The Great Fire (9 page)

The Bristols ran the American naval and diplomatic apparatus in Constantinople like a mom-and-pop business. Helen Bristol threw herself into creating a busy and useful social life for them in Constantinople
that included charity and relief work on behalf of Russian refugees. She arranged parties and dances to raise money for the displaced and homeless Russians and was not above twisting the arms of acquaintances with the means to make donations. She spoke to tourists aboard visiting cruise ships and then asked for donations. She held events inside the Palazzo Corpi, knowing that guests would be willing to pay to view the frescoes, grand hall, and elaborate rooms. Not everyone found the Bristols charming, or even good company. “A nasty pair,” said a British officer who was part of the set in Constantinople.

Helen Bristol was the daughter of a prominent family from Mobile, Alabama, and even as a young woman she had put her energy and social status to work in a society newsletter, “Social Season,” which reported on the debutantes, cotillions, Confederate balls, and important marriages in the South. Helen’s marriage to Bristol, in June 1908, was her second and his first. He was forty; she was thirty-nine. Helen had been married previously to a railroad executive, William Bailey Thomas, who had died in 1901 but not before she had aggressively intervened with personal connections that led directly to President McKinley to advance her first husband’s army career. She had worked through the U.S. postmaster general, a family friend, who, after much pressing from Mrs. Thomas spoke to McKinley. “I went to the White House this afternoon expressly to see the President on your matter. . . .” She had been a widow for seven years when she met Bristol—her family was involved in the harbor-dredging business, run by her father and brother, Rittenhouse Moore and Rittenhouse Moore Jr. Helen (Moore) Bristol was a practical, capable, and imposing woman, and the ambitions of her and her husband fused in his career. It sometimes needed a little help from a woman who knew her way around polite society and military politics.

Bristol’s career was not without blemish. In 1912, the destroyer USS
Albany
ran aground under his command in the fog off the south coast of China. A naval panel found him at fault and recommended a reprimand. The rocks struck by the ship had been well marked on maritime charts, and he should have known the ship was headed directly toward them. Most revealing about the inquest that followed the accident was not the person who had misread the compass or erroneously taken down
the ship’s course, both of which were points of dispute in the case. The memorable point was Bristol’s hectoring of the young navigation officer who had been on the bridge. At the naval inquiry, Bristol placed blame for the grounding on the man and brushed away any suggestion that he, despite being the commanding officer on the bridge, bore any fault. In response to Bristol’s request for a review of the navy’s decision that went against him, he received firm affirmation that the navigational error was his. The review also said this: “The Captain (Bristol) subjected the officer-of-the-deck to a set of series of cross-questioning which savored very much of ‘bullying,’ with insinuations as to the O.D.’s (Officer of the Deck’s) age, rank and experience.” It is not difficult to see the future blustering Admiral Bristol in the bullying of the younger Captain Bristol.

Soon after the Albany incident, in July 1914, Admiral Bradley A. Fiske, the great naval inventor (telescopic gun sights, aerial torpedoes, the artillery rangefinder), picked Bristol to head up the Office of Naval Aeronautics—at the very beginning of the military’s interest in aircraft as a weapon. Bristol’s expertise was naval ordinance. At the time, the navy had seven pilots and decided to place its flight-training center at Pensacola, Florida, instead of Annapolis (based on better weather). Bristol threw himself into the job with his trademark energy. He also got into a dispute with the pilots over aircraft design. The pilots favored the so-called tractor approach, which places the propeller ahead of the engine so that the plane is pulled ahead by its prop. Bristol favored propellers behind the engines so the propellers pushed the plane forward. The tractor approach was safer—when a plane crashed, which was not uncommon in the early years, the engine absorbed the impact, helping the pilot to survive. “I hope you will not use up too much time on arguments in regard to tractors and pushers,” Bristol lectured a pilot, “because arguments not based on facts and evidence will waste your time and mine. . . . The tractor is doomed for military purposes.” Of course, the pilot-favored approach eventually prevailed, but not before several pilots were killed. The rancor he stirred at Pensacola had eventually stalled his promotion to rear admiral.

In 1916, after working behind a desk in Washington, Bristol returned to sea duty but continued to experiment with naval aircraft, including
launching planes from battleships and cruisers. He commanded the battle cruiser USS
North Carolina
and the battleship
Oklahoma,
and in 1918 he took command of the U.S. Navy base at Plymouth, England. From there, he went to Belgium, then to Turkey. He brought with him no knowledge of the country and no background in diplomacy. He considered himself a quick study.

ON THIS MORNING
of September 2, Bristol had a lot on his mind besides the American bank that was closing. The military situation in Turkey was rapidly deteriorating. It was conceivable that the embers of the world war would burst back into flame in Asia Minor, and the British might soon find themselves in a hot war again with the Turks. In 1922, the military forces of Britain, France, and Italy, ostensible allies who were actually at one another’s throats, lightly occupied Constantinople. The sultan was hiding in his waterfront palace.

Only days before, Bristol had received a report from his chief of staff that a force of the Turkish nationalists had fortified its position within fifty miles of Constantinople. The British, along with the French and Italians, were moving a thin contingent of troops out of Constantinople along the intervening railway to block a nationalist sweep into the city. The Allies had continued to officially recognize the government in Constantinople with the sultan as its titular head of state. His imperial majesty, the sultan Mehmed VI, emperor of the Ottomans and caliph to the Faithful throughout the world, now sixty-one years of age, had become a prisoner in his waterside palace with his courtiers, eunuchs, and five wives. By September 1922, he lacked even the power of a symbolic ruler. If the nationalists decided to move their army into Constantinople, the British would have difficulty stopping them. The French and Italians were fully unreliable. At the same time, Bristol had learned, nationalist forces had begun an offensive against the army of Greece in the country’s interior, with apparent success.

In London, the government’s war cabinet was meeting to consider its military options. Bristol judged the entire situation in the region a diplomatic hash. Yes, he thought, all of this was an inept and sorry jumble,
especially for the British and the Greeks, but it was shaping up as a win for the Americans if he could continue to steer United States policy in the right direction—toward a friendly partnership with the nationalists. It was clear that a new order was beginning to emerge, and Bristol intended to continue guiding it for the benefit of the United States. This had been his self-imposed mission almost from the day he had arrived in Turkey three years earlier. He consoled himself with the thought that he was giving his government good counsel and doing what Washington had asked of him when he had come to Constantinople—to watch over American interests. Bristol had worked to open a door for American commercial interests, including the oil companies in the Near East, and now events were turning in the direction in which he had pushed.

He cheered the successes of the nationalists and gloated over the failures of the British and Greeks. All in all, despite disappointment with the Guaranty Trust Co., his mood was brighter than it had been in days. The day was Saturday and he planned to take the afternoon off. A long holiday weekend lay ahead—Labor Day. A little huffing and puffing over the bank had probably improved his disposition. The Bosporus sparkled outside the office windows of his office.

Bristol left the Palazzo around noon, bound for Therapia. His mind was on his yacht with its two raked masts and his tennis game. He played tennis every day and golf at least twice a week. Later, he made a note in his diary: “The afternoon was a half holiday, which was spent on board the
Scorpion
at Therapia. We had as guests for luncheon Dr. C. N. Ratcliff and Lieut. Commander L. C. Evans-Thomas, both of the Royal Navy. I took them up in my barge and had them to luncheon so that they could complete the Tennis tournament before their ship sailed.”

In the evening, the admiral wrote, he and Mrs. Bristol (he always referred to his wife, Helen, as Mrs. Bristol) joined guests at the Summer Palace Hotel in Therapia for dinner and attended a dance. The Summer Palace Hotel was the grandest of Therapia’s destinations, and Therapia, like Constantinople, was a whirlwind of legation dinners, dances, and lavish entertainments. The world might be headed for a second war in Turkey or the Balkans, but the fun continued in Constantinople. The Bristols were often present as a couple of senior chaperones—the military’s
Victorian parents of a smart young set of officers and their wives swaying to jazz bands, dancing the foxtrot, and drinking the whiskey-and-sodas that were banned back home.

On that pleasant afternoon of September 2, when Consul General Horton had sent his urgent cable from Smyrna, four hundred miles to the south, pleading for a ship to provide protection, Bristol was playing tennis with the British officers in white shorts on the lawn at Therapia.

A
t about midnight on Saturday, September 2, George Horton’s cable reached the Near East desk of the State Department in the south wing of the State, War, and Navy Building, one block from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue.
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A telegraph operator at the Eastern Telegraph Co. on the Smyrna waterfront had tapped out dots and dashes of letters and numbers that contained Horton’s message ciphered into the State Department’s Gray Code. The message had moved over the British-owned system of undersea cables, and when it had reached the United States, a Western Union operator had routed it to the State Department. It typically took a message an hour or two to travel from Smyrna to Washington on the network, and there was a seven-hour time difference between the two cities.

It was the first day of the long Labor Day weekend, the last holiday of summer, and an excuse for the city’s residents to depart muggy Washington for the seaside resorts of Delaware or Maryland. It had rained furiously late Friday and early Saturday, sending Rock Creek over its banks, flooding streets and stalling trolley cars along Connecticut Avenue, but
by the end of the workweek most everyone who had planned a holiday at the Atlantic shore had already left, and the sun had come out in time for the last-place Boston Red Sox to trounce the Washington Nationals at Griffith Park. It was a double-header, and the Red Sox won both games. The State Department was thinly staffed, and eventually the cable reached the chief of the Near East desk, Allen Dulles, a promising twenty-nine-year-old Princeton graduate who had only recently returned from Constantinople. He had served there as Mark Bristol’s diplomatic assistant, smoothing relations between the admiral and the British and gathering information that would help Washington formulate a strategy to secure oil supplies in the Near East. Dulles and Bristol remained in friendly contact, and Dulles had become a kind of buffer and interpreter on behalf of the outspoken admiral in Washington

On Tuesday, September 5, Dulles sent Horton’s cable to William Phillips, who had just returned from his family’s estate in Massachusetts, where his wife had just given birth to their first child. Phillips was the acting secretary of state, while the secretary of state, the formidable Charles Evans Hughes, former governor of New York and justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was on a passenger ship with an American delegation traveling to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil’s centennial. Phillips was in charge while Hughes was away and out of radio contact.

Phillips was a lean, starchy, and well-bred Bostonian, forty-four years old, who had entered service at the State Department in 1903 through a family friend, the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Phillips was prodigiously patrician. His family traced its beginnings in America to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Phillips had degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. His family had homes in Boston’s highbrow Back Bay and on Massachusetts’s North Shore, an oceanfront escape of farms and polo ponies. Phillips was the sort of man who had often dropped in for lunch with the aging eminence Henry Adams at his home on H Street. Phillips had served as undersecretary of state for President Wilson, an intellectual whom he admired, and briefly as the American minister to the Netherlands. He now served a president he did not admire, or even respect—Warren G. Harding. “Too many of his evenings,” Phillips wrote,
“were spent playing poker with his cronies, of which I was not one, and imbibing more than was good for him in spite of national prohibition.”

The State Department’s attention was mostly focused on Europe and the debate over German reparations—France wanted them paid in full, Britain was for relaxing them. Runaway inflation was ravaging the Weimar Republic, which was printing Deutschmarks by the billions to pay its bills. The department was also keeping an eye on Turkey, and Phillips had been tipped to serious trouble well before he read Horton’s cable on Tuesday. The U.S. embassy in Paris had picked up word from the British nine days earlier that the Turkish nationalist army had resumed hostilities, and Phillips had also seen Horton’s earlier cable, sent August 30, reporting the nationalist attack on the Greek line. Sitting in his office on the building’s second floor, Phillips could just as easily have looked at the front page of the
Washington Post
. The lead headline reported: “
TURKS NEAR SMYRNA
;
CROWDS AT SMYRNA
,
SEEKING TO EMBARK FOR U
.
S
.,
BESIEGE AMERICAN CONSULATE
.”

Nonetheless, the warning in Horton’s cable concerned Phillips. It said Americans needed protection. Horton had a reputation for the rhetorical flourish, but the situation appeared genuinely dangerous. “. . . I respectfully request,” Horton had written, “that a cruiser be dispatched to Smyrna to protect consulate and nationals.” Another aspect of the cable caught Phillips’s careful attention. It requested naval protection but Horton had addressed it to the secretary of state, not to Admiral Bristol. From the copy Phillips had in hand, it appeared that Horton had not even copied the admiral on his request for a ship. Everyone who knew Bristol understood he was sensitive to slights, and jumping over him to appeal directly to Washington for naval protection was no mere oversight. Horton’s reporting relationship as a consul was sufficiently ambiguous to allow him direct communication with the secreatry of state, but the end run around Bristol suggested that the trouble between the two men had opened into a serious breach at a bad time.

The snub, if that’s what it was, was a stupid move. Bristol had a long memory. Even Phillips knew it.

The State Department understood Bristol’s pro-Turkish reputation and Horton’s admiration of the Greeks. The two men stood poles apart
in opinions and temperament, but Bristol had the more commanding position in Washington. He outranked Horton in the State Department hierarchy, held a rear admiral’s commission, and possessed Dulles as his advocate. The department in the last two years had been repeatedly forced to defend Bristol against his critics, especially among American missionary organizations. Ironically, on the same day Horton had sent his request for help to Washington, Phillips had sent a cable to Constantinople informing Bristol that Senator William King of Utah, a Democrat, had introduced a resolution asking for an investigation into Bristol’s pro-Turkish attitudes. The resolution had been diverted to a Senate committee, where Phillips hoped it would die, and in his cable to Bristol, he had assured the admiral that he had the department’s support.

Phillips understood that Horton’s cable presented a political dilemma for President Harding. The conflict in the Near East and the plight of the region’s Christians were highly charged domestic issues. For years, newspapers and church organizations had made the American public keenly aware of Turkish atrocities against Christians, and religious leaders had agitated for a more forceful American role in defense of Turkey’s Christian minorities. In May, a public debate had broken out between Secretary Hughes and the leader of one of the country’s biggest Protestant denominations over the American government’s unwillingness to stand up for persecuted Christians, and ultimately the president was dragged into the dispute.

Also, in June, the British had asked the United States to join an Allied investigation of Turkish deportations of Christians along the Black Sea. The press had carried sensational (and accurate) reports of Christians being sent on long death marches. Secretary Hughes had sent the British request to Harding, and Harding responded with a note containing his thinking but no decision on whether the United States should participate in the investigation. Harding had little interest in foreign affairs and left the decision to Hughes. He was happy to defer to his secretary of state, but Harding’s note to Hughes offered a concise description of America’s dilemma:

Hughes ultimately chose to participate, but the matter had dragged out and by now, in September of 1922 with the Turkish military victories, the matter was moot. In making his decision, Hughes had weighed the matter as the judge he had been and sent Harding a note fleshing out the pros and cons of not participating—he had phrased the question in the negative, Should the United States not participate in the investigation of atrocities? Pro: Not responding would prevent a finding of atrocities, so there could be no demand for military action. Problem solved. Con: Not participating would be politically damaging to Harding. “We should offend a large body of Americans who have deep interest in the Christians of Anatolia. . . . It would be naturally said that we were far more solicitous about American interest in oil than about Christian lives.”

Indeed, many of America’s religious leaders already viewed American policy as favoring acquisition of oil over protecting Christians, and their argument would grow louder in the coming weeks and months.

IN 1922, AMERICA WAS HAVING
its first bout of oil anxiety. Getting and holding foreign oil supplies was by then already a central concern of the nation’s foreign policy.

The country feared that its domestic petroleum supply would last
only another ten years—twenty years at best. The worry permeated the country: petroleum experts, the president, the Congress, the military, and the public. “The position of the United States in regard to oil can best be characterized as precarious,” said George Otis Smith, director of the U.S. Geological Survey.

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.
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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.