Background
Stephen Bonsal was born on March 29, 1865, in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, into the prosperous, upper-class merchant family of Stephen and Frances Leigh Bonsal.
Stephen Bonsal was born on March 29, 1865, in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, into the prosperous, upper-class merchant family of Stephen and Frances Leigh Bonsal.
Stephen Bonsal attended St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and then audited courses at the Universities of Heidelberg and Vienna, where he received certificates in German and Italian literature.
Stephen Bonsal returned to Maryland and lived the life of a gentleman, breeding horses. He suffered a serious financial upset, however, when he lost a great deal of money on a race and was forced to seek steady employment. He decided upon journalism as a career with a "sound economic basis" and determined to get a job with the New York Herald. After initial rebuffs he succeeded, through the efforts of a friend and because of an article he had written for another newspaper, reporting on the narrow escape of the president of San Salvador from his rebellious countrymen. Bonsal's facility with languages, which he deprecated as easily surpassed by "any waiter in a cosmopolitan restaurant, " helped him get his first overseas assignment. In 1887 he attracted the attention of "Commodore" James Gordon Bennett, the Herald's owner, with a colorful, gory story about a canal boat fight, and a month later Bennett decided to make use of Bonsal's talents and linguistic ability by transferring him to Europe.
Assigned to London, Bonsal traveled throughout the Continent sending back dispatches that were extraordinary for their variety. He interviewed British Prime Minister William Gladstone and listened to the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin and Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Aveling talk about the new world to come. Bonsal visited several times with Charles Parnell and came to the Irish nationalist's defense when he was facing trumped-up charges invented by his enemies. Bonsal also covered the visit of "Gentleman John" L. O'Sullivan to England. He approached the assignment with initial reluctance but ended up with an exclusive story since he was the only reporter present at the meeting between the prize fighter and the Prince of Wales.
A year later Bennett sent Bonsal to cover the imminent war between Bulgaria and Serbia, and the journalist spent the following three and a half years crossing and recrossing Europe. At a time when few Americans had heard of the Balkans, Bonsal's reports acquainted them with the antagonisms that made this area a seedbed for conflict. He also visited North Africa, and his first book, Morocco As It Is, published in 1892, explained the problems he foresaw in this area. During this period he got to know the French general Georges Boulanger, whom many viewed as a new "man-on-horseback" in French politics. In Rome he won an interview with the pope about the Knights of Labor, and as Bonsal recalled, although "His Holiness had not talked much . .. still he had talked and my editor was pleased. " Bonsal also had long talks with German Field Marshall von Moltke and spent three days with Chancellor Otto von Bismarck at his country retreat. A dispute with Bennett ended this intoxicating sojourn, and after a short period of demeaning and low-paid work on the Herald's city desk, Bonsal left the paper and entered the diplomatic corps.
Between 1893 and 1897 Bonsal served as secretary of the legation and chargé d'affaires in Madrid, Peking, Tokyo, and Korea. Eventually Bennett repented and rehired Bonsal in time for him to cover the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. Bonsal then traveled halfway around the world to report on the Cuban insurrection and ensuing Spanish-American War.
In 1900 Bonsal left for China to join the American relief expedition, which followed in the wake of the Boxer Rebellion. For the next ten years his dispatches for the Herald and then for the New York Times were sent from such disparate locations as the Philippines, Venezuela, Russia, the Balkans, the West Indies, Japan, and Mexico. Wherever insurrections, revolutions, or wars erupted or threatened Bonsal was present to cover the story. In 1912 he returned home for a brief respite to write The American Mediterranean. The following year he accepted an appointment first as secretary to the governor-general of the Philippines and later as commissioner of public utilities of the islands. After this diplomatic interlude, Bonsal once again returned to reporting. He recorded the advance of Hindenburg's army on Germany's Eastern Front in World War I.
While in Berlin a fortuitous meeting with Colonel Edward House, President Wilson's adviser, brought him back into government work as an interpreter in conferences House was having with German political figures. Shortly thereafter Bonsal became adviser to the American-Mexican Commission. With the United States' entrance into the war he served as major at the Army War College and then with the Allied Expeditionary Force in France. When the war ended House asked General Pershing for Bonsal's services in preparing for the peace conference. He first became a consultant on Balkan affairs and then an aide to House on all conference issues, attending closed meetings of the Big Four diplomats as the president's interpreter. At the request of Wilson and House, he turned his notes into a daily journal to be used for reference, since no official translations or notes were taken at the sessions.
When his duties with the president were finished, Bonsal joined the Inter-Allied Mission to Austria-Hungary and the Balkan States. Bonsal's subsequent journalistic career was highlighted by a 10, 000-mile trip through the U. S. S. R. in 1931 and travels across North China and Manchuria in 1934. He retired in 1935 and began to write the reminiscences of his early days as a reporter, which appeared in 1937 as Heyday in a Vanished World.
In 1944, in the middle of World War II, Bonsal submitted to the urging of friends that he help prevent a repetition of the mistakes of 1919 by publishing his journal on the peace conference. The resulting book, Unfinished Business, was written with the same eye for color that characterized all Bonsal's books and dispatches and describes in detail the clashes in character and purpose that helped weaken the final results of the Versailles conference. Bonsal effectively portrayed all of the participants, particularly Wilson, whom he depicted as flawed by pettiness and convinced that the European leaders conspired together against the United States. Bonsal died in Washington, D. C.
During his career Stephen Bonsal served as secretary and chargé-d'affaire of the US diplomatic missions in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, and Madrid. He is famous through his books: The Real Condition of Cuba (1897), The Fight for Santiago (1899), The Golden Horseshoe (1900), The Lesser Nations at Versailles (1946), When the French Were Here (1945). His work, Unfinished Business (1944), a diary describing his experiences during the Paris Peace Treaty negotiations, won him the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for History.
(Excerpt from Morocco as It Is: With an Account of Sir Cha...)
(Excerpt from The Real Condition of Cuba to-Day Fortified...)
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
(The golden horseshoe; extracts from the letters of Captai...)
Quotes from others about the person
"One of the great reporters of global troubles, Bonsal was one of those few world-traveling journalists who would have prepared the people of the United States for what has happened to the world if they had heeded the signs he steadily pointed out to them for fifty years. " - Arthur Krock
In March 1900 Bonsal married Henrietta Fairfax Morris; they had four sons.
