Two-page letter on Near East Relief letterhead (151 Fifth Avenue, New York) dated October 3, 1922, from General Secretary Charles V. Vickrey to Mr. and Mrs. A.R. Miller of Elkhart, Indiana, addressing parental concern about their daughter Nellie’s safety and that of other NER workers in Constantinople following recent Turkish-Nationalist advances. Vickrey describes the reconstructed Turkish palace headquarters on the Bosphorus, with offices, warehouses, an emergency-supplied private dock fronted by NER’s chartered ship, and a Personnel House within ten minutes’ walk; he reports a multinational naval flotilla of British, American, French, Greek, and Italian dreadnaughts, cruisers, and destroyers riding at anchor on the Bosphorus to deter Kemalist crossings, with NER’s headquarters officially designated as a concentration point in case of emergency and the trans-European railroad available as a contingency evacuation route. He emphasizes that in six years of NER work in Anatolia “no physical violence has been attempted by the Turks against Americans,” concludes that NER workers are “practically as safe as if they were in their own homes in America,” and frames their service in terms of saving lives: “what are our lives good for anyway, if we cannot thus use them for others.” The letterhead also preserves a full Executive Committee and National Board of Trustees list down the left margin.
