A Near East Relief worker named Gertrude Anthony handed a report to the US State Department on 12 December 1921 document...

A Near East Relief worker named Gertrude Anthony handed a report to the US State Department on 12 December 1921 documenting killings, arson, looting, and deportations targeting Greeks and Armenians across northern Asia Minor. The internal note that accompanied it recorded something striking: she had already given a copy to Admiral Mark Bristol, the American High Commissioner in Constantinople, and he had not forwarded it. Anthony's report to Bristol was dated 1 November 1921. It described the violence of that July, including attacks carried out by the armed men of Topal Osman, and framed the persecutions as a continuation of the Young Turks' policy of extermination now being carried out by nationalist forces. The State Department note passed on her view, and that of her colleagues, that US intervention could save thousands of lives. Anthony was not a journalist or a diplomat. She had been a natural sciences teacher in Berkeley, California, a niece of Susan B. Anthony, before traveling to the region in 1919 with her sister Amy, a nurse. She worked first in Yerevan; after Americans were ordered out of Merzifon in March 1921, she waited in Samsun until permission came through in early June, then returned on the 13th. Her covering letter to Bristol showed careful precision. She separated what she had witnessed personally from secondhand accounts she judged reliable, and corrected an earlier draft because errors in wording could have made one week of massacres appear to be two. She also asked Bristol not to make her statements public, worried that exposure could bring new restrictions on the humanitarian work being done inland. The December note confirms the report eventually reached the responsible service in Washington. What it does not do is explain why Bristol had not forwarded it himself. His reasons are not recorded anywhere in the document. The report is now held at the US National Archives. Anthony's papers are at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. She returned to the region in 1922 and that autumn organized the movement of roughly 500 refugees and orphans from Merzifon to Samsun across three days, using 56 wagons. #PonticGenoc...