Hiram Bingham IV

Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV (July 17, 1903 – January 12, 1988) was an American diplomat. He served as a Vice-Consul in Marseille, France, during World War II, and helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.

Hiram Bingham IV, US commemorative stamp

Early life

Bingham was one of seven sons of former Connecticut Governor and US Senator Hiram Bingham III and his first wife, Alfreda Mitchell, the heiress of the Tiffany and Co. fortune through her grandfather Charles L. Tiffany. His great-grandfather Hiram Bingham I and grandfather Hiram Bingham II were the first missionaries to the Kingdom of Hawai'i. Hiram Bingham III was also the discoverer of the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu. Bingham attended the prestigious Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1925.

While posted in London, he met Rose Lawton Morrison, a college drama teacher from Waycross, Georgia, whom he escorted to Buckingham Palace to meet the Queen. They later married and had 11 children.

Foreign service

Bingham served in Kobe, Japan, as a civilian secretary in the United States Embassy. He worked part-time as a schoolteacher. He traveled to India and Egypt before returning to the United States to attend Harvard University. After obtaining his law degree, he scored third in his class on the foreign service exam.

Bingham's first assignment in the United States Foreign Service was in Beijing, China. There, he witnessed the beginnings of the communist revolution. His travels through Asia piqued Bingham's interest in eastern religious philosophy. He spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile eastern religious philosophies with that of the Christian traditions his family had been historically known to preach.

Bingham also served in Warsaw, Poland, sharing a flat with another diplomat, Charles W. Yost, whose daughter, Felicity, became Bingham's god-daughter. In 1934, Bingham served as third secretary to the United States Embassy in London.

Vice Consul in France

In 1939, Bingham was posted to the US Consulate in Marseille, where he, together with another vice-consul named Myles Standish, was in charge of issuing entry visas to the USA.

On June 10, 1940, Adolf Hitler's forces invaded France and the French government fell. The French signed an armistice with Germany. In Article 19 of the document, the French agreed to "surrender on demand all Germans named by the German government in France." Civil and military police began to round up German and Jewish refugees who were marked for death by the Nazis. Several influential Europeans tried to lobby the American government to issue visas so that German and Jewish refugees could freely leave France to escape persecution.

Anxious to limit immigration to the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. However, Bingham cooperated with Varian Fry in issuing visas and helping refugees escape France. Varian Fry had come to Marseilles to give 200 grants to "some of the best scientists and European scholars" (1) and help them settle in the US.

Hiram Bingham worked with him, and instead of 200, gave about 2,000 visas, most of them to well-known personalities, speaking English, not too left-wing and not looking too Jewish, among whom Max Ernst, André Breton, Hannah Arendt, Marc Chagall, Lion Feuchtwanger and Nobel prize winner Otto Meyerhof. All the other anonymous ones, waiting night and day in front of the American consulate, were not lucky enough. Varian Fry explains in his book Surrender on Demand (1) : "we refuse to help anyone who is not recommended by a confident person."

He also sheltered Jews in his Marseilles home, and obtained forged identity papers to help Jews in their dangerous journeys across Europe. He worked with the French underground to smuggle Jews out of France into Franco's Spain or across the Mediterranean and even contributed to their expenses out of his own pocket.

Consequence

In 1941, the United States government abruptly pulled Bingham from his position as Vice Consul and transferred him to Portugal and then Argentina. When he was in Argentina, he helped to track Nazi war criminals in South America. In 1945, after being passed over for promotion, he resigned from the United States Foreign Service.

Bingham did not speak much about his wartime activities. His own family had little knowledge of them until after Bingham's death in 1988. In 1991, Bingham's widow Rose and son Thomas found Marseille documents in the Connecticut farmhouse which they donated to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Several years later,Bingham's youngest son found documents in a cupboard behind a chimney and family members continued to unearth documents at the farmhouse. The materials told of Bingham's struggle to save German and Jewish refugees from death, details long hidden from the public.

Honors

After considering Bingham's deeds during the war years in Marseille for a number years, Yad Vashem issued the Bingham family a letter of appreciation on March 7, 2005. Although not a Righteous Among the Nations designation, the letter noted the "humanitarian disposition" of Bingham IV "at a time of persecution of Jews by the Vichy regime in France.... [in] contrast to certain other officials who rather acted suspiciously toward Jewish refugees wishing to enter the United States."

Hiram Bingham IV, US commemorative stamp

On June 27, 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented a posthumous "Constructive Dissent" award to Bingham's children at an American Foreign Service Officers Association awards ceremony in Washington, DC. Since December 1968 his son Robert Kim Bingham, Sr. had lobbied the U.S. Postal Service to issue a stamp depicting his father in recognition of his humanitarian deeds. After the proposal received wide bipartisan support in Congress, a commemorative stamp portraying Hiram Bingham IV as a "Distinguished American Diplomat" was issued on May 30, 2006.

On October 27, 2006, the Anti-Defamation League posthumously presented Bingham its "Courage to Care" award at the ADL’s national conference in Atlanta. In November 2006, the U.S. Episcopal Church added Bingham to a list of "American Saints" published in the book A Year with American Saints with a summary of his life and character.

On March 28, 2011, the Simon Wiesenthal Center posthumously awarded Bingham the "Medal of Valor" in New York City with a film Tribute. The film shows the Nazis on the march in Europe and how U.S. Vice-Consul Harry Bingham rose to the dangerous occasion to save lives.

The Wall Street Journal wrote of the event: "More than 450 supporters of the Simon Wiesenthal Center gathered for the 2011 Humanitarian Award Dinner. The Medal of Valor was awarded posthumously to Sir Winston Churchill, Hiram Bingham IV, and Pope John Paul II . . . ." Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2011.

References

(1) "Surrender on Demand" V. Fry, 1945 French translation " La Liste Noire", Plon ed., Paris, 1997 (2) "La liste de Hiram Bigham", C. Wainstain, "L'Arche", Nov. 2007

Further reading

• Courageous Dissent: How Harry Bingham Defied His Government to Save Lives, by Robert Kim Bingham. http://www.hirambinghamrescuer.com ISBN 0961360232

External links

• Hero Quietly Did The Right Thing, CBS Evening News, May 30, 2006
• Saving the Jews of Nazi France, Smithsonian Magazine, March 2009