Barclay Acheson Diaries (1926–1927)

Barclay Acheson (1886–1957), Near East Relief’s Associate General Secretary from 1922 and Director of Overseas Operations by 1925, kept a typed diary through the organization’s final years, dictated to a secretary from notes and memoranda as he traveled. It runs from June 1926 to September 1927 in four volumes. The first two follow an inspection tour from Constantinople (Istanbul) through Greece, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Caucasus, then south through Aleppo, Beirut, Sidon, Jerusalem, and Cairo. The last two open in New York and end in Athens, by way of the Constantinople Conference and a 2,000-mile overland journey from Beirut to Baghdad, through Persia to Tabriz, and across the Soviet border to Leninakan (Gyumri), as Alexandropol had been renamed.

The diaries are the inside record of NER’s turn from emergency relief to permanent development work: the Concentration Plan that consolidated the Caucasus orphanages, the Seversky property standoff with Soviet authorities in Tiflis (Tbilisi), the leadership crisis over General Secretary Charles V. Vickrey, the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of January 1927 that outlined a permanent successor institution, and the Constantinople Conference of May 1927. That institution became the Near East Foundation in 1930. Acheson wrote candidly about personnel, institutions, and the governments NER answered to, and his entries from Soviet territory, Persia, and Iraq cover operations that are thin elsewhere in the archival record.

Each entry below opens a complete volume with a companion summary. His photographs are presented in a companion collection. The diaries are held at the Rockefeller Archive Center within the Barclay Acheson papers, a special collection of the Near East Foundation records.