Catastrophe and Compassion

II.1The Hamidian Massacres and Clara Barton

The massacres of 1894–1896 under Sultan Abdul Hamid II were the first great crisis to draw the American public toward the Armenian cause. American missionaries sent word home, and relief committees asked the American Red Cross to take charge of distributing funds.^[1]

In 1896, Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, traveled to Constantinople and directed relief operations. She was the only woman, and the only Red Cross representative, that the Ottoman government allowed to intervene.^[2] Her teams made five expeditions through the Armenian provinces^[1], and she distributed more than $115,000 in aid despite hostile conditions.^[3] Her papers at the Library of Congress preserve the records of this Armenian relief mission.^[4]

II.2The First Great Wave of Immigration

Violence in the Ottoman Empire pushed tens of thousands of Armenians to emigrate. Between 1899 and 1917, 54,057 Armenians entered the United States: 46,474 from Turkey, 3,034 from Russia, 1,577 from Canada, 914 from Great Britain and 894 from Egypt.^[5]

A second wave of violence followed in April 1909, when the Adana massacre killed an estimated 20,000 or more Armenians in and around the city of Adana in Cilicia.^[6,7] Each new outbreak pushed more families to leave.

They settled in the mill towns of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, in New York and New Jersey, in the industrial Midwest and in California's Central Valley, building churches, schools, newspapers and benevolent societies. These communities would soon become the base for America's response to the genocide.

II.3Ambassador Morgenthau and the Genocide

When the Armenian Genocide began in 1915, the United States was neutral in World War I and still had diplomats across the Ottoman Empire. Henry Morgenthau Sr., U.S. ambassador in Constantinople from 1913 to 1916, received a steady stream of reports from American consuls describing massacres and deportation marches.^[8]

Morgenthau formally informed Washington and asked it to intervene. He confronted Interior Minister Talaat Pasha directly, and he worked with publisher Adolph Ochs to keep the story in the press. The New York Times ran 145 articles about the massacres in 1915 alone.^[8] Morgenthau resigned in 1916 and published Ambassador Morgenthau's Story in 1918, one of the most important eyewitness records of the genocide.^[8]

For Armenian Americans, the genocide was never only history: it was family history. Immigrants learned that parents, spouses, children and entire villages had disappeared. Survivors who reached America brought with them photographs, religious objects, recipes, songs and memories of homes that no longer existed.

II.4Near East Relief: America's Great Humanitarian Campaign

In 1915, former missionary James Levi Barton and philanthropist Cleveland H. Dodge led a group of prominent New Yorkers in founding the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. At its first meeting, on September 16, 1915, the committee raised $60,000, which was wired to Ambassador Morgenthau for distribution. Dodge personally paid the committee's operating costs so that every donated dollar could go to relief.^[11]

In August 1919, Congress granted the organization a charter, the second humanitarian group so honored after the American Red Cross, and it became Near East Relief.^[11] Its results were extraordinary:

On December 2, 1923, the International Golden Rule Sunday asked Americans to eat a simple orphanage-style meal and donate the savings to Armenian orphans, and President Calvin Coolidge urged the nation to take part.^[11] In 1930, Near East Relief became the Near East Foundation, which still operates today.^[11]

II.5America and the First Republic of Armenia

On May 28, 1918, an independent Republic of Armenia emerged in the South Caucasus. Its representative in Washington was Armen Garo (Karekin Pastermadjian). He had come to America in June 1917 on behalf of the Armenian National Council of Tiflis and served as the Republic's ambassador to the United States from 1918 to 1920. His pamphlets, including Why Armenia Should Be Free (1918), made the case for Armenian independence to American readers.^[12]

Armenia's heroes also came in person. In late 1919, General Andranik Ozanian led a delegation to the United States to lobby for an American mandate and raise money for the Armenian army and refugees. In Fresno alone he raised about $500,000.^[13,14] Read his full profile.

On April 23, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby informed the Armenian representative that President Woodrow Wilson recognized the independent Armenian Republic.^[15]

II.6The Harbord Mission and the Mandate Debate

To decide whether America should take responsibility for Armenia, Wilson sent a fact-finding mission. In September 1919, the 50-member American Military Mission to Armenia, led by Major General James G. Harbord, left Constantinople. It traveled by train to Adana, Aleppo and Mardin, then by car through Diyarbakir, Harput, Malatya, Sivas, Erzincan, Erzurum, Kars, Etchmiadzin and Yerevan to Tiflis.^[16]

Harbord's report concluded that Armenia should be included in any American mandate for the wider region, since a mandate for Armenia alone was judged unworkable. It estimated that a mandate would need about 59,000 soldiers and cost $88.5 million in its first year.^[16,17] The report was published in 1920, and its full text survives in the State Department's diplomatic record.^[18,19]

On May 24, 1920, Wilson asked Congress for authority to accept a mandate for Armenia. On June 1, 1920, the Senate rejected it by a vote of 52 to 23.^[20] In August 1920, the Treaty of Sèvres awarded Armenia 103,599 square kilometers, and on November 22, 1920, Wilson submitted his boundary decision to the Allied Supreme Council.^[20,15] It came too late. Under military pressure from Turkish nationalist and Soviet forces, the Republic fell at the end of 1920, and Sèvres was never ratified.^[20] In 1934, the State Department declared that its earlier support for "Wilsonian Armenia" had lapsed.^[20]