America’s attitude toward refugees is hardening. After banning refugees from war-torn countries like Syria and Yemen, the US this week launched tear gas at Central American asylum seekers on the southern border. Meanwhile, only 51% of Americans think they have a responsibility to admit refugees. Less than half think the US should do more to help them.
When European Jews were fleeing persecution in WWII, the US was similarly reluctant to help; the government turned away thousands, with little objection from the American public. But there is one moment in US history when the government and public rallied together to welcome large numbers of refugees: The Armenian genocide, which lasted from 1914 to 1923. In those years, US citizens launched an unprecedented grassroots aid fundraising campaign, while the US government opened its borders to nearly 80,000 Armenians.
Other large numbers of refugees have been welcomed at other times—100,000 Vietnamese refugees eventually entered the US after the Vietnam War—but the Armenian crisis stands out for the extraordinary outpouring of sympathy and aid that it elicited from the American public .
On Jan. 11, 1915, the New York Times published an article that warned of “a massacre of the Christian population” in the Ottoman Empire and noted that “in Constantinople no endeavor is any longer made by the Ministers to hide their feelings toward their Christian subjects.” Henry Morgenthau, US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, described it as a “race murder.”
The term “genocide” didn’t exist yet (it would later be coined to describe the Holocaust), and to this day the US government does not recognize the mass slaughter of Ottoman Armenians as a genocide. Nevertheless, Americans mobilized to offer refuge to the victims. Historian Vartan Gregorian tells Quartz that private citizens were able to raise well $116 million (about $2 billion today) for the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ACASR), which collected the money, managed volunteers to help victims, and distributed aid to Armenians through missionaries and the American embassy in Constantinople (now Istanbul).
Mostly funded through grassroots donations, the initial goal for the fundraiser, $30 million (about half a billion dollars today) was reached in 1931, collecting up to $90 per Armenian citizen (over $1,500 per capita today). The ACASR (today’s Near East Foundation) also enjoyed the support of then-president Woodrow Wilson. Some Americans gave more than money; over 1,000 people traveled overseas to provide humanitarian relief to the Armenians by setting up orphanages, camps and hospitals.
By comparison, USAID gave $61 million to Rwanda after the genocide in 1994 (amounting to $10 for every Rwandan) and the government was slow to even acknowledge that a genocide was happening. More recently, USAID has given $7.7 billion for the Syrian people since 2011 ($420 per capita), while Syrians themselves have been banned from traveling to the US.
The US response to the genocide created a template for US philanthropy to come. Gregorian notes that the Armenian crisis marked the first time individual Americans stepped forward to financially support to victims of conflict.
Today, many Americans still consider charity a personal responsibility. Americans lead the world for individual charitable donations per capita outdoing their government in generosity. ”Every year,” says Gregorian, “Americans give $400 million in private donations to charity, and there are 1.6 million registered civil society organizations…[American humanitarian efforts] don’t need government support,” says Gregorian.
According to Gregorian, as well as Henry Theriault, the editor of the Genocide Studies and Prevention journal, here’s what made such grassroots fundraising possible:
