A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide Read Online Free PDF Page A

disarm or harbored seditious thoughts. "We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty," Talaat told a German reporter. `But that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow."''

    U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau Sr.
    Instead of hiding his achievements, as later perpetrators would do,Talaat boasted of them. According to Morgenthau, he liked to tell friends, "I have accomplished more toward solving the Armenian problem in three months than Abdul Hamid accomplished in thirty years!"" (The Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid had killed some 200,000 Armenians in 1895-1896.) Talaat once asked Morgenthau whether the United States could get the New York Life Insurance Company and Equitable Life of NewYork, which for years had done business with the Armenians, to send a complete list of the Armenian policyholders to the Turkish authorities. "They are practically all dead now and have left no heirs,"Talaat said."The Government is the beneficiary now.""
    Morgenthau was incensed at the request and stormed out ofTalaat's office. He again cabled back to Washington, imploring his higher-ups to take heed:
    I earnestly beg the Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration with a view to reaching a conclusion which may possibly have the effect of checking [Turkey's] Government and certainly provide opportunity for efficient relief which now is not permitted. It is difficult for me to restrain myself from doing something to stop this attempt to exterminate a race, but I realize that I am here as Ambassador and must abide by the principles of non-interference with the internal affairs of another country."'
    Morgenthau had to remind himself that one of the prerogatives of sovereignty was that states and statesmen could do as they pleased within their own borders. "Technically," he noted to himself, "I had no right to interfere. According to the cold-blooded legalities of the situation, the treatment of Turkish subjects by the Turkish Government was purely a domestic affair: unless it directly affected American lives and American interests, it was outside the concern of the American Government" The ambassador found this maddening.
    The Neu, York Times gave the Turkish horrors steady coverage, publishing 145 stories in 1915. It helped that Morgenthau and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were old friends. Beginning in March 1915, the paper spoke of Turkish "massacres," "slaughter," and "atrocities" against the Armenians, relaying accounts by missionaries, Red Cross officials, local religious authorities, and survivors of mass executions. "It is safe to say," a correspondent noted in July, "that unless Turkey is beaten to its knees very speedily there will soon be no more Christians in the Ottoman Empire."22 By July 1915 the paper's headlines had begun crying out about the danger of the Armenians"' extinction." Viscount Bryce, former British ambassador to the United States, pleaded that the United States use its influence with Germany. "If anything can stop the destroying hand of the Turkish Government," Bryce argued, as did the missionaries who had appealed to Morgenthau, "it will be an expression of the opinion of neutral nations, chiefly the judgment of humane America.."23 On October 7, 1915, a Times headline blared, "800,000 ARMENIANS COUNTED DESTROYED." The article reported Bryce's testimony before the House of Lords in which he urged the United States to demonstrate that there were "some crimes which, even now in the convulsion of a great war, the public opinion of the world will not tolerate."" By December the paper's headline read, "MILLION ARMENIANS KILLED OR IN EXILE."25 The number of victims were estimates, as the bodies were impossible to count. Nevertheless, governmental and nongovernmental officials were sure that the atrocities were "unparalleled in modern times" and that the Turks had set out to achieve "nothing more or