Henry Morgenthau Sr.

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Henry Morgenthau

Henry Morgenthau (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.

Biography

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 US 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.

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.

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. 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the American embassy - and by extension Morgenthau - also represented many of the Allies in Constantinople, as they had withdrawn their diplomatic missions due to the hostilities.

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 so-called Morgenthau Report [1]. In 1933, he was the American representative at the Geneva Conference.

He published several books, most notably Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1919) on the Armenian Genocide, drawing on his experiences as the Ambassador during this period of Turkish history. Secrets of the Bosphorus (1918) also covers this period, whilst I was sent to Athens (1929) deals with his time working with Greek refugees. The Library of Congress holds some 30,000 documents from his personal papers.

He died in 1946 following a cerebral hemorrhage, in New York City, and was buried in Hawthorne, NY.

Armenia and Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

The first major work on the Armenian Genocide in the West was Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, still an important primary source, which discusses Turkish atrocities against the Armenians. The official Turkish position is that Morgenthau's account is inaccurate [2].

Critiques of Ambassador Morgenthau's Story

In 1920s Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story subjected to criticism by two prominent American historians. Sidney Bradshaw Fay, an authority on European diplomatic history,a recognised American authority on the question of war guilt and the writer of The Origins of the World War. In the journal Kriegschuldfrage, May, 1925 criticised the sixth cahapter of the book on the delay of German war initiation for two weeks or the well known Potsdam legend and commented:

The contemporary documents now available prove conclusively that there is hardly a word of truth in Mr. Morgenthau’s assertions, either as to (a) the persons present, (b) the Kaiser’s attitude toward delay, (c) the real reasons for delay, or (d) the alleged selling of securities in anticipation of war. In fact his assertions are rather the direct opposite of the truth.

Harry Elmer Barnes, in his The Genesis of the World War; an Introduction to the Problem of War Guilt (New York: Knopf, 1926), pp. 241-247) which largely consist of a Sidney Bradshaw Fay quote concludes:

In This luxuriant and voluptuous legend (Kaiser’s Potsdam conference) was not only the chief point in the Allied propaganda against Germany after the publication of Mr. Morgenthau’s book, but it has also been tacitly accepted by Mr. Asquith in his apology, and solemnly repeated by Bourgeois and Pages in the standard conventional French work, both published since the facts have been available which demonstrate that the above tale is a complete fabrication.

... As Mr. Morgenthau has persistently refused to offer any explanation or justification of his "story" or to answer written inquiries as to his grounds for believing it authentic, we are left to pure conjecture in the circumstances. It appears highly doubtful to the present writer that Mr. Morgenthau ever heard of the Potsdam legend while resident in Turkey. It would seem inconceivable that he could have withheld such important information for nearly four years. The present writer has been directly informed by the Kaiser that Wangenheim did not see him in July, 1914. We know that Mr. Morgenthau’s book was not written by himself, but by Mr. Burton J. Hendrick, who later distinguished himself as the editor of the Page letters. We shall await with interest Mr. Hendrick’s explanation of the genesis of the Potsdam fiction as it was composed for Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.

[3].

External links

• Ambassador Morgenthau's Story. An electronic copy of his most contentious book, at the World War I Document Archive.
• 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.