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Ambassador Morgenthau's Story: A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide
(The evocative, first-hand accounts of American ambassador...)
The evocative, first-hand accounts of American ambassador Henry Morgenthau regarding the Armenian genocide are one of the most thorough, authoritative sources on the atrocities.
This book contains the full accounts of Henry Morgenthau throughout his posting in Constantinople, Turkey. At the time the Ottoman Empire was on the brink of collapse; amid the chaos and upheaval began the Armenian genocide, a ruthless campaign of targeted killing which occurred over eight years, from 1915 to 1923. In his role as ambassador, Henry Morgenthau would receive regular, commonly excruciating reports of mass murders and forced deportations; revulsed, he moved to prevent further such atrocities taking place.
Despite the efforts of Henry Morgenthau to convince his superiors in Washington to intervene on humanitarian grounds, his pleas fell on deaf ears. The masses of evidence he personally reviewed and verified are related in this book, as are many of the high-level meetings Morgenthau personally held with Ottoman leaders in an attempt to stem the holocaust of the Armenian people. Stonewalled, dismissed and waved away at every turn, the frustrations Morgenthau felt at the futility are amply expressed in this emotional and sometimes harrowing chronicle.
The many obstructions he encountered with the Ottoman leadership led Morgenthau to resign his post in 1916. He spent the final three decades of his life tirelessly campaigning on behalf of the oppressed and victimized Ottoman peoples. As well as publishing this book plus hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, Henry Morgenthau Sr. raised enormous sums for the displaced Armenians reeling from the horrific genocide. Recognized and lauded for his humanitarian work, he would represent the United States at the Second Geneva Conference in 1932.
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was an American lawyer, real estate agent and diplomat.
Background
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was born on April 26, 1856, in Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, German Confederation (now Baden-Württemberg, Germany), the son of Lazarus Morgenthau and Babette Guggenheim and the ninth of their thirteen children, of whom six sons and five daughters survived. His early childhood was spent in comfortable circumstances, until his father, a self-made and prosperous cigar manufacturer, suffered a business failure.
Immigrating to the United States in 1866, Lazarus Morgenthau became an insurance agent in New York City but gave his major interest to organizing philanthropic campaigns for various Jewish welfare organizations.
Education
Young Morgenthau attended Public School 14 while learning English and graduated in 1870 at the age of fourteen.
He then entered City College in New York, intending to study toward a career in the law, but was forced to leave before the end of his first year in order to help support his family.
Starting as an errand boy, he worked for four years as a clerk in a law office, acquiring special experience in title searches and, after the panic of 1873, in mortgage foreclosure sales.
At nineteen he left his job to enter Columbia Law School while supporting himself by teaching in an adult night school. The fall in family circumstances left a strong impression on him, and Morgenthau, Sr. was fiercely determined to make a fortune.
Career
Admitted to the bar after his graduation in 1877, he formed with two friends the law firm of Lachman, Morgenthau, and Goldsmith in 1879. He dealt chiefly in titles and mortgages and gradually turned his major attention to buying and selling real estate, at which, over the next thirty years, he was conspicuously successful.
In 1899 he left his law firm and introduced the corporate form of operation into real estate with the founding of the Central Realty Bond and Trust Company, of which he was president.
Six years later he founded and headed his own real estate corporation, the Henry Morgenthau Company. An optimist about human progress and an adherent of reform Judaism in religion, he was in 1907 a founder and first president of the Free Synagogue, created to provide a pulpit for the advanced ideas of Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who was expressing in religion the spirit of the progressives and reformers of the time.
In the cause of civic reform Morgenthau, Sr. combatted the tenement problem in 1908 as a member of the Committee on Congestion of the Population. In 1911, after the notorious Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire, he joined Henry L. Stimson, Anne Morgan, Frances Perkins, and others to form the Committee of Safety to secure legislation for improved working conditions. He engaged actively in the settlement house movement as a supporter of the Henry Street Settlement.
Woodrow Wilson's fight against social privilege at Princeton appealed to Morgenthau's democratic ideals, and in December 1911, as one of Wilson's early supporters, he pledged $5, 000 a month for four months to launch his campaign for the presidential nomination; later he added another $10, 000 to become one of the three largest individual contributors.
As chairman of the finance committee of the Democratic National Committee during the campaign he introduced the budget system in the raising and spending of funds. Wilson's inspiration, together with the constant pressure within himself to devote his energies to some higher purpose than making money, led Morgenthau, Sr. to the rare decision that he had accumulated enough wealth.
In 1913, when he was fifty-seven, he closed his company's books and retired from business to begin a new career in public service. Disappointed at not being named secretary of the treasury, he at first refused Wilson's proffered appointment as ambassador to Turkey, a post which he and his friends regarded as a minor one traditionally relegated to Jews.
He was persuaded to change his mind by Rabbi Wise and reached Constantinople in November 1913. Upon the outbreak of war, Morgenthau, Sr. , anticipating that Turkey would soon join the Central Powers, realized that this would cut off the Jewish settlers in Palestine (then part of the Turkish empire) from the Western sources of supply on which they were dependent. His prompt action in securing $50, 000 from the American Jewish Committee in New York saved many lives threatened by starvation. The departure of the Allied ambassadors upon Turkey's entry in the war left the interests of Britain, France, Russia, and six other countries in Morgenthau's care, while at the same time he was overwhelmed by frenzied appeals for aid or asylum. As the only buffer between the harassed foreign nationals and Turkish seizures, arrests, and deportations, the American ambassador was pressed by constant crisis. His efforts gained the passionate gratitude of many groups and decorations from the French and British governments, and he managed to remain on good terms with the Turks, who at one point offered him a cabinet minister's post.
Finally, revolted by the appalling cruelty of the Turks' expulsion and massacre of the Armenians, which he tried in vain to stop, he returned home early in 1916. His report on the Armenian tragedy stirred Americans deeply. Besides raising funds for Armenian relief, he plunged, again as chairman of the finance committee, into the campaign for President Wilson's reelection. Although the United States maintained diplomatic relations with the Turks, Morgenthau, Sr. resigned as ambassador, because of the Armenian situation.
In June 1917 Morgenthau, Sr. embarked on an official secret mission proposed by himself and authorized by Secretary of State Robert Lansing and President Wilson to mediate a separate peace between Turkey and the Allies. British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour at first gave his approval, but subsequently the British had second thoughts, fearing that a possible "soft peace" negotiated by an American might interfere with their plans for the ultimate dissolution of the Turkish empire. Zionists, then negotiating with Britain for a place in Palestine, also feared that Morgenthau, Sr. might offer terms that would exclude their claims. Seizing on their objections, the Foreign Office succeeded in having the mission called off when Morgenthau, Sr. reached Gibraltar. So failed one more effort to shorten the war.
In February 1919, together with ex-President Taft and President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, Morgenthau, Sr. joined a group of eight prominent citizens on a speaking tour in behalf of American participation in the League of Nations. In March he was a delegate to the conference at Cannes for the formation of the International Red Cross. He served as technical consultant on Turkish problems at the Paris Peace Conference and was a member of the Harbord Commission, which recommended an American mandate for Armenia.
His concern for the plight of the Armenians had in 1915 led to the formation of the Armenian Relief Committee, under the chairmanship of James L. Barton; its scope expanded and in 1919 it became Near East Relief, Inc. , with Morgenthau, Sr. as vice-chairman (1919 - 1921).
President Wilson sent him to Poland (July 13 - September 13, 1919) as chairman of a commission to investigate the persecution of the Jews, but his recommendations, regarded as an invasion of sovereignty, proved unacceptable to the Polish government.
In March 1920 Wilson appointed Morgenthau, Sr. ambassador to Mexico, but owing to Sen. Albert B. Fall's special interests in that country and Mexico's then chaotic conditions, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee declined in May to confirm the appointment of an ambassador.
In October 1923 Morgenthau, Sr. went to Athens as chairman of the League of Nations Refugee Resettlement Commission at a time when Turkey, after the Greco-Turkish War, had forcibly deported 1, 250, 000 Greeks. Operating on the principle that the refugees could be an asset to the Greek economy, he showed how they could be made self-supporting and thus a source of credit for further international loans to continue the process. This successful mass resettlement, one of the major feats of international aid of the postwar period, was Morgenthau's crowning achievement.
In his later years Morgenthau's interests were bound up with the political fortunes of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1933 Morgenthau, Sr. , was appointed technical delegate to the World Monetary and Economic Conference in London. When almost eighty, he vigorously campaigned in defense of the New Deal and in warning of the threat of Germany under Hitler. In his later years he was known to friends and acquaintances from New York City policemen to President Franklin D. Roosevelt as "Uncle Henry. " He died seven months past his ninetieth birthday of a mesenteric thrombosis at his home in New York City and was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
Achievements
Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was a lawyer, businessman and United States ambassador, most famous as the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. As ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Morgenthau has come to be identified as the most prominent American to speak about the Armenian Genocide.
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Politics
Morgenthau's career enabled him to contribute handsomely to President Woodrow Wilson's election campaign in 1912. He had first met Wilson in 1911 at a dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Free Synagogue society and the two "seem to have bonded", marking the "turning point in Morgenthau's political career". His role in American politics grew more pronounced in later months and though his desire to be designated the financial chairman of the campaign finance committee went unfulfilled, Wilson offered him the position of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He had hoped for a cabinet post as well, but was not successful in gaining one.
Views
On Jewish matters, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. , fearful of divided loyalties and possessing the faith of his time in the power of democracy to eradicate religious and racial prejudice, believed that when the Jew had thoroughly Americanized himself his problem would disappear. He therefore rejected the Zionist solution of a Jewish state. His outspoken views on this issue led to irate and abusive exchanges with Zionists; in the last decade of his life, however, he changed his mind, as a result of the experience of the Jews under Hitler, and became an advocate of an independent Jewish state in Palestine.
Quotations:
"Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history. "
"When the Turkish authorities gave the orders for these deportations, they were merely giving the death warrant to a whole race; they understood this well, and, in their conversations with me, they made no particular attempt to conceal the fact… I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this. The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared to the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915. "
Personality
A small, wiry, blue-eyed man with a short beard, an amused eye, and a hovering smile, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. was intensely ambitious, highly moral, and not a little vain, but saved from the weight of these qualities by his warmth, buoyancy, and human understanding, a talent for friendship, and a lively sense of humor.
Connections
On May 10, 1883, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. married Josephine Sykes, the daughter of Samuel Sykes, a New York merchant. The couple had four children.
Father:
Lazarus Morgenthau
Mother:
Babette Morgenthau (Guggenheim)
Sister:
Adele Louise Morgenthau
Sister:
Pauline Morgenthau
Sister:
Ida M. Frances Ehrich (Morgenthau)
Sister:
Recha Morgenthau
Wife:
Josephine Morgenthau (Sykes)
Daughter:
Ruth Naumburg Knight (Morgenthau)
Daughter:
Helen Morgenthau Fox
Helen Morgenthau Fox was an American botanist and author of popular gardening books.
Daughter:
Alma Wertheim (Morgenthau)
Son:
Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was the United States Secretary of the Treasury during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
