Henry Morgenthau Sr.

Morgenthau was born, the ninth of 11 living children, in Mannheim, Grand Duchy of Baden, in 1856 into an Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was the son of Lazarus and Babette (Guggenheim) Morgenthau. His father was a successful cigar manufacturer who had cigar factories at Mannheim, Lorsch and Heppenheim, employing as many as 1,000 people (Mannheim had a population of 21,000 during this period). Having suffered a severe financial setback during the American Civil War, due to an 1862 tobacco tariff on imports, which closed German tobacco exports to the US forever, the family emigrated to New York in 1866. There, despite a considerable "nest egg" of cash, his father was unsuccessful in re-establishing himself in business, as his development and marketing of various inventions and his investments in other enterprises failed. Lazarus Morgenthau was able to stave off failure and stabilize his income by becoming a fundraiser for Jewish houses of worship. Henry attended City College of New York, where he received a BA, and later graduated from Columbia Law School. He began his career as a lawyer, but he made a substantial fortune in real estate investments. He married Josephine Sykes in 1882 and had four children: Helen, Alma, Henry Jr. and Ruth. Morgenthau built a successful career as a lawyer and served as the leader of the Reform Jewish community in New York.

Morgenthau's career enabled him to contribute handsomely to President Woodrow Wilson's election campaign in 1912. He had first met Wilson in 1911 at a dinner celebrating the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Free Synagogue society and the two "seem to have bonded", marking the "turning point in Morgenthau's political career". His role in American politics grew more pronounced in later months and though his desire to be designated the financial chairman of the campaign finance committee went unfulfilled, Wilson offered him the position of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. He had hoped for a cabinet post as well, but was not successful in gaining one.

A telegram written by Morgenthau to the State Department in 1915 described the massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as a "campaign of race extermination".

As an early Wilson supporter, Morgenthau assumed that Wilson would appoint him to a cabinet-level position, but the new President had other plans for him; like other prominent Jewish Americans, Oscar Straus and Solomon Hirsch before him, Morgenthau would be posted as the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Wilson's assumption that Jews somehow represented a bridge between Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians rankled Morgenthau; in reply Wilson assured him that the Porte in Istanbul "was the point at which the interest of American Jews in the welfare of the Jews of Palestine is focused, and it is almost indispensable that I have a Jew in that post". Though no Zionist himself, Morgenthau cared "fervidly" about the plight of his coreligionists. He initially rejected the position, but following a trip to Europe, and with the encouragement of his pro-Zionist friend Rabbi Stephen Wise, he reconsidered his decision and accepted Wilson's offer. Appointed as U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1913, he served in this position until 1916.

Although the safety of American citizens in the Ottoman Empire, mostly Christian missionaries and Jews, loomed large early in his ambassadorship, Morgenthau stated that the one issue that most preoccupied him was the Armenian Question. After the outbreak of war in 1914, the U.S. remained neutral, so the American Embassy – and by extension Morgenthau – additionally represented many of the Allies' interests in Constantinople, since they had withdrawn their diplomatic missions due to the hostilities. As Ottoman authorities began the Armenian Genocide in 1914–1915, the American consuls residing in different parts of the Empire flooded Morgenthau's desk with reports nearly every hour, documenting the massacres and deportation marches taking place. Faced with the accumulating evidence, he officially informed the U.S. government of the activities of the Ottoman government and asked Washington to intervene.

The American government however, not wanting to get dragged into disputes, remained a neutral power in the conflict at the time and voiced little official reaction. Morgenthau held high-level meetings with the leaders of the Ottoman Empire to help alleviate the position of the Armenians, but the Turks waived and ignored his protestations. He famously admonished the Ottoman Interior Minister Talaat Pasha, stating: "Our people will never forget these massacres." As the massacres continued unabated, Morgenthau and several other Americans decided to form a public fund-raising committee that would assist the Armenians – the Committee on Armenian Atrocities (later renamed the Near East Relief) – raising over $100 million in aid, the equivalent of $1 billion today. Through his friendship with Adolph Ochs, publisher of the New York Times, Morgenthau also ensured that the massacres continued to receive prominent coverage, with 145 articles in 1915 alone. Exasperated with his relationship with the Ottoman government, he resigned from the ambassadorship in 1916. Looking back on that decision in his The Murder of a Nation, he wrote he had come to see Turkey as "a place of horror. I had reached the end of my resources. I found intolerable my further daily association with men, however gracious and accommodating…who were still reeking with the blood of nearly a million human beings." He published his conversations with Ottoman leaders and his account of the Armenian genocide in 1918 under the title Ambassador Morgenthau's Story.

In 1918 Ambassador Morgenthau gave public speeches in the United States warning that the Greeks and Assyrians were being subjected to the "same methods" of deportation and "wholesale massacre" as the Armenians, and that two million Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians had already perished.

In June 1917 Felix Frankfurter accompanied him, as a representative of the War Department, on a secret mission to persuade Turkey to abandon the Central Powers in the war effort; the mission had as its stated purpose to "ameliorate the condition of the Jewish communities in Palestine".

Following the war, there was much interest and preparation within the Jewish community for the upcoming Paris Peace Conference, by groups both supportive and opposed to the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. In March 1919, as President Woodrow Wilson was leaving for the Conference, Morgenthau was among 31 prominent Jewish Americans to sign an anti-Zionist petition presented by U.S. Congressman Julius Kahn; he and many other prominent Jewish representatives attended the Conference. Morgenthau served 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 Morgenthau Report. In 1933, he was the American representative at the Geneva Conference

Morgenthau on a 2015 Armenian stamp from the series "Centennial of the Armenian Genocide"

He died in 1946 following a cerebral hemorrhage, in New York City, and was buried in Hawthorne, New York. His son Henry Morgenthau Jr. was a Secretary of the Treasury. His daughter, Alma Wertheim, was the mother of historian Barbara Tuchman.

In Terry George's 2016 drama The Promise, Morgenthau is played by James Cromwell.

He published several books. The Library of Congress holds some 30,000 documents from his personal papers.

• Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (1918). Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (online).
• The Secrets of the Bosphorus (1918) (online)
• The Morgenthau Report (October 3, 1919) concerning alleged mistreatment of Jews by the Poles.
• All In a Lifetime (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page & Co, 1925), 454 pages, 7 illustrations (online).
• I was sent to Athens (1929) deals with his time working with Greek refugees (openlibrary.org)
• The Murder of a Nation (1974). With preface by W. N. Medlicott. New York: Armenian General Benevolent Union of America.

Diaries

• United States Diplomacy on the Bosphorus: The Diaries of Ambassador Morgenthau, 1913-1916 (2004). Compiled with an introduction by Ara Sarafian. London: Taderon Press (Gomidas Institute). ISBN 1-903656-40-0.

Official documents

• Ara Sarafian (ed.): United States Official Records On The Armenian Genocide. 1915–1917 (2004). London and Princeton: Gomidas Institute. ISBN 1-903656-39-7