Hiram Bingham IV
Hiram "Harry" Bingham IV (July 17 1903 – January 12 1988) was an American diplomat, artist, and philosopher. He served as an Vice-Consul in Marseille, France, during World War II, and helped over 2,500 Jews to flee from France as Nazi forces advanced.
Bingham was one of seven sons of former Connecticut Governor and US Senator Hiram Bingham III and Alfreda Mitchell, the heiress of the Tiffany and Co. fortune. His great grandfather Hiram Bingham I and grandfather Hiram Bingham II were the first missionaries to the Kingdom of Hawai'i. Bingham attended the prestigious Groton School and graduated from Yale University in 1925.
Foreign service
Bingham served in Kobe, Japan, as a civilian secretary in the United States Embassy. He worked part-time as a schoolteacher. He traveled to India and Egypt before returning to the United States to attend Harvard University. After obtaining his law degree, he scored third in his class on the foreign service exam.
Bingham's first assignment in the United States Foreign Service was in Beijing, China. There, he witnessed the beginnings of the communist revolution. His travels through Asia piqued Bingham's interest in eastern religious philosophy. He spent the rest of his life trying to reconcile eastern religious philosophies with that of the Christian traditions his family had been historically known to preach.
Bingham also served in Warsaw, Poland, sharing a flat with another diplomat, Charles W. Yost, whose daughter, Felicity, became Bingham's god-daughter.
Family life
In 1934, Bingham served as third secretary to the United States Embassy in London. It was there that he met Rose Lawton Morrison, a college drama teacher from Waycross, Georgia. He had the honor of escorting Morrison to Buckingham Palace where the Queen had been expecting to meet her. They were eventually married and became proud parents of eleven children. The couple lived to see over forty of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Vice Consul in France
In 1939, Bingham was posted to the US Consulate in Marseille, where he, together with another vice-consul named Miles Standish, was in charge of issuing entry visas to the USA.
On June 10 1940, Adolf Hitler's forces invaded France and the French government fell. The French signed an armistice with Germany. In Article 19 of the document, the French agreed to "surrender on demand all Germans named by the German government in France." Civil and military police began to roundup German and Jewish refugees who were marked for death by the Nazis. Several influential Europeans tried to lobby the American government to issue visas so that German and Jewish refugees could freely leave France and escape persecution.
Anxious to limit immigration to the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. However, Bingham and Standish cooperated with Varian Fry in issuing visas and helping refugees escape France. Among those they helped Fry to rescue were famous authors and artists: Leon Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler Werfel, Heinrich Mann, Golo Mann, son and brother of Thomas Mann, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, André Breton, André Masson, Nobel Laureate Otto Meyerhof, Konrad Heiden, and Hannah Arendt.
He also sheltered Jews in his Marseilles home, and obtained forged identity papers to help Jews in their dangerous journeys across Europe. He worked with the French underground to smuggle Jews out of France into Franco's Spain or across the Mediterranean and even contributed to their expenses out of his own pocket.
Consequence
In 1941, the United States government abruptly pulled Bingham from his position as Vice Consul and transferred him to Portugal and then Argentina. When he was in Argentina, he helped to track Nazi war criminals in South America. In 1945, he was forced to retire from the United States Foreign Service.
As reported by CBS News correspondent Wyatt Andrews, Bingham did not speak much about his wartime activities. His own family had no knowledge of them until after Bingham's death, his youngest son discovered a tightly wrapped bundle of letters, documents, and photographs in a cupboard behind a chimney in the family home. The bundle told of Bingham's struggle to save German and Jewish refugees from death, details long hidden by the United States government.
On June 27 2002, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell praised Bingham’s "constructive dissent" and presented a posthumous "courageous diplomat" award to his children at an American Foreign Service Officers Association awards ceremony. His sixth child, Robert Kim Bingham, launched a stamp drive in 1998 to urge the US Postal Service to issue a postage stamp in honor of his father. The campaign gained wide bipartisan support in the US Congress and, after six years, it succeeded: Hiram Bingham IV was awarded a US commemorative stamp bearing his image, as a "Distinguished American Diplomat", on May 30 2006.
Yad Vashem's decision
After considering Bingham's deeds during the war years in Marseille for a number years, Yad Vashem issued the Bingham family a letter of appreciation on March 7 2005 (as posted in Robert Kim Bingham's website referenced below) that fell short of considering Hiram Bingham IV a hero of the Holocaust, thus failing to award him the Righteous Among the Nations title.
The letter to Bingham's family from Yad Vashem (addressed to Abigail Bingham Endicott, daughter of Bingham IV) noted the "humanitarian disposition" of Bingham IV "at a time of persecution of Jews by the Vichy regime in France." This, as noted by Yad Vashem, was in "contrast to certain other officials who rather acted suspiciously toward Jewish refugees wishing to enter the United States," making Bingham IV a "distinguished diplomat" as recognized afterwards by the United States with the issuing of a commemorative stamp.
Bingham received two additional honors in the fall of 2006:
On October 27 2006, the Anti-Defamation League posthumously presented to Hiram ("Harry") Bingham IV its "Courage to Care" award (previous recipients include Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara, and "The People of Denmark," et al), at the ADL’s national conference in Atlanta.
In November 2006, the United States Episcopal Church added Hiram Bingham IV to its list of "American Saints," with a summation of his life and character in the book A Year with American Saints.
References
- Book "COURAGEOUS DISSENT: How Harry Bingham Defied His Government to Save Lives," published by Triune Books, Greenwich, CT; author Robert Kim Bingham (Bingham's son)