Henry Morgenthau, Sr.
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Henry Morgenthau (IPA: /ˈmɔrgəntaʊ/; April 26, 1856–November 25, 1946) was a businessman and United States ambassador, most famous as the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. He was father of the politician Henry Morgenthau, Jr. and the grandfather of Robert M. Morgenthau, the current district attorney of New York County, and historian Barbara Tuchman. He was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1856 into a Bavarian Jewish family of 14 children, the son of Lazarus Morgenthau, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1866.
His father was an unsuccessful inventor. Henry Morgenthau graduated from Columbia Law School and made a fortune in real estate. He married Josephine Sykes in 1882 and had four children, Helen, Alma, Henry Jr. and Ruth.
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[edit] Democratic Party
Morgenthau's career enabled him to contribute handsomely to President Woodrow Wilson's election campaign in 1912; he was made financial chairman of the United States Democratic Party in 1912 and again in 1916.
[edit] Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire
He was appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1916; he had hoped for a cabinet post, but was not successful in gaining one. After the outbreak of war, the American embassy - and by extension Morgenthau - also represented many of the Allies in Constantinople, as they had withdrawn their diplomatic missions due to the hostilities.
[edit] Interwar Period
After the War he attended the Paris Peace Conference, as an advisor regarding Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and later worked with war-related charitable bodies, including the Relief Committee for the Middle East, the Greek Refugee Settlement Commission and the American Red Cross. In 1919 he headed the United States government fact-finding mission to Poland resulting in the Morgenthau Report [1]. In 1933, he was the American representative at the Geneva Conference.
He had connections with many intellectuals in the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle but refused to help them leaving Europe after the Nazis' rise to power.[2]
He died in 1946 following a cerebral hemorrhage, in New York City, and was buried in Hawthorne, NY. His son, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., later became famous as Secretary of the Treasury, served in that post for an almost unprecedented eleven years, and was the proposer of the controversial Morgenthau Plan in the 1940s. His daughter, Alma Wertheim, was the mother of historian Barbara Tuchman.
[edit] Publications
He published several books. The Library of Congress holds some 30,000 documents from his personal papers.
- The Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918) memoirs as the American Ambassador to Constantinople 1913-1916.
- The Secrets of the Bosphorus (1918) also covers this period.
- The Morgenthau Report (October 3, 1919) concerning alleged mistreatment of Jews by the Poles.
- I was sent to Athens (1929) deals with his time working with Greek refugees.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Mission of The United States to Poland, Henry Morgenthau, Sr. Report
- ^ Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision by Arnold Reisman
[edit] Official Documents
- Ara Sarafian (ed.): United States Official Records On The Armenian Genocide. 1915-1917, Gomidas Institute, Princeton & London 2004 ISBN 1-903656-39-7
[edit] External links
- Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. An electronic copy of his most contentious book, at the World War I Document Archive.
- Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. With translations in French, German, Turkish and Armenian.
- I was sent to Athens. An electronic copy of Morgenthau's book on the treatment of Greek refugees by the Ottoman Empire from 1913-1929.
