Henry White (diplomat)

Henry White, A Diplomatic Cousin , from Spy at Vanity Fair, March 16, 1899

Henry White (born March 29, 1850 in Baltimore , Maryland , † July 15, 1927 in Lenox , Massachusetts ) was an influential American diplomat who was also one of the representatives of the United States at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 . He was held in high regard by both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson .

Life

White came from an influential Maryland family and spent much of his time as a child in Hampton , whose mansion is now a National Historic Site. They sympathized with the Confederates during the Civil War and in 1865 the family moved to Paris , where White went to school. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out , they moved to England , where White made many contacts, including in pursuit of his passion for fox hunting. In 1879 he married Margaret "Daisy" Stuyvesant Rutherfurd from the wealthy New York Stuyvesant family and moved back to the USA with her. With the support of his equally ambitious wife, he now pursued a diplomatic career. In 1883 he became secretary at the US embassy in Vienna , but in the same year he moved to the embassy in London , where he stayed after the change of government to the Democrats (White was a Republican ). In 1886 he became first secretary at the embassy and remained so until 1893. He was a founding member of the social salon of The Souls .

Mrs. Henry White by John Singer Sargent

In 1893 White returned to the United States and settled in Washington, DC to establish and maintain political contacts. He benefited from his good English contacts. In 1896 he was again First Secretary in London. His wife fell ill with a degenerative nervous disease in 1898 and spent a lot of time in sanatoriums until her death in 1916, so that his daughter Muriel took over the receptions. In 1905 he became ambassador of the United States in Rome and mediated in this capacity between Germany and France at the Algeciras Conference in 1906. From 1907 to 1909 he was ambassador to Paris under President Theodore Roosevelt . He remained closely connected to Roosevelt even after that and accompanied him in 1910 when Roosevelt was US representative at the funeral of Edward VII . Both met all the leading statesmen and rulers in Europe except the tsar. The incumbent President William Howard Taft also appointed him in 1910 as a representative at the Pan-American Conference.

He was surprised by the First World War in Berlin in 1914 - his daughter had married a German nobleman (Count Hermann von Seherr-Thoß ). Because of his connections to both London and Germany, he long advocated neutrality and was thus an ally of President Woodrow Wilson. He only moved away from it after Germany declared total submarine warfare. Wilson offered him diplomatic missions and posts in Latin America, which he refused. After the armistice in 1918, Wilson appointed him one of the five US representatives at the Versailles Peace Conference , where he was employed for a good year from December 1918 to December 1919.

In 1920 he married Emily Vanderbilt Sloane of the Vanderbilt family. His daughter Muriel (* 1880) had been married to a German nobleman since 1909, lived from then on in Germany and died there in 1943; his son John Campbell White (1884-1967) was the US ambassador to Peru and Haiti .

Meridian House

His first wife was painted by John Singer Sargent , the painting is in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC His home in Washington, designed by architect John Russell Pope and completed in 1912, is now owned by the Meridian International Center (Meridian House, 1630 Crescent Place).

literature

• Allan Nevins Henry White: Thirty Years of American Diplomacy . New York: Harper & Brothers 1930

Web links

Commons : Henry White  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Henry White in the database of Find a Grave (English)
• Office of the Historian: Henry White

predecessor	Office	successor
George von Lengerke Meyer	US Ambassador to Rome April 16, 1905-26. February 1907	Lloyd Carpenter Griscom
Robert Sanderson McCormick	US Ambassador to Paris March 23, 1907–3. November 1909	Robert Bacon