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Chapter 17
SPECTATORS OF CATASTROPHE
“HISTORY,” WROTE THE NOVELIST PHILIP ROTH, IS “WHERE everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable.” Few observers in the summer of 1914 anticipated that Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia would spark an ineluctable chain reaction in which Russia dashed to Serbia’s defense and Germany ran to Austria’s, or that France would rally to its Russian allies while Britain sided with the French. Fewer still predicted that Turkey would fail in its efforts to stay clear of the fracas and be driven into an alliance with Germany and Austro-Hungary—the Central Powers—against the Triple Entente of Russia, Britain, and France. The shockingly unexpected, however, happened. World War I, the cataclysm that would last four unspeakable years, bring about the fall of empires and irrevocably transform the Middle East, had started. “The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides,” Roth concluded, “turning a disaster into an epic.”
Americans watched this inadvertent slide into war with a rapt, but ultimately detached, fascination. They, too, had been surprised by the unforeseen chain of events leading to catastrophe, but, in contrast to the Europeans and the Turks, Americans bore none of the consequences for their shortsightedness. Evoking America’s traditional disdain for foreign entanglements, President Woodrow Wilson vowed to maintain absolute neutrality between the combatants and to preserve proper, if not cordial, relations with each.
Maintaining amicability with Turkey would prove complicated, however, because ties between the United States and the Porte had long been frayed. The perennial source of friction was the oppression of Armenian Christians. Though a band of modernizing Young Turks, many of them graduates of Roberts College, had achieved power in Istanbul in 1908 and promised equal rights for all of the empire’s citizens, barely a year passed before the slaughter of Armenians resumed. Some thirty thousand of them were butchered by Turkish troops in south-central Anatolia. “The only difference between Young and Old Turks is that the Young Turks are more energetic and thorough in their massacring,” Helen Davenport Gibbons, the wife of the New York Herald correspondent in Tarsus, commented. Soon even the semblance of republican rule in Turkey collapsed and in 1911 the government was seized by a military junta. The United States responded with abhorrence to these events and, to register its protest, sent the battleships Montana and North Carolina to demonstrate near the Turkish coast. 1
Outrage over the Armenian massacres might have caused a rupture in America’s relations with Turkey but for the substantive rise in Turco-American trade. Economic cooperation between the United States and the Ottoman Empire had expanded vigorously since the turn of the century and by 1914 America accounted for 23 percent of all Turkish exports. Along with tobacco, figs, and licorice (some fifty thousand tons of it annually, for use in making candy and chewing gum), Americans were procuring a new Middle Eastern commodity: oil. Though the United States remained a major producer of petroleum—and an exporter of its derivatives to the Middle East—domestic wells could no longer satisfy the fuel demands of American industry, automobile owners, and the military. Acting on evidence of sizable Middle Eastern deposits, the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey started prospecting in Mesopotamia in 1910. Three years later, Standard of New York acquired rights to drill in Syria, Palestine, and parts of Asia Minor. Infrastructure for the oil rigs had already been constructed and drilling had begun when the global conflagration erupted.
Oil eventually became an obsession in America’s policymaking toward the Middle East, but on the eve of World War I the country’s principal interest in the region remained philanthropic. The number of American missionary institutions had multiplied prodigiously throughout the prewar period and now included world-class hospitals and colleges and well over four hundred schools. These establishments were deeply integrated into Ottoman society, serving not only local Christian populations but also the Turkish elite. “I am much gratified to learn of arrangements made for education of the [Turkish] war minister’s brother and sons at Robert College,” wrote Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to his ambassador in Istanbul in October 1914. “It is an excellent sign.” By receiving an American education, Bryan hoped, Turks might also learn to tolerate Armenians and other Middle Eastern minorities and restore their country to its former democratic course.2
The outbreak of war, however, only strengthened the military’s primacy in Istanbul and threatened the safety of American institutions. The Wilson administration, acting “in the interest of humanity and from no political consideration,” accordingly urged Turkey to declare its neutrality in the conflict. The Turks, American diplomats warned, were no match for the Allies, who dominated the Mediterranean and could swiftly capture its coastal cities, from Smyrna to Jaffa. But this advice went unheeded. No sooner had Turkey enlisted in the Central Powers than it initiated a campaign to expel all French and British citizens from the empire. The capitulations that for centuries provided extraterritorial privileges to Westerners in the Ottoman Empire were rescinded and English was outlawed as an “enemy language.” Already precarious, the situation of Americans in the Middle East grew imperiled when the Turkish government proclaimed a holy war—jihad—against all Allied Christians.3
Panicked by the specter of frenzied Muslim pogroms, the missionaries implored Washington for help. The Syrian Protestant College president Daniel Bliss impressed on Secretary of State Bryan the “grave immediate necessity for the protection of American life and property” and urged him to send American warships to Beirut and Smyrna at once. Similar appeals came from Jaffa and from Jerusalem, which reported a mass seizure of supplies by Turkish troops and a “reign of military terrorism.” In reply, Wilson dispatched the USS North Carolina and the Tennessee to deliver vital foodstuffs and money to the missionaries. America’s fears were then heightened when Turkish shells, fired from Smyrna, whistled over the Tennessee’s prow. On December 12, Wilson approved a measure advising all Americans to leave the Middle East “wherever…it would be unsafe for them to remain.”
Friction, meanwhile, intensified on the diplomatic level, in progressively acrimonious exchanges between the two governments. “Should organized massacres occur, the Turkish government would lose the good opinion of the United States,” Washington cautioned, and further warned that “any loss of life or property of missionaries” would elicit a stern American response. Djemal Pasha, the notorious military governor of Syria, in turn swore, “For each Mussulman killed by the bombardment of an open town we will shoot three British or French subjects,” and disavowed responsibility “if the bombardment…provokes a massacre of the Christians.” The American press replied with furious attacks against Turkey and calls for an Anglo-French takeover of the Middle East. In a volcanic letter to the Washington Star, Ambassador Ahmet Rustem Bey accused the United States of hypocrisy for condemning Turkey while condoning the Russians, “who gave the world not one but twenty pogroms against an innocent [Jewish] race,” the French, “who smoke to death in caverns the Algerians fighting for independence,” and the British, “whose punishment of the ‘rebels’ in the Indian mutiny was to blow them off with guns.” Rustem also reminded Americans of the “daily” lynching of blacks in their own country and the torture of Filipino insurgents. Rustem was consequently declared persona non grata and forced to leave the country.
Turco-American relations were close to rupturing in the fall of 1914, when suddenly and markedly they improved. Afraid to alienate an important noncombatant Western state, senior officials in Istanbul insisted that they “never doubted America’s sincere friendship for Turkey” and that the United States remained “the only great power with no ulterior motive toward them.” They reaffirmed the privileged status of American businessmen and apologized for any unpleasantness toward the missionaries. Though English was still outlawed, citizens of the United States were henceforth permitted to correspond in the “American” language. Washington, for its part, canceled plans for evacuating the Middle East and instead offered to send thirteen mobile Red Cross hospitals to care for Turkey’s sick and wounded. The forty-eight U.S. consuls serving in Turkey stayed in their posts, as did the Turkish representatives stationed in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, and New York. As the year ended and the Allies prepared to launch their mass landing on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula—a fiasco that would cost them a quarter of a million dead and prolong the Middle Eastern fighting for years—Americans seemed content to remain on the sidelines, uninvolved.4
Americans could not remain detached, however, indefinitely. War-stirred turmoil in the Middle East would soon engulf the United States and compel it to act on a multiplicity of levels—diplomatic, humanitarian, and even military. Religious and strategic considerations would once again vie for dominance in the making of America’s policies toward the region, while popular illusions about the Middle East, obscured by massacres and famine, would vanish.
The Most Horrible Crime in Human History
The first reports, from December 1914, told of anti-Christian pogroms in Bitlis, in eastern Turkey, and the hanging of hundreds of Armenians in the streets of Erzerum. Armenian men between the ages of twenty and sixty were being conscripted into forced-labor battalions, building roads, and hauling supplies for the Turkish army. The following month, after their defeat by Russian forces in the Caucasus, Turkish troops salved their humiliation by pillaging Armenian towns and executing their Armenian laborers. In the early spring, Turkish soldiers laid siege to the Armenian city of Van, in eastern Anatolia, and began the first of innumerable mass deportations. The slaughter then raged westward to Istanbul, where, on April 24, security forces arrested and hanged some 250 Armenian leaders and torched Armenian neighborhoods. Interior Minister Talaat Pasha informed the Armenian patriach that “there was no room for Christians in Turkey” and advised him and his parishioners “to clear out of the country.”5
The threat was anything but empty, as confirmed by eyewitness American accounts. “The Mohammedans in their fanaticism seemed determined not only to exterminate the Christian population but to remove all traces of their religion and…civilization,” attested Leslie Davis, a Cornell-educated consul in Harput, eastern Anatolia, early in 1915. Davis’s counterpart in Aleppo, Syria, Jesse B. Jackson, described a seemingly endless procession of railway cars crammed with Armenian deportees and estimated that no more than 15 percent were liable to survive the journey. Another American witness of these trains, Anna Harlowe Birge, remembered seeing “old men and old women, young mothers with tiny babies…and children, all huddled together like so many sheep or pigs—human beings treated worse than cattle.” In Urmia, the Presbyterian missionary William Shedd described the execution of 800 villagers, mostly old people and young women, by the governor, Jevdet Bey, who purportedly delighted in nailing horseshoes to his victims’ feet. The third-generation missionary Henry Riggs cataloged the tortures—“beating and starvation, extraction of teeth, branding with hot irons, stabbing in the face with sharp irons, burning of hair and beard”—to which the Armenians of southwestern Turkey were subjected. Reporting from the Caucasus, Dr. Richard Hill saw “children…dying by the hundreds” whose “frenzied mothers would…fling them…into the fields, so as not to see the[ir] dying agonies.”
Turkey’s leaders at the time insisted—and their present-day successors still do—that the suffering of Armenians was a by-product of the brutality that prevailed along all First World War fronts. They also claim that the Armenians were actively sympathetic to the Allies and collaborated with the invading Russians. The bulk of the massacres in fact occurred nowhere near the fighting, while the overwhelming majority of Armenians remained loyal to the Turkish state. Most contemporary observers agree that the massacres were scarcely connected to the war, but rather represented a systematically planned and executed program to eliminate an entire people. Indeed, foreshadowing the Nazi genocide of the Jews twenty-five years later, Turkish soldiers herded entire Armenian villages into freezing rivers, incinerated them in burning churches, or simply marched them into the deserts and abandoned them to die of thirst. “The Government…has decided to destroy completely all the indicated [Armenian] persons living in Turkey,” Talaat Pasha wrote in a September 1915 dispatch. “An end must be put to their existence…and no regard must be paid to either age or sex, or to conscientious scruples.” By the end of summer, an estimated 800,000 Armenians had been killed and countless others forcibly converted to Islam.6
In contrast to earlier atrocities committed in Ottoman lands, the details of which had been slow in emerging, information about the ethnic cleansing of Armenians was now relayed by telegraph and telephone lines and rapidly reached the West. Descriptions of Turkish brutality, together with photographs of its victims, were published widely. Compelled by these revelations, Britain, France, and Russia released a joint statement on May 24 pledging to hold Turkish leaders, as well as their collaborators, “personally responsible for such massacres.” But with their forces bogged down in static warfare and their citizens banished from the Middle East, the Allies were powerless to intervene either militarily or philanthropically. Not even an appeal from Pope Benedict XV, sent directly to Sultan Muhammad V, managed to evoke mercy for the Armenians.
Among the few Westerners still capable of responding to the catastrophe were the Americans who had long been ministering to Armenia. In Harput, the missionary couple Tack and Henry Akinson emulated earlier American abolitionists by running an underground railway that smuggled Armenians into Kurdistan. At the same time, in Van, Dr. Clarence and Elizabeth Ussher and the nurses Grisell McLareen and Myrtle O. Shane worked indefatigably to care for the hundreds of gravely wounded and disease-stricken patients who overwhelmed their clinics and for the many Armenians who fled, “weary, starving, wailing like lost and hungry children,” into Russia. Elizabeth Ussher died of typhus and her husband nearly succumbed to the epidemic as well. He managed to send off a desperate message to the State Department warning that “American lives [were] in danger” and urging immediate action by the United States.
The United States, however, had no intention of interposing between Turks and Armenians. Though the American press gave front-page coverage to the massacres—“State Department Shows Quarter of a Million Women Violated,” a typical headline exclaimed—and while anti-Turkish rallies were staged in New York, the government reacted guardedly to the massacres. The Wilson administration assumed that overt criticism of Turkey was liable to provoke reprisals against American citizens and establishments throughout the Middle East, destroying a century of determined work. There was also the fear that the public, agitated by reports of atrocities, might press for a more active American role in the war. Secretary of State Bryan quietly asked the German government to help protect “non-combatants [and] non-Moslem foreigners” from “an outburst of fanaticism among the Moslems,” but refrained from protesting formally to the Porte.7
The danger of being dragged into the war indirectly, through the rear door of the Middle East, now had to be weighed against the moral hazards of passively witnessing genocide. The value of American missionary schools and clinics had to be compared with that of the lives of the very people those institutions aspired to benefit.
An Evangelist of Americanism
One American, Henry Morgenthau, was determined to try to reconcile those interests and to resolve the conflicts in his country’s policies toward the Middle East. His qualifications for doing so were far from exceptional, though. He had no diplomatic experience and had never worked in the region. His religion, moreover, put him at a marked disadvantage in dealing not only with Muslim rulers but also with many officials in the United States. Yet no adversity had ever proven insurmountable to Morgenthau, a German-born Jew who, at age twelve in 1870, immigrated to New York with his parents and eleven siblings, not knowing a word of English.
Two years later, however, Morgenthau entered New York’s City College and swiftly went on to graduate from Columbia Law. A meteoric success as an attorney and businessman, he became a leader of New York’s Reform Jewish community and an unsparing benefactor of the Democratic Party. By middle age, affecting a clipped white beard and silver pince-nez, Morgenthau had acquired a patriarchal look and was fond of citing the Bible. He was especially enamored of the prophets, with their emphasis on charity and social justice, and of the Quaker principles of moderation, fairness, and hard work. Morgenthau claimed that “conscience” rather than “pride” animated his actions and that his “true religion was to serve democracy.”
An early supporter of Wilson, Morgenthau assumed he would be named to a cabinet-level position after the Democratic victory in 1912, but the president-elect had other plans for him. Like the prominent American Jews Oscar Straus and Solomon Hirsch before him, Morgenthau was to be posted as America’s ambassador to Turkey. Unlike his predecessors, however, who were deeply flattered by their appointments, the assumption that Jews represented a natural bridge between Muslim Turks and Christian Americans merely rankled Morgenthau. “Would prominent Methodists or Baptists be told there is a ‘Position’ [for them], go find one of your faith to fill it?” Wilson, in reply, assured Morgenthau that Istanbul “was the point at which the interest of American Jews in the welfare of the Jews of Palestine is focused, and it is almost indispensable that I have a Jew at that post.”8 Though no Zionist himself, Morgenthau cared fervidly about the plight of his coreligionists and, eager to please his president, he accepted.
Replicating the experience of so many American envoys to the Middle East, Morgenthau at first found the Ottoman capital “dazzling” and “decadent,” a scene out of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights. “This is undoubtedly going to prove an intensely interesting experience for me,” he wrote. A year, however, sufficed to leave him disillusioned with the political machinations of the Turks and their addiction to “intrigue, intimidation, and assassination.” But just as his image of Turkey had changed, so had his preconception of the American evangelists working in the Middle East. “I had hitherto had a hazy notion that missionaries were sort of over-zealous advance agents of sectarian religion,” he recalled. “They were, I discovered, in reality advance agents of civilization,” the exemplars of “the American spirit at its best.” The ambassador was soon surprised to find himself acting as the missionaries’ representative to the Porte, helping to spread their “gospel of Americanism.” The Armenians, too, changed in Morgenthau’s eyes, from a “few rug merchants” he had known in New York, to a people very much like the Jews, unshakably committed to their religion and infused with cultural pride.
Turkish officials, American missionaries, and Armenians together formed the complex and deadly triangle around which Morgenthau would have to maneuver. “Here was I, a Jew, representing the greatest Christian nation of the world at the capital of the chief Mohammedan nation…which was soon, because of its strategic position, to become one of the…centres of world diplomacy. Here was a worn-out empire, which in its death agony clutched other peoples…within its fatal embrace.”9 Meeting such challenges would have proved inestimably difficult for Morgenthau even under peaceful circumstances. Once war broke out and as the evidence of butchery mounted, the task became gargantuan.
Daily at first and then almost hourly, the reports reached Morgenthau’s desk. Consul Davis informed him of the closing of missionary schools in Harput and Jackson described a “gigantic plundering scheme” against the Armenian population of Aleppo. Consuls Oscar Heizer in Trebizond and W. Peter in Samsun told of mass deportations, of shootings, and of barges departing for the nearby Black Sea packed with Armenians but returning empty. Lewis Einstein, an American Jewish diplomat attached to the Istanbul embassy, saw a Turkish woman borrow an officer’s pistol and, for sport, shoot a passing Armenian refugee in the head. Many more accounts of atrocities were deleted by the Turkish censor and Talaat dismissed the rest as mere rumors or isolated cases of “mob violence.” German officials alternately denied that any massacres were occurring and absolved themselves of any responsibility for them. By July, however, the flood of dispatches from the field and the stream of Armenian survivors who staggered into his office persuaded Morgenthau that the Turkish government had embarked on a deliberate policy of “race extermination.” Writing to the new secretary of state, Robert Lansing, Morgenthau listed the “terrible tortures, whole-sale expulsions and deportations,” and “frequent instances of rape, pillage, and…massacre,” designed to eradicate the Armenian people. “Untold misery, disease, starvation, and loss of life will go on unchecked,” he warned, unless America interceded.10
Washington reacted to Morgenthau’s cable with alarm, but little else. Though Wilson reportedly told a missionary friend, “You may be sure that we have been doing everything that is diplomatically possible to check the terrible business,” America’s policy remained one of noninterference. Lansing, severe and unimaginative, even expressed sympathy for the Turks’ wartime concerns and distaste for the Armenians’ “well-known disloyalty to the Ottoman Government.” At most, the administration was willing to inform the Porte that the atrocities had “aroused strong sentiment among the American people” and that their continuation would “tend to jeopardize the good feeling…of the United States toward…Turkey.” The statement failed to convey the moral gravity that Morgenthau needed. “Nothing short of actual force…would adequately meet the situation,” he concluded, and determined to act on his own.
“Our people will never forget these massacres,” Morgenthau now admonished Talaat. “You are defying all ideas of justice as we understand the term in our country.” But the interior minister scarcely reacted. He no longer attempted to conceal the indiscriminate murder of Armenians or even his delight at its pace. “I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than [Sultan] Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!” Talaat questioned Morgenthau why he, a Jew, would worry about the treatment of Christians. Morgenthau explained that he was acting “not…as a Jew but as the American Ambassador, not…in the name of any race or religion but merely as human being.” But Talaat was less interested in Morgenthau’s motives than in the American insurance policies that many Armenians allegedly held. “They are all dead now,” the minister maintained, “and the Government is the beneficiary.”11
Such cold-bloodedness brought Morgenthau to the verge of eruption. “It is difficult to restrain myself,” he wrote. Still, as the representative of a friendly country, forbidden to interfere in the affairs of a sovereign state, his venues for expressing that rage were few. At best, he could try to alleviate the Armenians’ plight by soliciting the help of James Barton, secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and of the philanthropist Cleveland H. Dodge. Morgenthau proposed to create a massive fund for purchasing food, clothing, and temporary shelter for those who managed to survive the massacres. Both Barton and Dodge responded enthusiastically and recruited their influential acquaintances to form the Committee on Armenian Atrocities. Its board brought together the Episcopal bishop David H. Greer with the Jewish leaders Oscar Straus and Isaac Seligman and placed the American Zionist leader Rabbi Stephen Wise beside Charles Crane, a champion of Arab nationalism. In response to their country’s political impotence, Americans rallied with unprecedented ecumenicalism and unparalleled largesse. The organization, later incorporated by Congress as Near East Relief, would ultimately raise $100 million, the equivalent of $1 billion today.
And yet Morgenthau did not stop at merely raising money. Through his friendship with the New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, he ensured that the massacres continued to receive prominent coverage—145 articles in 1915 alone. He also offered one million dollars of his own money to resettle over 500,000 of the refugees in the American West. “The United States might be the Moses to lead the Armenian people out of bondage,” Morgenthau, perhaps recalling his own immigrant experience, surmised. “They are a clean, industrious, intelligent race, the best class for immigrants, farmers and laborers.” Turkey, though, and not the United States, ultimately vetoed the plan.12
The eradication of Armenians, meanwhile, accelerated. A pogrom of Turkish peasants in Marsovan devastated the American college and girls’ school; many of the one thousand pupils were placed before ditches and shot. “One group of our college boys asked permission to sing before they died and they sang ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee,’ then they were struck down,” recounted the Reverend George E. White, the school’s Iowa-born president. With the flair acquired in his former profession as a journalist, Leslie Davis described the road to Lake Göeljük, a source of the Tigris, lined with “arms or legs or even the heads sticking out the ground. Most of them had been partially eaten by dogs.” Visible beneath the water’s surface, he noticed, were “hundreds of bodies and many bones,” and strewn on the shores, an estimated ten thousand corpses. To conserve ammunition, the Turks were increasingly resorting to bayonets, swords, and pickaxes to eliminate their victims. Survivors recalled seeing rows of young women nailed naked to crosses and others dismembered for sport. “Women [who] escaped came back to beg at our doors,” recalled Myrtle Shane in Bitlis, “fingers off, hands off, faces and bodies mutilated.”13
The inescapability of these nightmarish scenes often became too much for their observers to bear. Walter M. Geddes, a licorice-purchasing agent for a New York confection firm, was in Aleppo for business and saw thousands of Armenian deportees die of exposure and starvation. He returned to Smyrna, filed a statement on his experience, and shot himself in the head. An American missionary named F. H. Leslie, who doubled as the consul for the southeastern city of Urfa, became physically and mentally debilitated by his futile efforts to save Armenian children and women. Arrested for attempting to help the refugees and tortured, Leslie committed suicide in prison.
For Morgenthau, too, the anguish was becoming insufferable. Turkish officials bragged to him of the new methods of torture they devised for the Armenians, some of them culled from records of the Spanish Inquisition. Enver Pasha claimed that American aid was only encouraging the Armenians to revolt and he strove to stem the flow of contributions. “The whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this,” the exasperated ambassador wrote. The once alluring Turkey had become “a place of horror” for him. “I had reached the end of my resources,” he conceded. “I found intolerable my further daily association with men, however gracious and accommodating…who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings.” Sickened and worn out by his twenty-six months of struggling, Henry Morgenthau resigned.14
The massacres continued, unabated. Abram Elkus, another Jewish lawyer from New York who replaced Morgenthau as ambassador, informed the State Department that the Turks were pursuing an “unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history.” In all, as many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in a genocide that the Turkish government would never acknowledge, much less regret. But Elkus also had other catastrophes to monitor, including the mounting Turkish attacks against the Greek population of Smyrna and western Anatolia and the displacement of Arabs from border lands. “Turkish authorities appear to be pursuing [a] policy of Turkifying Syria and adjacent Arabic-speaking countries,” one State Department memorandum asserted, and estimated that 250,000 Arab families were slated to be removed and supplanted by Turks.
If such atrocities were not sufficiently horrifying, a famine of biblical dimensions struck the Middle East. An estimated 200,000 people perished in Istanbul alone and several times that number in the provinces from Egypt to Syria. “The air was filled with the sound of bells tolling for funerals and children crying for a crust to eat,” wrote Cleveland Dodge’s son, Bayard, the president of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. American philanthropists again mobilized to address the disaster and procured the use of the USS Des Moines and Caesar to deliver emergency supplies—another example of power in the service of faith. For hundreds of thousands of civilians, the arrival of these ships represented the difference between survival and almost inescapable death from starvation and disease. “The whole country was literally living on expectation,” Margaret McGilvary, a young volunteer with the American Mission Press in Lebanon, recounted, adding, “In Syria we were fighting our share in the World-War just as truly as were our compatriots on the Western Front.” Turkey, however, continued to deny the existence of any human emergency in its empire and often blocked elivery of the supplies. An American consular report confirmed, “In spite of the best efforts of the [American relief] committees, the number dying…is being augmented with terrible rapidity.”15
For all their attempts to detach themselves from the conflict and its consequences, Americans had been caught up in the worst waves of bloodshed ever to ravage the Middle East, witnessing acts of inhumanity that, even by Great War standards, were appalling. The enormity of those horrors was to some degree diminished by the unflagging efforts of relief workers and missionaries, but the ability of Americans to alleviate Middle Eastern suffering would remain limited as long as the United States stayed aloof from the war.