Key Documents

In September 1915 the American ambassador in Constantinople cabled Washington that the Armenians were being killed, and asked for help. A relief committee formed almost at once, run at first by a handful of men meeting in Cleveland Dodge’s office in downtown New York. Within a few years it had become the largest private charity the country had ever seen, and in 1919 Congress gave it something it had granted almost no one else: a federal charter, on the condition that the charter last twenty-five years and no longer. It ran the full term. When it expired in 1944 the trustees held a final dinner, printed a small pamphlet, and handed the work to the Near East Foundation, which still exists.

This collection holds the documents behind that story. Some are official: the ambassador’s telegram, the congressional charter, the yearly reports the organization was required to file. Others come from the field — among them a 1919 needs assessment carried out across a region still in ruins from the war, in places the official Allied missions could not yet reach, by relief workers sent to find out how many were left alive and what they lacked. Others still are the papers of a charity deciding its own future: the survey that concluded the emergency was ending and the orphanages should close, and the 1944 pamphlet in which the trustees, looking back over thirty years, tallied what the effort had cost and saved. Read together, they trace how a few people raising money in New York came to feed a million and shelter a hundred thousand children across a dozen countries.

The figures cited elsewhere on this site are drawn from these records. Additional documents will be added as materials are digitized from the archives of the Rockefeller Archive Center, the National Archives, and other repositories.