The Great Fire (40 page)

O
n Friday, September 15, two days after the fire had broken out, and as it was still burning, Acting Secretary of State Phillips cabled Admiral Bristol and directed him in no uncertain terms to work with Britain, France, and Italy to develop a joint plan to aid the refugees at Smyrna. It was an order, not a request. He sent a copy of his directions simultaneously to the British, French, and Italian governments.

Immediately upon receiving the message, Bristol’s tone turned agreeable and conciliatory. “I concur absolutely with the Department’s opinion that situation clearly beyond the scope of any private charity.” His tone changed, but his actions remained the same. He would continue to find reasons not to cooperate with the Allies.

In Washington, the pressure was building on President Harding for intervention in Turkey to save the Christian population. Bristol was managing the American reporters in Turkey, but shocking reports of the suffering at Smyrna still found their ways into American newspapers. Day after day, Smyrna was the lead story in the The
New York Times:
SMYRNA BURNING
,
SMYRNA IN RUINS
,
SMYRNA WIPED OUT
,
KILLINGS CONTINUE
. Prentiss’s reports of Turkish moderation were overwhelmed by reports of cruelty. The
Times
carried a French observer’s account of the torture and killings of Armenians. “How long will Christian America stand by?” a New Haven minister thundered in the newspaper.

It was not just the coverage in The
New York Times
that captured the nation’s horror. In towns and small cities across the country, Smyrna was big news: in the
Bismarck Tribune,
TURK ARMY MASSACRES 2,000
; in the
Tulsa Daily World
,
TURKS BEGIN MASSACRE IN GREEK CITY
. The press was responding to the reservoir of American sympathy for the Christians in Turkey, and especially for the Armenians.

Protestant clerics reacted to the press reports with resolutions and telegrams to President Harding. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church read a letter to Episcopal bishops gathered for a convention in Portland, Oregon, that described the fate of a half-million “breadless and roofless Christians” who were “exposed to unheard of torments.” The bishops passed a resolution calling for ministers and Sunday schools to make time for presentations on the suffering at Smyrna. The presiding bishop said the church supported the president in any effort he would make in response to the suffering, “diplomatic, naval or military.” Many churchmen were ready to go war with the Turks to protect the Christian minorities.

Henry Morgenthau and Oscar Strauss, Jewish Americans with reputations as human rights advocates and former U.S. ambassadors to Turkey, added their voices to the calls for action. So did James Barton, head of the Foreign Missions Board and one of the founders of Near East Relief. In a telegram to Harding, he wrote: “Turkey has entered Smyrna and is conducting the affairs of that city true to form.”

The American Federation of Churches of Christ sent a petition signed by twenty of its leading members to the State Department. Allen Dulles passed it along to Phillips with a note that said he was working on a reply, adding, “At the same time, we have received a mass of telegrams from all over the country from various kinds of and conditions of people requesting various types of action, involving war, intervention and general protest. These telegrams are being answered as rapidly as possibly [
sic
] by the form letters which you have seen.”

The conflict between religious leaders and the administration grew more intense when James Cannon Jr., bishop of the Southern Methodist Church, stepped forward with powerful public criticism of Harding’s policy. Cannon at the time was a big figure in American politics. H. L.
Mencken, from his perch at the
Baltimore Sun,
would call him “the chief figure in American public life today.” Cannon was the leader of the Anti-Saloon League and the embodiment of the nation’s conservative and rural Protestant values.

Cannon represented the old order with a forceful, reasoned, and articulate presence. He was also an internationalist in the Wilson mold. He had been traveling through the Near East in the summer of 1922 and had included Admiral Bristol in the list of people he had interviewed about the status of the Christian minorities. (Bristol seemed not to know who he was in their meeting, asking him to explain his background and credentials. The two sharply disagreed on America’s Near East policy in their meeting.) Cannon was appalled by the conditions of refugees he had witnessed in Constantinople and moved by the sickly Armenian orphans he saw lain out in the city’s bleak warehouses. He directed his anger against Islam itself and inveighed against the “Terrible Turk.”

As Smyrna spiraled toward intensifying violence, Cannon, in Britain as he made his way home to America, wrote a heated letter to the
London Times
. He called for American military force to protect Christian lives in Turkey. “The blood of millions of Armenian and Syrian Christians cries to heaven,” he wrote, “and any massacres that have been perpetrated in the last few months by the Greeks in retaliation for Turkish massacres is as dust in the balances compared with the practically continuous massacre of Christians by the Turks.” The administration was forced to respond, and Secretary of State Hughes eventually detailed the administration’s efforts on behalf of the Christians in Asia Minor but defended Harding’s unwillingness to send the American military. Cannon—speaking for millions of churchgoers, especially in the South—had put the issue at the steps of the White House.

By the middle of September, the rail and coal strikes were coming to an end, easing pressure on Harding. On September 15, the first poststrike deliveries of anthracite coal, the principal fuel for heat in those years, were made in New York. At the White House, Mrs. Harding was recovering from her illness. President Harding was sympathetic to calls for helping refugees, but he firmly resisted demands for American intervention in Turkey. He was sure that the public’s support for the Christian minorities
did not extend to sending troops to Asia Minor to protect them. “Frankly,” he had written to Hughes earlier in the year, “it is difficult for me to be patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of a contending religion. It is, of course, unthinkable to send an armed force to Asia Minor. We would have open rebellion in this country if we attempted it.”

Harding was not against providing relief—he showed far more willingness than Bristol—but on the question of steering events through military force or ultimatums, Harding was opposed. The president, in fact, had worked to reduce America’s military expenditures and had called history’s first disarmament conference in 1921. It slowed battleship construction by the world’s leading powers. He was a noninterventionist from head to toe.

With Secretary Hughes still away, Phillips continued to handle matters with a cool hand. Bristol was not his sole source of information about Smyrna. The State Department had received intelligence from its officers in other capitals, who had their own information networks and perspectives. The cables from well-regarded Jefferson Caffrey, the chargé d’affaires in Athens, painted a picture different from Bristol’s. Greece, he said, was in no position to finance the relief effort: it was broke and had food stores that would last less than a week. Caffrey also reported that he had received reports of the Greek army burning crops and villages in its retreat, but other reliable reports were skeptical of the widespread civilian atrocities by Greek troops, which were reported as a fact by Bristol. Reports from London described the Turkish occupation in cruelest terms. In London, U.S. ambassador to Britain, George Harvey, cabled the State Department: “Foreign office states that is no longer possible to doubt there has been a deliberate and wholesale massacre of the Armenian quarter.”

On September 15, Phillips sent Hughes (still traveling) a memorandum that said Britain and the Allies were close to war with the nationalist Turks and that such a war was likely to bring in Bulgaria, Serbia, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Russia. Troop movements already had begun in the Balkans. Once again, southeastern Europe seemed to be the tinderbox
that would burst into a major European war. The British had concentrated their Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets for the defense of the Dardanelles and called up troops from its Dominions. Phillips wrote to Hughes,

As the week passed, and Bristol plied back and forth between the
Scorpion
and the embassy, he seemed oddly detached from Washington’s demands and actual events in Smyrna. He was hewing to his own plan, which was to let the Greeks flounder and events to unfold in favor of the nationalist Turks. “I have received,” Bristol cabled the State Department, “no reports up to the present time of atrocities committed by Turkish forces, and all are agreed that the Turkish occupation of Smyrna—even during the first few days when that city was practically in a panic and when disorders of all kinds were to be feared—was carried out in a most orderly and peaceful manner.”

The State Department’s attitude toward Bristol during the previous two or three years had been tolerance of an ornery old salt who was something of a character, but one who was also a fierce proponent of American interests. He was a son of a bitch, but he was their son of a bitch. Now, its patience grew short, and Phillips’s tolerance for Bristol’s inaction had worn thin.

Bristol was viscerally opposed to working with the Allies, and his reports back to the State Department distorted the directions he had given his commanders. He left the false impression that he had ordered an
evacuation of refugees by U.S. destroyers. The only refugees removed by American warships were those that had been brought to the
Lawrence
on the first night of the fire by the British and the orphans taken away on the
Litchfield
through Jaquith’s insistence and others through Powell’s unstinting efforts to juggle ships. Most astonishingly, as the days progressed into the third week of the month, Bristol would appear uninformed about details of the plan Powell and Jennings were formulating to evacuate the refugees through the use of Greek merchant ships. Keeping his plans hazy to Bristol may have been Powell’s intention.

Bristol’s first thought on receiving Phillips’s cable directing him to work with the Allies was to seize the initiative and call a meeting of the Allies at the American embassy. But he decided against it and mulled his next move for the next several days. His mind was a hive of bees. He fussed about who should make the first move—him or the Allies. Bristol was taking a position not articulated in Washington. Before he joined a mutual effort, he wanted the Allies to declare their willingness to evacuate refugees (something they already were engaged in to a limited extent) and identify the place to which they intended to evacuate them. The latter point seemed intended to squeeze Britain and Greece on the fate of the Greek province of Thrace, a place to which some refugees from Asia Minor already had fled and the nationalists wanted to take back for Turkey.

Bristol’s sympathies resided with the Turkish claims to eastern Thrace, and he was essentially suggesting that the Allies decide on the national boundaries of a new Turkey before a rescue could begin, an impossibility. It was a point that could only be settled through extensive negotiations among all the parties at a peace conference. He also wanted Britain and Greece to take primary responsibility for the expense of a relief effort. His position ignored the economic position of Greece, and to a large extent, that of Britain.

Bristol insisted the Greeks could afford a relief effort if it demobilized its army, notwithstanding the fact that the Turks were now threatening to cross the Dardanelles to seize some of its territroy. If war broke out in the Balkans, the center of it would be Greece’s easternmost province. Yet Bristol wanted Greece to disband its army.

The admiral carried these ideas around as he traveled back and forth between the
Scorpion
and the embassy and as he moved about the crowded streets of Constantinople in the Cadillac that bore the license plate of the U.S. Navy on its front grille.

Constantinople at the moment was a mix of Allied tension and Turkish hopefulness. The narrow streets, filled with the usual assortment of street vendors and hamals carrying huge loads on their backs, were hung with bright red Turkish flags displaying the star and crescent. The British had moved nearly all of their troops out of the city to Chanak, where the clash with the Turks was likely to occur. Left to patrol the city were a company of the Irish Guards and about eight hundred infantry of the Royal East Kent Regiment, the Fifth Battalion of which had fought at Kut in 1917. The city’s Greek population was glum and keeping a low profile; many were departing.

The Turkish population, well armed with guns smuggled into the city from the Asiatic shore, was intent on driving out the city’s Christians. Turkish nationalist officers slipped into the city in civilian clothes, preparing for what might be a battle for Constantinople. Bolsheviks from Russia were active in the Stamboul section to stir an uprising. Bristol was getting queries from Americans asking if they should evacuate. When the sultan’s mounted guard clambered through the streets with Turkish banners on September 15, frightened Greeks and Armenians thought they were the vanguard of Kemal’s army and went into hiding. Soon, they began leaving the city in large numbers. For the first time since the Turks had captured Constantinople from the Byzantine Empire in 1453, the sultan paid a visit to the tomb of Mohammed II the Conqueror. Turks waving flags lined the streets, and Turkish flags hung from minarets, including the spires at St. Sophia Mosque. Turkish nationalism had merged with Islam, creating a belligerence that frightened the city’s Christians.