AMERICANS COULD NOW AFFORD TO FANTASIZE. REUNITED after an excruciating fission, they stood on the brim of a second industrial revolution, much mightier than the first, a burst of production that would propel them to world leadership in the export of machinery, textiles, and oil. The country’s population, enriched by waves of immigrants, would swell 40 percent in the decades following the Civil War and fan out across thirty-seven states. Though dispersed, the American people were linked by more than a quarter million miles of railway, telegraph lines, and, by 1880, some 133,000 telephones as well. In steel production, American mills were ambitiously closing the gap with Europe and allocating a growing share of their output to weaponry and armor-plated battleships. This great fusion of energy could hardly be contained by North America. Now, with its western frontier largely settled, the country cast its attention beyond its continental borders, toward Central America, the Pacific, and the Far East. If not yet an imperial power in France’s and Britain’s league, the United States nevertheless commanded a role in international affairs.
In the Middle East, that role had traditionally been one of liberator, a champion of minority rights and of the independence of Ottoman provinces like Greece and Hungary. Having paid such an agonizing price for their own national integrity, the American people felt entitled—indeed, compelled—to secure those benefits for others. Their beneficence, moreover, would now be backed by military and economic muscle. In spite of the carpetbagging corruption associated with Reconstruction, not withstanding the persistent prejudice against African Americans in the North and racist legislation in the South, and the final suppression of Native American tribes in the West, Americans would bring freedom to the East.
Stars and Stripes in the Empire of the Half-Moon
Though the documentary record on the episode is vague, the first American attempt to assist the Arabs in achieving independence occurred in Syria in 1868. Charles Lamar, Andrew Romer, and a certain Colonel O’Reilly, all Civil War veterans, led eighty Arabs in a revolt against Ottoman rule. Armed with breechloading rifles and howitzers, the rebels clashed with a superior Ottoman force near the Syrian city of Hamma. The fighting was savage and, after the rebels’ camels were killed, Romer and Lamar fell prisoner. The two were cast into tiny, dank cells situated next to privies and then sent in chains to Istanbul, where they languished behind bars for months. The Damascus consul J. Augustus Johnson worried that the incident would give Middle Eastern peoples the impression “that Americans sympathize with…efforts to overthrow despotic governments” and encourage them to revolt. In contrast to the European powers, Johnson stressed, America’s mission in the area was “one of humanity and not policy.”1
Johnson’s admonition proved accurate: the image of Americans as freedom fighters indeed proliferated. By the late 1860s, nationalist forces battling against the Ottomans on the island of Crete were appealing to Congress for military and humanitarian assistance. The Baha’is of Baghdad sought America’s help in rescuing their venerable leader, Baha’u’llah, from Turkish exile. Washington, meanwhile, continued to show solicitude for oppressed Jewish communities throughout the Middle East—in Palestine, Persia, and North Africa. President Rutherford B. Hayes told Congress in December 1880 that the United States had “lost no opportunity” to pressure the emperor of Morocco to respect the rights of his Jewish subjects. “It is to America, the great pioneer of liberty and equality, that this unfortunate people lift up their eye,” the grateful Jews of Casablanca said in thanking the State Department. “The stars and stripes of America will shine brilliantly in the empire of the half-moon,” the leaders of Jerusalem Jewry declared. “The United States will forever be blessed by the chosen people in the sacred spot of our common ancestors.”2
American concern for the victims of Middle Eastern intolerance was especially keen in Bulgaria. Though never considered part of the Middle East, the country was still an Ottoman province when, in 1876, Turkish troops massacred some 15,000 Bulgarian Christians. To investigate the atrocity, the State Department sent an urbane diplomat, Eugene Schuyler, translator of Turgenev and recipient of Yale’s first Ph.D., to Sofia and its environs. “In Paniguischte 3,000 people killed by…regular troops,” read one of Schuyler’s daily reports, dated August 14. “Almost all women ravished, also boys and old men.” Similar dispatches were filed by Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, an American of quite a different stripe, a bearded, bear-like newspaperman from Pigeon Roost Ridge, Ohio. MacGahan’s articles, reprinted in the New York Times, described “the remains of babes and little children slaughtered by the hundreds, of immense heaps of bodies of maidens—first violated and then murdered—of…churches packed full of corpses.” The testimonies of Schuyler and MacGahan proved pivotal in turning international opinion against Turkey and emboldening the Russians to attack the Ottomans in 1878—a war during which MacGahan lost his life to typhus. Bulgaria subsequently attained its independence, adopting a constitution drafted by Schuyler and several graduates of Robert College, the American school on the Bosphorus.3
Not since the signing of the U.S.-Ottoman treaty fifty years earlier had the United States expressed such open displeasure with the Porte. The dissatisfaction, moreover, was mutual; Schuyler was declared persona non grata and banished from Ottoman lands. Such friction, however, never interfered with the daily conduct of diplomacy between the two nations or the pursuit of lucrative trade. On August 4, 1873, the Ottomans opened the first Middle Eastern embassy in Washington, while American warships visiting Istanbul were regularly received with cannonades and Turkish band renditions of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In 1877 alone, the United States imported some $167,000 worth of opium, spices, and various “bazaar items” from the Ottoman Empire and supplied it with over $4.5 million in oil and military goods. Cyrus Hamlin reveled in reporting that Turkey “now gets its…Martini-Henry rifles from Providence, Rhode Island, and its ammunition from New Haven, Connecticut!”
The United States was projecting its influence through other and more distant parts of the region as well. In December 1879, the USS Ticonderoga became the first American warship to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and enter the Persian Gulf. Penetrating what had previously been considered an exclusively British lake, the sloop steamed sixty miles up the Shatt al-Arab waterway to the ports of Basra and Bushire. For the Ticonderoga commander Robert Wilson Shufeldt, this display of American strength aimed not only to claim new markets but also to promulgate American ideas. “There is no place in the world where the physical manifestation of power is so necessary for the diffusion of the knowledge…of a civilized Nation,” Shufeldt, who had previously captained the steamboat Quaker City, proclaimed.
America’s ability to assert itself in the Middle East was illustrated by a diplomatic incident that took place in 1881 and which nearly ignited a crisis. The setting was the sultan’s palace in Istanbul where Lew Wallace, a former Union general, had come to present his credentials as the new American ambassador. Ironically, Wallace had replaced the ex-Confederate commander James Longstreet, who had failed to make an impression on his Turkish hosts, and was determined to succeed in his post. But instead of gaining admittance to the palace, Wallace was kept waiting in the antechamber. Such discourtesy was standard practice, his dragoman explained, intended to teach Westerners their place.
A formidable presence, in spite of his bookish specs and whiskers, Wallace had fought in some of the bloodiest Civil War fighting, and, as New Mexico’s governor, had once hunted Billy the Kid. In addition to physical bravery, Wallace evinced strong religious views, which, when combined with a fecund imagination, had recently inspired him to write the best-selling novel Ben-Hur. He was a man accustomed to dispensing—and receiving—respect, not to being denigrated. As if back in battle, Wallace brusquely pushed through palace guards, burst into the imperial chamber, and marched straight toward the sultan.
Unlike his reform-minded predecessors, Abdul Mejid and Abdul Aziz, the new sultan, Abdul Hamid II, was archly conservative and chronically suspicious of the West. He glowered at the brash intruder, ignoring the dragoman who kowtowed and begged forgiveness for his master’s impudence. Wallace, meanwhile, remained at attention, with his hand rigidly proffered. Anxious moments passed before the sultan’s scowl slowly curved into a smile. Then, stepping forward and declaring him doghru adam dir—a forthright man—Abdul Hamid shook the American’s hand.4
Wallace would have other opportunities to protest Ottoman practices and to demonstrate American mettle in the Middle East. Throughout much of the remaining decades of the nineteenth century, however, the major challenge to American ascendancy in the region stemmed not from the Porte but rather from the European powers. Rankled by what they regarded as an alien encroachment into an exclusively European sphere, the powers would attempt to block Americans from expanding their influence virtually everywhere in the Ottoman Empire. A foretaste of that friction occurred in Egypt, where the Europeans opposed one American’s attempt to acquire a Middle Eastern memento and to share it with his fellow citizens back home.
A Generous Mark of International Regard
This was no mundane American, but the railroad magnate William H. Vanderbilt, the embodiment of Mark Twain’s “Gilded Age” of excess, wealth, and optimism. Impressed by the honors that Egypt had lavished on Grant and learning that Paris, London, and Rome had each obtained an ancient Egyptian obelisk, Vanderbilt asked the State Department to help him procure a similar monument for his own native city of New York. The department agreed and instructed its consul in Alexandria, Elbert Eli Farman, to request an audience with Isma’il.
“The population of the United States is approaching fifty million, and the time is not distant when it will be double that number,” Farman told the khedive, Isma’il. Many of these millions would eventually visit New York, the consul explained, and “should an obelisk be erected there…they would learn something of its ancient history, and [that] it was a gift of His Highness to the people of the United States.” An Amherst-educated attorney from Warsaw, New York, Farman at forty-eight possessed the high forehead, sentient eyes, and copious beard of a philosopher. In the three years since his appointment, he had worked closely with American missionaries to help free African slaves from their Egyptian masters, to the annoyance of local authorities. Farman nevertheless succeeded in cultivating a warm and candid relationship with Isma’il and had no difficulty telling him outright of Vanderbilt’s request. The United States had two obelisks in mind, the consul said, one at Luxor and the other at Karnak.
Indebted to the American officers and educators who had contributed to Egypt’s defense and welfare, eager to diminish the status of his European creditors by raising that of the United States, Isma’il readily obliged. He mentioned an obelisk even more impressive than those at Karnak and Luxor—the 3,000-year-old granite monument that had once adorned the Temple of Caesar in Alexandria and that was popularly known as Cleopatra’s Needle. The obelisk could be taken, free of charge, “another souvenir,” he said, “of the friendship that has constantly existed between the Government of the United States and that of the Khedive.”
News of Isma’il’s offer captivated America. The needle, Farman stressed, was indeed of better quality and greater historical significance than the obelisks given to Britain and France, and its transfer to New York would “long remain one of the marked events of history.” President Hayes triumphantly told Congress that the gift represented “a generous mark of international regard” for the entire nation.
In praising Egypt’s generosity, though, the president failed to anticipate Europe’s resentment of American inroads into the Middle East. First, the Italians claimed that they owned the property under the obelisk and objected to its removal. Britain and France next insisted that all Egyptian property, artifacts included, belonged to them as security against Isma’il’s debt. “It is not for Europeans, whose capitals are enriched with the treasures of Ancient Egypt, to say that not a single monument should be taken to the United States,” Farman protested. Public opinion in the United States was also incensed. The European powers, the New York Herald warned, would “point the finger of scorn at us and intimate that we could never rise to any real moral grandeur until we had our obelisk.”
European interference in Egypt’s internal affairs meanwhile escalated, along with demands for Isma’il’s removal. The ruler finally received a letter addressed to the “ex-Khedive” informing him of his “abdication.” The soft-spoken visionary who once aspired to transform Egypt into an independent, Western-style country, who built theaters and canals, and who brought American officers to help modernize his army was replaced by his more pliable son, Tawfiq. Also eliminated was America’s chance to receive an obelisk. Vanderbilt, however, refused to truckle to European fiat. He sent a former naval officer, Henry Honeychurch Gorringe, to Alexandria with instructions to rebuff all attempts at interference and to retrieve the obelisk at once.
Like Vanderbilt, Gorringe, innovative and robust, personified the new American age. Earning an officer’s commission under fire during the Civil War, he rose to the rank of lieutenant commander and, as captain of the USS Gettysburg, escorted Ulysses Grant on his Middle Eastern tour. Gorringe was also an enthusiastic member of the Masons and shared their attachment to ancient Middle Eastern monuments. Arriving in Egypt in October 1879, he spent the next nine months laboring to extract the obelisk and its fifty-ton pedestal. With the help of one hundred local workmen and a winch once used to build the Brooklyn Bridge, he dredged 1,730 cubic yards of earth from around the obelisk’s base. Detached, the seventy-foot-long needle was then hauled overland to an Egyptian steamer and inserted into its specially perforated hull. The operation cost over $100,000, but Vanderbilt covered all expenses, and in July 1880 the obelisk was ready to sail.
“It would be absurd for the people of any great city to hope to be happy without an Egyptian Obelisk,” the New York Herald now chimed. Ballasted by cannonballs and sliding on iron tracks, the cargo descended onto the docks of New York harbor at West Fifty-first Street. From there, a team of thirty-two horses dragged it across town to Fifth Avenue and up to Eighty-second Street, where the train entered the sylvan confines of Central Park. Restlessly waiting on Graywacke Knoll, behind the newly built Metropolitan Museum of Art, were twenty thousand exhilarated New Yorkers, among them Secretary of State William Maxwell Evarts.
A son of the secretary of the American Board, Evarts was a pious man and a zealous supporter of Middle Eastern missions. Rising to address the crowd, though, he adopted a tone that was less religious than philosophical. Looking out over the sea of derby hats, parasols, and bonnets, Evarts wondered aloud whether any country, even one prosperous enough to buy an obelisk, could resist the forces of decadence. “Can you expect to flourish forever?” he asked. “Can you expect wealth to accumulate and man not to decay?”
Evarts’s gravitas was lost in the cheers of the crowd. His listeners were more captivated by the consequence of the moment than by the contemplation of history—more conscious of their country’s achievements of the past twenty years than apprehensive about its future. Riven during the Civil War, the American people were once again united and rising to world prominence. In the Middle East, as elsewhere in the world, the United States would be acknowledged as a formidable economic and military force. European nations would no longer seek to deny Americans the right to pursue their interests in the region or to establish relations with native rulers. That ascendancy was now heralded by a ground-shaking thud as cranes lowered the 220-ton monolith into its original pedestal. America’s obelisk was confidently erected, looming over the east.5