Hard Aground: The Wreck of the USS Tennessee and the Rise of the US Navy by Jampoler Andrew C. A

Author:Jampoler, Andrew C. A. [Jampoler, Andrew C. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Alabama Press

The anxieties of Americans stranded in Europe that urgently pulled Tennessee and North Carolina across the Atlantic were nothing as compared to the near panic in early August of Americans living in the Levant, in those Turkish cities and towns where the horrors of holy war were expected to erupt at any moment against members of the local American expatriate “colony.” Beginning August 5, these fears began to stream into Ambassador Henry Morgenthau’s embassy via overlapping reports from his consuls in Beirut (the shaky W. Stanley Hollis), Smyrna (George Horton and Leland Morris), Jerusalem (Otis Hazebrook), Jaffa (Jacob Hardegg), and Alexandretta (agent H. E. Bishop, a Standard Oil employee), and several times from these outposts directly to the secretary of state—each consul pleading for the presence of American “battleships” to “prevent anarchy” or much worse. The hysteria peaked in early autumn, after the October 1 Turkish abrogation of the “capitulations,” which for many decades had given Americans and other Western nationals extraterritorial insulation from Turkish officials and Ottoman law, took away this special protection from privileged foreigners, and after the Turkish declaration of holy war. Hollis was especially nervous, reminding his superiors that the direct descendants of the notorious old tribe of “Assassins” lived in his area, and that they would like nothing better than an opportunity to attack, loot, and massacre non-Muslims.

Leland Morris’s August 10 letter to the secretary of state on the situation in Smyrna, copying one sent August 8 to the embassy in Constantinople, and received in Washington on September 4, was typical of these alarms. “The immediate effect of the declaration of war by Germany was the stoppage of almost all exportation and the cessation of cash payments by the banks. Many people were caught unawares and today people of wealth are unable to obtain enough money for daily living expenses . . . From a business viewpoint the outbreak of war at this time means heavy loss to Smyrna. The fruit exportation was just about to commence. This fruit exportation is the principal source of wealth to Smyrna, and its loss will have disastrous consequences.” But business aside,

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