Background

George Post Wheeler was born in Owego, N. Y. , the son of Henry Wheeler and Mary Sparks. His father, a Methodist clergyman and writer, was born in England. His mother served the Woman's Christian Temperance Union as its national evangelist.

Education

Educated at home by a governess, he also attended public schools and graduated from William Penn Charter School in Philadelphia. He received the B. A. from Princeton in 1891 and remained there as a teaching fellow, earning the D. Litt. in 1893. He then continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Sorbonne.

Career

While in Paris he established a syndicated newspaper column, presenting feature topics for newspapers in eleven major American cities. In 1895 Wheeler returned to New York. He worked first as editor of the New York Press, where he helped to popularize the term "yellow journalism" when he used it as a caption for an editorial deploring the sensationalism and vulgarity of the circulation war between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. He also began to write poetry, short stories, and articles. He also published The Writer (1893) and Reflections of a Bachelor (1897). From 1897 to 1900, at the height of the gold rush, Wheeler explored the Alaskan frontier and the Yukon. In 1900 he founded the Camelot Publishing Company in New York and, under its imprint, issued and promoted a best-selling novel, A Furnace of Earth (1900), by Hallie Erminie Rives. They were later married and had no children. Wheeler began his diplomatic career in 1906 as second secretary to the United States Embassy at Tokyo. He subsequently was secretary to the embassies at St. Petersburg (1909-1911), Rome (1912 - 1913), and Tokyo (1914 - 1916). He was also counselor of the legation at Stockholm (1917 - 1921) and of the embassies at London (1921 - 1924), Madrid (1925), and Rio de Janeiro (1929). In 1929 he was appointed envoy and minister to Paraguay and, in 1933, minister to Albania, where he served until his retirement in November 1934. Wheeler was considered the first American career diplomat. His assignment by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 followed his taking the first examination given by the State Department for admission to the Foreign Service. In his first term in Tokyo he became absorbed with the events and ultimate conspiracy that led to the fall of the Russian fortress, Port Arthur, to the Japanese in 1905. Gathering data from informants, Wheeler traveled to Korea in search of additional facts and eventually set forth the bizarre details in Dragon in the Dust (1946). Wheeler was traveling by train in Austria when World War I broke out in 1914. Caught with other aliens, he was sent to Berlin, where he took charge of American refugees fleeing Germany. From Berlin he and his group of approximately 100 Americans entrained to Esbjerg, Denmark, from which they made safe passage across the mine-filled North Sea to Hull, England, their Danish vessel being the first to come from Europe after the declaration of war. While charge d'affaires in Japan he handled negotiations concerning military matters. All correspondence between the Japanese government and the governments of the Central Powers was channeled through him. He was also responsible for some 3, 000 prisoners of war taken by the Japanese at the collapse of the German fortress at Tsingtau. While minister to Paraguay, Wheeler conducted two years of negotiations between the Paraguayan government and the Commission of Neutrals in Washington growing out of the Chaco War between Paraguay and Bolivia. Throughout his diplomatic career Wheeler continued to write. In St. Petersburg he was attracted to Russian folklore and published a collection of twelve folktales, Russian Wonder Tales (1912), each story illustrated with a painting by Ivan Bilibin commissioned by the czar. His other collections included Albanian Wonder Tales (1936), illustrated by Maud and Miska Petersham, and Hawaiian Wonder Tales (1953). Fascinated by life in India, he wrote Hathoo of the Elephants (1943), a jungle adventure story, and India Against the Storm (1944). His abiding interest in geography was reflected in The Golden Legend of Ethiopia (1936), the love story of the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, and The Sacred Scriptures of the Japanese (1952). During his tenure in Japan, Wheeler began a continuing study of hanashika tales, which had been handed down in the oral tradition by professional storytellers. He assembled and collated approximately five hundred legends in ten volumes entitled Ho-Dan-Zo, Storehouse-of-Ten-Thousand-Jewels. The work was not published due to a shipping error involving customs clearance at the time of Pearl Harbor, but a posthumous one-volume collection, Tales From the Japanese Storytellers (1964), appeared under the editorship of Harold G. Henderson. Throughout his and his wife careers they kept diaries and scrapbooks highlighting the ups and downs of their life abroad. In their joint autobiography, Dome of Many-Coloured Glass (1955), they wrote alternate chapters describing their life in the foreign service. In candid and lively prose they revealed that although their service overseas was a series of adventures, it was also filled with frustration and disappointment. The book was an indictment of the Foreign Service. Charging that a controlling clique favored friends and associates with desirable assignments and other preferential treatment, the Wheelers accused the service of "rampant favoritism and nepotism, craft, falsehood, sycophancy and chicanery. " They claimed that they had been placed on the cabal's blacklist and received only minor assignments in less important posts. In fact, Wheeler held the grade of counselor of embassy for a longer period than any previous officer in the foreign service, before his promotion to minister. His career was interrupted by ill health, and at one time he had a two-year hiatus while waiting for a suitable assignment. The nadir came in 1913, when he was recalled to Washington and officially requested to resign from the diplomatic service by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Wheeler fought the ouster and won, being completely cleared and reinstated in 1914. A lifelong Republican, Wheeler developed many political friendships, including those with Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William E. Borah, Joseph G. Cannon, and Sumner Welles. In retirement Wheeler continued to travel and write. He died in Neptune, N. J.

Achievements

• Wheeler published a number of books and short pieces over his lifetime, including works of poetry and humor, as well as collections of Russian, Albanian, and Hawaiian folklore. He also collected a number of Japanese rakugo tales to be published in a ten-volume work entitled Hō-Dan-Zō (Treasure-Tale Storehouse), but the work was never published due to the United States' entry into World War II. The manuscript now resides in the New York Public Library. He and his wife wrote Dome of Many-Coloured Glass in 1952 about their experiences serving in the United States Foreign Service.

Works

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  • Russian Wonder Tales: With a Foreword on the Russian "Skazki"

    (Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)

Connections

On December 29, 1906, Wheeler married the novelist Hallie Erminie Rives in Tokyo.

Father:

Henry Wheeler

Mother:

Mary Sparks

Spouse:

Hallie Erminie Rives