Charles W. Fowle

Charles W. Fowle ran Near East Relief's work in Syria and Lebanon, and he came to it from a desk in New York. He was the organization's foreign secretary at the national office, the man at headquarters who handled the overseas side of the operation. On 1 April 1923 he went out to take charge of the Beirut area himself.

He travelled the stations. That April he inspected the new orphanage at Nazareth with Edward W. Blatchford, who directed the Palestine work. When Flora Stanton Kalk left the Sidon orphanage for America later that year, the children and the local staff wrote their thanks to Fowle rather than to New York. In November 1923 he went to Geneva as a delegate to the International Near East Association, the body set up to coordinate the European and American relief organizations and was elected one of its vice-chairmen.

By 1926 he sat on the advisory committee that set policy across the region, alongside William W. Peet, Bayard Dodge, Barclay Acheson, Harold Jaquith and Joseph Beach. Barton, closing his history in 1930, named Fowle among the small group of directors whose long service had carried the organization.