The trickle of 2.000 Armenian immigrants into U.S. before 1895 had become a gush of 20.000 by 1914.

 P.40: (In 1914 there were some thirty thousand, mostly Armenian and Arab Americans). Turkish Government protested that these people took unfair advantage of their adoptive citizenship. Partly to serve such people, but more because of mission pressure, United States consuls come to reside at Halab, Iskenderun, Bagdad, Beirut, Erzurum, Harput, Jerusalem, Mersin, Sivas, Smyrna and Trabzon. Occasionally missionaries influenced the choice of a council or vice-council or took the latter office themselves. - At no time did the Protestants from America became agents of the State Department, even though other Western missionaries in Turkey sometimes used capitulatory rights to advance their nations’ imperial interests. – Discomfort for missionaries intensified when in the 1880s Sultan Abdul Hamid the Second harassed their schools, occasionally closing them. Often French and Russian agents encouraged measures against American learning centers, because these agents told Ottoman officials the centers had political object.

P.41 : In exasperation, the American Board in 1885 asked the President use the U.S. Navy to help protect missions in the Empire. Only joint American-British complaints prevented disruption of schools. Fearing an insurrection among Christian minorities, Ottoman leaders became neurotic about American colleges which had an Armenian clientele. – The student body of Anatolia College in 1893 included ninety-four Armenians, twenty-three Greeks and three Turks. Among the teachers Turks claimed there were two members of an Armenian revolutionary organization who had posted at the school treasonable placards printed on a college duplicator. – Turks charged the two Anatolia teachers with treason and condemned them to death; officials also arrested and executed several Merzifon Armenians. Pardoned and exiled because of pleas by British and American diplomats, the two Anatolia College teachers symbolized the growing import of missionaries in Ottoman-American relations. The U.S. Government asked for indemnities from the Porte for mission losses by fire in 1892 and 1893. The Sultan paid $ 2,200 for damage at Anatolia college. Then came terror for the Armenians. Frustrated by small revolutionary Armenian groups, Abdul Hamid promised booty to nomadic Kurds who would pillage Armenians. The Sultan in autumn 1894 also ordered Turkish soldiers to murder Armenians at Sassun West of Lake Van. – About 10 % of the casualties were Protestants.

P.42: The terror of 1895 and 1896 spurred thousands of Armenians to emigrate to the U.S. where they later helped their government to take an active interest in the diplomacy dismembering the Ottoman Empire. The trickle of 2.000 Armenian immigrants into U.S. before 1895 had become a gush of 20.000 by 1914. The Protestant Armenian church in Harput in 1 year alone lost 25% of its 3.000 constituents as immigrants.

"Turkey has been the object of systematic attacks on the part of the press of [the] U.S. She is represented as being a sink of iniquity."
(Ahmet Rustem, Ottoman ambassador to Washington)

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Bully boy Teddy

   In addition to the Hay-Washburn relation, there was another mission tie with an American official which after the events of the 1890s assisted missionary interests. This association had begun as a boyhood friendship between Howard Bliss of the Syrian Protestant College and Theodore Roosevelt. A bombastic who deplored the Armenian massacres, Roosevelt declared in 1909: "Spain and Turkey are the two powers I would rather smash than any in the world."

P.46: During the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and 1912 the White House toyed with an offer of mediation, partly because the American Board and several U.S. peace societies asked for this step. The President abstained. –
One writer has summarized relations between Washington and Constantinople: "It should not be understood that the missionaries exploited American diplomacy or that American diplomacy exploited the missionaries."

P.47: … and despoiling of American Board compounds showed a mission relation to nationalism among minorities in the Near East. Protestant organizations were among private groups in the Ottoman Empire facilitating identity not only among Armenians but also among Arabs, Bulgarians and Albanians. During the first Word War these ties between Americans and minorities would help draws the U.S. into considerations of which countries would gain the lands of the Empire. It appears that the religionists neither endorsed intrigue by Armenians, nor preached political revolt. There is “evidence that Armenian extremists held it against the missionaries that they refrained overtly… supporting the movement for the Armenian independence”. The missionaries’ contribution to violence was insensitivity toward the possible results of their attention to Armenians instead of Turks. Missionaries apparently did not expect that invigoration of the Armeno-Turkish language by a modern bible translation and maintenance of many schools among Armenians would encourage nationalism. American Board members neglected their indirect livening of the conflict. Instead they cried out against Ottoman injustice, and gave the Turks a terrible reputation in the U.S. The Ottoman ambassador to Washington, Ahmet Rustem, remonstrated against oversimplification of his nation’s affairs: "Turkey has been the object of systematic attacks on the part of the press of U.S. She is represented as being a sink of iniquity." – Missionaries did not understand that they were expecting the Porte to react benignly as they trained an Armenian minority in literacy and professions – a minority which included people who spoke of independence. The American Protestants did not imagine how they might behaved if for several decades in their homeland a foreign educational system directed by Muslims had devoted itself to, say, Afro-Americans, with the result that the black Islamic minority became more proficient than the majority of white Americans. – Regarding the troubles of 1894 to 1896, George White of Anatolia admitted that the missionaries at Merzifon were "intensely interested spectators and friends” of the Armenian cause. But White believed they were not at all "actors on the stage."

P.48: White took them food during the year they were in prison. He apparently did not perceive how removing a single revolutionary from a closet did not appear to Turks adequate to show impartiality in Turkish-Armenian tension, especially when compared to White’s general preoccupation with teaching Armenians and his regular visits to jailed Armenian students. At Central Turkey College in Aintab, the thirty faculty members had trouble in 1909 with a secret Armenian revolutionary society among two hundred male students (almost exclusively Gregorian and Protestant Armenians). – The Turks leniently treated the Armenians, who became the favourite non-Muslin minority in the Ottoman government. – The creation of a Tsarist Armenia intensified humiliation among the separated Russian and Turkish Armenians. The Treaty of Berlin made a token statement on behalf of the Armenians, who incorrectly interpreted this comment as a commitment to their freedom. Russia wanted to absorb the Armenians. Britain had a limited interest in an independent Armenia, which would be both inaccessible and peripheral to the route to India. The Treaty of Berlin stimulated nationalism among Russian and Turkish Armenians without Western guarantees of aid, and upped the jitters among Turks without controls on Ottoman hostility.

 

P.49: Influenced by French and Marxist socialism, Armenians (primarily Russian) sought to force European interposition by starting revolutionary movements. The Hunchakian party appeared in 1887 (but fragmented within a decade) and the Dashnaktsuthiun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) arose in 1890. The only important group solely Turkish Armenian ’the Armenakan’ began in 1885, and stressed education and self defense rather than revolt. Located in Van, the Armenakan had little relation to the other parties. Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Gregorian leaders among the Armenians did not endorse revolution and were usually apathetic about it. – By the middle 1890s the Dashnaktsuthiun was evolving into the first powerful secular institution in Armenian history. It menaced the status of the Gregorian Church. Attempts by western section of the Dashnaksuthiun to stir Turkish-Armenian brothers aggravated relations with the Porte. Turkish authorities indiscriminately jailed Armenians. Abdul Hamid sought to end talk of rebellion by the massacres, started in 1894 at Sassun and continued the next two years. Armenian revolutionaries in August 1896 temporarily seized the Ottoman Bank headquarters in Constantinople, hoping to bring European intervention. Memoirs of the Armenian volunteer fighter Rouben or Minasian epitomized its work. From 1903 to 908 Minasian operated in roving, clandestine company carrying ten to a hundred men. The band trained Armenians around Lake Van to use arms against preying Kurds, generated propaganda, assisted threatened peasants and administered reprisals against Turks and Kurds – The Young Turk party gave promise of better days when in 1908 and 1909 it cooperated with Dashnaksuthiun to depose Abdul Hamid.

P.50: The new Dashnaksuthiun planks were Armenian autonomy and election of representatives from their party to the Ottoman Parliament. – Militancy and independence again became the platform of Dashnaksuthiun. – Two American missionaries and twenty evangelical Armenian. Pastors died. Five missionary women were fortunate to survive a week’s siege at Hadjin. – British and American warships helped restore order as relief activities began among thousands if refugees. Young Turk investigation brought execution of several Armenians and Turks and compensation to injured Armenians. The government also proclaimed the innocence of Armenians generally and their loyalty to the central authority. – Each millet was a religious community receiving more faithfulness from its adherents than did the central Turk administration. Millets handled marriage, divorce, inheritance, and other personal civil matters and nourished separate languages, courts, tax collections and cultural and educational institutions. After 1863 the Armenians even had their own legislature, which met biennially in Constantinople under the Gregorian Patriarch. As Westernization penetrated the Ottoman Empire, chiefly through French thought, the millets became nuclei for European-style, territorial nationalism.

P.51: Such Christian minorities as the Greeks and Armenians developed interdependence with Western ideas and groups which undermined the Porte’s authority and helped make reforms dead letters. – A sign of the nearly hopeless pulling and tearing in the Ottoman fabric was the multiplication of millets: in 1831 there was only three (Greek Orthodox, Jewish and Armenian Gregorian); in 1914 there were seventeen. – Dashnak groups armed primarily to protect Armenians against Kurdish sackings. – Approximate population figures in the year 1914 for the six vilayets of Asia Minor with largest numbers of Armenians exemplified there: 1,000,000 Armenians (about 30%), 1.000.000 Turks (about 30%) and 650.000 Kurds (about 20%) in a total population of over 3.000.000 people (including Greek, Nestorian, Arab and others). Throughout all of the Ottoman Empire there were probably 1.800.000 to 2.000.000 Armenians.

P.53: In the impossibly brief time from 1908 to 1914, Young Turks strove to create a modern Ottoman state. But in conflicts with such enemies as Italy, Greece and Bulgaria abroad and Armenians at home, the Committee of Union and Progress turned increasingly to assertive Turkification.– Cultural lag within the Empire was helping make relations between Turks and Armenians a sorrowful experience, also for American missionaries.

P.58: Forces released in the Western balance of power helped begin hostilities between the Turks and the Armenians and Arabs, and also begin unprecedented trouble for the Protestants. – The American Protestants at first were not certain what to do. – Their reaction blended many aspects of diversified mission behavior of 1914: evangelistic and ethnocentric zeal (as represented by the slogan ‘Christianize the nations”), theological flexibility, active humanitarianism, and readiness to use government aid for Protestant ends.

 P.75: Barton’s chief effect in working with Bryce was a book edited by the Britisher and informally put together by the ACASR and a young scholar specializing in the history of the Ottoman Empire, Arnold J. Toynbee. Considerably over half the documents in the book, a 684-page volume, had come to the American and Presbyterian boards from Armenian refugees and other witnesses of the deportation. The purpose of this work, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-16, was to attract favor for relief and for Armenian interests. The American Board secretary in 1916 ordered three thousand copies from Toynbee for influential personages, President Wilson and his adviser Colonel Edward M. House, were among those who received the book. The New York TIMES on October 8, 1916, included three pages of extracts from The Treatment. Lobbying for the ACASR, Barton obtained much support from the U.S. government. Beginning in 1915, Peet at the Bosphorus used diplomatic pouch to avoid censorship. By mid-1916 local ACASR committees had been formed in thirty-eight cities, in sixteen states, with each spreading information and raising money. To awaken the country’s consciousness Barton and his associates persuaded the Congress to pass a resolution of compassion for Armenians and Syrians. Barton also recommended that the President of U.S. appoint a special day in October 1916 for relief collections. The ACASR chairman appealed to Wilson: "Tens of thousands have miserably perished and still the assassin’s hand is not withdrawn." The President complied. Many state and local figures issued similar statements. The American Board head made ACASR prppaganda a major factor in expanding the relief movement; public relations was this executive’s forte.

P.76: Barton in 1915 recruited a professor of church history at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, William Walker Rockwell, to prepare several pieces on the Armenians. Titles of the three booklets were The Pitiful Plight of the Assyrian Christians in Persia and Kurdistan, The Deportation of the Armenians (an eyewitness account) and Ravished Armenia: the story of Aurora Mardigonian willing concubine to a Turkish officer and went through imprisonment, escape, recapture, and rape. Eventually ACASR had rescued Aurora. These pieces were not good enough for the American Board publicist in Boston. Impatient with their dispassionate quality and with Rockwell’s slowness, Barton delegated pamphleteering to men who used such titles as Atrocities – Talaat Bey Boasted that He Would Make the Armenians Pray for Massacre and He Has. Enlarging on the idea of the terrible Turk which Americans had accepted since the 1890s, the ACASR aroused hostility against Turks as brutally inhuman, degenerate agents of German Huns; it glorified Armenians as responsible Christian victimized by Muslims. These astigmatic views portrayed religion as almost the exclusive problem in Asia Minor and ignored ethnic, economic, and political factors. Notions built up in this campaign would later militate against the understanding of Near East realities needed by the people and government of the United States to fulfill the missionaries’ postwar desires. One would have to look endlessly for some American comment presenting the Turkish point of view. The closest to the Ottoman perspective was a concession that the Turkish peasant was not a bad sort; it was his leaders who were bad. Pages and columns of newspapers and magazines were full of such Social Darwinist tone as the following in the Independent of October 18, 1915: “Intellectually and physically they (the Armenians) are vastly superior to the Turks.

P.77: "In education, enterprise, industry and love of home they surpass all the other races. This ancient and proud spirited race. Conscious of its own innate superiority, ambitious to educate its children, Christian in religion, and eager for progress, cherished the hope of an independent Armenia reestablished upon the ruins of its ancient kingdom. We can hardly conceive of any power’s favoring the perpetuation of Turkey in any form after this ghastly exhibit (massacres) of Moslem incapacity to rule alien peoples or even Mohammedans." In addition to money, people gave jewelry, heirlooms and wedding gifts. The Rockefeller Foundation in 1915 and 1916 gave over $ 300,000, and the proceeds of the Harvard Yale football game of 1916 went to ACASR. Dodge facilitated relief in the Near East by persuading the richest charitable group in the United States, the American Red Cross, to assist. The Christian Herald and the Literary Digest helped solicit. By the time United States declared war on Germany, the ACASR had raised over $ 2,000,000 and had the second largest income of any American philanthropic institution. In the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks until 1916 did not permit relief goods to enter. Probably German missionaries to Turkey indirectly pressed the Porte through their government to allow food and clothing in the Empire.

  Gates’ evenhandedness so upset Armenian workers at Robert College that they planned a strike.

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P.167: From the Caucasus such statements as the following went to ACRNE at home: "Saw Refugee Women stripping flesh from dead horse with bare hands today… Another week will score ten thousand lives lost. For heaven’s sake hurry." Missionary Ernest Yarrow succeeded Main in May 1919 the latter went back to the U.S. Groups similar to the Main contingent went by train or U.S. destroyer to various parts of the Empire. George Washburn led a party to Konya, Harold Hatch to Samsun, Stanley White and Aaron Teitlebaum to Syria and Palestine. Other leaders took workers to such places as Smyrna, Adana and Bursa. Directed by American Board secretary Barton and accompanied by Caleb Gates and Gate’s son, a twenty-two-car relief train set out on the Baghdad railway, headed straight into evidences about Armenian massacres. The Protestants on the train discovered that the deported minority of Asia Minor usually had not dared to try to repossess its seized property From Aintab three older Gates winced: "We have heard many sad, sad tales here". At Urfa young Moore Gates came up with rather stupefying data: only twelve out of four thousand houses were intact in the Armenian Quarter, no more than five hundred of twenty thousand former inhabitants of the Quarter were left, fewer than five hundred Armenian children were in orphanages there, the Protestant Church building was empty ! This information was fuel for Barton’s Armenianism. It heated his conscience; he thought it wrong that no Western armies were occupying Anatolia in 1919 to provide security for Armenian survivors to find their broken houses and start afresh. He therefore left his group at Aleppo to go to Cairo for a few days, where early in April he sought persuade General Allenby to send British regiments into Asia Minor.

P.169: President Gates had left the relief train at Aleppo and retraced his way to Robert College. There he made a speech, called “bombshell” by one missionary, which warned against hope for a final enlightenment of the Muslim-Christian enigma. Less of an Armenophile and farther-seeing than the ACRNE chairman, Gates felt that any treaty setting up a separate Armenia would be unwise. Unless the Peace Conference regarded Armenian and Turkish disputes within a single frame – preferably a mandate by the United States – strife between Muslims and Christians would persist, The missionary believed that Turks would adjust to this mandate if the Allies acted quickly. In his last comments Gates said: "I have been astonished at the ardor and unanimity with which the peoples of Asia Minor, both Turks and Christians, express their desire for an American protectorate”. Gates’ evenhandedness so upset Armenian workers at Robert College that they planned a strike. Some Armenians in Constantinople were angry enough to think of seeking Gates’ removal as head of the missionary school. With endorsement from Admiral Bristol, Gates departed the Bosporus on April 24 to present his view at Paris.

P.170: After the Barton Relief Commission was in Turkey, the Herald editor exuberated: It is the biggest advertisement of particular Christian altruism that the world has ever had. The men that are in it are making a demonstration that will never be blotted out of history’s page. How’s that for a rhetoric?” Rumor in Paris was that members of the Barton Relief Commission were to be part of the future administration of Turkey. The jests of Strong were not hiding the factor that a unique demonstration of Christian altruism was a play in Barton’s game. The American Board leader wanted to get an ace, the Woodrow card, on the Near East table. A poor sign was Barton’s own unwillingness to give credence to Turkish as well as Armenian nationalism, as the Robert College head had done in his speech at Constantinople. There was no small irony in that for a period of several days in May 1919, two symbolic individuals – Barton, the West’s chief Armenophile, and Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the future “father” of Turkey – were in the Samsun-Sivas region and did not speak with each other. The ACRNE chairman coddled Armenians and scarcely communicated with the leaders of the Turkish ethnic group, by then the overwhelmingly majority people of the Eastern Anatolia.

P.171: Peripatetic Barton had the capability not only to mastermind philanthropy but to compose memorandas and other documents indefatigably. At Paris under Boghos Nubar’s pleadings, he had given attention to Armenia. Boghos insisted with good intuition, but without success, that he needed Barton’s guidance in France. The American Board secretary was the principal person to the mission-relief strategy. While there, he was active for Boghos’ cause: “We have spent much time with the Peace Comm.,” he wrote. “I think we will be able to do a good thing for Armenia”. The Supreme Council should put a single mandate, preferably by the United States, over the entire country. In an article for the Missionary Herald, he remarked that leading Muslims were speaking freely of the United States and not Europe as the ideal: “The Turks honor and respect American missionaries, their character, integrity and fairness… They know America only as they have learned through American missionaries. Removed from Gates; counsel by April, Barton in his messages thereafter dropped references to a single mandate for all of Turkey. Fresh from hearing sorrowful stories among the ethnic group to which he had given much of his life, he cabled House and others that the Armenians at once should have a guaranteed independence. He begged for a strong mandate immediately: “The Turkish Government is not preventing new atrocities to the Armenians”. Barton’s intimates in the American Board also advertised a United States role in the Near East. A Missionary Herald editorial in March 1919, said that Turkey, because of Protestant education and humanitarianism there should fall to America.

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P.172: The Armenian Missionary Association, a group that the American Board had helped organize in America, resolved the deep appreciation to Barton for his acts on behalf of its countrymen overseas. The Armenian Missionary Association requested the Board to facilitate aspirations of Armenia for independence under United States wing. The words of Dodge and Williams about an obligation by Washington in the Near East were similar to the contentions of three presidents of mission colleges in Turkey. The president of International College in Smyrna, Alexander MacLachlan, responded to a request from the American Peace Commission for his view on a Greek occupation of Smyrna. “Of all the possible solutions of the Near East end of the peace settlement,” he wrote, “the one proposed is the worst. It cannot fail to be disastrous for both Turkey and Greece. Turkey will never submit to Greek domination. So long a Greek armed force remains in Asia Minor we who are domiciled here will be doomed to live under bitter war conditions”. His analysis could not have been more accurate.

P.173: He believed a healing could come to Turkey if Allied troops would replace Greek and if the Council would end its scheme of sovereignty by Athens over southeastern Anatolia: “the country can only be saved from ruin under protection of a British or American mandate.” The head of Constantinople Woman’s College, Marry Patrick, went to [the] French capital at the end of June and there prepared an article imitating the Fourteen Points: “Fourteen Reasons for an American Mandatory over Turkey”. Point one on the distaff side argued that “All the people of the Near East would welcome an American mandatory”. Armenians, Greeks, Turks would prefer the United States, Miss Patrick said in her other points, because they felt it would be more democratic than other nations, would promote harmony among ethnic groups, introduce a superior educational system, not exploit the country commercially, and stay forever. The American Committee for the Independence of Armenia (ACIA), the institution whose founding Dodge and Barton had aided late in 1918 neglected all Ottoman peoples except Armenians. In contrast to ACIA, Caleb Gates upheld the unity of Asia Minor and showed a considerable objectivity about minorities there.

P.174: Writing member of the American Peace Commission, he said: “I think that the crux of the Near East Question is not the Armenians but the Turks. The attention of the Peace Conference should be centered upon giving the Turks a good government rather than upon delivering the Armenians and Greeks from the Turkish government. Because it will be of little profit to establish an Armenia, more than half of whose people will be Turks, if alongside of this new State there remains a Turkey of the old type… To save the Armenians and the Greeks you must save the Turks also”. Wilson read this statement of Gates and said it was interesting and important. In Paris the Robert College president opposed Greek control of Smyrna, broad territorial claims by Armenians, and the International Commission on Mandates in Turkey. Mark Bristol shared much of Gate’s outlook. The admiral wrote that the Greek landing at Smyrna and other factors pointed to the absolute need of combining all of the Ottoman Empire under one mandate. Turks were leaning toward America as a mentor. After trips into Asia Minor, Bristol stated that Greece’s possession of Smyrna had antagonized Turks tremendously and would make an Ottoman treaty difficult. Seeking to point out from the Greek abuse of Turks in Smyrna that ethnic peoples in the Near East were alike, Bristol claimed that if someone would put all races “in a bag and shake them up you could not predict which one would come out first as being the best one”. The admiral disapproved of excessive pro-Greek and pro-Armenian propaganda in the United States. He believed it encouraged an American idea about the Empire which would create a new Balkan mess.

P.175: Henry Morgenthau combined the best views of Bristol, Gates and Barton; using an invitation to help the International Red Cross as an excuse to get to France, the finance chairman of the ACRNE on the first day of arrival, in March 1919, had conversations with Wilson, House and Hoover. He prepared a memorandum for Wilson: "The Future Government of Asia Minor". Morgenthau memorandum advocated that one nation, the United States or else Britain, supervise each of the three mandates” Constantinople, Turkish Anatolia and Armenia. The document included much from the overlapping views about Turkey held by people in or related closely to the Protestant lobby. The paper rejected a totally independent Armenia. It took into account the prediction that such an entity with its mixed population would not easily escape hostilities with Turks. (The ACIA felt that the Morgenthau Memorandum’s failure to approve unqualified freedom for Armenia was immoral). It was most importantly an unorthodox policy proposal, capitalizing Wilson’s prescription of a mandate system for Turkey, overriding the secret treaties, disregarding the Cobb-Lippmann and other explanations of Point Twelve, admitting a long-term U.S. embroilment in the Old World. But the Morgenthau Memorandum had important weaknesses. It came late in the Peace Conference. Further, the American public had little or no conditioning to the idea of a U.S. mandate, an idea which probably required the experience in mission-relief-government coordination developed by Barton during the years since 1915, and the American Board secretary was nearly inaccessible to Paris, having left a command post there for scouting in Asia Minor.

P.176: Perhaps it was mission-minded Prof. Albert Lybyer of the University of Illinois who kept the International Commission from expiring, Lybyer had taught for seven years (until 1906) at Robert College. Partly because of this experience, he had been able to write a book on Turkey, one of the best by Americans on Ottoman affairs. He had been one of the activists in the ACRNE. In Paris since Dec. 1918, a specialist on the Balkans within the U.S. delegation, he had worked with Crane, Bliss, Gates, Barton and Peet for American sponsorship of Armenians and Syrians. He also had contacts with such missionary professors visiting Paris as L. Scipio and Abraham Hagopian of Robert College.

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P.177: At one point, Gout (French appointee) accused the American missionaries of using ACRNE philanthropy as a bid for United States territorial control of part of the Ottoman Empire; Lybyer protested moralistically. … the French intended to have Syria regardless. The fraudulent de Caix Note, accepted as authentic by the U.S. Peace Commission, led the Americans next day to decide that the Ottoman Empire was the great loot of the war and that the International Commission would be senseless. Other voices helping in this capitulation to the old diplomacy were those of the United States Zionists. The Zionists had seen that polling Arabs in Palestine was not the best way to create sentiment for a Jewish homeland and had been importuning Wilson and House with their anxieties. For years the American Zionist movement had been growing, but its competition with missionary diplomacy had not become clear until the Peace Conference.

Money did not lure Turkey along the paths of harmony with the United States.
(p. 246)

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CONCLUSIONS:

P.240: According to another scholar, “the political approach of the U.S. toward the Middle East up to 1941 could be described as one of indifference, good will and conviction that the area was a British preserve where no major American interests were involved. “ These judgments are generally accurate in the sense that the U.S. did not view Turkey as a critical nation in the interwar period.

P.241: When Turkey pressed in the mid-1930s for a revision of the Straits regime and later the acquisition of Alexandretta, the U.S. did not take sides. These political problems were chiefly the concerns of Turkey and European nations. The U.S., in contrast to various European nations, did not adopt a “big brother” attitude toward Turkey. As a matter of fact, as illustrated by frequent comments by Turkish officials, the political disinterestedness of the U.S. in Turkey was an ever present factor promoting closer Turco-American relations. International politics is only a part of international relations. This history of Turkish-American relations from 1919 to 1939 contradicts the view that Americans followed a rigidity isolationist code during these years. Although somewhat reduced in numbers, missionary and lay educators, now catering to Turks rather than to Armenians, Greeks and other minorities, remained an important group of Americans in Turkey.

P.242: The end of Turkish-American trade and the work of the missionaries of the American Board would have been a calamity for persons directly concerned with these activities, but their termination would not have seriously jeopardized the larger national interest. Foremost among the factors conditioning American relations with Turkey between 1914 and 1919 was nationalism, which complicated every problem between the two countries and affected all Americans living and working in Turkey. Nationalism was the lifeblood of the Turkish revolution and the ideological foundation upon which Kemal Ataturk based his program. Turkey, like the U.S. a century and a half earlier, fought for its independence and right to control its own destiny. Historically, Americans revered the right of independence and self determination and thus they were inclined to be sympathetic with Turks; desire to establish and maintain themselves as a nation. Armenians and their supporters based their opposition to Ataturk’s program on moral (or idealistic) grounds, saying that the long Turkish record of brutality against minorities disqualified the new Turks from international recognition. The Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, although Turkish nationals, were clearly a small minority. Obviously, the principle of self-determination could not be applied to two hostile groups occupying the same geographical area.

P.243: The U.S. government, assessing the situation realistically, recognized that only by military force could the Turks be forced to permit establishment of an independent Armenia. U.S. policy toward Turkey, a necessary combination of realism and idealism, recognized the right of the Turks to govern themselves and chart their own development as long as they did not seriously harm American interests. Except for the economic loss, it would have been much easier for American missionaries, for example, to end their work in Turkey in the face of the almost overwhelming obstacles after World War I. They decided, however, to comply with regulations dictated by Turkish nationalism, rather than lose the opportunity, however limited, to advertise the goodness of Christianity by personal example in their schools and medical facilities. Obviously, the missionaries preferred to combine religion with education and to make direct attempts at converting Muslims to Christianity but, realistically, they acknowledged that these courses at action were impossible. At times missionaries and other Americans in Turkey grumbled and asked for diplomatic protection, but generally they recognized and respected Turkish nationalism, The “Terrible Turk” stereotype was another important conditioner of Turkish-American relations, both during and after World War I. This conception of the Turk, circulated widely by in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, impeded the State Department’s postwar effort to resume regular relations with Turkey. The description had some historical validity when applied to Turkish treatment of the Armenians, but it was unfair to the Turks of the post-Lausanne period. Armenian-Americans and their supporters, in their fight for an Armenian home and their opposition to the Turkish-American Lausanne Treaty, continued to use time worn epithet. This unfortunate representation contributed strength to the opponents of the Lausanne Treaty and helped defeat it in 1927. Led by the Armenian-American lawyer, Vahan Chardasian [Cardashian], the enemies of Turkey in the United States, sought, with some success to cloud the issues in Turkish-American relations by poisoning American public opinion.

P.244: As the years passed, the futility of the Armenian cause and the splendid example being set in Turkey blurred the “unspeakable” Turk image in the U.S. The efforts of U,S, diplomatic representatives, the State Department, and other interested individuals to publicize Turkish development, and praise from Americans who worked or visited in Turkey, did much to improve public opinion in the United States. The American Friends of Turkey, through philanthropic work in Turkey and a publicity campaign in the United States, made an impressive contribution painting a more accurate picture of the new Turks. Fortunately, the old stereotype had almost disappeared by 1939. The Turkish people had shown their capacity to change, and the American people forgave past misdeed[s] when confronted with a vastly changed situation. Admiral Mark L. Bristol’s service as High Commissioner between 1919 and 1927 was meritorious and contributed to good relations between Turkey and the United States despite lack of formal ties.

P.245: The President and his advisers made the decisions to sign the Lausanne Treaty in 1923 and the agreement of February, 1927. But, particularly in the case of the Lausanne Treaty, the influence of a minority of the American public coupled with political considerations caused [the] Senate to reject the treaty.

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P.246: In the short space of twenty years, a new enlightened republican government had installed itself firmly in a Turkey vastly changed from the time of the Sultans, The government of Kemal Ataturk was a benevolent dictatorship; it designed its principles, policies and programs to revitalize the Turkish people as a nation and restore them to a position of consequence on the international scene. American diplomats, missionaries, doctors, traders, businessmen, archeologists and tourists provided the individual links so essential to understanding between the two nations. The two countries smoothed over their problems and built a solid basis for friendship without the assistance of foreign-aid programs like those of the World War II and postwar eras. Money did not lure Turkey along the paths of harmony with the United States. During the interwar period, not one cent of such aid went to Turkey from the U.S. government.

P.247: The Truman Doctrine was not a direct result of friendship established by Turkey and the U.S. between 1919 and 1939, but the events of the interwar years certainly provided a logical basis for it. Turkish President Celal Bayar told his Parliament on November 1, 1958, that the relationship between Turkey and the United States “is based on mutual respect and confidence” and that “the bonds are even stronger than ever”.

“CLAMOROUS ARMENIANISM”

P.259: Barton and Montgomery prepared a booklet, The United States Government and Help to Armenia, which traced Western obligations to Armenians. Near East Relief in June 1921 distributed the booklet to every Congressman and hundreds of leaders and organizations in every state. The State Department soon responded to this propaganda by forwarding to Boston a Bristol dispatch which recommended missionaries; forbearance both in Turkey and in Armenia and abstention from an anti-Turkish campaign. Near East Relief and the American Board soon discovered that Armenianism no longer was going to move the U.S. government into Turkish peacemaking. A lull came in mission-relief lobbying when Barton, whom an Armenian leader described as the intercessor between Western and Eastern Christians and “father” of the Armenians, surveyed the Far East for the American Board. Near East Relief’s educational director, Ernest Riggs, who returned from Anatolia in late summer 1921 after expulsion by Kemalists for pro-Armenian policies, partly filled Barton’s place. At the London Conference of sprinh 1921 which Barton attended, Italy had agreed with the Kemalists to withdraw from Adalia in return for economic concessions. The Greeks tried to check the Allies’ move away from Sevres by marching east into central Anatolia to capture Ankara. Just short of the Kremalist capital, the Greek advance halted. Mustafa Kemal and his troops then made ready for countering the Greeks while skirmishing against French in Cilicia. At the end of the summer the Greeks lost fifteen thousand men in a desperate battle along the Sakarya river, and retired to the Baghdad railway. Weakened in Cilcia because of this Kemalist victory, France in October promised the Turkish nationalists to evacuate the area which the London Conference had set an Armenian national home.

P.260: Having more losses than any Western nation in the war, France decided that Syria was the only vital interest it could afford in the Near East. When the French left Cilicia, over one hundred fifty thousand Greeks and Armenians fled with them. Bristol since January 1921 had been receiving evidence that the Ankara government wanted formal relations with the United States. After the French agreed to withdraw from Cilicia, Bristol persuaded Washington to send to Ankara a U.S. Department of Commerce official to discuss economic matters informally. During the Commerce official’s stay in the Kemalist capital, the Armenia-America Society kept trying to get an Armenian national home. Montgomery got stimulation from a visit by Bryce to the United States; Bryce thought the Greeks could force a Turkish evacuation of Cilician Armenia. Montgomery and Riggs drafted a resolution and persuaded Congressman John J. Rogers of Massachusetts to introduce it in December 1921. The Rogers Resolution requested that the U.S. call a conference to consider methods for establishing the Cilician Armenians as a nation. Back from the Far East, Barton set about getting Secretary of State Hughes to bring up the Cilician issue at the Washington Naval Conference. He had such a concert partly because the Kemalists had driven American Board personnel out of Cilicia. But Bristol summed up the State Department’s reaction to Barton, writing that partiality for Christian minorities was an injury to them so long as the West did not supply the military forces required for Turkish compliance with a separate Armenia. Bristol’s attitude Barton and Montgomery, who sought to have Bristol removed as Armenian high commissioner to Turkey, in part because Bristol had not defended Ernest Riggs when the Kemalists had expelled that missionary. Rather, Bristol had remonstrated with Riggs for favoritism to Armenians. Barton felt that Bristol’s apparent accommodation to the Kemalists was “absolutely wrong.” Riggs doubted the wisdom of an anti-Bristol position; “I confess that I fear” he confided to Montgomery, “that a new man going from America might be led to the same position which Admiral Bristol holds.”

P.241: Yet Barton went ahead with a case against Bristol, in which in March 1922 he presented to Secretary Hughes. The theme was that Bristol had not protected American interests in the Near East. Commending the Admiral for zeal and ability, Barton declared that Bristol “inclined to take the word of a Turk as more value than the word of an American”, and to defend the Turks more than the minorities. But attacking a fairly perceptive Bristol was trying to remove a symptom. The missionaries needed to think about coming to terms with the Kemalists, Relying on a West determined to behave irresponsibly about Asia Minor was not producing security for the Armenians or for the Protestants from the United States.

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Barton and other friends of Armenia could not obtain a State Department endorsement of the proposed dismissal of Bristol or of the Rogers Resolution. As the Allies in February and March 1922 postponed scrapping the Sevres Treaty and reaffirmed a national home for Armenians, the American government remained aloof. The Secretary in April 1922 wrote Barton at length: “I am very sorry to say that I see no way in which this Government can, in existing circumstances, act to the advantage of the Ottoman Greeks or of the Armenians…” Then, another flicker of hope. Barton acted vigorously when in May 1922 the British ambassador to Washington proposed a Western investigation of alleged Turkish atrocities, There had been reports of new deportations attending the Kemalist-Greek war. The executive committee of Near East Relief directed its chairman to ask Hughes to appoint a representative for the investigation.

P.262: The American Board secretary reported to Caleb Gates that recent publicity by Near East Relief and the Federal Council of Churches had done something of worth for the Armenians: Washington had decided to join an international inquiry of Muslim-Christian relations in Asia Minor. Giving a sop to Armenianism, Hughes in June 1922 publicly announced America’s commitment to the inquiry. The Secretary followed Barton’s desire and James Harbord be the American representative. But the French and Italians balked at a mobe which might weaken their relations with the Ankara government; so the inquiry was put in the hands of the International Red Cross. Dulles in July told Barton that the idea of an international commission was unworkable. Meanwhile Near East Relief continued its philanthropy. It had transferred work out of such Kemalist areas as Kars (annexed from Erivan Republic in December 1920) and Harput to Soviet Armenia and Syria. The Relief Group early in 1922 dismissed twenty five thousand children from orphanages because of limited funds. It was in August 1922 that relief chairman Barton observed Kemalist momentum pushing all before it. The Turkish nationalists began an offensive against the Greeks, and within three weeks pushed their antagonists into the Aegean sea. Kemalists soon controlled all of Asia Minor. This drive to the Aegean outraged the American Board secretary, not least because a fire in Smyrna inflicted damage more than one hundred thousand dollars to Board property. Foreseeing an Armageddon. Barton burst against Turks, whom he chose to blame for missionary problems: “The rights of Americans and of minorities are held in contempt and all civilized laws are defied” he wrote to Harding and Hughes “as we must always expect from a distinctly Mohammedan Government. We are witnessing what promises to be beginning of another European war, in which barbarianism will be arraigned against civilization”. He urged a Western ultimatum to the Kemalists, and troops to the Bosporus to save the Near East. Several church groups passed resolutions with similar language. But the thunder of the First World War’s rhetoric was ineffective.

P.263: The view of Turks in Barton’s message to Harding and Hughes was inappropriate, as remarked by President MacLahlan of International College. The Turks did not massacre Greeks, as Greeks had done to Turks in May 1919. About the worst the Turkish Army did was force captured Greek soldiers to shout “Long live Mustafa Kemal” (in return to their forcing Turks to shout Zito Vrenizelos when they entered Smyrna) as they marched intro detention. Turkish soldiers protected International College during the disruption of the occupation; a Turkish cavalryman rescued MacLahlan from irregulars who nearly beat the missionary to death while trying to loot the agricultural buildings of the college. A three-day Smyrna fire (September 13-15), which Turks made every effort to control, destroyed nearly a square mile in Greek and Armenian areas and made two hundred thousand people homeless. Included in this loss was the American Board’s Collegiate Institude for Girls. MacLachlan’s investigation of the fire’s origin led to the conviction that Armenian terrorists, dressed in Turkish uniforms, fired the city. Apparently the terrorists were attempting to bring Western intervention. Informing Washington of a three million dollars claim by the American Board against the Ankara government, Barton requested through an aide that the U.S. participate in any conference planned by the Allies to rewrite the Treaty of Sevres. As the West talked of negotiating with the Kemalists, part of the American public began to realize that Armenianism and godliness were not identical. Ever since missionaries in the nineteenth century had become the dominant U.S. concern in the Ottoman Empire, opinion in America increasingly favored Christian minorities.

  "... the monopoly of opinion about Asia Minor held so long by missionary and Armenian groups."

P.266: The journalist stated that American missions, Armenian clauses in the Treaty of Berlin, and such societies as the Dashnaktsuthiun had alienated Armenians from Turks. After the war, he declared, missionaries to the Ottoman Empire sought to take over the country and use Armenians for this vast political project. Price said that the Near East Relief was at the same time of his writing flooding the United States with Armenianism through its monthly, New Near East (successor to the News Bulletin). He noted that the editor of the periodical, Talcott Williams, had published a book pleading for America to adopt a protectorate over Asia Minor. (Actually, Williams in his book, although showing special concern for the "great people" of Armenia , did recognize that both Christians and Muslims committed atrocities against each other. Price regarded Kemalist leaders as trustworthy and not implicated in the Armenian massacres. He thought that mission and relief workers should communicate with the Ankara government, stop "clamorous Armenianism", realize that the millet system made it almost impossible for Turks to regard Christianity as anything other than an unfriendly political program, and accept the Turkification of Asia Minor. Montgomery protested in Current History that American Missionary schools were not divisive. Armenian revolutionary leaders criticized the American Board schools, Montgomery said, because they prohibited politics.

P.267: Another missionary defender less restrained than Montgomery was Everett P. Wheeler, who had helped relief among Armenians since [the] 1890s. Wheeler claimed it a perversion of patriotism to blame missionaries and Armenians for seeking victory over the Allied enemy, the Turks. History had praised the defense of the West against Muslim intrusion in the Middle Ages he said, and Christian nations should receive credit for seeking protection of Christians in the Near East. An unorthodox view had arisen, and Barton saw Bristol and Gates had helped bring it into being. The public debate of late 1922 loosened the grip of Armenianism upon Americans. It also helped threaten the monopoly of opinion about Asia Minor held so long by missionary and Armenian groups. The debate came at the same time that President Harding decided the United States would send observers to a conference at Lausanne, which the Allies were calling to negotiate a peace with the Kemalists. Bristol’s preaching about un-Christian elements in Armenianism never found its mark with Barton until Kemalist guns made it ridiculous for the American Board to snub Ankara any longer. The Turks eventually named a hospital in Istanbul for Bristol in recognition of his sense of justice. The missionaries since the 1830s often had sustained their enterprise by being anti-Muslim and anti-Turk.

P.268: The American Board also had been willing to idolize its institutions among Armenians more than to remember that God is no respecter of persons. If Barton had heeded Jesus’ instruction about loving enemies and praying for those who are spiteful, the mission secretary might have seen Christianity in Bristol’s remarks long before the Greek evacuation of Smyrna.

P.269: Some voices urged a United States mediation between European nations and the Kemalists; Secretary Hughes stated in a speech in Barton’s home city that the American Government did not intend to intervene in Turkey, Before [the] Lausanne Conference opened there was an interesting exchange between the Harding administration and Barton forces. The American Board secretary had pressed Washington for formal representation at the negotiations. Harding on October 5, 1922, wrote that the United States “can be represented informally and properly safeguard American interests”.