The Great Fire (10 page)

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.”

T
he 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,

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 had 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.

Jennings did survive—and he seemed determined to accomplish Amy’s prediction of important work ahead. Early in 1918, while he was working for the YMCA in upstate New York, Jennings answered some inner call of mission or adventure. He took a job as a YMCA army chaplain, and he traveled, without his family, to bases in Virginia and New Jersey where he ministered to soldiers departing for the war in Europe. The little man with the big smile and the hunched back was a success with the men—he gave them songs, quips, Bible verses, and reminders to write home to mother. A year later, with the war ended and Amy and the children still back in her hometown of Cleveland, Jennings had asked the YMCA to send him to France, and off he went with a group of forty-eight other YMCA men across the Atlantic.

Jennings’s job in France had been to direct the YMCA’s “huts” at the military forwarding camp at Lemans, the main staging area for American troops’ return to the United States. Jennings and his YMCA colleagues served hot coffee and little cakes to the soldiers, held Sunday-school classes, entertained the men with silent movies and vaudeville skits, and arranged sports events. Sports were embedded in the Y’s culture—a healthy body being one of three points of the “Y.” (The other two were a
healthy mind and healthy spirit.) By the war’s end, the Y had shipped a half-million baseballs to France for the soldiers.

By the start of the 1919 season, the soldiers were back home in the United States and sports writers had picked the Chicago White Sox, with slugger Shoeless Joe Jackson in left field, as the team to beat in the American League. Jennings had departed France too. He traveled by train across middle Europe to Czechoslovakia, where he continued to minister to demobilizing soldiers with the Y’s mix of books, Bible passages, hot coffee, films, and sports including the new game of basketball, invented just a few years earlier at the Y’s training center in Springfield, Massachusetts. Balls were bouncing in the gynasiums of Silesia, and Jennings was still reminding soldiers to write home to mother when he had gotten orders to pack for Smyrna.

IN PARADISE
, Jennings had use of his boss’s Chevrolet—a small four-seat touring car with a soft top. He decided to use it for his trip into Smyrna. Driving it required double clutching to change the gears, and the brakes needed heavy pressure to bring the car to a stop, but Jennings found that he could handle it. The continuing passage of so many people through Paradise on their way to Smyrna was mystifying to Jennings, but he did not see it yet as dangerous. He decided not to call Jacob back from his holiday and drove off to get an explanation at the American consulate.

The trickle of people he had seen on the road the previous three days had turned into a river, and the trains passing by the Paradise station were full of people and baggage, and the human cargo included soldiers. People were hanging on to the sides of train cars and riding on top of them, and the trains were passing more frequently than usual, not any regular schedule.

He took Amy with him in the car to Smyrna. The children were safe at home; the college was right there if they became frightened or needed an adult. On the way into the city, Jennings and Amy passed refugees trudging along the road, stepping aside to make room for them to pass, and they saw that many people were camped at the outer edge of the city
where the ancient Caravan Bridge spanned the Meles River, not much more than a sluggish creek in late summer.

Once in the city, they saw many thousands more people—all more or less in the same condition as the people on the Paradise Road. They were coming in from the north and east as well as the south, on foot and by train. Jennings drove through the Armenian Quarter and by the Basmahane station, which was the terminus of the Casaba line that reached to Afyon Karahisar and was serving as the main path of retreat for the Greek army. The train station was across the street from the American Girls’ College, but Asa decided against stopping there. Jennings saw soldiers, unshaven, tattered, and dirty, leaving the station and walking toward the Quay. There were also many people sitting and standing in the public spaces around the station and gradually sifting into the city’s streets as the area around the station became too crowded to accommodate all the people who wanted to linger there. Most of the people were obviously country dwellers, in simple clothes—women in long skirts, aprons, headscarves, and rough homemade shoes, and men in cotton work shirts and vests, loose trousers, boots. The faces were brown, deeply wrinkled and strangely passive. They were setting down their bags and luggage wherever they could find space: churchyards, small public spaces, cemeteries, or just in the streets. Many had already gathered along the Quay.

Jennings and Amy were shocked at their physical condition—they looked like they had walked a long way and were covered with a thin layer of white dust from the backcountry roads and apparently without much food or water. Women were nursing babies. Old women were carrying sickly men on their backs, their big work-roughened hands hung from their sleeves. Families found small polygons of shade in which to sit and spread their household possessions, all the time holding the ropes of their goats or donkeys. It was terribly hot in the sun—in the high nineties, and it was not yet noon.

Asa and Amy clattered in the Chevy through the city and reached the YMCA, which was in a building it rented at 28 Frank Street, the city’s main shopping street, two blocks back from the Quay and a block south of the American consulate. It was an attractive building with a series of floor-to-ceiling
windows at street level that offered a view inside to a sitting area arranged for reading and conversation. Inside there were classrooms where young men took classes in English and French, a bigger room for amateur plays and movies, and a thousand-volume library with current magazines and newspapers.