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Susan Wealthy Orvis

Susan Wealthy Orvis
Born	December 20, 1873 Altanta, Illinois
Died	January 10, 1941 Earlville, Iowa
Education	BA, Grennell College, 1902 AM (MA), University of Chicago, 1915 BD, Oberlin College, 1939
Occupation(s)	Teacher, Christian Missionary in Turkey, and lifelong learner
Employer	American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
Known for	Helping to save more than 3,000 orphans during the genocides in the Ottoman Empire

Susan Wealthy Orvis (December 20, 1874 – January 10, 1941) was an American teacher and Christian missionary, who helped save more than 3,000 Armenian, Assyrian, Greek, and Turkish orphans during and after the genocides of the late Ottoman era from their mission compound in Talas, Turkey.

Early Life

Orvis was born in Atlanta, Illinois, the daughter of Clarkson Finney Orvis, a U.S. Civil War veteran and one-time Congregationalist pastor, and Mary Ellen Phelps, a distance cousin of Samuel Morse, co-developer of Morse code. Orvis was named after her paternal grandmother, Susan Wealthy (White) Orvis, an 1844 graduate of Oberlin College. Since less than one percent of Americans were college graduates, and few were women, Orvis was inordinately proud of her grandmother, and used to sign her full name, not only on official documents, but even on letters to her parents and siblings, e.g., "Yours lovingly, Susan Wealthy Orvis".

Not long after her birth, the family moved to Roseland, Nebraska, where Orvis completed her basic education. Then 16 years old, she had to work for nine years as a rural school teacher to earn enough money to attend Grinnell College, where she graduated with the highest honours. During her last year at college, she joined the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) and thought seriously about becoming a missionary. By the time she was a delegate at the SVM's 1902 conference in Toronto, she was convinced. She signed up with the Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior, one of three Congregational Woman's Boards founded under the auspices of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), said goodbye to her family, who were now living in Dubuque, Iowa, and by October, was teaching at the Girls' School in Talas, Turkey.

Life Pre-WWI

Orvis settled in quickly to life at the Talas mission. She worked under the supervision of the Girls' School principal, Stella Loughridge, and got along well with her American and Canadian colleagues. At first it disturbed her to be living in a compound with windows that "have heavy iron bars, just like a prison", but once she learned they were put in place as protection after the Hamidian massacres (1894–1897), she felt safe and secure. By the time her first one-year furlough came around in 1908, Orvis was fluent in Turkish, the empire's official language, and was learning Armenian. No sooner had she started her leave with a vacation in Beirut, when she heard the news of the Young Turk Revolution. It was an almost bloodless event initiated by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which forced the Sultan to reinstate the 1876 Constitution.

Most of the Sultan's subjects—Muslims, Christians, Jews and others—were thrilled, and were inspired by the Young Turks' slogan: “Liberty, Justice, Equality and Fraternity, for all the races and religions of the empire, with equal rights and equal duties for all.” George Washburn, however, was wary. “As we in America proclaimed these principles in 1776, and have not yet been able to put them in force in all parts of our country," said Washburn, the president of Robert College in Constantinople, "we may expect to wait some time before they can be fully carried out” in the Ottoman Empire.

Washburn's skepticism was soon born out. Between 1908 and the start of World War I (July 1914), the empire did not live up to those ideals. CUP's power increased exponentially during the Second Constitution Era. The imperial transformation began with annexation, wars and independence movements, resulting in a vast amount of territorial loss. Poverty was extremely high, agricultural methods and transportation were ancient, natural resources were undeveloped, and the economy was so bad, the empire was known as the Sick Man of Europe. Murder of journalists, and purges against political enemies were attributed to CUP's central committee, and more specifically to the powerful, dictatorial Talaat Pasha, one of the Three Pashas.

As the Ottoman Empire shrank, the concept of Turkification (see late Ottoman era) grew, especially among the governing council. In their minds, the idea of a national Turkish identity, consisting of the Turkish language, history, culture and traditions, and one religion (Muslim), could only strengthen the empire. Of course, to "Turkify" the empire meant to rid it of any groups that didn't fit. They were easy to identify: Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, who were Christian; Arabs, who were fighting for independence anyway; and Jews and Muslim Kurds, both of whom represented such a small minority that initially they weren't worth bothering about.

Those who embraced the ideology of Turkification took it upon themselves to anonymously create—deplete of evidence—and spread anti-Christian pamphlets. An excerpt of public lectures on hygiene delivered by three medical students is an excellent example of the tone and language used to rile and influence their particular audiences:

We are broken-hearted at finding you Muslims are still asleep. The Christians, profiting from our ignorance, have now for ages been taking our place and taking away our rights. These vipers whom we are nourishing have been sucking out all the lifeblood of the nation. They are the parasitical worms eating into our flesh whom we must destroy and do away with. It is time we freed ourselves from these individuals, by all means lawful and unlawful.

Orvis and her colleagues lived through these changes, which only took five years to escalate.

Early WWI and Genocide

In early July 1914, Orvis was the Talas delegate at the ABCFM Western Turkey Missions' AGM in Constantinople. It was chaired that year by Rev. Dr. Frederick W. MacCallum. A few days before, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria had been assassinated in Sarajevo, which sparked the July Crisis, which eventually lead to the outbreak of WWI. A few days after the duke's assassination, the Ottoman Empire began mobilization, albeit in a manner that ABCFM missionaries found disorganized, frustrating and often ridiculous.

Because of the prohibition of civilians' travel during mobilization, Orvis could not return to Talas. After spending time in Constantinople teaching at local ABCFM schools and volunteering at their Bible House, the ABCFM council decided she should take her furlough one year early. Luckily, she had her passport with her. She sailed from Smyrna to Naples and, on November 3rd, from Naples to the United States. Because war had started in late July, she travelled at her own risk. Her ship, the SS Critic, was stopped in the Mediterranean Sea, but was ultimately allowed to continue on its journey to New York. She arrived home in Dubuque just in time for American Thanksgiving, thankful to be with her family, but worried about what the war would do to her colleagues and students in Talas.

WWI brought more hardship to the Empire's people and economy, but there was a more sinister plan about to be launched by the Ottoman government. Under the cloak of war, harassment and attacks against Christian groups in the Empire rapidly increased. By 1915, attacks turned into genocide. In the east, the Sayfo (Assyrian genocide) began in January with the slaughter of Assyrians in Azerbaijan and continued westward for months into the Ottoman vilayet (provinces) of Bitlis and Diyarbekir. The latter was a Turkification zone, so any Kurds living there were deported. Many did not survive the journey. There was no need for distinction between Armenians and Assyrians because, by April, the Armenian genocide had begun in earnest throughout Turkey. The implementation was systematic and included arrests, murderous attacks on communities, and deportations to the Syrian Desert, which, in thousands of cases, amounted to a death march. It takes a long time to "cleanse" a country of undesirables. By December 1916, millions of people were gone.

During those two years, the Talas missionaries did everything they could to protect their Armenian students and staff. They appealed to their local Turkish governor and administrators, who were sympathetic but who had no authority to reverse the policies of the government. They tried to prevent the deportation of their students by shuffling them around and asking friendly Turks to hide them. Both actions were only temporary solutions. After hearing of massacres in the hinterland and in the east, they wrote long, detailed letters to Henry Morgenthau Sr., American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, pleading with him to use his diplomatic position to stop the horrors. When the deportations began in Talas, with the help of local Greek women, the missionaries prepared food and clothing packages, especially shoes, for their charges. They rejoiced when they received an occasional letter from a student who had survived the trek, but after spending almost two years in this daily tension, they were exhausted.

In January 1917, ABCFM ordered them to close the mission. By then there were no students to teach and the level of danger was at an all time high. The Bible House staff in Constantinople had arranged passage for the Americans, Stella Loughridge and others, to go to neutral Switzerland, and from there, to the United States, which was not at war with the Central Powers of WWI. That was true until the day they left the country, when the USA declared war and joined the Allies. The missionaries would have been expelled anyway. The Canadian missionaries at Talas, Herbert and Genevieve Irwin and their children, were legally also British subjects, and therefore belligerents. They had to remain at Robert College, technically as prisoners of war, for the duration of the war, although he was allowed to teach there.

Meanwhile, in January 1915, Orvis enrolled at the University of Chicago to earn a master's in teacher training. She and Loughridge had often discussed how knowing how to properly train teachers would greatly help improve the Talas mission. One of her professors said that her thesis, Religious Education in the American Schools in the Ottoman Empire, was "one of the best theses ever presented to them for a degree." Like others around the world, she had heard of some anti-Christian violence in eastern Turkey, but because of heavy censorship due to the war, she was not aware of the situation in Talas or elsewhere. Near the end of her furlough, she was eager to be in Talas, especially so that Loughridge could have her long-awaited furlough. However, because the American government prohibited transatlantic crossings during wartime, Orvis agreed to speak about mission work at as many meetings in the Mid-West as she could. In the fall of 1915, Morgenthau managed to send a telegram to US Secretary of State about the dire conditions in Turkey. He advised that a national fundraising committee be established to relieve the humanitarian crisis that was in full swing. James Levi Barton, then Secretary of the ABCFM, suddenly also became chair of The American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief (ASCAR). Once the newspapers printed stories about the atrocities that were occurring, people readily opened their wallets. Orvis learned all that she could to include the information in her talks, which were now geared towards raising money for relief. When she heard that a refugee camp was being created in Port Said, Egypt, she began to study Arabic at the University of Chicago in preparation for working at the camp.

Back Door Through Russia

Almost since its inception, an ACASR team had being setting up a refugee camp in the Transcaucausus. The genocides had continued for more than a year and there were now more displaced people than they could handle. They needed workers to start a new relief camp in Alexandropol, Russia. Would anyone be interested? Orvis leapt at the chance. She only had a couple of weeks to get her affairs in order before setting off from Dubuque for San Fransisco. There she met other ABCFM missionaries she had known in Turkey. They arranged for visas at the Russia Consulate, and on July 17, 1917 they set sail across the Pacific. On board, they started studying Russian and did fairly well during the three weeks it took to arrive at Yokohama. They ran into Fred MacCallum on his way back to the United States. He advised them not to continue further until they heard from the American Consul and ACASR; the environment was dangerous and uncertain. They took his advice, but it delayed their journey for 13 weeks. After a few weeks of sightseeing, they offered their services to local missions in Japan. Orvis wanted to teach at Kobe College, but did not speak Japanese, so she accepted a post in Matsuyama teaching English. Finally, on November 6, they received a cable from Ernest Yarrow in Tiflis, that read, "Work greatly increased. Your presence imperative. Let whole party come at once." The ABCFM group converged at Vladivostok on November 15th, and boarded the Trans-Siberian Express for Moscow, not realizing they were heading straight into the Russian Revolution.

Ovis kept a diary of her 6,800 mile journey. In it she detailed how she, her colleagues and the YMCA Field Secretaries they met on board, lived for three harrowing weeks. They were safe enough in their staterooms at the end of the train, but were hassled by Russian soldiers on their way to the dining car, who threatened them often. Sometimes they bought food from farmers, mostly cabbage, when they stopped at a station, but sometimes it was "too dangerous to disembark, where crowds were ready to stampede the train." Halfway along, the electricity line was cut; their candles didn't last long. They only drank boiled water. As they neared Moscow, notices were posted in each car that read:

Please do not shoot in the cars or kill the engineers or guards. All the world will hear of it. Don't throw passengers out of the window while the train is in motion.

Rescue of Orphans in Talas

Some of the personnel of the Talas mission, circa 1919. At left, Stella Loughridge and Susan Wealthy Orvis.

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the Greek genocide.

arrived and immediately went into hospital with acute ??

Life after Talas

ABCFM personnel record of Susan Wealthy Orvis, showing her arrivals, departures and any other significant occasion, 1902-1941.

By the summer of 1923 Orvis had recovered from her illness, and decided to go back to school—this time teaching at Tabor College. However, it seems that Turkey was never far from her mind because she returned in 1926 to teach at the Adana mission. Unfortunately, her health was not good, and she retired in 1931. Ever curious and eager to learn, she received a Bachelor of Divinity from Oberlin College's Graduate School of Theology in 1939. Susan Wealthy Orvis died in Earlville, Iowa in 1941 and is buried there in Fairview Cemetery.