and treated as American charges of the Ambassador. The cover letter from Mr.
Peet indicates that the Ambassador asked for it. Certainly things were brewing and the clouds
of war were gathering. William Wheelock Peet
(1851-1942) was the Treasurer of the American Board of Commissioners for
Foreign Missions in Constantinople and had an enormous amount of expertise and
experience navigating the system and dealing with Turkish bureaucracy. He and his wife had been in Turkey since
autumn 1881.
The following four pages derive from photographs taken by us at The
United States National ‘Archives II’ in College Park, Maryland. The annotations in red are not the clearest
but one can figure out other nationals - Br indicates British [mostly
Canadian], Dane - Danish, Gr - German, and Swiss etc. We cannot say who made
the annotations.[4]
WHAT
THEY LOOKED LIKE:
Photographs showing Ambassador Morgenthau and
William Wheelock Peet and others
Readers will recall that we are
very much interested in locating and identifying good quality photographs of
any and all sorts, including those of people associated with situations deemed
especially noteworthy in and of themselves, or of relevance to the persecutions
and massacres culminating in the Genocide.
We will therefore present
photos cropped from a group photograph that includes both Ambassador Morgenthau
and Mr. Peet. [Even though William W. Peet was bestowed an honorary LL.D. by
both Grinnell College and by the University of Vermont in 1917 he rarely
referred to himself as Dr. Peet. In fact, he was one of the very first, if not
the first layman to be commissioned by any missionary board, certainly of the American
Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) to carry out exclusively
secular work. Among the many plaudits
bestowed on Mr. Peet is that he was regarded as a “trainer of Ambassadors.”[5]
We present below a group
photograph that includes Ambassador Morgenthau and Mr. Peet. This photo dates
from January 1915 and is so marked on the back in pencil. We thank the Franklin
D. Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York for their courtesy in
allowing the group photograph to be scanned on site.[6]
When it was first published in
1915 it was tersely described as “STAFF OF AMERICAN RED CROSS HOSPITAL,
TAXIM.” The caption goes on to say,
“Front row left, to right: Dr. W.M. Post; the Mother-Superior; Hon. Henry Morgenthau;
Mrs. Morgenthau; Hon. G. Bie Ravndal, Mr. W.W. Peet” (cf. The Orient issue of February 17, 1915 volume 6 no. 7, pg. 50.) In a considerably later date publication
(1918) we see same photograph with the caption “At the American Red Cross. Mr.
and Mrs. Morgenthau (in the centre of the group) devoted much time to this
establishment. Dr. [Wilfred M.] Post [1876-1966], an American, (extreme left of
the first row) was the medical head. Next to him is Sister Jeanne [Soeur
Jeanne, who served as head, Mother Superior, of the French Hospital in
Constantinople]. At the right of the
first row is Mr. [Gabriel Bie] Ravndal [1865-1949] American Consul General at
Constantinople, and Dr. Peet, secretary of the American missionary interests”
(see Henry Morgenthau “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story” in The World’s Work vol. 36, no. 3 July (1918) pg. 270).[7]
An interesting aside on this photograph is that the people in it seem
not to be dressed for very cold weather. Only a few men are wearing
topcoats. Were it not for the dating on
the rear and the February 1915 publication in The Orient one might have estimated the photograph from around late
autumn of 1914.
Photograph Taken in January 1915 at the
American Red Cross Hospital at Taxim.
(See The
Orient vol. 6, no. 7 February 17, 1915 pg. 51 for a general exterior view
of the facility.)
We also present two blowups
from the group photograph. Here
Ambassador Morgenthau and Mr. Peet are juxtaposed on the same scale. The intent here is to allow comparison of the
two men in terms of size and physique. Again, courtesy of the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Library and Museum, Hyde Park, New York.
WHAT
COULD BE SAID ABOUT THE MISSIONARIES IN NOVEMBER 1915?
Having
presented copies of the original pages of missionaries serving in Turkey provided
by Mr. Peet to Ambassador Morgenthau, it seems worthwhile to jump ahead a bit,
as it were, and include an article on the deaths of missionaries that chose to
remain in Turkey. A news article
published in The New York Times dated November 3, 1915 pg. 9 reads as follows:-
“AMERICANS’ DEATHS LAID TO THE TURKS”
“Five Missionaries Succumb to
the Shock of Armenian Horrors, Says Report.
“The
strain and shock of the tragedies that the war has brought to Turkey during the
last year is responsible for the deaths of five of the American missionaries on
duty in the Turkish Empire since the first of last May, the period covered by
the Turkish campaign against the Armenians, according to the annual report of
the Rev. Dr. James L. Barton, the foreign secretary of the Board of
Commissioners of Foreign Missions, made public here yesterday.
“The
missionaries whose deaths are attributed to the terrible conditions in Turkey
were Mrs. Mary E Barnum, died at Harpoot, May 9, after fifty six years of
service in Turkey; Mrs. Charlotte E. Ely, died at Bitlis, July 11, after
forty-seven years’ continuous service; the Rev. George P. Knapp, died at
Diarbekir, Aug. 10, after twenty-five years’ service at Harpoot and at Bitlis;
Mrs. Martha W. Raynolds, wife of the Rev. Dr. George C. Raynolds, died Aug. 27,
from injuries received while in flight from Van to Tiflis, Russia, and Mrs.
Elizabeth Ussher, died of typhus fever at Van, July 14, after sixteen years of
service.
“The
report goes into the war situation in detail.
Among the hundreds of thousands of Armenians and other Christians who
perished in Turkey, Dr. Barton states, were “professors and teachers in our
schools, pastors and preachers, pupils, and all other classes,” every one of
whom, he adds, “miserably perished at home, or have died of exposure upon the
road toward northern Arabia or elsewhere, where vast multitudes have been
exiled.”
“Probably
in all history,” Dr. Barton continues, “two hundred missionaries have never
been called on to pass through more terrible experiences than have our
missionaries in Turkey during the last nine or ten months, and the end is not
yet.”
“Referring
to the treatment of Americans by the Turkish authorities, Dr. Barton says that
when Harpoot was made a military centre several of the buildings of Euphrates
College were voluntarily turned over to the Turkish military authorities. A large dormitory was not and the American
Consul sealed the door with the official seal of the United States.
“This
seal,” adds Dr. Barton, “was ostentatiously broken by the Kaimakam of Harpoot,
and so since March the college has discontinued its work altogether. The mission buildings at Afion and Kara
Hissar were early taken possession of by the Government, as was the school
building at Adabazar,
“In
their dealings with Americans the officials have assumed that the decree of
abrogation of the capitulations has put all foreigners under local official
control. As a result their houses as
well as their persons have been searched repeatedly, their communications with
the United States Consuls and even with the Ambassador have often been
suppressed, their movements seriously obstructed, and in one instance, that of
Dr. and Mrs. Smith at Diarbekir, they were arrested and sent out of the country
by court-martial. No charges worthy of
consideration were preferred. Several
missionaries have suffered brief periods of imprisonment.”
And so it went, on and on….
No more needs to be said at this point. Good fortune will hopefully help the task set
before us to develop and expand a worthy data base.
APPENDIX
Copy of President Wilson’s
letter to the Sultan of Turkey from an untitled dispatch published in the New
York Times, Sunday December 28, 1913 pg. 7. The article from which this letter
was taken states that “Yesterday Henry Morgenthau, the
new American Ambassador, was formally presented to the Sultan. The ceremony is thus described in the
Official Gazette”… [some of the entries in the
Takvim-i Vekayi were in French. We do
not know whether this notice derived from one in Ottoman Turkish or in French.. Anyone interested
can apparently buy a set on disc for $1500 U.S. See http://www.ircica.org/takvim-i-vekayi-the-ottoman-official-gazette/irc1040.aspx]…
ENDNOTES
[1] A trivial spelling error involves the well-known Danish missionary nurse
Miss Maria Jacobsen. Her surname is
misspelled - son.
[2] We make an attempt to provide here a few readily available sources that may
be consulted online as a starting point for those new to such research. The long and short of it is that it is not
difficult but requires some dedication and attention to detail. An excellent source of information on
American Board missionaries may be found in the volumes referred to as the “Vinton Books” at the Congregational Library,
Boston. These provide a wealth of information - see http://www.congregationallibrary.org/books/vinton. Our early studies when they were not online
required using hard copy. Likewise, the
American Board Memorial Book and Personnel Card File at the ABCFM Istanbul,
under the auspices of the Digital Library for International Research, allows
search by surname - see http://dlir.org/abpcc-home.html. Also provided by the Digital Library for
International Research and which is a fairly difficult to find nowadays in its
entirety is a publication by Bible House called “The Orient.” Issues are accessible at http://www.dlir.org/arit-periodical-collection/201.html. A particularly helpful aspect of the
reportage is the news of the comings and goings of the missionaries to and from
the Empire. It was suspended at the end of 1915 and resumed publication in
1919. Its final publication was 1922.The
Orient included biographies of early missionaries and drew attention to
official Turkish government happenings.
Finding aids for Papers of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions from the Houghton Library at Harvard
University may be found at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01467
Such
information coupled with that from the other sources provides data on
immigration into such American Ports as Ellis Island, which is accessible on
line. Ellis Island in One Step provides aspect that can help fill in
gaps, including such data as who might be traveling in groups- see http://stevemorse.org/ellis2/ellisgold.html
The
Missionary Research Library Archives at The Burke Library
Archives, Columbia University Libraries, Union Theological Seminary, New York,
has a
Finding Aid for Near East Relief
Committee Records, 1904 – 1950. http://library.columbia.edu/locations/burke/archives/mrl.html
and http://library.columbia.edu/content/dam/libraryweb/locations/burke/fa/mrl/ldpd_10126110.pdf
Journals like the
Missionary Herald (American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston: Published for the Board by Samuel
T. Armstrong, 1821-1934) may be accessed on line as well through the Hathi
Trust. Although private individuals and
those at non-member libraries have to endure a little bit of inconvenience
looking at these page by page, it is considerably easier than having to go to a
library where they would be consulted in print copy. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005909183
Google Books has scanned some volumes and these are available at no cost as
well.
[3] Some, like ourselves who are no means admirers of Woodrow Wilson, might
go so far as to describe the letter as one from one imbecile to another. Many
contemporary evaluations of Sultan Mehmed V frequently describe him as a
harmless imbecile. Imbecile “yes”, harmless “no”. In the context of diplomatic vocabulary
nowadays, this letter certainly appears unnecessarily flowery and servile,
pretending not only great friendship between the two nations but
even intimate personal friendship. Whether this was solely for public
consumption in America or an attempt at bolstering Morgenthau’s credibility in
Constantinople or both cannot be dealt with here.
[4] From
United States National Archives College Park, Maryland ‘National Archives II’ RG84, Stack Area 350, Row 10, compartment 9
shelf 4 vol. 354-373.) Digital scanning
of materials in bound volumes is not allowed but may, with permission depending
on conditions of desired pages in question, be photographed.
[5] See
for example William Wheelock Peet and Louise Jenison Peet (1939) No Less Honor. The biography of William
Wheelock Peet (Chattanooga, Tennessee, privately printed.) This biographical work is written as if it
were an autobiography. This was the
conscious decision by Peet’s daughter-in-law to make the presentation more
interesting. It is based on Mr. Peet’s
Diaries, which are now apparently lost (personal communication by a family
member in Ames, Iowa some years back when we attempted to track them down.)
Ambassador Morgenthau refers to
him either as Dr. Peet or Peet in his diaries. We suppose this derives from his
thinking that like many of the distinguished missionary men, who had doctor’s
degrees in theology etc. so did W.W. Peet (see United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: the Diaries of Ambassador
Morgenthau 1913-1916, compiled and with an introduction by Ara Sarafian
(2004, Gomidas Institute, Princeton and London). Ambassador Morgenthau himself
was bestowed the honorary LL.D. from Constantinople College late 1915.
[6] The
back of the photographed is marked in pencil January 1915 and this fits in with
what we know about the photograph.
[7] The Pennsylvania Medical Journal volume
181 (January,
1915) p. 310 provides the notice under the heading “General News Items” –
more specifically - “Red Cross Works in Turkey. British and French Hospitals in
Constantinople are now being managed by the American Red Cross Chapter in the
Turkish capital.” It is of significance
that as part of a “standalone” photograph in The New York Times, Sunday November 28, 1915 pg. RP2 there is a
photograph of Mrs. Morgenthau in the uniform of “a Red Cross Nurse in a
Constantinople War Hospital. With her is the Mother Superior in charge of the hospital.”
This photo was presumably fostered by Mrs. Morgenthau’s return to the United
States on 14 October 1915 (The New York Times October 15, 1915 pg.4 entitled
“Mrs. Morgenthau home from Turkey.” The
‘standalone photograph’ is identical to the one published in 1918 in The World’s Work July, 1918 pg.
270. In Morgenthau’s Diaries (ed. by
Sarafian, 2004 pg. 253) a comment is made under the entry on Monday June 14,
1915 that agreement was reached that “Tash Kishla and the French [hospitals] be
run as one, and that we could exchange officers etc.” Refer to the issue of The Orient February 17, 1915 volume 6 no. 7 for photograph of the
Tash Kishla Hospital. It was located
near the famous landmark of today’s Istanbul the Galata Tower built by the Genoese
in 1348 and reconstructed in very recent times.