Humanitarians
James L. Barton needed to get to the bottom of it. In 1915, the foreign secretary of the ABCFM had been receiving letters from his correspondents in Turkey that made him nervous. Something was going on, it was clear. The Armenian population around Harpoot (Harput), where he had previously served as a missionary for seven years, seemed to be in danger. The letters used coded language. They reported “unusual events” that seemed to parallel some that “had before taken place in the country.” Clearly, the missionaries were trying to get news past the Ottoman censors who controlled the flow of information outside of the region. When Barton spoke to other Americans familiar with the region in the late summer, they expressed similar concerns. “No one had very definite information,” Barton would later remember, “although all had grave apprehensions.” When he received a telegram from Henry Morgenthau, the US minister at Constantinople, his worst fears were confirmed: “Destruction of the Armenian race in Turkey is rapidly progressing.”1
Barton soon joined with humanitarian leaders to form the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), an organization dedicated to providing aid in the region. On September 21, he was in Washington, DC, hoping that the State Department would support these humanitarian efforts. These requests were “unhesitatingly granted” by Assistant Secretary of State Alvey Adee. The government support first came in the form of information. Barton was taken to a private room and given all of the dispatches and reports that the State Department had received from Turkey in the past year. A clerk provided pencils and a large pad of paper, and assured him that no one would disturb his work. If Barton had any questions, or needed any further materials, the clerk was at his service.2
When Barton told the story of that day later in his life, he was sure to describe the unfettered access he had been granted. Even cyphered telegrams were at his disposal. The government had no qualms with sharing what they knew with the missionary and authorized him to make use of whatever networks he had to share the information even more broadly.3
What he found was shocking.
Barton had gone to the State Department expecting to read horrible stories of violence against Armenian Christians. It had happened before, in the 1890s. The Hamidian massacres in that decade inspired a new era in US humanitarian activism. Twenty years later, Europe was at war, and the Ottoman Empire had joined on the side of Germany. There had been no reason to expect anything but bad news, but Barton was still taken aback. It was much worse than he had imagined. The Armenian population was forced to live “under most cruel conditions,” he summarized. In fact, he had learned that the Turkish government was attempting nothing less than to “annihilate an ancient Christian race.”4
That very night, Barton was on a train back to New York, where he took a room at the Hotel Roosevelt and began writing. By midnight, he had reports ready for the American papers, where they would cause a sensation. He provided a “vast collection of absolutely authentic material from Turkey” that told the story of the “regimented and designedly inhuman deportation of an entire race of men, women and children, from their ancestral homes towards the desert.” As war erupted around the world. Barton worked to ensure that the story of the Armenian Genocide would be “spread upon the first pages of practically every journal in America.”5
The Armenian crisis brought together missionaries, politicians, and humanitarian activists in a common cause. Initially, Barton had hoped to raise $100,000. Between 1916 and 1918 ACASR (later renamed Near East Relief) had raised nearly $14,000,000.6 Adee was not Barton’s only ally in the US government. Barton served as an advisor for President Woodrow Wilson, as did several other prominent missionaries and missionary supporters, which made it possible to bring the mission movement’s priorities close to the heart of US strategy during the First World War.7
The Wilson administration seemed to present new opportunities for the mission movement. Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, seemed to share many of the values of missionary leaders. Speaking before the Young Man’s Christian Association in 1912, Wilson claimed to great applause that “it is Christianity that has produced the political liberty of the world,” and he celebrated the work of missionaries in creating educational institutions around the world and setting the stage for the spread of democracy.8 His vision of American internationalism aligned well with what missionaries had long advocated. This intellectual affinity was further helped by Wilson’s close prewar relationship with many missionary leaders. Over the course of the war years, American missionaries positioned themselves as key partners in the new internationalist vision of the United States. They expected to be able to partner with their government in this new era.
For the missionaries, the Great War was the culmination of a century of international engagement. Violence that would have been almost unimaginable in their earlier experience perversely created opportunities to place missionaries close to the seat of diplomatic power. The modern era that the war ushered in presented new challenges for missionary diplomacy. After the robust debate over the value of missionary work a decade earlier, missionaries in Turkey could now clearly show their usefulness to their fellow Americans. But increasingly they went about this work alongside partners who embraced the humanitarian aspects of their work without the same dedication to the evangelical cause.
The Armenian Genocide again united the mission movement and the government in their visions of America’s role abroad—and again revealed the fractures in that unity. Political realities, including waging war and attempting to build a lasting peace, made the Wilson administration at once reliant on missionaries and wary of committing completely to their influence.
World War and Armenian Genocide
In 1914, the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire set off a chain of events that engulfed the European continent in war. The Ottoman Empire joined the war as one of the Central Powers allied with Germany, and the fighting would initiate a new phase in the nationalist movements that had plagued the empire for decades. These struggles were political, cultural, and religious. Ottoman attempts to create a shared Turkish identity over the past decades had emphasized assimilation for religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities, including the Armenian Christians with whom US missionaries had long worked. With Turkey at war with the Allied powers, diplomats from Russia, France, and Great Britain all had to leave the region. The US diplomats, representing a neutral government, remained in place.
War touched the missionaries in the region quickly. At first, pressing military needs prompted government seizure of missionary property—especially hospitals. When medical missionary Dr. W. S. Dodd described the Turkish takeover of his hospital—“nurses, physicians, and all”—he did not seem disturbed. It was quite likely that the mission would have offered the premises to the Red Crescent, anyway. Using the mission hospital to tend wounded soldiers seemed in keeping with missionary goals.9 In other locations, however, the effects of the war seemed less benign. In Moush (Muş), the Turkish army had seized food and fuel in addition to impressing all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five, leaving in their wake “many families without food and only the women and children to care for the fields.”10 In Harpoot, missionaries were “very apprehensive” about what might follow. They pledged to stay beside the people through whatever was to come.11
It soon became clear that the war against the Allied Powers was not the only battle that Turkey was engaged in. From their various bases across the empire, American missionaries and consuls began to report horrific atrocities to Ambassador Henry Morgenthau in 1915.12 Something needed to be done. But once again, it was not at all clear what type of action the United States might take.
Missionaries were major figures in Morgenthau’s letters to the State Department throughout 1915 and 1916. Morgenthau had come to Constantinople expecting the missionaries to be a bother. He thought they would be merely sectarian, primarily concerned with the supremacy of their own religious practices and beliefs. Instead, he was surprised to find the missionaries to be valuable partners in his work. They were, he wrote, “agents of civilization” whose work greatly benefited the interests of the United States in the region.13
Early in 1915, Morgenthau’s letters to Washington about missionaries largely resembled those that his predecessors had written for decades. He and the missionaries were concerned about changing Turkish regulations that might affect the mission schools. The schools would soon face higher taxation and more oversight, most of which focused on religious instruction and the Turkish language. In March, he secured a delay in the new regulations and reported that he and the missionaries intended to comply with Turkish oversight. By September, however, he reported that the embassy had decided to protest the policies.14 In just a few months, the situation had changed. Morgenthau no longer talked only of educational policy. Now, his concerns about the mission schools were connected to the ongoing violence against Armenian Christians.
FIGURE 11.1. Map of Turkey, 1898, including the region of the Armenian massacre.
Source: ABCFM, Maps of Missions of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Boston: The Board, 1898), 5.
“Owing to general deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor, accompanied by massacres, atrocities, and starvation, schools in those provinces may not open, or will open under greatest difficulties,” Morgenthau telegrammed the Secretary of State on September 4. In light of everything else he mentioned, the question of whether or not the schools would open seemed of minor importance. But the missionary connection would be an important avenue into US action. “Inform Barton, Boston; Dodge, Crane, Brown, New York,” Morgenthau signed off.15 These were Rev. James Barton, of the ABCFM; Cleveland Dodge, a philanthropist and trustee of Robert College; Charles Crane, a Wilson supporter with an interest in the Middle East; and Arthur Judson Brown, of the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board. These missionary leaders would lead the US humanitarian efforts to aid the Armenians throughout the war years.
Eyewitnesses described arrests, looting, stabbings, stoning, and rape. Some of the victims were thrown into wells while they were still alive. In an attempt to escape the violence, crowds of Armenians attempted to flee on foot. Many died on the journey from hunger or cold. The US missionaries eventually received permission to bury some of the dead. They found mutilated corpses that were missing eyes, ears, lips, or noses.16 But news was slow to spread. Missionaries were cut off from easy communication with consuls, and it would take months for missionaries in one portion of the empire to learn of the violence that their peers faced in other regions. Slowly, missionary reports of this new wave of atrocities began to reach consulates, the embassy, and eventually, Washington. Across the empire, Armenians were exiled from their homes, forced to relocate to unfavorable locations, and faced with brutal attacks that amounted to nothing short of genocide.
In Ourmiah (Urmia), for example, it was the departure of Russian soldiers that created the opportunity for some thirty thousand Turkish and Kurdish soldiers to descend on nearby villages.17 The Turkish government understood the Armenian Christians here and elsewhere to be a threat on multiple levels: they were a threat to the ethno-religious unity of Turkey as well as a potential military threat if their nationalist ambitions led them to join arms with Russia. And so they attacked. Missionary Mary Platt recorded these events in her journal using stark anti-Islamic language: “Evil-minded Moslems all over the plain began to plunder the Christian villages.”18
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan first contacted Morgenthau about the humanitarian crisis in February. He had heard rumors of potential unrest and instructed the ambassador to ask the Turkish government to take action to protect the “lives and property of Jews and Christians in case of massacre or looting.”19 Morgenthau was already attuned to the matter.20 By late May, there was word of massacres of Armenians in Erzerurm (Erzurum), Dertchun (Datsun), Eguine (Egin), Van, Bitlis, Mush, Sassun (Sason), Zeitun (Süleymanli), and Cilicia.21 Morgenthau described attacks of “unprecedented proportions” across “widely scattered districts.” It was, he concluded, a “systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations.” The victims were sent out on foot to the desert regions of the empire, “herded like cattle,” with no provisions for lodging or food. Most of them, he expected, would “doubtless perish by murder or slow starvation.” The only exceptions might be those who “in desperation embrace Mohammedanism.” In several places, he reported, aid workers were denied access to the refugees. The missionaries expected their schools to be shut down, but Morgenthau did not think they were in personal danger.22 By September, Morgenthau had shifted from describing persecution to warning about absolute destruction.23
Missionary accounts agreed. In Van, American missionaries watched in horror as the violence erupted around them in April. The governor-general had ordered “a general massacre of his Armenian subjects,” as the missionaries would later report. Since most men of fighting age had been drafted into the war, the Kurdish forces who came to smaller towns and villages throughout the province met little resistance. Missionaries estimated that 55,000 were killed in these attacks, with thousands more wounded and fleeing to the city for safety.24 Missionary Grisell McLaren described listening to the rifles and cannons from inside the Van hospital, where she had been working with wounded Turkish soldiers. Soon, the government closed the hospital and the patients were transferred to Bitlis. McLaren accompanied them at the request of an Armenian patient who was sure they would die without the protection of an American escort.25 On her journey, she described an Armenian community that was terrified of further violence and traumatized by what had come before, “rocking back and forth, and wringing their hands” as they told her their stories. McLaren recounted tales of babies who “had been killed and their bodies thrown into the lake and others had been thrown in alive,” and of young women “carried off by the Kurds.”26 Thousands of Armenian refugees with similar stories poured into Bitlis, seeking protection. When McLaren reached the US mission, she was among approximately seven hundred refugees who sought sanctuary on the missionary premises.27
The missionary compound was “rather small,” with only four buildings inside: a church, two schoolhouses, and the residence of one of the missionary families. But it was well fortified with a stone wall and iron bars that secured the gate every night. As they continued to hear of village after village under attack, terrified Armenians continued to pour into the city. Soon, the missionaries estimated that twelve thousand refugees had come to Bitlis. Many of these were cared for at the Armenian church; the American missionaries were responsible for eight thousand. The available relief funds were insufficient, barely enough to keep any individuals alive. Soon, soldiers gathered the refugees and drove them out of the city. The missionaries later heard that many of those refugees were murdered during their travel.28
This was not the end. In late June, the mission premises were surrounded by soldiers and police who arrested every man and boy over ten years of age. After a week, the missionaries learned that the men had first been brought to an underground dungeon and then killed.29 Soon thereafter, the women, too, were gathered together and forced to leave Bitlis. When McLaren asked that her female students be allowed to remain at the mission school, her request was denied. The government had ordered that no Armenians should remain in Bitlis.
The missionaries were allowed to take their students to Harpoot, but the mission premises there had already been turned over to the government for hospital use. McLaren planned to barricade the school building to protect her students if necessary, but was finally granted permission to keep them in place for as long as possible. No more Armenians could come into the compound, however. The missionaries “tried to keep this promise” to turn away the many suffering people who came by their gates “as their only hope of saving a few.” The only exceptions to this prohibition came when the missionaries found old women “in a dying condition” or young children who were starving. These they were permitted to bring into the school building, but the police later claimed the children. “The screams of women and children could be heard at almost any time during the day,” the missionaries would later recall. “The cries that rang out through the darkness of the night were even more heartrending.”30 By November, the missionaries, too, had been forced out of Bitlis.
The Bitlis mission was not the only one with such stories. American missionaries throughout the empire tried to do what they could, and sent word to Morgenthau in Constantinople that aid was desperately needed. This was a humanitarian crisis, but it was also about US interests, they reminded him. Some well-connected missionaries went beyond Morgenthau straight to Washington in their appeals for US intervention.
Missionary William Chambers had known President Wilson as a student at Princeton, and he had long followed Wilson’s career with pride. In 1915, he was in New Jersey after a harrowing journey from Adana, Turkey, as part of a party of twelve missionaries. When he wrote to Wilson, he described a Sunday service that he had conducted on board the ship, one hand holding the Bible and the other on one of the guns of the USS Des Moines. It was a “startling” experience for Chambers to preach between these two objects whose purposes he felt were so different: “The one made for the destruction of men and the other revealed for their life and peace.” The only way that he could resolve the tension was to recognize that “the world needs them both.” Under the leadership of men like Wilson, Chambers was sure “the one would be used to restrain evil and the other to develop righteousness and good-will to men.” The Armenian Genocide helped him to reach this conclusion. It was so horrible, he wrote, that he had come to hope that the United States “should become so strong on land and sea that such a government as Turkey would never dare to commit such a horrible crime.” Humanitarian intervention—even, perhaps, military intervention—was needed.31
Morgenthau knew that Americans needed to act, but he was not sure how. The Ottoman government insisted that this was a domestic matter in which the United States had no right to interfere.32 By August, he admitted that it was “difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race,” but he knew that as an ambassador he was duty-bound to maintain a position of neutrality on the internal affairs of a foreign nation. He asked for the State Department to issue him with some orders—any orders—to make an “unequivocal protest on behalf of our government.” Perhaps they might ask the Germans to challenge their ally’s behavior. At the very least, he hoped, the United States might demand that the Ottomans allow Americans to provide relief to those who were suffering. “The advance of such assistance might be the means of saving thousands,” he wrote.33
Morgenthau was not the only one asking. James Barton of the ABCFM telegrammed the secretary of state: “Cannot something be done to alleviate the horrors?”34 By September, Morgenthau urged the secretary of state to create a committee to raise funds for Armenian relief that might allow for refugees to emigrate to the United States.35
American official appeals to humanitarianism did not move the Ottoman government to action. When Hoffman Philip, the US chargé in Constantinople, met with Talaat Bey, the Ottoman minister of war, Talaat insisted that US reports were an exaggeration and, further, that the American missionaries who had shared so much of the news with the world were a destabilizing presence. The “main effect” of missionary work with Armenian Christians, Talaat insisted, was to “stimulate their antigovernmental tendencies.” Here was the familiar charge that missionaries were meddling in situations they did not understand, but Philip was unconcerned. Instead, he focused on how to get help to the suffering.36
Through the summer of 1916, Philip continued reporting that many were “dying of disease, starvation, and exhaustion” after being “shifted about from one place to another in the desert by relentless officials.” The missionaries reported that somewhere between nine and eleven thousand men, women, and children in Aleppo and Adana had been massacred.37 Thousands more were attacked later in the summer. “It is a complete extermination,” Philip put it simply. “Everybody is in terror.”38
But what was the US Department of State to do? Secretary Lansing asked Philip for ideas, but had few to share. Perhaps the United States should “flatly threaten to withdraw our diplomatic representative from a country where such barbarous methods are not only tolerated but actually carried out by order of the existing government.” Such a threat would “have the effect of bringing the guilty parties to an appreciation of their true position before the world and of ameliorating the situation.” But such a move would be risky, too. It would put US interests in Turkey—the missionaries—at risk, and could make it impossible to get the necessary aid to those who suffered.39
In the meantime, concerned Americans in the United States raised awareness and collected for Armenian relief. Foreign missionaries and their American supporters were at the center of this work: James Barton, foreign secretary of the ABCFM, served as president of ACASR, which quickly became a hub for missionary and government news from the region.40 Barton worked with journalists to keep stories of the atrocities and appeals for relief in the news. Newspapers and more than twenty magazines ran stories on the Armenians in these years, many of which emphasized Islamic violence and the particular needs of women and children.41 Inspired by their work, President Wilson set aside days of remembrance for the Armenians in 1916. Barton and other missionary leaders prepared his proclamation and traveled to Washington to deliver it by hand.42
As in the Armenian massacres of the 1890s, the most pressing concerns were how to stop the atrocities and how to get relief to those who were suffering. In 1916, US funding supported more than a thousand orphans in Aleppo, but this was hardly enough. The US embassy reported that hundreds more died of starvation. Many had only grass to eat.43
Relief took several forms: food for the hungry, specialized aid for exiles, medical aid, and finally, care for the many children who were left orphaned. By 1917, relief work also took the shape of employment: one thousand women in Erivan (Yerevan), for example, labored in a wool shop where they produced socks and blankets. Other workers produced bedclothes for local hospitals, sweaters for soldiers, or embroidery for export.44 Missionaries, particularly from the ABCFM, were major distributors of this aid. After all, sixteen of the twenty cities that the Rockefeller Foundation’s War Relief Commission had suggested for relief work were already the homes of American Board mission stations. The missionaries were on the ground and ready to help.45
To keep up this work, ACASR encouraged donations from the American populace. ACASR’s aggressive public relations campaign kept Armenian suffering at the front of Americans’ minds, encouraging even more donations. In 1916, the committee raised more than $2 million, and would raise double that in 1917. In 1918, they raised about $7 million.46 But the need continued to outstrip donations. Armenia was, as missionary W. Nesbitt Chambers expressed it, “drenched with the blood of her sons and daughters.” He urged US Christians to respond to the “piteous wail of a nation in distress.”47
In the midst of humanitarian disaster, missionaries worried that their property, too, was under attack. Military authorities continued to seize missionary property, claiming that it was needed for military purposes. The Ottoman minister of foreign affairs assured the US government that these were merely temporary conditions, but the Americans were not so sure. In Marsovan (Merzifon), officials arrived without warning, ordered the fourteen missionaries out of their homes, and expelled their students from the school premises. The missionaries were prevented from contacting the ambassador and were told (incorrectly) that the embassy was closed and that a US declaration of war was “imminent.” They were sent to Constantinople without being permitted to remove their personal belongings. When Philip inventoried the mission compound for the Turkish minister of foreign affairs, he listed some twenty-two buildings (schools, hospitals, residences) and “a library of 10,000 volumes, a museum with 7,000 objects,” all on thirty-seven acres. Not counting the personal property of the missionary families, Philip valued the property at £50,000.48 Mission properties at Sivas and Talas were similarly seized. It was not just the property that concerned Philip, however. Also of concern was the fact that the female students and teachers who were Ottoman subjects had been removed from mission premises and faced “strongest pressure” to renounce Christianity, embrace Islam, and take Muslim husbands.49
Philip had serious doubts about the military necessity of occupying missionary buildings, and he was furious about the way that the missionaries were treated. Missionaries and their supporters were upset that their buildings were being seized and their work stopped, but they were even more worried about their Armenian teachers and students who were killed or scattered. An article on the “martyred professors of Euphrates College” singled out four murdered Armenian teachers who had been taken from the school and tortured: one had been starved and hung by his arms, another had his finger nails pulled out by the roots. All were killed, alongside the majority of their students.50 “American citizens, American property, and American enterprises have all suffered at the hands of the mad Turk,” one article in the Missionary Herald summarized.51
Washington took this threat seriously. This was American property, and the rights of US citizens were at risk. It was not simply a matter of internal Ottoman politics. Acting Secretary of State Frank Polk ordered Philip to request that the Turkish government clarify its attitude toward the United States.52 The United States was neutral in the war at this point; Americans should not be treated as belligerents.
Missionaries, Wilson, and War
That neutrality did not last long. In early April 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, marking the US entry into the European war. Wilson had won his narrow reelection with a slogan claiming that “he kept us out of war,” but after continued German submarine warfare on neutral ships in the Atlantic and the discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram and its suggestion that Germany might ally with Mexico, the United States could remain neutral no longer. It was more than just submarines and German intrigue that brought Americans to the front. Wilson and many others had come to understand this as a war between democracy and absolutism, with nothing less than the “ultimate peace of the world and the liberation of its peoples” at stake.53
Woodrow Wilson was a sympathetic supporter of missionary interests. As had been the case for earlier generations of politicians, Wilson well understood that missionaries could have profound political importance. And he was enthusiastic about the positive effects missionaries could have in spreading not only Christianity, but also democracy. He said as much in an address to the YMCA in 1912, when he credited the organization with contributing to the recent revolution in China.54 The following year, Wilson wrote to Barton from the White House to celebrate the centenary of American missions in India. He praised “the great educational, christianizing and civilizing benefits” that the missionaries had brought about in that country.55 It was his understanding of the missionary benefit to US foreign relations that made him nominate John Mott of the YMCA and Student Volunteer Movement as minister to China (Mott declined the appointment).56 It should be no surprise, then, that when Wilson decided that the time had come to declare war, his description of the ideal world order and the US role within it resonated deeply with missionaries and their supporters.
As he addressed Congress on April 2, 1917, Wilson laid out the “motives and objects” of the United States in this fight. Americans would go to war to “vindicate the principles of peace and justice,” which Wilson believed could only be maintained through “a partnership of democratic nations.” Americans had no “selfish ends to serve,” Wilson argued. “We desire no conquest, no dominion.” Rather, they were fighting because “the world must be made safe for democracy.” Americans would fight, too, for “the rights and liberties of small nations”—a claim that would raise the hopes of Armenians and others around the world that Wilson’s vision of political self-determination would include them.57
In churches across the country, including the mainline and evangelical Protestant churches that supported foreign missions, US Christians generally embraced Wilson’s call to arms. Wilson’s own religious world-view emerged regularly as he described America’s war aims and his hopes for the eventual peace. Through this war, he argued, providence had provided the United States with an opportunity “to show the world that she was born to save mankind.”58 Such a framing of America’s role in the world echoed the patriotism of missionaries throughout the prior century.
Missionaries, too, supported America’s entry into the war. Missionary Mrs. Douglas, in Tehran, wrote to the United States of the pride she felt when she learned that the United States had joined the war: “We feel so proud that our country has taken her rightful place among the nations to fight for righteousness and permanent peace.”59 The committee at the head of Woman’s Work, a Presbyterian missionary magazine, showed their own pride in their country by investing one thousand dollars of the magazine’s reserve fund toward a Liberty Bond. It was, they felt, “the duty of every Christian woman to back the Government of the United States in this way to the very utmost of her ability. In one way or another we are all in the war.”60
Even before the United States entered the fight, missionaries began to use militaristic language to describe their work: the missionary lectures at a 1916 conference were referred to as “bugle calls from mission fields.”61 Missionaries embraced Wilson’s internationalist vision and insisted that the war would ultimately further their larger goals. John Mott explained his support for the war simply, echoing Wilson’s framing of the transformative effects of the peace that would follow. “At the close of the War there will be an unparalleled opportunity for reconstruction,” he explained in 1917. The postwar era would be a moment of “incalculable plasticity.” And the civilizing and humanitarian work that missionaries had long dedicated themselves to would, he assumed, be at the center of that reconstruction.62 One missionary in Asia insisted that the defeat of Germany would be a tremendous boon to world missions. If more Americans understood this, he wrote, “there would not be a pacifist among them.”63
Despite this enthusiasm, the war years presented challenges for mission work around the world. Prices went up. Communication became more challenging. Men who might have served as missionaries became soldiers instead.64 Missionary societies across the country were insistent that they supported the overall goals of the war, and that their work was essential to both the war effort and the even more important reconstruction that would follow. The ABCFM urged its supporters not to “be drawn into any attitude of rivalry or competition” between mission work and the war effort.65 Woman’s Work appealed to its readers to “think a minute” about how to balance their support for the war effort with their support for missions: “Are YOU sacrificing for War Relief, or Are you asking your Missionary Magazine to sacrifice?” If you had to ask “the Red Cross or the Missionary Society—Which?” the magazine answered enthusiastically, “Both!”66
Missionaries were quick to remind their supporters that the realization of Wilson’s grand vision would require the mission movement to act as an auxiliary to the war effort. “Certainly no organization is more vitally concerned with the American ideal which underlies our declaration of war than the American Board, which has been preaching and inculcating justice, humanity, and peace for over a century,” the Missionary Herald appealed in its May issue. The only way to secure worldwide democracy and peace would be to support missionary work, Barton wrote. He claimed the full agreement of the president and the State Department in this assessment.67
While missionaries were not “political agents,” Barton and the ABCFM took pride in the way that missionaries had helped to inspire “striking moral reforms” around the world through “the leadership of men and women trained in mission institutions.” As the “confidential advisers of ambassadors, ministers, and consuls,” missionaries had provided the kind of advice that was “helpful to sound, sane, and fraternal international relations.”68 These ideas were echoed in publication after publication. In Woman’s Work, Mrs. Dwight H. Day wrote about the importance of convincing people that “the high purposes of the war positively cannot be achieved unless Christian principles are established among the nations of the world.”69
However, missionaries and their supporters worried about what would happen to the US mission in Turkey. Since the Ottoman Empire and Germany were allied, would the United States go to war with the Turks? The other allied powers had done so. But missionaries and their supporters were sure that this would have grave effects. In the Missionary Herald, the answer to the question, “Should the United States declare war against Turkey and Bulgaria?” was “unqualifiedly and emphatically, ‘No.’” The risks to the missionaries and the relief work they had undertaken were simply too great. And because the United States claimed that it had not entered the war out of aggression, it was “morally bound to limit its field of warfare to the utmost.”70 James Barton and Cleveland Dodge used their positions on the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief and as advisors to President Wilson to urge the government to remain neutral toward Turkey, even as it declared war against Germany.71 The New York Tribune went so far as to call the missionary lobby the “silent unofficial Cabinet” that was advising President Wilson on these matters.72
There were practical reasons for not going to war with Turkey. Most pressingly, the United States did not have a sufficient military force to dedicate to both the western and eastern front of the war.73 The missionaries had a long list of reasons beyond the practical, and Secretary of State Robert Lansing echoed them in a memo to the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. “The interests of the United States in Turkey are very large,” he explained. These interests primarily consisted of the missionary institutions that had been built over the past century, with a total value of several millions of dollars. The missionaries themselves (numbering about three hundred in 1917) would also be in “great personal danger” if war was declared before they could leave the country. Without a declaration of war, however, Lansing believed that the missionaries would be allowed to remain in place and tend to their students, whom Lansing estimated to number around fifty thousand. “As a final observation,” he concluded, “it might be added that if we should declare war against Turkey, the Turks would be likely to retaliate by fresh massacres on the Christians and Jews in the Turkish Empire.”74
The question of whether to declare war against Turkey was a difficult one. Britain and France both wanted the United States to do so, and General Tasker Bliss supported this plan. Former president Theodore Roosevelt loudly urged the United States to declare war on Turkey and Bulgaria in addition to Germany, and Republicans in Congress such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge were also in favor.
But Secretary Lansing noticed “the failure to recognize the humanitarian side of the question” in these arguments for US belligerence. “Thousands of Armenians and Syrians are being kept alive today by the distribution of supplies purchased through funds sent to our missionaries in Turkey, which amount to one or two millions of dollars a month.” While Lansing did not think that this issue should determine the US response, he did feel that it needed to be considered. “If a state of war is declared,” Lansing understood, “that relief will come to an end, our missionaries will be expelled or interned and the great missionary properties will be confiscated.”75
The United States did not declare war on Turkey, but the Ottoman government ended diplomatic relations with the United States regardless. Upon learning that the embassy would be forced to leave, Ambassador Abram Elkus recalled all the Americans in Turkey to Constantinople in preparation of their evacuation. More than fifty missionaries refused to abandon their posts and chose instead to remain at their stations and continue what missionary and relief work they could still perform, relying on the Swiss embassy for protection in case of emergency. They continued to serve tens of thousands of refugees, making good use of funding raised by ACASR.76
Missionary Ammunition and Planning for Peace
Missionary Ammunition began publication in 1916. The idea behind the series was much the same as had inspired publishers of missionary intelligence in the previous century: to encourage missionary enthusiasm by providing information to pastors and congregants about the world and the work of foreign missionaries.77 But the language was new. This was not just missionary intelligence. Missionary ammunition implied that the pastors who read it were at battle. They were fighting against many of the same forces that they had struggled with for generations—apathy, localism. The Great War presented a new foe, even before the United States officially entered the fight. American missionaries were fighting for their place in the new world order, hoping to define the war and the US response to it in ways that would advance their cause and their vision.
The war itself brought Americans face to face with an unprecedented death toll and the horrors of trench warfare. By its end, more than a hundred thousand Americans had died, but this was nothing in comparison to the toll on their European counterparts. For some, the war challenged the basic premise that had undergirded a century of missionary diplomacy: the superiority of Western Christian civilization. What was the value of that civilization, really, if all of Europe seemed determined to kill each other?
In 1918, Missionary Ammunition took up the theme of “The War Test.” In thirty-two short essays and prayers—by authors including political figures such as Woodrow Wilson and missionary leaders like John Mott, James Barton, and Robert Speer—the volume asked what the obligations of missionaries were during war. The “so-called Christian countries of Europe and North America,” Mott explained with biting sarcasm, were in the midst of the most destructive war the world had ever seen. J. H. Oldham explained that “so complete an overturning of the established order cannot leave men’s thoughts about Christianity unchanged.”78 But missionaries remained optimistic, insisting that “the non-Christian people themselves are coming to see that the type of Christianity which our missionaries represent is the only solution of the problems of the world.”79
The missionaries identified this project with the goals of the United States in the war. The volume included excerpts from Wilson’s addresses that defined US war aims as unselfish and humanitarian.80 The missionary writings echoed this theme and urged America “to keep the flag and the cross close together.”81 Barton wrote about how the war had drawn missionaries closer than ever into diplomatic relations, particularly in Turkey. But even those who worked farther away from the center of fighting were affected. Missionaries, he wrote, “represent the true democracy which recognizes the right of the individual as well as the brotherhood of man.” As a result, he was sure that whatever the end of the war would bring, it would require more missionaries to go out and serve.82
The war did not only present a crisis, missionaries argued. It also presented an opportunity. When calling for new volunteers in 1918, the ABCFM announced that it “believe[d] in Preparedness,” adapting a watchword of the era. But they did not speak of military preparedness, but of missionary preparedness. They wanted to be ready for the new fields they hoped would open in the aftermath of war.83 In 1918, Egbert Smith titled his report on the progress of Presbyterian missions “How the Battle Goes” and described the mission field as “the Front” and the United States as the “supply base.” Though the war was not yet over, Smith already revealed some of the surprising optimism that many missionaries would bring to the postwar era. The war had changed everything. It brought untold destruction and suffering, but Smith hoped that it was “proving also a powerful promoter of the missionary cause.” No longer could anyone focus on “petty” or “provincial” concerns. Instead, people were forced to realize that “world issues are the dominant questions of humanity.” More and more, Americans would “eagerly scan the daily record of international developments.”84 The war, in other words, had the potential to draw American attention to the spiritual needs of the world, just as the foreign mission movement had been trying to do for over a century.
By the war’s end, this sense of optimism was even more present in the pages of Missionary Ammunition. “The war is over! The battle for the ideals of righteousness, justice, and truth has been won,” the writers celebrated. The war, further, had created “unparalleled opportunities.” And the world needed these missionaries. “The war must be interpreted to the Nations of the World,” the writers argued. “They must realize that spiritual forces are more powerful than material, that righteousness exalts a Nation, that Brotherhood and not rivalry must determine international relationships, and that sacrificial service is essential to the world’s well-being. These truths are at the heart of the missionary message.” The war had been won with armies, but “to keep it won,” missionaries were needed.85 After all, missionaries were “the great peacemakers between the most widely separated, unlike, and menacing nations.”86
Both men and women were needed for this cause. The Reverend Stephen Corey described the “new thrill” that had come to “American manhood,” marked by unselfish sacrifice for “sacred ideals, for human freedom, for the liberation of women and little children.”87 Lucy Peabody urged women, too, to heed the call for service. Women around the world needed to be “fitted for the new world democracy,” and would need female missionaries to lead them. “Victory will not come to us,” she urged. “We must win it and to win it we must have first a united campaign. We must recognize the necessity of working together, of praying together, and of presenting together the plan for the salvation of the women of the world.”88
As the war ended, Wilson decided to travel to Europe himself to take part in the peace negotiations. He was the first sitting US president to travel to Europe, marking the start of a new era in US diplomacy. But the missionary diplomacy that had defined US interests in Turkey continued. As he prepared, Wilson asked Barton, Dodge, and some missionaries working in the Ottoman Empire to advise him. Barton’s reports again emphasized that the only way to address the problems in Turkey was to spread Christianity there.
Missionaries greeted the peace with gratitude and optimism. “Turkey has surrendered,” the Missionary Herald reported. “Her peoples are free from the yoke of their hated rulers.” The time had come to “take up the work of rendering intelligent relief, of restoring and stimulating agriculture and industrial arts, and of heartening the several races to be found in the land, to reestablish themselves and to develop their life.”89 It was their dearest hope that the United States would be able to play a central role in the region after the Great War.90 But this would be an uphill battle. Diplomatically, there was little that the Wilson administration was able to do to protect Armenia. When the Armenians declared the creation of a new republic in May of that year, the United States did not even recognize its independence.91
During the peace negotiations, the Great Powers faced the challenging question of what to do with the colonies and territories of their defeated foes. For the same reason that Americans had resisted independence in the Philippines in 1898, the Allies regarded the unrestricted independence of these former colonies as unwise. The people were not ready for self-government; Wilson explained that they were “not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” They needed guidance, and the solution to this problem would be the creation of mandated powers responsible to the League of Nations that would prepare the country for true independence. This would be a “sacred trust of civilization,” with a more powerful country providing varying degrees of oversight for these new and weaker countries.92
Religious freedom was one of several rights that Wilson hoped the mandates would guarantee. Since Wilson and many other American observers considered the Armenian Genocide to have been primarily religiously motivated, it was essential that the religious freedom of minority groups would be guaranteed in the future. Religious freedom, Wilson believed, would be one way to prevent future conflicts, atrocities, and warfare. But the old challenge of missionary definitions of religious freedom continued: What did religious freedom mean, and who could claim it? The planned guarantees of religious freedom that would shape the mandate system focused on two groups: religious minorities, who should be granted freedom of conscience; and Christian missionaries, who should be granted the freedom to go about their business of building schools and hospitals, publishing, and evangelizing.93
Among the countries that would need a mandated power was Armenia. The peace conference would not seat any Armenian delegates, leaving the fate of the new country in the hands of other powers. As Wilson would explain to Armenian leaders, they could not join the negotiations until they were recognized as members of the community of nations. Left unstated was the fact that Wilson, and many other political leaders, would not be willing to recognize the country until it had undergone a period of oversight and modernization.94 Wilson and the missionaries hoped that the United States would accept this responsibility. In fact, he told Cleveland Dodge, he had “set [his] heart on seeing this Government accept the mandate for Armenia.” It seemed to Wilson that the duty was “plainly marked out for us.” The question was only how to secure public support.95
First, Wilson understood, he would have to get Americans to accept the planned League of Nations. In 1919, Wilson returned from Europe and began the hard task of convincing Americans that the League of Nations was the only possible solution to the problems that had led to the Great War.96 To gain support for his plan, Wilson repeatedly invoked Armenia alongside other small nations that he feared would be at risk of destruction without the international protection of the League and the mandate system it would create. “You poured out your money to help succor Armenians after they suffered,” he reminded a crowd in Boston. “Now set up your strength so that they shall never suffer again.”97 In Kansas City, he described one of the major war aims as “to see that helpless peoples were nowhere in the world put at the mercy of unscrupulous enemies and masters” as the Armenians had been.98 And to members of the Democratic National Committee, he explained that Americans “know more about Armenia and its sufferings than they know about any other European area,” not only because of the recent atrocities, but because of a longstanding missionary interest in the region. “That is a part of the world where already American influence extends—a saving influence and an educating and an uplifting influence.” This was the sort of influence that Wilson hoped the United States might have on the world at large.99
As the political debates over the League of Nations continued, the suffering of Armenians continued as well, and US missionaries and humanitarians continued to serve them. Wilson made a public appeal at the end of 1918 for Americans to contribute to relief efforts, and Near East Relief collected $20 million the following year.100 A delegation from Near East Relief in 1919 reported more than 500,000 refugees in the Caucuses. Aid continued to be desperately needed.101 Missionaries who had been forced to abandon their posts were now beginning to return, and they reported horrible situations in the aftermath of war and genocide. As missionary Minnie B. Mills explained in Smyrna, the challenge that missionaries now faced was “what to do with all these children and young women, who have been the victims of such evil deeds, and how to save them from further unhappiness and wrong.”102 The Reverend Nesbitt Chambers, in Adana, echoed this image of dire suffering as he described the needs of those Armenians who began to return home after four years of exile and suffering. They had faced “indescribably diabolical and inhumanly cruel tortures” in that time and now were “in need of careful and sympathetic treatment with the necessary opportunity for recuperation and reconstruction.”103 Only additional giving from the United States could make it possible to help more and to prevent such dire suffering.
Missionaries were optimistic about the rumors of a potential US mandate in Armenia. In 1919, the Missionary Herald shared reports from Paris that suggested that the peace conference was urging the United States to assume this responsibility. Such a choice made sense, due to the longstanding American missionary presence in the region. And though such a move would be daunting, the Herald suggested it was necessary for the United States to rise to the challenge. “If there is anything in our talk about the brotherhood of nations,” the article urged, “we cannot promptly refuse to act as the Big Brother when we are soberly called upon so to do.” America had a duty toward the Armenians and could not shirk it. “Let us not hide in selfishness behind any Monroe Doctrine. America belongs to the world and will evermore; ours is a full-orbed world, not a hemisphere; that at least is settled.”104 Missionaries had been globally active for a century; it was time for their home government to catch up.
The crisis in Armenia created a duty for the United States, missionaries argued. It simply could not leave the country to “work out, unaided, her tremendous problems—social, religious, economic, national. No other country is in a position to render the same service, and we must not hesitate to respond.”105 As one departing missionary reflected, Armenia was “about to leap forward under the blessings of liberty, prosperity, and, it may be, under the protection of the Stars and Stripes.”106 The ABCFM was reluctant to officially take a political stand on the subject, but did avow that “justice demands that the Armenians shall be delivered from the atrocities of Turkish tyranny and misrule.”107
Both the League and the mandate met with resistance in the Republican-controlled Congress. The primary conflict related to competing visions of the US role in the world and of the implications of international cooperation. But Wilson continued his appeal on behalf of a US mandate in Armenia. In 1920, the Senate passed a resolution congratulating Armenia on its independence in May, and Wilson informed Congress that he believed it was “providential,” and not merely “coincidence” that on the same day he received a request for the United States to accept the mandate for Armenia. Wilson asked Congress to give him power to accept this mandate, with the expectation that it was the will of the people of the United States. After all, Wilson argued, Americans had sympathized with the Armenians “with extraordinary spontaneity and sincerity” that emerged from “untainted consciences, pure Christian faith, and an earnest desire to see Christian people everywhere succored in their time of suffering, and lifted from their abject subjection and distress and enabled to stand upon their feet and take their place among the free nations of the world.”108
Ultimately, the United States rejected both the League of Nations and the Armenian mandate. In the Senate, the mandate vote was 23 in favor and 52 against.109 Missionaries and humanitarians continued to work for Armenia regardless; Near East Relief remained active through the 1920s. In fifteen years, it spent $116 million in aid, serving more than a million refugees, educating 132,000 orphans, training 200 nurses, and building hundreds of miles of roads. The development work that missions had long undertaken continued under this mantle, introducing modern Western agricultural practices to the region alongside health-care and education.110
These missionaries and humanitarians continued to promote US engagement with the cause through the creation of Golden Rule Sunday, the first Sunday in December. On this day, families were urged to eat simple fare like what might be served in an orphanage and to donate to Near East Relief. The Golden Rule was emerging as a nonsectarian ethos that Americans believed united all faith traditions. Because it was not specific to any particular religious group, it was presented as a civic idea as much as it was a religious one. Golden Rule Sunday quickly took off, with international participation and broad enthusiasm in the United States. Donors received letters from Presidents Coolidge and Wilson, in addition to governors, senators, and members of cabinet. Local schools and merchants sponsored connected events, which might feature Near East Relief promotional films or guest speakers alongside the simple fare.111 The event’s goal was nothing short of bringing together people from over fifty countries to try to envision a new world order in the aftermath of war.
The missionary movement emerged from the Great War secure in the righteousness of their country and of their churches. Yet under the surface, cracks were beginning to show. The connections that missionaries had made to humanitarian organizations provided new venues for Americans who were interested in serving the needs of others around the world. And for all that missionary leaders insisted that the church was stronger than ever, the horrors of war would profoundly challenge US Protestant denominations. Further, the rejection of the League of Nations brought the United States into a new period of conflict over its role in the world. The internationalist vision that missionaries had hoped the war would usher in was, in fact, defeated.
What that would mean for future of missionary diplomacy, only time would tell.