23

WILSON’S QUANDARY

Armenia is to be redeemed…

—Woodrow Wilson, September 1919

Merciful God! It’s all true! Nobody has ever told the whole truth! Nobody could!

—Eleanor Franklin Egan, Saturday Evening Post, December 1919

Less than a month after the Armistice in 1918, Woodrow Wilson became the first president to cross the Atlantic while in office. When he left New York aboard the SS George Washington on December 4, thousands of people jammed the city’s streets to send him off on the voyage he called his “highest duty”—to make good on the sacrifice American soldiers had made to make the world safer for democracy.¹ Ships on the Hudson River blew their whistles, navy fliers circled low over his ship, and confetti rained down all over Manhattan. When he arrived in Paris ten days later, two million Frenchmen and women lined the streets shouting, “Vive le President Wilson!” and “Wilson le juste!” Wilson rode in an open carriage, waving his top hat to deafening cheers, as the parade proceeded down the Champs-Elysées.

As Herbert Hoover put it, Wilson’s eloquent plan for peace, with its goals of “independence of peoples,” “self-determination,” “justice,” “new order,” and a “lasting peace,” had stirred hope among the masses everywhere in the world.² Wilson had unveiled his famous Fourteen Points the previous January (1918), when the war still seemed unstoppable. Five of these points pertained broadly to open diplomacy: the end of secret treaties, free use of the high seas during times of peace and war, the reduction of armaments, the removal of barriers to free trade, and an impartial adjustment of colonial claims. Eight points dealt with the goals of national self-determination, including the German evacuation of Russian territory, the restoration of Belgian independence, the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the creation of an independent Poland, and the autonomous development of each of the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The fourteenth point—for which Wilson would fight to the death with his own Senate—was his League of Nations—“a general assembly of nations” to foster “the mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity.”

In the twelfth point Wilson specified that “the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development.” While a group of top advisers urged him to spell out autonomy for Armenia and sent Wilson this memorandum—“It is necessary to free the subject races of the Turkish Empire from oppression and misrule. This implies at the very least autonomy for Armenia”—Wilson’s chief adviser, Col. Edward House, steered him away from mentioning that detail.³

Wilson’s commitment to the idea of national sovereignty was part of his vision of world democracy. A president who had been a prominent scholar of American government, Wilson arrived at the Paris Peace Conference with deep convictions about democracy. He believed that morality should guide relations between nations, and that in the coming age all nations would be judged by ethical standards.⁴ For him World War I was “a war of emancipation,” a war fought, in part, for the smaller peoples of the world so that they could have, as he put it, the “right to determine their own fortunes, [and] to insist upon justice.”⁵ The Armenians were a classic case of such “smaller peoples.”

Realizing that emerging nations like Armenia would need a transitional period of mentoring, Wilson advocated that they be protected by a “League of Nations,” and by a “mandate” system that would further protect them from being overtaken due to the imperial designs of larger countries.⁶ Under the mandate system, the League of Nations would authorize an established nation to be a protector and an administrator over a newly formed nation; the idea was to help emerging nations reach a point of stability before they stood on their own. In Wilson’s mind this was a rational and peaceful way to ensure political change.

Given his high hopes for a new democratic world order, it is perhaps not surprising that Wilson found himself embattled with his European allies, whom he saw as driven by imperialistic designs on the spoils of war. When the issue of mandates came up, Wilson urged the universal application of a mandatory system for all former German and Turkish colonies.⁷ When conversation turned to Armenia, there was concern and uncertainty. British prime minister David Lloyd George affirmed that Armenia was one place that would do well with mandated status, since it had lost a large portion of its population—having been “massacred, outraged, and pillaged for a generation”—and would thus need guidance and protection. But Britain, France, and Italy were all reluctant to accept the responsibility of an Armenian mandate, arguing, in Lloyd George’s words, that “they were already overburdened with the mandates they were prepared to accept in Mesopotamia, Palestine, other parts of Anatolia, Syria, and Africa.”⁸

With the Europeans backing away from the Armenian mandatory, the United States emerged as the only country acceptable to all, given its wartime neutrality toward the Ottoman Empire. By 1919 Wilson seemed more inclined to act for Armenia than he had been previously, and realizing that a just settlement for Armenia would embody many of the ideals of self-determination and justice of his Fourteen Points, he appeared openly optimistic about an American mandate for Armenia. “I think there is a very promising beginning in regard to countries like Armenia,” he wrote.⁹

 

But the Paris Peace Conference did not go smoothly for Wilson and his team. As one of the Big Four—with French president Clemenceau, British prime minister Lloyd George, and Italian president Vittorio Orlando—Wilson struggled for months to forge agreements and compromises over the terms of the peace. When Wilson returned from Paris on July 8, he was exhausted both physically and mentally, but he was about to face his biggest challenge. When he presented the treaty—“one of the greatest documents in human history,” as he called it—to the Senate on July 10, with its provision for a League of Nations, he was met with opposition and, in some quarters, hostility. Henry Cabot Lodge, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—a fierce Republican isolationist, who had become a bitter enemy of Wilson and his League—led the opposition. In the weeks of hearings before the Foreign Relations Committee, Lodge and his colleagues dragged Wilson through a relentless process of compromises and amendments, and by the middle of August, Lodge was now hoping he could have the entire treaty defeated.¹⁰

Angry and physically frail, having suffered a stroke in mid-July, Wilson was still passionately committed to the treaty and his dream of making the world safer for democracy through a League of Nations. In late August he told his physician, Dr. Cary T. Grayson, that he was planning a grass-roots campaign and major tour of the West in order to bring the League of Nations and his vision of a new world order directly to the American people for their approval. “I cannot put my personal safety, my health in the balance against my duty,” he told Grayson. “I must go.”¹¹ Traveling in a private train from Washington on September 3 with his close advisers Joseph Tumulty and Dr. Grayson and his wife, Edith Galt Wilson, Wilson was weak and often trembling as the result of yet another stroke. In three weeks of September he made thirty-seven speeches to huge crowds often as large as thirty thousand, and almost always without a loudspeaker to help prevent the strain on his voice. From Kansas City to Salt Lake City, with speech after speech, he was paraded through the town or city and ran endless gauntlets of handshaking and crowd greeting.

On that Western trip Wilson addressed the issue of Armenia with the kind of moral fervor that defined his grass-roots campaign. In part he knew that the issue of an American mandate for Armenia might help to promote his treaty, because it had been a cause dear to the hearts of the nation for so long. To an overflowing, flag-waving crowd of more than fifteen thousand in Kansas City’s Convention Hall, Wilson appealed to America’s sense of responsibility to protect the Armenians, who, as he put it, had been exterminated from their homeland.¹² The treaty, Wilson told the crowd, would protect vulnerable people, and, citing the “example of Armenia,” Wilson exclaimed that they were “helpless, at the mercy of a Turkish government which thought it the service of God to destroy them.” In some way, consciously or unconsciously, Wilson may even have been acknowledging his own administration’s failure to act against Turkey during the war. “When I think of words piled upon words, of debate following debate, when these unspeakable things are happening in these pitiful parts of the world, I wonder that men do not wake up to the moral responsibility of what they are doing.”¹³

At the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, on September 23, Wilson, once again before a full house, raised the issue of America’s political responsibility to Armenia. He lambasted the Turkish government for its crimes against Armenia, which were now, he noted, compounded by Turkey’s denial of responsibility, as that government claimed “that it was unable to restrain the horrible massacres which have made that country a graveyard.” But Armenia, Wilson told his audience, would no longer suffer because it “is one of the regions that is to be under trust of the League of Nations. Armenia is to be redeemed,” the president stated, “so that at last this great people, struggling through night after night of terror, knowing not when they would see their land stained with blood, are now given a promise of safety, a promise of justice, a possibility that they may come out into a time when they can enjoy their rights as free people that they never dreamed they would be able to exercise.”¹⁴

Two days later, on September 25, after stirring speeches to huge crowds in Pueblo and Denver, Colorado, Wilson collapsed. At four o’clock in the morning, Dr. Grayson found him fully dressed, sitting in his drawing room car, in a stupor, the left side of his face sagging and the left side of his body paralyzed. He had had another stroke. When he noticed that it was Grayson in the car, he mumbled, “I am not in condition to go on…. I just feel as if I am going to pieces.” As he stared through the train window into the dark Colorado morning, tears rolled down his cheeks. Again he strained to speak, telling Grayson that he had to go on—otherwise Lodge would think him a quitter. Immediately Mrs. Wilson and Dr. Grayson canceled the rest of the president’s engagements and ordered the train back to Washington. Only days after his return, Wilson suffered another and more debilitating stroke, which further impaired his speech, so that by October 6, Dr. Grayson was forced to inform the cabinet that the president had suffered a “nervous breakdown.”¹⁵ For the remainder of his term, Wilson would have to fight his battles for the treaty, the League of Nations, and the mandate for Armenia in rapidly declining health.

While the campaign for Armenia was part of Wilson’s final struggle for his vision of international justice, the Armenian massacres had been a complex and unresolved issue for the president. He had been sympathetic to the plight of the Armenians from the time the massacres had been confirmed by Ambassador Morgenthau. As early as the fall of 1915, Colonel House suggested to him that the U.S. government make an official “protest over the Armenian massacres.”¹⁶ In December 1915 Wilson wrote to a former Princeton classmate, who was a missionary in Turkey, that “the situation with regard to the Armenians is indeed nothing less than appalling. You may be sure that we have been doing everything that is diplomatically possible to check the terrible business.”¹⁷ In the summer of 1916 Wilson had issued proclamations for Armenian and Syrian relief, and he had spoken out on Armenia during his reelection campaign that same year. But the deeper struggle over America’s commitment to Armenia was wrapped up in the thorny issue of America’s entry into World War I, and specifically Wilson’s quandary over whether to declare war on Turkey.¹⁸

The president had resisted entry into the European war with a strong stance of neutrality throughout the last half of his first term in office, but had found it increasingly difficult to defend his position as acts of German aggression began to encroach on his parameters of neutrality. The sinking of the Lusitania in April 1915, which took twelve hundred lives—a hundred of them American—and German violations of Wilson’s neutrality policies on the high seas, especially involving German submarines, continued to stir the bellicose forces at home. After the famous Zimmermann telegram was intercepted, revealing Germany’s hope of getting Mexico and Japan to join the war on the side of Germany, Wilson’s efforts to keep the United States neutral eroded, and he came to the difficult conclusion that war was inevitable. After Congress overwhelmingly declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in April 1917, the president faced the issue of war in the east.

Not only was Wilson reluctant to expand the war effort, but he found himself facing antiwar pressure—ironically, from American missionaries. As Alexis de Tocqueville once noted, when one meets a missionary one is often “surprised to meet a politician where you expected to find a priest.”¹⁹ Given the relatively young diplomatic relationship the United States had with the Ottoman Empire, the missionaries had accrued a good deal of political power in the course of their long involvement in the region. In 1915 the missionaries had more power than ever because of their personal friendships with President Wilson, which would put them in opposition to what might have been one way to help and perhaps save the Armenians.

Wilson’s moral idealism, rooted in his Christian faith, had brought the president and many leading missionary figures together as lifetime friends. At the center of the missionary influence surrounding Wilson was Cleveland Dodge, whose family was one of the primary benefactors of the missionary movement in the Ottoman Empire. His daughter Elizabeth was married to George H. Huntington, a professor at Robert College in Constantinople; his son Bayard was the son-in-law of Howard Bliss, the president of the Syrian Protestant College. By 1915 Cleveland Dodge had become the chief benefactor of the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities, and later a primary force behind Near East Relief.

Wilson was also good friends with other missionaries, such as his Princeton classmate William N. Chambers, who had been a key rescuer during the Adana massacres in 1909, and the writer and editor Albert Shaw, an influential member of Near East Relief. Even Colonel House was a friend of Dr. George Washburn, the son of the former president of Robert College.²⁰ Clearly the president’s world was tied in with missionary politics in an unprecedented way.

With more than two decades of American anger against the Turks for their treatment of the Armenians, public opinion favored war with the Ottoman Empire. As Walter Lippmann of the New Republic put it, Americans wouldn’t fight for other countries’ imperial interests, but “they will fight for justice, whether it is in Macedonia, or in Turkey.”²¹

On the other side of the fence, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) realized early on that war with Turkey would be disastrous for its interests. Although some of ABCFM’s property in Turkey had been confiscated and destroyed during the massacres, a formal declaration of war would mean the complete seizure of missionary properties and perhaps expulsion from the Ottoman Empire—in effect the destruction of nearly a century of their work. One missionary stationed in Mardin summed up the missionary perspective in a letter to James Barton; having to leave, he wrote, “would be out of the question…so long as America keeps her finger out of this muss, and from this stand point, on top of the Mardin mountain, we see no reason for America’s having anything to do with it [war].”²² Barton, who had been so instrumental in the Armenian relief movement of 1915, now became a powerful missionary voice against war with Turkey.²³

The missionaries also made the point—again not without self-interest involved—that if they were expelled from the Armenian provinces, there would be no humanitarian relief for the Armenians, and the Armenians would be totally annihilated. Realizing that the ABCFM was now in “danger of becoming the victim” of their own Armenian relief campaign, Barton went on a public relations campaign in the Western states to promote neutrality with Turkey. In short, he embraced what Theodore Roosevelt called the pure hypocrisy of keeping the United States out of war with Turkey, in part, to protect the missionary interests in the Ottoman Empire, especially their vast real estate holdings, which were then worth about $123 million.²⁴

Even Clarence Ussher, who only three years earlier had lost his wife and nearly his own life fighting to protect the Armenians during the siege of Van, declared that war against Turkey would make it impossible to continue the rescue of the “remnant of the Christian races of Turkey,” and would play into the hands of Germany, which desired, he believed, to see the United States at war with the Turks.²⁵ A professor at the Syrian Protestant College, Maynard Owen Williams, inflated the missionary stance further by asserting in an article in The Independent that the real enemies were the Germans and the best way to fight them was to keep the missionaries firmly entrenched in the Ottoman Empire, where they could be moral beacons in a land of chaos.²⁶

As the missionaries became increasingly defensive and self-interested, the quandary over war with Turkey took on increasing moral proportions. They had formidable opponents, including Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was also a member of Near East Relief. Wise believed that France, England, and the United States would be in a far better position to help the Jews and the Christians of the Ottoman Empire if the United States declared war on the Turks. Angry with Barton over the issue, Wise wrote, “I confess to you that I am greatly concerned about the Armenian problem,” fearing that without proper intervention in Turkey, “the entire liberation of Armenia” would not be possible.²⁷

Not yet the staunch isolationist he would become after the war, Henry Cabot Lodge agreed. The powerful Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had a lifelong dislike of the Ottoman Empire because of its violent, despotic system, endorsed war with Turkey as early as December 1917, believing that intervention could make a difference in the Armenian crisis.²⁸ Lodge called Turkey “a disgrace to the world, [which] has never been so bad as under the control of Germany,” and he went on, “I should not like to see the United States, when the time for peace comes, in the miserable attitude of being at peace with Turkey.” He referred to Turkey as “a plague spot” and “a breeder of wars,” and he insisted that the “massacres must not under any pretense be condoned nor her iniquities rewarded…. The Syrians and the Armenians must be made safe.”²⁹

No one, however, articulated his disgust with missionary hypocrisy more forcefully than former president Theodore Roosevelt, who had sounded off to Cleveland Dodge and his fellow missionaries in 1915 when the American Committee on Armenian Atrocities was first formed. Then he had lambasted the missionaries for being too passive about confronting the Armenian atrocities. He had berated Wilson’s “cowardly” neutrality and his refusal “to take effective action on behalf of Armenia.” Now, in 1918, he felt the pang of Wilson’s failure to declare war on Turkey with even greater rage.

In a letter to Cleveland Dodge in May 1918, more than a year after the United States entered the war, and only about six months before the Armistice, Roosevelt made what is perhaps his most eloquent summation of the failure of American policy toward Turkey in the wake of the Armenian Genocide. Disappointed with Cleve Dodge for putting the missionaries’ self-interest ahead of the call to duty, Roosevelt scolded his old friend: “In Turkey public opinion is nil and the people always obey any effective executive force, and obey nothing else.” Roosevelt rebutted Dodge’s contention that there were decent Turks who were not in favor of the massacres, asserting, “The perpetuation of Turkish rule is the perpetuation of infamy, and to perpetuate it on the theory that there are large numbers of Turks who have fine feelings but who never make those feelings in any way manifest, is an absurdity.” The missionary colleges must not be used “as props for the Turkish infamy,” Roosevelt insisted, or the good they had done in the past would become a mockery. The former president was then as blunt as ever:

Moreover, I feel that we are guilty of a peculiarly odious form of hypocrisy when we profess friendship for Armenia and the down-trodden races of Turkey, but don’t go to war with Turkey. To allow the Turks to massacre the [Armenians] and then solicit permission to help the survivors, and then to allege the fact that we are helping the survivors as a reason why we should not follow the only policy that will permanently put a stop to such massacres is both foolish and odious.

In concluding, Roosevelt noted that not going to war against Turkey was similar to America’s refusal to go to war with Germany and Austria—only worse because it condoned the crime against Armenia. “The Armenian massacre,” Roosevelt asserted, “was the greatest crime of the war, and failure to act against Turkey is to condone it; because the failure to deal radically with the Turkish horror means that all talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world is mischievous nonsense; and because when we now refuse to war with Turkey we show that our announcement that we meant ‘to make the world safe for democracy’ was insincere claptrap.”³⁰

The Armistice came, and the United States had remained neutral toward Turkey. The anger and disappointment about America’s failure to declare war on the Ottoman Empire was felt as keenly by the Armenian American community as it was by Roosevelt. They understood that Wilson’s failure to declare war on Turkey would limit U.S. power in settling peace with the Ottoman Empire after the war. Mihran Sivasly, a prominent Armenian American in Boston, spoke for other Armenian Americans when he underscored that declaring war on Turkey would have put the United States in a better position to assure that Armenia would be treated justly after the war. James Barton was particularly alarmed that “some of these people,” as he then referred to Armenian Americans, believed that because the missionaries opposed war with Turkey, they were defending Turkey.³¹ And yet, when asked by the editors of New Armenia to declare in their pages his position on the future of the Ottoman Empire after the war, and in particular the future of Armenia, Barton declined, fearing that such a statement would make him persona non grata in Turkey and “turn the Turkish officials against the missionaries.” Yet Barton confessed privately that “after the war the Turkish government should not rule over any part of Armenia, Syria or wherever Greek populations predominated,” and only under limited conditions should the Turks rule themselves.³² In the coming years Barton’s position on Armenia would continue to change with the political winds.

 

As Wilson was dealing with the Allies at the Peace Conference in Paris, an extraordinary movement for Armenian independence was evolving back home in the United States. The year 1919 was one of social violence and political turmoil in the United States. Inflation had risen 77 percent from the prewar years, and labor strife led steel workers, coal miners, and even the Boston police force into the streets on strike. A revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, which had gained a hundred thousand new members, led to the worst race riots in American history, and before the year was over, twenty-five race riots around the country had claimed hundreds of lives and resulted in millions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Labor strife and fear of Bolshevism fueled more nativist hysteria. What soon became known as the Red Scare escalated when some radicals and anarchists sent bombs through the mail, setting off a bomb in front of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The attorney general responded with a slew of arrests and raids nationwide. By the end of that year some six thousand Americans who were not even Communists were dragged into prisons, and Congress passed laws creating restrictive immigration quotas. In this xenophobic social climate, it may seem astonishing that the Armenian cause in the United States could evolve and reinvent itself with vigor.

In the fall of 1918 a distinguished group of Americans led the formation of the American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (ACIA). While powerful Americans had pioneered the Armenian National Relief Committee in 1896 and the Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief in 1915, they were primarily business elites, clergy, and missionary leaders. But in 1918 the ACIA was led by a group of politicians and high-ranking government officials, and, for the first time, several Armenian Americans. James W. Gerard, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, chaired the ACIA executive committee, which included Charles Evans Hughes (Republican candidate for president in 1916), Elihu Root, Henry Cabot Lodge, Charles W. Eliot, and Cleveland Dodge. The ACIA general committee boasted William Jennings Bryan, Charles J. Bonaparte, Rabbi Stephen Wise, Samuel Gompers, Oscar Straus, Lyman Abbott, and Alice Stone Blackwell, among other philanthropists, industrialists, and clergy. The governors of nineteen states were represented, among them Al Smith of New York and James Cox of Ohio, both of whom would be presidential candidates in the coming decade.

One Armenian American in particular was a catalyst for the ACIA. Vahan Cardashian, a talented and fiery attorney, born in Caseria (Kayseri), Turkey, in 1883, had come to the United States in 1902. Having graduated from Yale Law School in 1908, he married a wealthy New York socialite, Cornelia Holub, an activist in the women’s movement. Fluent in Turkish, Cardashian became an attorney for the Turkish embassy in Washington and for the Turkish consulate in New York City, and in 1913, as the Balkan Wars were being settled, he was hired by the Chester Group, an American business alliance that was eager to set up business in Turkey.³³

As an attorney in diplomatic circles, Cardashian met and corresponded with Theodore Roosevelt and former ambassadors Andrew White, Joseph Choate, and Horace Porter, as well as university presidents Nicholas Murray Butler and Charles W. Eliot. Behind the scenes, he networked for support for Armenia. When the news of the massacres broke in the American press, and he learned that his mother and sister had been killed by Turkish gendarmes, Cardashian was stunned and enraged. Storming into the office of the Turkish ambassador, he cursed the ambassador and quit. From then on, his work for Armenia took on a new tone.³⁴ In 1918, having left the Armenian National Union, an early activist and fund-raising organization (the other being the Armenian General Benevolent Union), he began working on the formation of ACIA and soon teamed up with James Gerard.

By December 1918, Henry Cabot Lodge had proposed a resolution in the Senate (Res. 378, December 19, 1918) calling for an independent Armenia that would stretch from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea—an idea embraced by many of the surviving Armenians in Turkey, who wished to see their full historic homelands returned to them.³⁵ As 1919 arrived, the ACIA and the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, which would soon become Near East Relief (affirmed by an act of Congress in 1919), were working hard together for the future of a new Armenia.

The two organizations planned their debut with a gala benefit. On February 8, 1919, a clear, cold breezy night in Manhattan, more than four hundred Americans filled the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. Social and political figures, writers, actors, scientists, clergy, educators, and other leading cultural figures turned out for Armenia. In a banquet room with huge American flags draping the walls, the cast of characters that night represented extraordinary solidarity by American elites with an American minority culture—an ethnic group that in 1919 had a population of a mere one hundred thousand. The turnout underscored the support Armenia had accrued in American popular culture over the past three decades.

The success of the evening had already been foreshadowed by the telegrams of acceptance that had been arriving throughout January. Thomas Edison telegrammed ACIA organizers Harutun Azadian and George Koolakian in Syracuse: THEY SERVE BUSINESS WITH ENTERPRISING DISTINCTION AND RESOURCE…. ACTS OF BARBARISM SHOULD BE CONDEMNED, and he asked to have his name put to any proclamation for THE DEMOCRATIC LIBERATION of Armenia. From Paris, Koolakian and Azadian received a telegram from President Wilson expressing zeal for the future of Armenia:

INDUSTRIOUS THE ARMENIANS HAVE DEMONSTRATED UNFAILING APTITUDE FOR FREEDOM AND DESERVE LONG WANTED DEMOCRACY MUCH IS PLANNED FOR FREE ARMENIA STABILITY IS NEEDED IN THE NEAR EAST INCLUDING ARMENIA IN OUR FOURTEEN POINTS WILL INSURE ACHIEVEMENT OF THIS IMPORTANT GOAL AN EXAMPLE FOR ALL PEOPLES WE NEED TO PUT TO REST FOREVER THE INJUSTICES AND SUFFERINGS OF YOUR NATION FOR ALL OF HUMANKIND LEST THEY BE REPEATED…I AM CONFIDENT THE AMERICAN DELEGATION WILL VOTE ON THIS RESOLUTION TOMORROW…CONGRATULATIONS…YOUR WORK IS WELL DONE

ADMIRABLY WOODROW WILSON

Roosevelt and Wilson now seemed to be sounding the same note, and from his Oyster Bay home at 7 P.M. on January 5, Theodore Roosevelt sent a telegram accepting his invitation to the gala:

ROOSEVELT FAMILY WILL ATTEND NUMBER UNCONFIRMED ONE OF THE EARLIEST NATIONS AND THE FIRST CHRISTIANS ARMENIA HAS BEEN A PROUD BULWARK OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION DEMONSTRATING LONG AGO HER INALIENABLE RIGHT TO DEMOCRATIC SELF GOVERNMENT HER AWAITED HOUR OF LIBERATION IS UPON US IT IS OUR REQUITED DUTY TO SEE THAT JUSTICE AND FREEDOM BE OPPORTUNED TO ALL WHO SEEK ITS HALLOWED GROUND NONE ARE MORE DESERVING THAN THE ARMENIANS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, SAGAMORE—³⁶

For Roosevelt, who was often a virulent Anglo-Saxon supremacist, the pull of Armenia as a “bulwark of Western civilization” was congruent with the way many Americans continued to think of Armenia—an educated, entrepreneurial Christian culture, shaped, in part, by a century of Protestant-American influence. In an age of American xenophobia, this appeared to be an anomaly.

Having sent the telegram, Roosevelt went to bed and never woke up, dying of a heart attack in his sleep. But it was fitting that one of the last things he wrote was his testimony about an issue that had aroused his anger since the era of the sultan’s massacres in the 1890s.

The gala at the Plaza on February 8 was a culmination of three decades of working for Armenia. The black-tie event drew the political elite: Joseph Tumulty, Wilson’s White House secretary, standing in for the president, who was in Paris; the powerful head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Henry Cabot Lodge; Charles Evans Hughes; William Jennings Bryan; Bernard Baruch, then Chairman of the U.S. War Industries Board; and Andrew W. Mellon. Table by table, uncanny groups of people were gathered. Notwithstanding Theodore Roosevelt’s death a month earlier, his daughters Alice Roosevelt Longworth and Ethel Roosevelt and his sister, Corrine Roosevelt Robinson, were there. Aurora Mardiganian was a featured guest; this Armenian massacre survivor’s account had been made into a film, Ravished Armenia, which had been screened the night before.

William Howard Taft, Warren G. Harding, Colonel House, and former attorney general Charles J. Bonaparte surrounded Edith Galt Wilson at another table. J. Pierpont Morgan, Calvin Coolidge, and U.S. Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels joined influential Armenian Americans Harutun and Akabi Azadian and George G. Koolakian. New York governor Al Smith joined Alice Stone Blackwell, Rabbi Stephen Wise, industrialist George Eastman, the feminist Lucia Ames Mead, and Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler. At other tables champagne glasses were clinked by Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, Adolph S. Ochs of the New York Times, Fiorello H. La Guardia, and Mrs. Thomas A. Edison.³⁷

The evening opened with the singing of the song Armenia, and then ACIA Executive Chair James W. Gerard, the toastmaster, paid tribute to the memories of Theodore Roosevelt and Julia Ward Howe for their support of the Armenian cause over the decades. William Jennings Bryan spoke about the new democracy he believed Armenia would be and the American ally it was natural to become. Charles Evans Hughes took the floor and spoke at length in praise of the Armenian people for their “industry, their intellectual achievement, their aptitude for education,” and the other familiar qualities that were now associated with the Armenians. “Now,” said Hughes—who had narrowly lost to Wilson in the 1916 election and would soon turn his back on Armenia for the sake of oil interests—“we rejoice that the hour of liberation has come.” The Armenians, he went on, have demonstrated “a capacity to survive incredible misfortunes”; “they have rare intelligence,” and “it would be unthinkable that Armenia should be left longer under Turkish control.”³⁸ The evening closed with a pageant depicting scenes from Armenia’s 2,500-year history, and then the singing of the Battle Hymn of the Republic—a fitting American anthem and a tribute to the woman who had stood up for Armenia a quarter century earlier.³⁹

But the gala had really begun the night before at the Plaza with the screening of a sensational silent film called Ravished Armenia. Mrs. Oliver Harriman and Mrs. George W. Vanderbilt, whose families had been big supporters of Near East Relief, hosted the evening. A passionate believer in the new age of cinema, Mrs. Harriman exhorted the crowd that the world must visualize what happened to Armenia, and “the screen” was the best “medium” to reach the millions of people who must be reached.⁴⁰

Ravished Armenia was based on the survivor account of an Armenian girl, Arshalois (meaning “morning light”) Mardigian, who in the United States had changed her name to Aurora Mardiganian. Aurora had arrived at Ellis Island in November 1917, a sixteen-year-old with one surviving brother, for whom she was searching in the United States. In New York City she was taken in by an Armenian family who placed ads in the papers to help her search. The advertisements caught the eye of several journalists at the New York Sun and the New York Tribune, who interviewed Aurora and published her story.

When Harvey Gates, a twenty-four-year-old screenwriter who would become know for If I Had a Million (1932), The Werewolf of London (1935), and The Courageous Dr. Christian (1939)—read about Aurora, he was both deeply moved and saw a unique opportunity.⁴¹ He and his wife, Eleanor, persuaded Nora Waln, Aurora’s guardian, that the girl should abandon her plans to work in a dress factory and pursue a career in the movies. They soon became Aurora’s legal guardians and transcribed her story, which was published as Ravished Armenia in the United States in 1918 (and as Auction of Souls in England in 1919). The book came with a preface and testimony by H. L. Gates, the president of Robert College in Constantinople, and Nora Waln, who verified the truth of Aurora’s story. While the book sold well, its more sensational venue would be the big screen.

Ravished Armenia was an epic story and a first in film history, bringing genocide to the screen. Aurora’s story begins in April 1915 in the city of Tchemesh-Gedzak (Chemeshgadzak), a town just north of the twin cities of Harput and Mezre in what Leslie Davis had recently called “the slaughterhouse province” of Harput. From her comfortable, affluent home (her father was a banker), Aurora is arrested and then abducted by Turkish gendarmes and thrust into a ghoulish world of massacre and violence. As she describes the death marches across Anatolia, Ravished Armenia depicts the story of what Ambassador Morgenthau had already called “the murder of a nation.”

Col. William N. Selig, a pioneering producer from the 1890s, bought the film rights to Aurora’s story, and Oscar Apfel, who had recently directed The Squaw Man with Cecil B. DeMille, was signed on as director. Irving Cummings and Anna Q. Nilsson, well-known movie actors of their day, were signed to leading roles.⁴² Just as President Wilson was heading to Paris for the Peace Conference, Gates was bringing Aurora Mardiganian to Los Angeles to act in her own story at $15 a week. “They said $15 was a lot of money,” and “I was naive,” Aurora said, looking back at her life. At the Selig studios in Santa Monica, Ravished Armenia was made in less than a month, with death march scenes filmed on the beach near Santa Monica and Mt. Baldy standing in for Mt. Ararat.

Aurora barely spoke English and knew nothing about the world of cinema. On the set, when she saw actors in red fezzes, she fell into terror. “I thought they were going to give me to the Turks to finish my life,” she said, breaking down in the middle of the scene. It took Eleanor Gates’s consoling and explanations to assure Aurora that the actors were not Turks but Americans playing their roles, and that they would not harm her.⁴³ Today we would call Aurora’s response post-traumatic shock.

Having experienced the deaths of her mother, father, brother, and sisters at the hands of the Turks, she was left alone to endure and witness torture, mass rapes, the crucifixion of women, the sale of women into slavery and harems, and the notorious “game of swords” in which girls and women were thrown by chetes and gendarmes from horses and impaled on swords that were set blade-up in the ground. As film critic Anthony Slide put it, no matter how hard both the book and the film tried to portray the violence Aurora experienced and witnessed, they were both “relatively sanitized versions of what [she] actually suffered and witnessed.”⁴⁴

When Aurora saw Apfel’s version of the Armenian women being crucified on large, well-constructed crosses with their long hair covering their nude bodies, she told the director, “The Turks didn’t make their crosses like that. The Turks made little pointed crosses. They took the clothes off the girls. They made them bend down. And after raping them, they made them sit on the pointed wood, through the vagina. That’s the way they killed—the Turks. Americans have made it a more civilized way. They can’t show such terrible things.” Aurora then told Apfel and the others how her pregnant aunt, who was trying to protect her two-year-old son, was killed. “The Turks, they took a knife and cut open her abdomen. They said, this is how we are going to end all you people. They pulled out a fetus from her. Put it on a stone. They took the end of the gun that they had, which was heavy, and started to pound and pound and pound her baby.”⁴⁵

Ravished Armenia opened to mostly positive reviews. “Nothing could be more affecting than this vivid picture of the greatest tragedy of the world,” wrote Hanford C. Judson in Moving Picture World, May 31, 1919. A critic in the Los Angeles Evening Express saw the film as transcending the more conventional Orientalisms of the time: “Now the producers have broken with tradition and in stage setting, costume, and action have reproduced not a conventional Arabian Nights slave market and harem scene, but have taken as their models these places as they actually exist today or did exist before the British entered Constantinople.” In Variety the editor Sime Silverman said the movie was “superbly produced” but should not be taken as “a truthful representation” of the Turks’ much more “fiendish and ghoulish torture” of the Armenians. Still, he wrote, “if Ravished Armenia in time may be given credit for the removal of Turkey from the map of the world, it will have helped in part to avenge Armenia and to have been of immeasurable benefit to civilization.” Other critics called the film “cheap sensationalism.”⁴⁶

Yet the film was controversial enough to be banned in Pennsylvania, until the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia interceded. The British Foreign Office tried to censor the twice-daily screenings of Auction of Souls, as the film was titled in the UK, at London’s Royal Albert Hall. Although the film was being sponsored by the newly created League of Nations, the Foreign Office was concerned that it would arouse anti-Turkish sentiment in England at a time when Great Britain was in peace negotiations with Turkey; the Foreign Office was also afraid that it might arouse anti-British sentiment throughout the Muslim world. Even though Scotland Yard threatened prosecution if the film was screened, protests from the League of Nations and intervention by the Home Office salvaged the show, but not without compromise. The screening was approved only under the condition that all references to Christians in the subtitles be removed, and that the scene of the Armenian women being crucified be deleted.

Although she was traumatized and exploited, underpaid by Gates and Selig, and forced to act with a broken ankle, the result of an accident on set, Aurora Mardiganian was introduced to the American public in Los Angeles in January 1919 as a kind of sensation, or perhaps an exotic freak. The film had catapulted her into strange stardom with a full-page color portrait on the cover of the January 12, 1919, issue of American Weekly. As her new American “mothers,” Mrs. Harriman and Mrs. Vanderbilt, paraded her around the country for screenings among the elite of American society, she found herself lonely and angry; and the more she was portrayed as the “Joan of Arc of Armenia,” the more morose she became. In the middle of May 1920, after grueling weeks of media appearances, Aurora broke down and threatened suicide. Gates, refusing to stop the show, sent her to a convent school and hired Aurora look-alikes. Later she sued Gates for the seven thousand dollars he owed her. Traumatized by the sexual violence she had endured on the death marches, she had nothing to do with men until she finally married an Armenian American in 1929 and moved to Los Angeles, where she lived until her death in 1994.⁴⁷

As Gates, Apfel, and Selig were making Ravished Armenia in November 1918, Henry Morgenthau’s memoir of his years as ambassador to Turkey was published by Doubleday and Doran. Compelled by the extraordinary episode of history he had just lived through, and aware that he was bearing witness to something, as psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton has put it, “for which there was as yet no name,” Morgenthau used terms such as “organized attempt to wipe out a whole nation,” “the murder of a nation,” and “the massacre of a nation.”⁴⁸ At the moment of the Armistice and in the weeks following, as President Wilson was preparing to leave for Paris, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story was met by wide critical acclaim.⁴⁹ Coming after the years of press coverage of the Armenian massacres and the humanitarian aid movement, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story brought to the American public a more coherent narrative of the massacres and a context in which to understand the Young Turk nationalism that made possible the extermination of the Armenians.

 

With the Armistice, the Committee on Armenian and Syrian Relief began a new era of activism and fund-raising to aid the Armenians. In addition to working with magazines and newspapers for coverage of the disaster that surrounded the Armenians, the Syrians, Greeks, and other Christians stranded in and on the fringes of the now-defeated Ottoman Empire, the committee began a poster campaign to spread the news to Americans with compelling images and catchy slogans. The focus was on relief to the orphans and refugees all over the Near East, and the phrase “starving Armenians” came into the popular culture with a new force. Posters were plastered in storefront windows, in subway cars and streetcars, and on highway billboards around the country. The American Railways Express went so far as to donate poster space on all of its trains, as did nearly all the streetcar systems around the nation.⁵⁰ The posters appealed to Americans to send money to the orphans and refugees of the Armenian Genocide and to the other uprooted and devastated Christians of the Ottoman Empire. The posters featured dramatic images with slogans such as: “Hunger Knows No Armistice,” “Has This Little Girl a Home in Your Heart?” “They Shall Not Perish.”

Like Mrs. Harriman and the ACIA, the Near East Relief organization also realized the power of cinema. They commissioned documentary footage of the orphanages and the relief work in progress, and showed them in schools, churches, and movie houses around the country. The aftermath of genocide came in newsreels titled “Alice in Hungerland,” “Stand by Them a Little Longer,” “Uncle America’s Golden Rule Children.” On the Sunday before Wilson left for the Paris Peace Conference, “Four Minute” speeches, as they were called—short exhortations about the crisis of the starving Christians in the Near East—were given by seventy-five thousand speakers to Sunday schools across the nation.⁵¹

In the midst of the outpouring for Armenia in February 1919, a voice from Germany also reached out to President Wilson. The indefatigable Armin T. Wegner, who had smuggled out eyewitness photographs of the Genocide and published a collection of his letters from Turkey in Berlin (The Way of No Return: A Martyrdom in Letters) now addressed Woodrow Wilson in an open letter published in Tageblatt in Berlin. As one of the few European “eyewitnesses of the dreadful destruction of the Armenian people,” Wegner wrote, “I appeal to you” for a just settlement for an independent Armenia. “No people in the world,” Wegner went on, “has suffered such wrongs as the Armenian Nation…. The Armenian Question,” he exclaimed, “is a question…for the whole human race.” Wegner told Wilson that he was writing to him as “a German,” from a nation that was Turkey’s ally, and he begged Wilson not to allow Armenia to be ignored or betrayed once again by European “selfishness” and “neglect,” as it had been at the time of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. As an international peace advocate, however, Wegner underscored that he was not making an “accusation against Islam,” as “the spirit of every great religion is noble.”

The Armenians, he reminded Wilson, were “a highly civilized nation with a great and glorious past, which has made unforgettable contributions to art, literature, and science,” and had suffered as no nation had. “It would be an irremediable mistake,” he wrote, “if the Armenian districts of Russia were not joined with the Armenian provinces of Anatolia and Cilicia to form one common country entirely liberated from Turkish rule.”⁵² The letter came at a moment when hope for Armenia was in the air.*

By the winter of 1919 Wilson’s stance on Armenia was more affirmative than it had been during the war, when the missionaries helped sway him from declaring war on Turkey. Having made public proclamations for Armenia and its independence, Wilson now found himself facing a hostile political climate in Washington. In Europe, Great Britain, France, and Italy were moving slowly on a settlement for Armenia, but in eastern Turkey and Transcaucasia, an emerging Republic of Armenia faced new disasters.