by Lou Ureneck
In 1900, there were hardly more than 3,000 cars in the United States. By 1914, there were 1.8 million, and by 1920, 9.2 million. The most ubiquitous was Ford’s Model T, which could be bought for $260, the price of a horse. By 1920, 4,698,419 Model Ts had come off Ford’s production lines. A car for the people, it packed a ten-gallon gas tank and burned ten miles per gallon—a hundred miles to a fill-up. Models Ts rolled from Ford’s Highland Park plant at the rate of more than a million a year, and other auto companies’ factories turned out fleets of their own brands: Buicks, Studebakers, Chevrolets, Coles, Columbias, Dusenbergs, Durants, Hudsons, Overlands, Stutzes, Packards, and many many others.
Each year Americans drove their Model Ts and Model As and Chevy 490s longer distances. Between 1900 and 1920, the nation built 225,000 miles of hard-surfaced roads, enough to circle the earth about ten times. The road-building created a voracious demand for asphalt, a petroleum product. The new roads encouraged the sale of new cars, which created demand for additional new roads. And so it went: more cars, more roads, and more cars—an ever-widening spiral of oil consumption.
There were also the needs of the military, which by the 1920s ran on prodigious volumes of oil, and a rapidly expanding merchant fleet, which required oil to carry the nation’s burgeoning flow of manufactured products to foreign markets. The mechanization of agriculture demanded petroleum, and there was also the less visible but equally compelling need for industrial lubricants. U.S. oil consumption was rising at the rate of 9 percent per year in 1920. Already, America was “gasoline alley”—both the world’s leading producer and consumer of oil.*
In the first decade of the 1900s, U.S oil production moved west from its birthplace in Pennsylvania and the Alleghenies to Oklahoma, Texas, and California. The great gusher at Spindletop, in Beaumont, Texas, threw its first oil into the sky in 1901; other wells sent more oil skyward. But the years immediately following World War I had failed to produce major new discoveries—a worrisome problem for an oil-addicted nation. America’s top geologist said the country had two choices—conserve oil at home or find it abroad. The national consensus was to keep guzzling and put new holes in the ground, and it didn’t much matter whether those new holes were in Midland, Texas, or Mesopotamia. The likely places: South America, the Dutch East Indies, and the Near East.
Supply worries were immediately followed by price worries. In 1920, gas peaked at thirty cents per gallon, a price that would not be reached again in real terms until 1981. By the time of the Harding administration, Americans already had decided that they had a God-given right to cheap gas.
IT WAS AGAINST this political background, fraught with conflicting issues of morality and economic self-interest, that William Phillips, sitting in his office, the windows open to admit some air into the stuffy building, considered George Horton’s request and judged it important enough to bring to the president’s attention. He sent it along to the White House with a cover note that was deferential yet decisive, acutely aware that Harding would accept the department’s guidance. Phillips recommended that Admiral Bristol be directed to send one or more destroyers to Smyrna for the protection of American life and property.
At the time, President Harding was dealing with simultaneous national coal and railroad strikes, which threatened the country’s industrial production—Ford Motor Co. had said it would stop its assembly lines because of the strikes. Harding’s wife also was seriously ill with kidney disease and bedridden in the White House. In the best of times, the president was more likely to engage in issues at home rather than crises abroad, and this was not the best of times. The country was emerging from a deep recession, and the Roaring Twenties were only just beginning to roar. Mostly, Harding’s attention was turned to the labor strikes and his wife, Florence. Phillips awaited a response, fully aware of the president’s proclivities, interests, and habits.
BEFORE BECOMING PRESIDENT, Warren Gamaliel Harding had sold insurance, taught high school, and worked as a reporter for his father’s small-town newspaper in Ohio. Harding was handsome, affable, and loyal to his friends—a natural politician. As a young man, he had pulled together a stake to buy his own newspaper, the Marion Star, in Marion, Ohio. The paper made him more friends and lots of money. The newspaper avoided controversy, and Harding married a wealthy divorced woman who had a good eye for business, and together they prospered. He was the ultimate small-town American businessman: he joined lodges, sat on the porch, counted his money, and reminisced about the old swimming hole. (He also had a secret affair with a neighbor, the wife of the owner of a local dry goods store.) In 1914, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. He missed more sessions than he attended, but he was well liked and served as a genial bridge between Republicans and Democrats. In 1920, after being picked by Republican Party leaders in Suite 408-10 at Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel, the original “smoke-filled room,” Harding was elected president in a landslide. His platform rejected internationalism and promised a return to “normalcy.” Some said he was elected because he looked like a president, and indeed he did—tall, lionesque head, graying hair, black eyebrows. He loved to give a speech.
Harding’s response to Phillips’ note came later the same day—first as a phone call from the president’s executive secretary, who said the president concurred with Phillips’s recommendation—Send ships to protect Americans and American property. Later in the day, Phillips got a note from the president’s personal secretary confirming approval of the instructions to Bristol.
As these White House messages were sent and received, Phillips received a second and more urgent cable from Horton expressing his fear that Smyrna might be destroyed by the Greek army as it exited the city. Some Greek officers, talking loosely, had threatened to burn the city rather than leave it and the munitions it contained to the Turks. Horton said the situation was worsening, and he asked that Bristol, who was known to have good relations with the nationalist Turks, mediate between the nationalist forces and the Greek government to save Smyrna. Horton made it clear that the request had come from the Greek governor of the city: “In the interest of humanity and for safety of American interests beg you to mediate with Angora (Ankara) government for amnesty sufficient to allow Greek forces to evacuate. Amnesty would avoid possible destruction of Smyrna, which may result from blowing up ammunition dumps… . I repeat my request for one or more naval units.”
The heading on the second cable indicated it had been sent to Bristol as well. Phillips sent it to Harding and advised against American mediation. “It seems to me it would be wiser for us to confine our acts to caring for the lives of Americans and protection of American property.” Harding was content to follow the advice, and he sent Phillips a note of agreement.
Yet another cable came in from Horton during the day reporting that Americans in Smyrna had formed a relief committee to help the refugees flooding the city. It asked the State Department to intervene on Smyrna’s behalf with Herbert Hoover of the American Relief Administration. Hoover was secretary of commerce and head of the ARA, which was feeding victims of a famine that had swept Russia in the wake of the Russian civil war. Hoover had tons of supplies stored in warehouses in Constantinople. Horton said food, medicine, and blankets were needed for 150,000 refugees in Smyrna.
Amid this flurry of cables, Phillips sent a note to Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the former president and acting secretary of the navy. Roosevelt’s office was down the long marble hall and around the corner from Phillips’s office. (The twenty-foot-wide hallways were so long that messengers rode through the building on bicycles.) Phillips’s note explained the situation and “respectfully” asked him to direct Bristol to send destroyers to Smyrna for the protection of American lives and property. He did not mention his communication with the president. There was no need to invoke the president’s authority between gentlemen. (Roosevelt was also a Harvard man.) In the note to Roosevelt, Phillips had tactfully added the phrase, “I assume Mr. Horton is in communication with Admiral Bristol and is
keeping him fully informed.” (As it turned out, he was: Horton’s first request for protection had been addressed to the State Department without a “cc” to Bristol, but Horton had indeed sent a copy to Bristol—making it clear he was asking Washington for a ship. This would have served the clever purpose of letting Bristol know to whom he was appealing while covering Horton against criticism that he had failed to inform Bristol. The relationship between the two feuding men had fallen that low.)
Phillips followed up with a call to Roosevelt who agreed to the request for ships and said he would leave the decision about landing U.S. sailors in Smyrna to the naval officer on the scene. Phillips concurred. Roosevelt immediately cabled Bristol: “Direct one or more destroyers as necessary proceed Smyrna/protect American interests/employment confined to American lives and property and not as naval or political demonstration.” America had serious interests in Smyrna, but there would be no saber-rattling as there had been in the previous administration when Wilson had sent the navy and marines to protect American oil interests at Vera Cruz during the Mexican revolution. In this instance, the absence of American action was more likely in the long run to help American oil interests than a show of force on behalf of Christian refugees.
Finally, Phillips responded to Horton. The message arrived at the Eastern Telegraph office and was delivered to Horton at the consulate early on September 6. Horton decoded it in his private office upstairs, which was part of his family’s living quarters. “Department is not inclined to do more than send destroyers to Smyrna to assist in protection of American lives and property,” it said. “The situation would not appear to justify this Government assuming the role of voluntary mediator.”
CHAPTER 8
Jennings’s Suggestion
The Jenningses had been settled into their new home at Paradise for only two weeks when they saw a troubling scene outside their door. Paradise was a stop on the Smyrna-Aydin Railroad, and the hard-packed dirt road, which traced the rail line through the fig-and-grape country to the south, ran past the college’s wrought-iron front gate and the porch of their house.
Beginning on Friday, September 1, Asa and Amy saw knots of people, four or five at a time and sometimes more, passing along the road in the direction of Smyrna. They carried sacks on their backs and small children in their arms, and some were leading oxen or riding on wooden carts. Most were women, children, or old men. They walked quietly, seeming to occupy some timeless private space of patient suffering. Like others in Paradise, Jennings had heard rumors of a Greek setback at Afyon Karahisar, and there was speculation that a shift in the position of forces at the front had uprooted farmers on the frontier. It all seemed the inevitable dislocation of distant people by the armies that were ranging and fighting around them, but there was no immediate sense that something seismic had occurred. These people, it appeared, had wisely and probably temporarily cleared out of an area where new fighting had broken out along the front.
As the hours passed, and the number of people on the road increased, Jennings could not escape the conclusion that the flow of people represented more than a minor shift in the battlefield—there must have been some major disruption in the Meander Valley to the south or the high plateau beyond the mountains to the east, and most certainly the flight of these people from their farms and villages was tied to the war between the Greek army and the nationalists. But beyond that general surmise, Jennings did not comprehend the scope of what was unfolding. Most of his neighbors, and this included nearly all the faculty at International College, were away on vacation during the last week of August and the first week of September. The town and school grounds were mostly empty of Americans, and he didn’t have anyone to turn to immediately to get an explanation. His boss, Ernest Jacob, was among those on vacation. Jacob and his wife and young daughter were at Phocaea, a seaside town about twenty miles northwest of Smyrna that was a favorite escape for the American missionaries. The only means of communication with Phocaea was a ferry that departed daily from Smyrna.
When Jennings had arrived in Paradise, he had been told that the war was a long way off, and he had absorbed the general impression that the Greek army would maintain its strong position along its line in the east and the stalemate would continue from there until the Allies worked out a diplomatic solution. Jennings simply had not given the military situation much thought. He had come to Smyrna to organize activities for boys, and his thinking had been along the lines of teams and leagues and lessons to impart about sportsmanship and character. Political and diplomatic events swam outside his daily considerations. Family and work bounded his thinking.
In the meantime, the people kept passing along the road in bigger numbers, trudging under their burdens. There was no letup on Saturday and Sunday, September 2 and 3; they kept coming and coming, passing by the porch of the Jenningses’ cottage. The sheer number of them by Sunday night was unnerving. It was as if the few people he had seen on Friday were the small advance flocks of a great migration of birds that was now filling the trees and blackening the sky. The road was a long and congested parade of families and farm animals reaching far to the south and east.
Monday, September 4, was Labor Day but Jennings decided to drive into Smyrna.
THE HOUSE THAT JENNINGS and his family had settled into—the one from which they watched the passing refugees—was one of the comfortable stone-and-masonry cottages near the campus of the International College in Paradise.
The town was in a pleasant valley between tall and often snow-capped mountains to the east and a low line of undulating coastal hills to the west. It was a quiet suburb of big and small houses with wood-rail porches, English flower gardens, and lavender hedges. There were shops, a bakery, and a tiny stone and slate-roof train station that looked like it had been lifted from a commuter stop along the New Haven Line. The Meles River flowed through the valley, and two aqueducts from Roman times crossed it, still bringing water down from the mountains to Smyrna.
International College was a boys’ high school founded twenty-five years earlier in Smyrna by a Scots-Canadian missionary, Alexander MacLachlan, an ecumenical-minded minister who had graduated from the Union Theological Institute in New York in 1887. Under the auspices of the Missions Board back in Boston, MacLachlan had built the school into the best college preparatory school in the Ottoman Empire. The school offered a rigorous curriculum in the humanities, physics, and mathematics taught by a bright group of American missionary teachers and scholars: Ralph S. Harlow of Harvard, J. Kingsley Birge of Yale, Cass Arthur Reed of Pomona College, and Samuel L. Caldwell of Carleton College—all of whom were ordained ministers.
The Jennings family found the school’s atmosphere of Protestant religious purpose friendly and familiar—music in the evenings in the family parlor, the missionary sensibility, Protestant hymns sung at chapel,
Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee …
For Asa, there was also the college’s farm. Jennings had grown up with the rhythms of family, farm, and church, and while the fruits and vegetables of Asia Minor (figs, lemons, olives, pomegranates, and trees that grew pods of carob) were exotic, the texture of life was not so different from the Finger Lake country. He had spent his boyhood picking raspberries and taking cartons of them by wagon to sell in the nearby boomtown of Rochester.
Asa Jennings had brought something else to Turkey—his illness. Barely a day passed that he didn’t have a low-grade fever, and he sometimes broke into coughing fits that could not be quelled. He was frequently racked by pain along his spine, though he never spoke of it to his colleagues. It was a private matter, and his suffering was an intimacy he shared only with Amy.
Asa was victim of a tubercular infection that had ravaged his body sixteen years earlier. When he was twenty-eight and working at the YMCA in Utica, he had developed a high temperature, night sweats, and nearly continuous pain that doctors had diagnosed as typhoid fever. He had seemed to get better, but twice relapsed. Amy h
ad taken him to a succession of doctors, and they eventually diagnosed his illness as acute tuberculosis. (Tuberculosis can follow typhoid fever, which weakens the immune system.) The doctors at the General Hospital in Utica told Amy to make Asa comfortable in his final days; the disease was far too advanced to save his life. She might take him to a warm climate, they said, to help him breathe with less effort, but there was no chance he would survive. His condition was hopeless.
Amy had been distraught at the prospect of Asa’s death. She had lost her firstborn child, Ortha, only two years before, and she had come close to losing her second. Now she was told she would lose her husband. Frightened and unwilling to deliver the news to Asa, she sought guidance from her Bible. She opened it at random, hoping to find a message that would tell her what to do. She looked down at the page, and her eyes fell on the eleventh verse of the Gospel of St. John, which tells the story of Lazarus who Jesus had raised from the dead. She read and reread the passage and grew calm with its repetition, seeing in it a message of hope: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.” She read it over and over and over again.
At the hospital the next morning, Amy told Asa first of her fated encounter with the passage from John’s Gospel and her interpretation of its message, which was that he would overcome his sickness and his recovery would be a sign from God of work that he would do in the future. Only later did she tell him of the doctors’ consensus about his disease and impending death. Asa took the prognosis stoically. They talked, with Amy returning again and again to the meaning of the biblical passage, and reading it aloud in tears. Together, they resolved not to accept the doctors’ conclusion. A long and difficult period commenced in which Amy threw herself into saving her husband’s life. It was a period of setbacks, anguish, pain, and home therapies, but it seemed only to deepen their faith in God. Another two years would pass before Asa showed signs that he was likely to survive.
