The Starving Armenians
Posted By shirley on January 28, 2010
Once I was at a dinner with my husband and his coworkers. I was seated next to a gentleman and we struck up a conversation. I can’t remember how the conversation was going, but we were talking about typical things in our lives, our childhood etc. For some reason he brought up how his mother would encourage him to finish his food by saying, “don’t forget the starving Armenians.”
I looked at him rather quizzically and stated, “I’m Armenian.” With some embarrassment he apologized. We went on to talk about why Armenians had become a household name and not long ago the term, “poor starving Armenians,” was in the national consciousness.
A reference to “starving Armenians” is made in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, The Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1980.
World War I summoned forth American’s hitherto greatest humanitarian crusade. Organized through Near East Relief, the sole agency incorporated by Congress for aid to refugees in Biblical lands, and Armenian philanthropic organizations, American contributions to the “starving Armenians” enabled the building of refugee camps and hospitals and distribution of food and clothing to hundreds of thousands of Armenian refugees and orphans. Fund raising for them became so universal that American schoolchildren, said President Woodrow Wilson, knew as much about Armenia as they knew about England. Many first-generation Armenian Americans owe their lives to Near East Relief.
And there is this quote from a syndicated columnist, Paul Greenberg, of the Washington Times:
Even today some Americans may remember being told to think of “the starving Armenians” when they were children and wouldn’t eat their vegetables. The phrase remains in the language even if the history behind it has been forgotten.
I know this to be true about the American Red Cross and missionaries, because when my mother was a small child my grandfather begged the hospital and its American doctor, Dr. Shepard, for a prescription of milk for her. Without that milk, my mother would not have survived.
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