Chapter 1
by John Gavin Nolan
As regards the other, and principal, reason for the trip, however, Mr. Smith said nothing to the pope. Complaints had been heard, and were about to be published, that the American–subsidized relief operations were slipshod and inefficient. Herbert Hoover said a few months later, for instance, that in the Caucasus “corruption and thievery were beyond belief,”22 and Doctor Barton and his committee commissioned Mr. Smith to teach the people in charge some basic business procedures. Because they were the only Americans with firsthand experience in the Ottoman Empire available at the time, Doctor Barton had hired for the relief work the same missionaries, nurses, teachers, and “mission workers” he had supported when he was secretary of the American Board. Although their personal honesty was unquestionable, their inexperience in this regard made them incapable of administering efficiently huge quantities of relief supplies. To make matters worse, the “committee” itself was incapable. In June, Herbert Hoover warned his headquarters that the Barton group had a “total lack of executive and business ability,” and that, if the facts were known, their story would be the “greatest scandal in American charitable history.”23
Meanwhile in Rome, having been received also by secretary of state Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, Mr. Smith and his sister befriended Father George Calavassy, whom they had entertained at their home in Torresdale, Pennsylvania, during the war. Through him they met, among other Eastern prelates who happened to be in Rome, Bishop Boghos Bédros Terzian, the patriarch of the Armenians, and Archbishop Isaiah Papadopoulos, Father Calavassy's former superior in Constantinople, who had been recently named the assessor, or undersecretary, at the Oriental Congregation. As the Catholic member of the Barton committee, Mr. Smith was questioned again and again in Rome about the American relief work and about the alleged discriminatory practices. It would not be Father Calavassy’s fault if, in the Near East, the Smiths failed to get the facts firsthand; they carried with them, when they sailed to Constantinople on 15 March, letters of introduction to all of the Catholic hierarchs they might conceivably be able to meet.24