THE LIBERTY STATUE WOULD BECOME A HALLMARK FOR Americans as would the verse inscribed on its pedestal: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Those words, from the second stanza of “The New Colossus,” were penned by Emma Lazarus, an American Jewish poet from New York, an unreserved patriot who initially displayed little interest in religion and none whatsoever in the Middle East.
That indifference vanished for Lazarus in 1881, when czarist-approved pogroms ravaged Jewish villages in Russia, killing thousands. The atrocities coincided with the pinnacle of the thirty-three-year-old poet’s career. She had been writing verse since age seventeen, but only now had her work finally gleaned praise from the general public as well as from the age’s literary mandarins—Emerson, Henry James, and Walt Whitman.
Swarthy and pert, with the prominent nose and aristocratic mien of her Sephardic ancestors, Lazarus had never denied her heritage, but neither did she celebrate it. News of the atrocities in Russia, however, and the world’s indifference toward them, suddenly spurred her to reexamine her roots and to seek out a solution to what was then called the “Jewish problem.” The answer, she concluded, lay in the creation of “a home for the homeless, a goal for the wanderer, an asylum for the persecuted, a nation for the denationalized,” in Palestine. Suddenly Lazarus was writing a different type of poem, one that exhorted her people to “Recall today the glorious Maccabean rage,” and “Wake, Israel, wake!”
The Lamp and the Golden Door
Lazarus was not the only Jew to undergo a nationalist transformation in the 1880s. Zionism, or the belief in the Jewish people’s right to a recognized polity in Eretz Yisrael—Hebrew for the Land of Israel—was just then taking root among the Jews of Eastern Europe. Small groups of Zionists had even immigrated to Palestine and settled on its parched and inhospitable terrain. In contrast to the 26,000 Jews already residing in the country, most of them urban-based rabbis or tradesmen, the new colonists tried to reintroduce the Jews to agrarian life—the same objective sought by American evangelists like Clorinda Minor and George Adams—in order to prepare them for sovereignty.
Enthusiasm for Zionism remained largely limited to Europe, however, and was virtually nonexistent among American Jews. The decade of the 1880s inaugurated the period of mass Jewish immigration to the United States. Over two and a half million Eastern European Jews would enter the country, many of them sailing past Lady Liberty en route to de goldene medine, as they called it in Yiddish, the “land paved with gold.” Though generally more traditional than the German Jews who had settled in America earlier in the century, these newcomers were too preoccupied with integrating into their new Promised Land to contemplate relocating to the old one. American Jews contributed generously to maintaining their coreligionists in Palestine. Judah Touro, the renowned New Orleans philanthropist, funded construction of the first modern neighborhoods in Jerusalem, and Macy’s co-owner Nathan Straus bought the land on which the Israel city named for him, Netanya, still stands. But most members of the American Jewish community were unwilling to devote their lives to Zionism, preferring the tenements and sweat-shops of urban America to Palestine’s deserts and swamps.
American Jews’ indifference to Zionism did not, however, daunt Emma Lazarus. Palestine, she maintained, would serve as a refuge for oppressed European Jews, not for the freedom-blessed Jews of the United States. These would continue to reside in the major American cities or, better yet, “renew their youth amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.” Even without an American contingent, Lazarus was sure that new state would serve as an “organic center” for the entire Jewish people, providing it with “a defense in the court of nations,” and humanity with an example of neutrality and peace. “The world will gain as Israel gains,” she wrote.
But Lazarus’s assurances brought little comfort to American Jews who, ever wary of anti-Semitism, feared that supporting Zionism would cast doubts on their loyalty to the United States. “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community,” stipulated the Union of Reform Congregations in 1885. “[We] expect therefore neither a return to Palestine nor a restoration of…the Jewish state.” The conservative Jewish scholar Abram S. Isaacs lectured Lazarus that it was “unwise to advocate a separate nationality…at a time when anti-Semites are creating the impression that Jews…are only Palestinians, Semites, [and] Orientals.” He reminded her that Zionism was not unrelated to restorationism, a Christian doctrine that aspired to convert all the Jews.
Unfazed by these barbs, Lazarus mounted a one-woman struggle for the right of Jews to work as “artisans, warriors and farmers” in their own sovereign polity. She established the Society for the Improvement and Emigration of East European Jews and promulgated Zionism through her prose and fiery verse. The idea of Jewish statehood, she told a friend, “opens up such enormous vistas in the past & future, & is so palpitatingly alive at the moment, that it has about driven out of my thoughts all other subjects.” A proponent of enlightened imperialism, Lazarus looked forward to Europe’s anticipated conquest of the Middle East, relieving the United States of the burden of liberating the Holy Land. She persisted in believing that American Jews would eventually surmount their hesitations and join her in lifting the lamp—to paraphrase the last line of “The New Colossus”—above “the golden door” of Palestine.
Lazarus’s optimism was misplaced. She remained largely alone in her campaign for a Jewish Palestine and her society, lacking membership and funds, dissolved. In September 1887, the poet fell ill, apparently with cancer, and died two months later.
Lazarus’s Zionist legacy appeared to have perished with her. The movement had failed to claim the respect, much less the allegiance, of even a segment of American Jews. Of the nearly two hundred delegates to the First Zionist Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland in 1897—a gathering then likened to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and the landing on Plymouth Rock—only four hailed from North America.1 The dream of renewed Jewish sovereignty in Palestine had yet to grip America’s Jews, but millions of their countrymen remained seized by it. Love for the Jewish people was still their primary motivation, not as an end in itself, but rather as a means for hastening Christ’s return.
Forgotten Memorials
Christianity in the United States had, by the 1890s, reached the apex of “the Protestant century,” a term coined by scholars to describe the period in which religion pervaded all aspects of society. The neighborhood church and its varied activities—services, social gatherings, and Sunday school—became the linchpin of American life. Congregations rallied to raise funds for foreign missions and to welcome itinerant preachers. Beyond its provincial dimensions, though, religion in America was attaining a broader national scope. With the aid of a vigorous press, prominent theologians could now reach millions of readers weekly, if not daily, syndicating their sermons and tracts.
One of the most popular and revered of these “pulpit princes” was T. De Witt Talmage, a Levitical figure with deep-set eyes, a determined mouth, and a nose of exacting angularity. As pastor of the famed Brooklyn Tabernacle and spiritual adviser to President Grover Cleveland, Talmage commanded a vast audience for his pronouncements. These ranged from the connections between musculature and spirituality to the temptations of a summer vacation. Yet no subject possessed him more intensely—indeed obsessed him—than Palestine. “I have read about it, and talked about it, and preached about it, and sung about it, and prayed about it, and dreamed about it until my expectations were piled up into something like Himalayan proportions.”
Talmage satisfied his Holy Land yearnings, finally, on December 1, 1889, when he stepped from a steamer onto the Jaffa shore. He came, like most Christian clergymen of his day, with an abiding hatred of “that curse of nations, that old hag of centuries,” the Ottoman Empire, and of Islam, which he denounced as antithetical to Western civilization. But Talmage, an ardent restorationist, was concerned less with Palestine’s present situation under the Muslims than with its future as the state of the Jews. “All the fingers of Providence now-a-days are pointing to that resumption of Palestine by the Israelites,” he attested, and prophesied that the repatriated Jews would transform the country from a wasteland into a cultural and economic Eden.
Though primarily concerned with precipitating redemption, Talmage’s concept of Jewish statehood was similar to Emma Lazarus’s. He, too, recognized the urgency of finding shelter for the Jewish refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe where, he predicted, displays of anti-Semitism would soon “quadruple and centuple.” He agreed with Lazarus that the Jews of the United States would not be expected to emigrate. “They would be foolish to leave their prosperities in our American cities where they are among our best citizens, and cross two seas to begin life over again in a strange land.” Rather, American Jews would ally with their Christian countrymen in an ecumenical effort to influence govenment policies toward the Middle East. In this respect, at least, he differed from Lazarus. While the poet assumed that Europe would pry Palestine from the Ottomans, the preacher believed that America should lead the world in wresting the Holy Land from Islam.2
The proposition that the United States could spearhead an international effort to free Palestine from Muslim rule and to settle the land with Jews would have surely sounded delusional in the Civil War or antebellum periods. But America in the final decades of the nineteenth century was a much altered country, an industrial juggernaut with a valid claim to global status. Quite naturally, then, in pursuing his dream of an American-emancipated Palestine, Talmage would join forces with one of the yielders of this booming financial clout, a real estate magnate named William Eugene Blackstone.
Born in Adams, New York, in 1841, self-educated and self-made, Blackstone by age thirty had amassed a real estate empire and, with it, the time to pursue his true, evangelical passions. In 1878, he attended the Niagara Conference, dedicated to the Jews’ return to Palestine, and emerged a diehard restorationist. The result was Jesus Is Coming, a book in which Blackstone departed from the traditional creed by absolving the Jews of the need to convert to Christianity before or after their ingathering. “Shall we Christians condemn the Jews for not accepting the cumulative evidence that Jesus is the Messiah; and ourselves refuse this other cumulative evidence that His second coming is near?” The volume, later translated into thirty-six languages with nearly a million copies in print, became one of the age’s most popular disquisitions. But literary accomplishments meant little to Blackstone. Deceivingly avuncular-looking with his balding pate and muttonchops, he had grander plans, and upon completing a tour of Palestine in 1888, he put them into motion.
“We believe this is an appropriate time for all nations, and especially the Christian nations of Europe, to show kindness to Israel,” stated the “memorial” that Blackstone submitted to President Benjamin Harrison and Secretary of State James G. Blaine on March 5, 1891. Some “2,000,000” Russian Jews, Blackstone explained, were “piteously appealing to our sympathy, justice, and humanity,” and desperate for shelter in Palestine. Just as Europe had succeeded in detaching Bulgaria and Serbia from the Ottoman Empire, so, too, the United States could now secure Palestine’s freedom for the Jews. The president had merely to summon an international conference of leaders, including the emperors of Germany and Austria-Hungary and Britain’s Queen Victoria, to decide the best means of achieving this goal. “Not…since the days of Cyrus, King of Persia, has there been offered to any mortal such a privilege opportunity to further the purposes of God concerning His ancient people.”
As anticipated, Talmage swiftly affixed his signature to the memorial, but, less expectedly, so did more than four hundred noteworthy individuals—clergymen, businessmen, journalists, and politicians. These figures were neither controversial nor peripheral, but representatives, rather, of America’s financial, political, and cultural elite: John D. Rockefeller, Charles Scribner, J. Pierpont Morgan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, and Congressman William McKinley. Several dozen Jews also signed the petition, marking the first time that personages of the two faiths cooperated on staking the Jewish claim to Palestine.3
Though radical in its recommendations, the Blackstone Memorial was in spirit consonant with long-standing American policy. For nearly a decade, since the outbreak of the 1881 Russian pogroms, Washington had been urging the Porte to open Palestine to Jewish immigration. The State Department instructed America’s ambassador in Istanbul, Lew Wallace, to take the issue up personally with Sultan Abdul Hamid II. An avowed restorationist, Wallace showed no hesitation in pressing for the resettlement of Jewish refugees in Palestine. His successors, Oscar Straus and Solomon Hirsch, though both anti-Zionist Jews, also pursued the matter. None of their efforts prevailed. Justifiably fearful of Zionism and any effort to disassemble their empire, the Ottomans placed increasingly draconian strictures on all Jewish immigration to Palestine. American diplomats denounced these measures as “inquisitorial” and “utterly repugnant to…our Constitution,” but again without effect. The European powers, for their part, showed no inclination to intervene on the refugees’ behalf or to follow America’s lead on Palestine.
With the Europeans withholding support for Blackstone’s memorial and the Ottomans vehemently opposed to it, Harrison refrained from taking any dramatic action on the issue of Palestine. Blackstone continued to lobby for American leadership in the campaign for Jewish statehood, but neither Harrison nor the next presidents, Cleveland and McKinley, ever yielded. As often happened in America’s Middle Eastern experience, one man’s faith proved to be another’s fantasy, while policy was determined by power.4
The refusal of successive administrations to endorse the creation of a Jewish state did not, however, discourage great numbers of American Christians from continuing to cherish the idea. Some, like Blackstone, even began describing themselves as Zionists. Among the general public, however, explicit enthusiasm for restorationism was diminishing. The once dissident Methodist and Presbyterian churches were gravitating toward the mainstream and leaving many of their millenarian doctrines—restorationism included—behind. American Protestantism in general was moving away from the revivalist fervor that had animated it since the late eighteenth century and reverting to more conventional practices. Though the renewal of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine remained a dream for many Americans, the urge to achieve it had waned.
The mellowing of restorationist zeal and the transition from evangelical to more traditional forms of worship, was illustrated by the last attempt to create an American colony in Palestine. The saga revolved around the Spafford family and its followers and around an American diplomat, Selah Merrill, who became their inveterate foe.
It Is Well with My Soul
The Spaffords, Horatio and Anna, were a respected, churchgoing Chicago couple, close friends of William Blackstone. Having survived the Great Fire of 1871, Anna and four of her daughters embarked on a pleasure cruise to Britain, but the ship sank when it struck another vessel, and the four daughters were lost. Shortly thereafter, the couple’s only son died of scarlet fever. “When sorrows like sea-billows roll, whatever my lot,” the devastated but still devout Horatio wrote, “Thou hast taught me to say: ‘It is well, it is well with my soul’”—a hymn that is still sung by many Protestants. Resolving to transform their personal tragedy into a spiritual force, the Spaffords founded a new sect, the Overcomers, and decided to move to Jerusalem.
A full decade would pass, however, before the family, together with twelve of their followers, landed at Jaffa. The group proceeded immediately to Jerusalem, riding in “American-made spring wagons” that had once belonged to the ill-fated Adams settlement. The failure of that venture fifteen years earlier did not deter the Spafford group from attempting to establish its own colony in Jerusalem. The pilgrims rented a large house outside of the Old City walls and set to work making textiles, cabinets, and bricks. Soon, too, they opened a girls’ school and a shop selling Holy Land souvenirs. The new American Colony, as it was known, quickly became a tourist site. Visitors included such luminaries as the British general Charles “Chinese” Gordon, then en route to the Sudan, where Muslim warriors would later kill him. “He taught me [how] to swear,” one of the Spaffords remembered.
Like earlier American settlers in Palestine, the Overcomers sought to emulate the life of Jesus, the “Man of Sorrows” who suffered immensely on earth but who later gained heavenly glory. They also longed for the fulfillment of biblical prophecies, in particular those predicting the Jews’ return to their native land. Unlike their predecessors, though, the Spafford group felt no compulsion to help prepare the Jews for their ingathering, no injunction to teach them how to farm. They were content merely to climb each day up the Mount of Olives, equipped only with tea and cake “hoping,” they professed, “to be the first to offer refreshment to the Messiah.”5
The American Colony was also unique in that it was spared the fate of the previous farms and was never ravaged by famine, disease, or bandits. Though the settlement’s construction coincided with the anti-Western reign of Abdul Hamid II, the Overcomers enjoyed excellent relations with the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, as well as with the city’s more established religious communities. The colonists faced only one serious adversary—ironically, an American.
As a doctor of theology and the chaplain of an African American battalion during the Civil War, Selah Merrill appeared to have much in common with the Overcomers and their tolerance, piety, and courage. He also shared their love of Palestine. Starting in 1882, he served several terms as America’s consul in Jerusalem, and over the course of the next quarter-century authored numerous books on the history, topography, and archaeology of the Holy Land. Yet Merrill, whose kindly, fatherly face, studious glasses, and patriarchal beard disguised a curmudgeonly disposition, saw no room in that land for the American Colony or for its subversive communal ideas.
Merrill denounced the Spaffordites, as he called them, as swindlers and heretics, accusing them of kidnapping and brainwashing young people and, on at least one occasion, of assaulting him with intent to kill. He urged Jerusalem residents not to purchase goods made by settlers and told tourists to avoid the colony’s shop. “They hate the United States Government…and all of the…American residents of Jerusalem outside their own circle.” The consul also submitted depositions from former colony residents testifying to various “lewd practices” that the Spaffords encouraged, including isolating unmarried couples in dark rooms and later forcing them to confess their transgressions.
Tensions boiled over when Merrill, an amateur archaeologist, decided to excavate a historical area outside of the Old City Wall that also happened to contain the American Colony cemetery. Though he later claimed that he had conscientiously relocated the graves, the horrified Spafford family complained of finding Horatio Spafford’s bones unearthed and wantonly scattered. Hounded by protests from the colony’s American supporters and suffering from throat cancer, Merrill ultimately resigned. By that time, however, the community had merged with a Swedish group and lost its distinctive American identity. The house was refitted as a hotel and a restaurant that, a century later, still served as a favorite purlieu of foreign journalists. All of Merrill’s vindictiveness was futile.
Merrill’s malice toward the American Colony was outdone only by his rancor toward Jews and their nascent Zionist movement. Again, as a former professor of Hebrew at Andover and a man whose first name derived from the Jewish liturgy, Merrill might have been expected to empathize with Jewish refugees and with efforts to build them a state. But the Jews, according to Merrill, were to blame for much of their own suffering. Their “character,” their lack of “cleanly habits and civilized modes of life,” had provoked the Russian pogroms and anti-Jewish outbursts elsewhere. “The Jew needs…less flattery,” he averred; “the Jew needs to learn his place in the world.” Asked by the State Department to submit his opinions on the Blackstone Memorial, Merrill dismissed the document as “one of the wildest schemes that was ever brought before the public.” Retarded by “trifling observances” and interested only in money, most Jews would never settle in an inhospitable, unprofitable Palestine, he predicted, even if given the chance. The consul concluded by urging the United States to avoid any contact with Zionism and eschew all sympathy for the Jews. “[They are] a race of weaklings of whom neither soldiers, colonists nor enterprising citizens can be made.”6
IN HIS contempt for the Spaffords’ millenarianism and his antipathy toward Zionism, Selah Merrill reflected some of the views that were gaining prominence among mainstream American Protestants. Yet revivalist forms of worship were still immensely popular in the United States and anti-Semitism, even if privately condoned, was still publicly frowned upon. Support for the idea of restoring Jewish sovereignty in Palestine, though less exuberant, nevertheless remained widespread. Public opinion on such issues was reflected less by Merrill than by America’s favorite everyman, Mark Twain. Although he often lampooned evangelicals in prose, Twain also retained an inbred respect for the “old time religion,” and while his writings sometimes revealed an anti-Jewish bias, he disavowed any animus toward Jews. Twain’s attitude toward Zionism was unknown, however, before 1897, when he began a two-year sojourn in Vienna. It was during that period that Twain was himself mistaken for a Jew. He also came into contact with outstanding Jewish figures, among them Theodor Herzl, journalist, playwright, and father of the Zionist movement.
Twain’s arrival in Vienna coincided with the denouement of the infamous Dreyfus affair. A French army captain falsely accused of spying for Germany and a highly assimilated Jew who considered himself more French than Jewish, Alfred Dreyfus became the focus of an anti-Semitic onslaught unleashed by the military, the Catholic Church, and other conservative elements. The impact of the Dreyfus trial reverberated across Europe, and especially in Austria, where anti-Semitism had gained legitimacy as a journalistic motif as well as a political platform.
Irrespective of his misgivings about Jews, Twain was scandalized by the libel against Dreyfus. He had come to Vienna to accompany his daughter, Clara, a musician married to an Austrian Jew, and through her was able to meet many of the city’s leading Jewish intellectuals, including the struggling philosopher-therapist Sigmund Freud. Consequently, Twain learned the perversions of anti-Semitism, though never so profoundly as when he personally became its target. The Viennese press, noting that his original first name, Samuel, was a favorite among Jews, and that his nose was rather large and crooked, dubbed him der Jude Mark Twain.
Twain struck back with a characteristically stinging essay, “Concerning the Jews,” in which he assailed the fact that so few Christians had publicly stood up for their spiritual cousins. The Dreyfus trial was especially disgusting. “It is un-English; it is un-American; it is French.” Twain nearly defeated his purpose by mentioning the Jews’ alleged love of money and their reluctance to serve their country in war—he later apologized for these slurs—but redeemed himself by praising the Jewish intellect. “The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole’s and an Archbishop’s,” he reckoned. “It’s a marvelous race—by long odds the most marvelous the world has produced, I suppose.”
Twain’s newfound affinity for the Jews was further illustrated by his interest in Herzl. While covering the Dreyfus trial for a Viennese paper, Herzl became convinced that the Jews could never integrate into Europe, but rather had to emigrate and found their own independent nation. He subsequently convened the First Zionist Congress and published his vision of a future polity, The Jewish State. Herzl and Twain had already met once, briefly, at a reception in Paris in 1894. Herzl was disappointed to behold “a short, spare man…a bit shaky…[with] a blank look [and] shabby cheeks,” rather than the barrel-chested comic he had imagined. He even managed to misidentify the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as an Englishman.
Their next meeting, four years later in Vienna, proved more satisfying, and not only for Herzl. Twain, too, was apparently impressed with the charismatic reporter turned visionary whose intense ebony eyes and thick square beard often evoked Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. After attending the opening of Herzl’s play The New Ghetto, the story of an assimilated Jew named Samuel who is rejected by Christian society, Twain offered to translate the drama for the New York stage. He also evinced a gritty regard for the movement Herzl had founded. In his idiosyncratic, satirical fashion, Twain conveyed support for the proposed creation of a Jewish state by appearing to oppose it. “If that concentration [in Palestine] of the cunningest brains in the world were going to be made on a free country (bar Scotland), I think it would be politic to stop it,” he counseled. “It will not be well to let that [Jewish] race find out its strength. If the horses knew theirs, we should not ride anymore.”7
Twain never got around to translating The New Ghetto. Instead, he turned his attention to criticizing America’s suppression of the nationalist revolt in the Philippines and to denouncing imperialism. But Twain did not regard Zionist colonization of Palestine as a form of imperialism, nor did he condemn French and British incursions elsewhere in the Middle East. In this respect, too, his opinions were typical of turn-of-the-century Americans. Whether pro-or anti-imperialist, most of them still looked forward to the day when the Middle East would be freed from despotic rule and made to resemble the United States. That transformation did not have to take place through conquest, however, but rather through philanthropy and the dedicated work of preachers, educators, and physicians. The Protestant century may have been ending, but great numbers of Americans still supported the missions.
Apostles to Islam
In the single decade between 1885 and 1895, the budget for missionary institutions in the Middle East expanded sevenfold. In addition to over four hundred schools and nine colleges with a total enrollment of 20,000, the money also paid for nine hospitals and ten dispensaries treating an estimated 40,000 patients annually. Along with journals, newspapers, and Bibles in five Middle Eastern languages, American presses rolled out some four million textbooks on topics ranging from astronomy to dentistry, lithography to moral philosophy.
The missionaries’ contributions to the ethical and educational uplifting of the Middle East became a wellspring of pride for Americans and a yardstick for measuring their altruism against Europe’s imperialist avarice. “Too high praise cannot be given to the faithful men and women of our country, who…do their duty so…fearlessly here amid arid sands and burning sun,” one of those Americans, Simon Wolf, reported from his consulate in Cairo. “The mention of the United States or ‘I am an American’ serves at once as a passport to their [the Egyptians’] kindness and confidence.” One of Wolf’s successors, Lewis Idding, further pressed the claim by positing that “Americans occupy Egypt as fully as does England.” Though Britain had developed the country economically, Idding explained, the United States had molded its people into citizens.8
The missionaries, too, reveled in these achievements, but their failure to realize their original goal—salvation—still stung. “In the war against Islam we are only yet putting on the armor and not by any means ready to wave the ensigns of victory,” confessed Henry Jessup, the doyen of American evangelists in Lebanon. Jessup was alluding to the fact that, despite the establishment of over nearly one hundred churches and the work of over two hundred missionaries throughout the Ottoman Empire, the total number of converts remained negligible. Many of these, moreover, later immigrated to the United States—so many that the Syrian Protestant College, lacking Arabic-speaking professors, changed its language of instruction to English.
Uniquely in the Middle East, no amount of cultural or material inducement proved effective in luring local populations away from their traditional rites in favor of those of Protestant America. In contrast to the Far East, where the services provided by American missionaries gave them a well-oiled conduit to conversion, Middle Eastern peoples saw no contradiction between receiving instruction and medical care from evangelists while maintaining their original faith. “No man ever came into a mission hospital who needed his hernia mended one-half so badly as he needed to learn about Jesus Christ,” one exasperated doctor complained.
The missionaries’ failure was illustrated by the case of Alexander Russell Webb. A former New Yorker and consul to the Philippines, Webb converted from Presbyterianism to Islam in 1888. He returned to his native city five years later, stout, bearded, and turbaned, and proceeded to establish one of the nation’s first mosques and Muslim newspapers. Webb’s efforts to Islamicize the United States were scarcely less successful than the missionaries’ attempts to Christianize the Middle East, but his campaign underscored the challenges Protestants faced from a proud, equally proselytizing Islam.
Stymied by this opposition, some Americans resolved to become “modern missionaries,” a term invented by Howard Bliss, who had succeeded his father as president of the Syrian Protestant College. The objective was now to preach a “Social Gospel,” introducing Christ whenever and however possible “with or without [a] resulting change in…ecclesiastical affiliation.” For Bliss and his circle of comfortably ensconced clerics in Beirut, the new definition of the missionary’s role meant that medical and educational institutions could continue to expand, even at the expense of purely evangelistic activities. The Middle East might one day reflect America politically and intellectually, but spiritually speaking the mirror would remain Muslim.
Not all missionaries were prepared to adopt this modern, social calling, however, and to abandon their quest for converts. Many were still willing to strike out, Bibles in hand, to the remotest areas of the region, braving brigands and disease.9 Indeed, the closing decades of the nineteenth century saw redoubled efforts by American missionaries to establish stations in eastern Anatolia, Persia, and the Sudan.
No evangelist, however, had ever set foot in the Arabian Peninsula. A waterless and sun-seared landmass roughly the size of the United States west of the Mississippi, the area today includes Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the independent emirates of the Persian Gulf. In the 1890s, though, Arabia was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. The Islamic heartland, home to the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, the peninsula was also the cradle of the extremist Islamic sect known as the Wahhabis. The movement formed an alliance with the Saudi family, which mobilized Wahhabi warriors in its battles with other desert tribes. Such an environment was unlikely to accommodate an American intent on transforming Muslims into born-again disciples of Christ. Yet that was precisely the aspiration of Samuel Marinus Zwemer, a twenty-three-year-old missionary from Vriesland, Michigan.
One of thirteen children of a Reformed Dutch minister, Zwemer believed from the earliest age that he was destined for overseas evangelizing. At seminary school, he stared for hours at the metronome his teacher had placed before the class, ticking every time a soul died unsaved in Asia. Zwemer consequently resolved to fulfill the biblical injunction “Oh, that Ishmael might live before Thee” (Genesis 17:18), and to preach throughout Arabia. The region had long been recognized as an exclusive Dutch domain, but the church, convinced that the Arabs could never be saved, refused to finance a mission. Zwemer had to obtain his own funds for the journey. He also acquired a rudimentary knowledge of map reading, medicine, and Arabic. Fully equipped, at last, in June 1890, Zwemer set off for “the very heart of Islam.”
Zwemer’s journey took him first to Cairo and then across the Red Sea to Jidda. He traveled light, equipped with little more than the two volumes of Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, both of which he later sold to a young British officer named T. E. Lawrence. Trekking southward, Zwemer claimed to be the first Westerner ever to enter the Yemeni city of San’a—a feat for which he was made a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He then rounded the tip of the Arabian Peninsula and sailed north through the Persian Gulf to Basra, where, reuniting with an old seminary friend, James Cantine, he founded his first station.
Preaching in the middle of Muslim Mesopotamia could prove precarious, the Americans quickly learned. A hefty six-footer with blond hair and chiseled Nordic looks, Zwemer was singled out by Ottoman authorities, placed under house arrest, and forbidden to preach. Nevertheless, “a steam engine in breeches,” as one colleague called him, Zwemer managed to flee Basra and relocate to Muscat (Oman) and the island of Bahrain. His memoirs tell of bizarre encounters with lizard-eating boatmen armed with Civil War surplus muskets and with an American prospector in search of Persian gold. Over the course of his travels, Zwemer was robbed, threatened with beheading, and dehydrated by 107-degree heat. “Pioneer journeys in Topsy Turvy Land are not without difficulty,” he allowed. In time, though, Zwemer was joined by his younger brother, Peter, by Kamil Aetany, one of the few Muslim converts from Beirut, and by the British missionary Amy Wilkes, who became Mrs. Samuel Zwemer and the mother of his six children. Together, they distributed Bibles, tended to the sick, and sheltered fugitive slaves. They also found time to erect Muscat’s first windmill, imported in sections from Waupun, Wisconsin.
Such services, both secular and sacerdotal, had been an American missionary tradition in the Middle East since the 1820s, but rendering them invariably exacted a price. Two of the Zwemers’ daughters succumbed to illnesses, as did Zwemer’s brother Peter. Kamil Aetany also died, poisoned, Zwemer’s associates thought, by his own father. Finally, after sacrificing all of their lives, and devoting twenty years of his own to the effort, Zwemer had to confront the ineluctable truth: the Arabs could not easily be converted.
Zwemer consequently fell back on the practice well known to missionaries throughout the Middle East: he began to open schools. “A country [without]…such schools cannot progress,” he reasoned. “Some day education in Arabia will be what it is now in America.” Clinics followed and a full-time physician, Paul Harrison, was brought in from Baltimore. “All the missionary can do is to give to those who care for it a picture of the Christian life and an opportunity to follow,” Harrison later recalled. The fact that none of those patients was ever baptized undoubtedly challenged Harrison’s—and Zwemer’s—faith, but never broke it.
Respectfully nicknamed “the Apostle to Islam,” Samuel Zwemer would also fulfill another traditional missionary function by interpreting the Middle East to Americans. He authored dozens of books on the Muslim world—its mores, outlooks, and beliefs. Returning from Arabia, he taught at Princeton and helped build the university’s Department of Near Eastern Studies. Generations of students, many of them the sons and daughters of missionaries, would study there and go on to become State Department Arabists and executives with American corporations operating in the Middle East. “American religious-philanthropic organizations in the Near East have a tendency to combine religious, educational and medical services with business investments,” observed one prominent financier of the missions.10 Arabian leaders would remember those services early in the next century, when choosing between American and British oil contractors.
Though apostolic in its initial intent, Zwemer’s mission would have vast ramifications for the economic and strategic interests of the United States. The modest efforts to disseminate American religious beliefs in Arabia would ultimately produce an efflorescence of American might.
Soldiers of the American Crusade
The symbiosis of faith and power in America’s Middle East involvement became increasingly pronounced toward the end of the nineteenth century. Pro-imperialist American leaders routinely marshaled religion to justify their policies, while prominent clerics hailed imperialism as a weapon in the war for global redemption. “America is to become God’s right arm in his battle with the world’s ignorance and oppression and sin,” proclaimed Josiah Strong, the Congregationalist minister and radical social Darwinist. “[T]his land of ours…must take the lead in the final conflicts of Christianity for possession of the world.” Embarked on a common crusade, missionaries, soldiers, and statesmen could unreservedly collaborate with one another, and not only in Arabia but throughout the Middle East.
THIS BLENDING of foreign policy and evangelical zeal was especially manifest in Persia. American missionaries had long been active in Urmia, Hamadan, and Tabriz, but these areas held little attraction for the State Department. A commercial treaty signed by the United States in Persia in 1856 had never been activated, nor had the two nations ever exchanged ambassadors. The situation changed in 1883, however, when Persia’s Qajar rulers appealed to Washington for help in resisting British and Russian attempts to dominate the country. The Chester Arthur administration responded positively, not out of sympathy for Persia but rather from fear for the missionaries’ safety during a period of domestic and international unrest.
The head of America’s first official mission to Persia was, fittingly, the son of missionaries, Samuel Green Wheeler Benjamin, a forty-six-year-old painter and art historian. Approaching Teheran, Wheeler was greeted by a royal entourage that included six governors and a thousand horsemen arrayed, he wrote, in “the most brilliant European uniforms, with some…touches of Oriental splendor.” With his artist’s eye, Wheeler noted the details of Persian decor and dress, especially those of the shah, Naser ad-Din, whose coat was buttoned with diamonds “fully the size of pigeons’ eggs.” Yet, like a competent diplomat, the envoy also listed the products—“iron, coal, copper, sulphur…wheat, maize, sugar-cane, tobacco, rice…tropical and semi-tropical fruits”—that Persia proposed to exchange for advanced American weaponry, especially Gatling guns. But the United States balked at the offer. Apart from the security of the missions, Washington disavowed any interests, economic or strategic, in the Persian Gulf.11
Nevertheless, the burgeoning missionary presence in the Middle East, and the growing willingness of missionaries to defy Muslim authorities, compelled the United States to adopt a more muscular policy toward the region. The death of twenty-four-year-old Howard Baskerville, a Presbyterian missionary who was killed defending rebellious peasants in Tabriz, elicited stern diplomatic protests from Washington. The trend was not confined to Persia. In Turkey, too, the United States abandoned the policy established by David Porter in the 1830s of withholding protection from those missionaries who antagonized local rulers. “The wayward Turks are accused of having roasted…a stray missionary…over his rosy kitchen fire and we are supposed to…wring satisfaction from the Sultan,” wrote Lieutenant Charles Sperry in February 1885 as his cruiser demonstrated along the Anatolian coast. The distinction between church and state, so jealously guarded at home, was steadily blurring for Americans in the Middle East. Lieutenant Sperry was also detailed to accompany Ambassador Lew Wallace on a tour of Christian sites throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Wallace’s “pilgrimage,” Sperry noted was undertaken entirely at the public’s expense.
The line between religious and governmental activities in the Middle East was further effaced by the emergence of missionary dynasties capable of exerting far-reaching influence over America’s foreign relations. The descendants of the original missionaries to the region—the Blisses and the Birds, the Dodges and the Dwights—now presided over its premier cultural institutions. They maintained intimate connections with leading American universities, most notably Princeton, and with preeminent American families such as the Rockefellers, the Morgans, and the Roosevelts. The primary supporters of the missionary effort circulated in the same social milieu as the country’s political elite, sent their children to the same schools, and allied with them through ties of marriage. Through their personal connections with decision makers, the missionaries and their backers could place evangelism and its advocates at the head of America’s overseas priorities, particularly in the Middle East. One consul in the area calculated that nine-tenths of his time, at least, was devoted to dealing with the missions and their multifarious concerns. “Even the head of our State Department used to quake when the head of a Bible society walked in.”12
Americans might celebrate the empowerment of their missionaries in the Middle East, but the joy was scarcely shared by the region’s rulers. With growing intensity, the Ottomans complained about the evangelists’ insolence and about the presence of U.S. warships along their coasts. Tensions between Washington and the Porte were then brought to the breaking point, starting in the mid-1890s, by the mass execution of Armenians.
THE DESCENDANTS of an ancient people that flourished on the scraggy terrain between the Caspian and the Black Seas, and between the Caucasus and the Taurus Mountains, the Armenians were early converts to Christianity who remained a formally protected, but often persecuted, minority under Ottoman rule. Resented for their relatively higher levels of education and professional success, the Armenians were also suspected by the Turks of owing allegiance to the Christian powers, and to Russia especially, which were plotting to dismantle the empire. The buildup of Ottoman oppression and Armenian anger erupted finally in the spring of 1894, when Turkish troops set out to crush a local rebellion, but then went on to raze entire villages and slaughter all of their inhabitants. “All the Armenians in sight were killed and their houses and stores robbed,” reported an appalled American consul in Trebizond. “Dead bodies were scattered over the streets all bearing fearful evidence of their cruel deaths.” Some 200,000 Armenians died—20 pecent of the population—and a million homes were ransacked.
“Armenian holocaust,” cried a New York Times headline in September 1895, employing the word that would later become synonymous with genocide. The American press was virtually unanimous in calling for urgent action to save the Armenians and to remove, “if not by political action than by resort to the knife,” the “fever spot of the Turkish Empire.” Clergymen, too, stood united in their concern for Armenians, even though most of them followed Eastern Orthodox rites. “Not all the perfume of Arabia can wash the hand of Turkey clean enough to be suffered any longer to hold the reins of power over one inch of Christian territory,” fumed the Catholic World, while the Reverend De Witt Talmage urged “the warships of the western powers [to] ride up as close as possible to the palaces of Constantinople and blow that accursed government to atoms.” The ecumenical furor, meanwhile, was matched by bipartisan outrage in Congress. Newton Blanchard, a Democratic senator from Louisiana, demanded American intervention to erase this “blot upon civilization of the age.” His Republican colleague from Illinois, Shelby Cullom, declared, “The demon of damnable and fanatical hate has spread ruin, desolation, and death.” In his presidential platform for 1896, William McKinley listed saving the Armenians, along with annexing Hawaii and securing Cuba’s independence from Spain, as his foreign affairs priority.13
The American reaction to the Armenian massacres—the first of many such atrocities soon to blot the Middle East—had multiple sources. There was the deeply entrenched aversion that Americans felt toward Islam and their no less rooted empathy for the Christians straining under Muslim rule. Popular opinion in the United States also tended to identify with the hardworking and family-oriented Armenians and to see them as “the Yankees of the Orient.” Finally, the Armenians were linked in the American mind with the mission schools from which many of them had graduated and which were seen as extensions of the United States. Some of these institutions had been extensively damaged in the pogroms, spurring demands for restitution not only for the Armenians but equally for the evangelists who served them.
“The policy of the United States Government in this world crisis has been one of impotence as far as the cause of humanity is concerned, contemptible from the standpoint of national honor, and suicidal as regards American interests,” exclaimed the veteran evangelist Frederick Davis Greene in his popular monograph, Armenian Massacres; or, The Sword of Mohammed. To remedy these failings, the missionaries exploited their privileged access to the Congress and the McKinley White House. The president of Robert College, George Washburn, petitioned Secretary of State John Hay, his cousin, to confront the Turks openly. At the same time, James B. Angell, a headstrong Congregationalist who served as America’s ambassador to the Porte, urged the legislature to approve military action against Turkey. A fleet of gunboats must be dispatched at once, Angell argued, to “rattle the Sultan’s windows.”
Pressure from Washburn and Angell proved persuasive, and in December 1900 the USS Kentucky steamed toward Turkey. Exactly one hundred years after the George Washington exemplified America’s impotence in the Middle East by conveying Algerian tribute to Istanbul, the newly christened Kentucky arrived in Smyrna bristling with more than fifty guns. The Kentucky’s captain, the ruddy-faced “Red Bill” Kirkland, bluntly warned Smyrna’s governor, “If these massacres continue I’ll be swuzzled if I won’t someday forget my orders…and find some pretext to hammer a few Turkish towns…. I’d keel-haul every blithering mother’s son of a Turk that wears hair.” Though softened by the translator and conveyed with a smile, Kirkland’s message penetrated. The sultan paid $83,000 in compensation to the missionaries and even placed an order for an American-made destroyer.14
Still, muscle was not the only means through which Americans expressed their concern for Armenia. No sooner had news of the massacres reached North America than societies for the support of their victims sprang up in virtually every major city. In Boston, Julia Ward Howe, whose husband had volunteered to fight in the Greek war of independence in 1825 and whose fame as author of the Union’s favorite hymn proved to be an asset in fundraising, organized the United Friends of Armenia. New York’s chamber of commerce formed the National Armenian Relief Committee, an elite group whose backers included Supreme Court Justice David Josiah Brewer, the American Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff, and the railroad executive Chauncey Depew. John D. Rockefeller contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the effort, while less moneyed people donated blankets, clothing, and foodstuffs. American women were especially active in the drive, spurred by reports of the rape and enslavement of thousands of Armenian girls.
Contributions poured in, but the problem remained of how to transport them to the victims. For a solution, the relief committee turned neither to the State Department nor to the missions nor even to the U.S. Navy but rather to a seventy-four-year-old woman, one of the most extraordinary Americans of her day.
Born on Christmas in the presidency of James Monroe, Clara Barton was raised on a Massachusetts farm, but later took up a teaching position in Washington. The Civil War, though, furnished her with a new profession. Tending to the Union wounded, spearheading supply drives, and distributing provisions among the troops, Barton attained a legendary status, the Angel of the Battlefield. After the war, she befriended Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony, joining their struggles for racial equality and women’s suffrage, and volunteered for the newly created Red Cross in Europe. She returned to the United States determined to establish a national branch of the organization and realized her vision in 1881 by establishing the American Red Cross.
Fifteen years later, Clara Barton was well past retirement age, a petite, wizened woman whose indefatigable smile made permanent mounds of her cheeks. That smile would often be her only protection as she confronted the terrors of Ottoman bureaucracy. Denied permission to display the symbol of the cross, Barton had to present her mission as a private initiative to aid all Ottoman subjects, irrespective of creed. She also had to manage her affairs from Istanbul, under the army’s eyes. “I shall never counsel nor permit a sly or underhand action with your government,” she promised the Ottoman foreign minister. “I shall expect the same treatment in return.”
Barton succeeded in obtaining the authorities’ full cooperation and in directing a series of food-and medicine-laden expeditions deep into the Armenian hinterland. Though members of the National Armenian Relief Committee resented the exclusive credit she received, and some Armenians protested the assistance she lent to distressed Turkish minorities in their districts, Barton solidified her reputation as “perhaps the most perfect incarnation of mercy the modern world has known.” Even the Ottomans honored her with a medal.
America’s aid to the Armenians remained a collaborative effort of the members of all faiths and parties, an unparalleled pooling of religious and political resources. It represented the continuation of decades of American solicitude for downtrodden Middle Eastern minorities, including Jews, Bahais, and Orthodox Christians. While many Americans believed that they were fated to dominate large sections of the world, they also insisted on saving that world from oppression. The Reverend Strong praised America as “the representative…of the largest liberty, the purest Christianity, [and] the highest civilization,” destined to “impress its institutions upon mankind.” Barton, by contrast, vowed to “defy the tyranny of precedent” by liberating subject peoples and alleviating their plight. Not just in the 1890s but for many decades to come, America’s interaction with the Middle East would waver between these impulses, the imperialist and the humanist, between the Strongs and the Clara Bartons.15
This dynamic relationship between strength and conviction in America’s relationship with the region seemed to leave little role for the element of fantasy. Yet, in fact, romantic notions continued to color Americans’ perceptions of the area and to govern their actions toward it. Indeed, as the century drew to close, myths about “Oriental” sensuality and exoticism attained renewed poignancy in many American minds. Such illusions would be fostered not by reading novels and memoirs about the Middle East or even by traveling to it, but rather by a single visit to America’s own heartland, the Midwest.