Henry Morgenthau Sr.

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Henry Morgenthau Sr.
Abram I. Elkus
Personal details
Born(1856-04-26)April 26, 1856
Mannheim, Baden (present-day Baden-Württemberg, Germany)
DiedNovember 25, 1946(1946-11-25) (aged 90)
New York City, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
SpouseJosephine Sykes
Children
Relatives
Alma mater
ProfessionLawyer, diplomat
ReligionReform Judaism

Henry Morgenthau (

ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Morgenthau was one of the most prominent Americans who spoke about the Greek genocide and the Armenian genocide[1] of which he stated, "I am firmly convinced that this is the greatest crime of the ages".[2]

Morgenthau was the father of the politician

District Attorney of Manhattan for 35 years, and Barbara W. Tuchman, a historian who won the Pulitzer Prize for her book The Guns of August
.

Early life and education

Morgenthau was born the ninth of 11 living children, in

Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was the son of Lazarus and Babette (Guggenheim) Morgenthau.[3] His father was a successful cigar manufacturer who had cigar factories at Mannheim, Lorsch and Heppenheim, employing as many as 1,000 people (Mannheim had a population of 21,000 during this period). His business suffered a severe financial setback during the American Civil War
, due to an 1862 tobacco tariff on imports, which closed German tobacco exports to the US for good.

The Morgenthau family immigrated to New York in 1866. There, despite considerable savings, his father was not able to re-establish himself in business. His development and marketing of various inventions and his investments in other enterprises failed. Lazarus Morgenthau staved off failure and stabilized his income by becoming a fundraiser for Jewish houses of worship. Henry attended City College of New York, where he received his BA, and later Columbia Law School.

Business career

He began his career as a lawyer, but he made a substantial fortune in real estate investments.

Henry Morgenthau Company from 1905–1913.[7]

Morgenthau married Josephine Sykes in 1882 and they had four children:

Alma, Henry Jr. and Ruth.[8] His daughter Helen - a noted garden writer who broadcast on radio & television and lectured on horticulture - married Mortimer J. Fox an architect, banker and landscape artist.[9] His daughter Alma - an art collector and patron of the arts & music - married investment banker, art collector and philanthropist Maurice Wertheim.[10] His daughter Ruth married banker and philanthropist George Washington Naumburg[11][12][circular reference][13] She was also a civic leader supporting the arts and music. Ruth founded Fountain House, a home in NYC to assist those with schizophrenia and men leaving jail. It was a residence that pioneered providing psychological counseling to people, and developed the novel concept of looking after the community's mental health. She was also a board member of the Manhattan School of Music, and there she established a fund to assist troubled students at the school, which still operates. In Pound Ridge, NY she co-founded the town's library and gave it an additional reading room, and then at her death, she donated the Henry Morgenthau Preserve, Pound Ridge, NY, in her father's memory.[14][15]

Morgenthau built a successful career as a lawyer and served as the leader of the Reform Jewish community in New York.[16]

Political career

Morgenthau, Samuel Train Dutton and Cleveland Hoadley Dodge in 1916

Morgenthau's career enabled him to contribute handsomely to President Woodrow Wilson's election campaign in 1912. He had first met Wilson in 1911 at a dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Free Synagogue society and the two "seem to have bonded", marking the "turning point in Morgenthau's political career".[17] His role in American politics grew more pronounced in later months. Although he did not gain the chairmanship of Wilson's campaign finance committee, Morgenthau was offered the position of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He had hoped for a cabinet post as well, but was not successful in gaining one.

Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire

See also: Ottoman Empire–United States relations and Armenian genocide
State Department
in 1915 described the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a "campaign of race extermination."

As an early Wilson supporter, Morgenthau assumed that Wilson would appoint him to a cabinet-level position, but the new President had other plans for him. Like other prominent Jewish Americans (

U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
in 1913, he served in this position until 1916.

Although the safety of American citizens in the Ottoman Empire, mostly Christian missionaries and Jews, loomed large early in his ambassadorship, Morgenthau said that he was most preoccupied by the

Armenian Question.[20] After the outbreak of war in 1914, the U.S. remained neutral, so the American Embassy – and by extension Morgenthau – additionally represented many of the Allies' interests in Constantinople, since they had withdrawn their diplomatic missions after the beginning of hostilities. As Ottoman authorities began the Armenian genocide in 1914–1915, the American consuls residing in different parts of the Empire flooded Morgenthau's desk with reports nearly every hour,[21] documenting the massacres and deportation marches taking place. Faced with the accumulating evidence, he officially informed the U.S. government of the activities of the Ottoman government and asked Washington to intervene.[22]

Audio recording of Chapter 24, "The Murder of a Nation", from Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.
Morgenthau's Story, 1918

The American government however, not wanting to get dragged into disputes, remained a neutral power in the conflict at the time and voiced little official reaction. Morgenthau held high-level meetings with the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to help alleviate the position of the Armenians, but the Turks waived and ignored his protestations. He famously admonished the Ottoman Interior Minister

New York Times, Morgenthau also ensured that the massacres continued to receive prominent coverage. The New York Times published 145 articles in 1915 alone.[24]

Exasperated with his relationship with the Ottoman government, he resigned from the ambassadorship in 1916. Looking back on that decision in his memoir Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, he wrote he had come to see the Ottoman Empire as "a place of horror. I had reached the end of my resources. I found intolerable my further daily association with men, however gracious and accommodating…who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings."[25] He published his conversations with Ottoman leaders and his account of the Armenian genocide in Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, which appeared in the end of 1918.[26]

In June 1917 Felix Frankfurter accompanied Morgenthau, as a representative of the War Department, on a secret mission to persuade the Ottoman Empire to abandon the Central Powers in the war effort. The mission had as its stated purpose to "ameliorate the condition of the Jewish communities in Palestine".[27] In 1918 Morgenthau gave public speeches in the United States warning that the Greeks and Assyrians were being subjected to the "same methods" of deportation and "wholesale massacre" as the Armenians, and that two million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians had already perished.[28]

Interwar period

Following the war, there was much interest and preparation within the Jewish community for the forthcoming

Geneva Conference.[citation needed
]

Death

Morgenthau on a 2015 Armenian stamp from the series "Centennial of the Armenian Genocide". In the background is the telegram (in strip form pasted onto a page) pictured above.

Morgenthau died in 1946 following a

Barbara Tuchman. His daughter Ruth Morgenthau was married to banker George W. Naumburg (son of Elkan Naumburg), and then John Knight.[30]

Selected works

Morgenthau published several books. The Library of Congress holds some 30,000 documents from his personal papers, including:

  • Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918). Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (online).
  • The Secrets of the Bosphorus (1918) (online)
  • The Morgenthau Report (October 3, 1919) concerning the plight of Jews in the Second Polish Republic.
  • All In a Lifetime (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1925), 454 pages, 7 illustrations; featuring the Morgenthau Report (online, at Archive.org).
  • I was sent to Athens (1929) deals with his time working with Greek refugees (openlibrary.org)
  • The Murder of a Nation (1974). With preface by W. N. Medlicott. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America.
Diaries
  • United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913–1916 (2004). Compiled with an introduction by
    ISBN 1-903656-40-0
    .
Official documents

Depictions

In

The Promise, set in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, Morgenthau is played by James Cromwell.[31]

See also

References

  1. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response. New York: HarperCollins. pp. 219–221
    .
  2. ISBN 978-0-7377-7319-4
    .
  3. ^ "Collection: Morgenthau Family Collection | the Center for Jewish History ArchivesSpace".
  4. ^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 219.
  5. ^ "Col. Astor Sells a Block," The New York Times, Dec. 6, 1900.
  6. ^ Clifton Hood, "The Impact of the IRT on New York City," in Historical American Engineering Record, Survey Number HAER NY-122, pp. 145–206, available at https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_Impact_of_the_IRT_on_New_York_City_(Hood).
  7. ^ "Morgenthau | Encyclopedia.com". encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 23 December 2023.
  8. ^ About Henry Morgenthau. henrymorgenthaupreserve.com
  9. ^ "HELEN FOX DEAD; A GARDEN EXPERT; Writer Lectured Widely on Horticultural Topics". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-04-09.
  10. Jewish Telegraph Agency
    . January 24, 1934.
  11. ^ "Naumburg". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 2022-03-29.
  12. ^ "Elkan Naumburg". wikipedia.
  13. ^ "George W. Naumburg Is Dead; Banker and Philanthropist, 94; He Specialized in Children's Welfare in Several Areas Assisted Refugees". The New York Times. Retrieved 2022-04-09.
  14. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  15. ^ "The Henry Morgenthau Preserve". The Henry Morgenthau Preserve. Retrieved 2022-04-10.
  16. ISBN 9780393330304
    .
  17. ^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 220.
  18. ^ Oren. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 333.
  19. ^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 222.
  20. ^ Balakian. The Burning Tigris, p. 223.
  21. ^ "Daily at first and then almost hourly, the reports reached Morgenthau's desk": Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 334.
  22. ^ Oren. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, pp. 333–336.
  23. ^ Oren. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 335.
  24. ^ Oren. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 336.
  25. ^ Oren. Power, Faith, and Fantasy, p. 337.
  26. ^ Morgenthau, Henry (1918). Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
  27. ISBN 0-465-01979-X
    .
  28. ^ Travis, Hannibal. "Native Christians Massacred: The Ottoman Genocide of the Assyrians during World War I," Genocide Studies and Prevention 1 (December 2006): p. 327.
  29. Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? (New Brunswick, New Jersey: North American, 1982), pp. 768–769. Cited in Edward C. Corrigan, Jewish Criticism of Zionism Archived 2010-07-06 at the Wayback Machine, Middle East Policy Council
    , Journal, Winter 1990–91, Number 35
  30. New York Times
    . May 18, 1972.
  31. ^ Bezdikian, Hooshere (20 April 2017). "'The Promise' Premieres in New York with Full Cast, Filmmakers, and UN Dignitaries". The Armenian Weekly. Retrieved 2 October 2017.

Further reading

  • The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response
    . New York: HarperCollins.
  • Meier, Andrew. Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty. New York: Random House, 2022.
  • Morgenthau III, Henry (1991). Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History. New York: Ticknor & Fields.
  • Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present
    . New York: W. W. Norton & Co.
  • Tuchman, Barbara. "The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story," Commentary
    63 (May 1977).

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henry Morgenthau, Sr..
Wikiquote has quotations related to Henry Morgenthau, Sr..
——. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story at the World War I Document Archive.
——. Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. With translations in French, German and Turkish.
Diplomatic posts
Preceded by
United States Ambassador to Turkey

1913–1916 		Succeeded by
Abram I. Elkus
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