Benjamin Sumner Welles (October 14, 1892 – September 24, 1961) was an American government official and diplomat in the Foreign Service. He was a major foreign policy advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and served as Under Secretary of State (the second-ranking position) from 1937 to 1943, during FDR's administration. On the August 11, 1941, issue of Time, Welles was featured on the cover.[1]
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He was born in New York City, the son of Benjamin J. Welles (January 11, 1857-December 26, 1935) an 1878 graduate of Harvard University and Frances Wyeth Swan (November 26, 1863-February 25, 1911). His sister was Emily Frances Welles (October 22, 1889-April 22, 1962), who married Harry Pelham Robbins.[2]
Welles was born into wealth and privilege, the son of an aristocratic family prominent in society. He preferred to be called Sumner after his famous relative Charles Sumner, a leading Senator in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Welles was a grandnephew of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, simply known as "the Mrs. Astor" wife of William Backhouse Astor, Jr.. Mrs. William Astor's New York was the world of high society, manners and rules that was dramatized by author Edith Wharton in The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920) her Pulitzer Prize winning novel. The novel describes New York's social elite in the 1870s and provides historical context to New York's aristocratic families
Mrs. Astor's sister, Katherine Schermerhorn Welles, was his paternal grandmother. They were the daughters of Helen White and Abraham M. Schermerhorn (1791–1855) a banker who was the third mayor of Rochester, New York and a United States Representative for New York's 28th congressional district.
He was a direct descendant of Gov.Thomas Welles,[3] the Fourth Colonial Governor of Connecticut and the transcriber of the Fundamental Orders. He was also a descendant of Increase Sumner (November 27, 1746 – June 7, 1799) who served as the first Federalist governor of Massachusetts from 1797 to 1799.
His cousin, Helen Schermerhorn Astor, was married to James "Rosy" Roosevelt, Jr., the son of James Roosevelt, Sr. and Rebecca Howland. He was also the half brother of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR). At the age of 10, Welles was entered in Miss Kearny's Day School for Boys on 42nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. In September 1904, a month before he turned 12, he entered Groton School in Massachusetts, where he remained for the next six years.
At Groton, Welles roomed with the brother of Eleanor Roosevelt. He later served as a page at Franklin's wedding to Eleanor.
Welles then attended Harvard College, where he was a top student, graduating in 1914.
His first wife was the sister of a Harvard roommate, a Boston heiress descended from Samuel Slater, whose family owned a textile empire based in Massachusetts. She was also the granddaughter, through her mother Mabel (Hunt) Slater, of the Boston painter William Morris Hunt.
He and Esther "Hope" Slater were married on April 14, 1915, in Webster, Massachusetts, with the reception being held in Boston. They had two sons, Benjamin Welles (1916-2002),[4] a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of his father's biography, and Arnold Welles (1918-2002). They were divorced in Paris in 1923.
He married, as his second wife, on June 27, 1925, in upstate New York, Mathilde Scott Townsend (1885-1949).
Mathilde had married as her first husband, in 1910, Peter G. Gerry, the son of Elbridge Thomas Gerry (1837-1927) and Louisa Matilda Livingston, and the great grandson of Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814), the fifth Vice President of the United States (who had given his name to the term gerrymandering). They divorced in 1925.
She was the granddaughter of William Lawrence Scott, a Pennsylvania railroad and coal magnate who was a Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania's 27th district.
Her father was Richard H. Townsend, was the President of the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad. Her mother, Mary Scott Townsend, was one of Washington's social leaders, known for her elegant entertaining, built the The Townsend Mansion, hiring the New York architectural firm, Carrère and Hastings.
The mansion is important both as the work of a renowned architectural firm and for its place in Washington's history. Its preservation is also important to retaining the character of the Dupont Circle Historic District of which it is part. Mrs. Townsend's husband, Richard H. Townsend, died shortly after the house was completed, but she continue to live there until her death in 1931.
The Welles' lived in the mansion until World War II when it was leased to the Canadian Women's Army Corps. The Cosmos Club purchased the building from Mrs. Welles's estate in 1950. She left him $200,000 in her will.
But, for the most part, Welles spent the bulk of his time a few miles outside of Washington in the Maryland countryside at the hulking 49-room "country cottage" known as Oxon Hill Manor. He would make great use of Oxon Hill during his career, fêting foreign dignitaries and diplomats, entertaining the president, and hosting informal meetings of senior officials. FDR, too, liked the location, and would steal away to Oxon Hill, only a twenty-minute drive from the White House, to sip mint juleps on the veranda overlooking the Potomac.
He was married for a third and final time on January 8, 1952, in New York City, to Harriette Appleton Post, a childhood friend whose paternal grandfather was architect George B. Post, who designed the New York Stock Exchange. She was married and divorced twice, to R. Thornton Wilson and Baron Emmerich von Jeszenszky, after which she resumed her maiden name.
After graduating from Harvard University, he followed the advice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and entered into the Foreign Service winning an assignment to Tokyo, Japan, where he was third secretary at the U.S. Embassy.
Welles specialized in Latin America, was sent to Argentina in 1919, became fluent in Spanish, and proved a quick study in grasping the complexities of Latin American politics. In 1920, he became assistant chief of the Division of Latin American Affairs in Washington, and focused his attention on the Caribbean and Central America. He monitored closely the situations in Cuba and Haiti (then under American occupation).
In 1922, Welles briefly resigned from the State Department, upset with Republican high tariff policies and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracy. The Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, brought him back as a special commissioner to the Dominican Republic with the rank of minister and with direct access to the secretary. Welles remained in this post for three years, but failed to end American control of the nation's economy or to bring about the withdrawal of American troops there.
During the Cuban situation in 1933, President Roosevelt sent Welles as special envoy to Cuba. He arrived in Havana with a specific charge: mediate "in any form most suitable" an end to the Cuban situation. Welles’ role in these kinds of mediations was crucial. He started mediating and promising both sides of the Cuban opponents what they wanted to hear.
Welles promised President Gerardo Machado help of new commercial treaty to relieve economic distress if Machado reached a political settlement with the opposition. The government believed that the proposed mediation represented a clever form of continued support and a guarantee that Machado would serve a full length of his term.
Welles promised the opponents of Machado’s government a change of government, and participation in the subsequent administration, if they joined the mediation and supported an orderly transfer of power. The opposition believed that the mediation was an ingenious method by which the United States planned to remove Machado.
The mediation provided the United States the means with which to pursue several policy objectives at once. The mediations provided the means through which opposition groups could obtain their objectives and join the political process in an orderly, instructional fashion. Just as important as easing Machado out was the necessity of easing new political elements in. The mediation conferred on sectors of outlawed opposition a measure of political legitimacy, providing them with a vested interest in a settlement sanctioned and supported by the U.S. This served as a recruitment process, a method by which the U.S. determined which groups were "responsible" and which were not.
Not being able to influence Machado, Welles negotiated an end to his presidency, with support from General Herrera, Colonels Castillo and Delgado, et al. (see Hugh Thomas ISBN 0-306-80827-7 and Enrique Ros). Fulgencio Batista, an army sergeant in the Cuban Army Telegraph service, was still not a player. In September 1933, Batista emerged on the public scene a leader of an enlisted man rebellion, and began to seize control. In January 1934, Batista transferred army support from Ramón Grau to Union Nacionalista leader Carlos Mendieta. Within five days, the United States recognized the new government.
Following the principles of Stimson Doctrine, on July 23, 1940, Welles made a declaration on the U.S. non-recognition policy of the Soviet annexation and incorporation of the three Baltic states—as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. More than 50 countries later followed the U.S. in this position.
In the week following the Kristallnacht in November 1938 the British government stated that it would be willing to give up the major part of the quota of 65,000 British citizens that could emigrate to the United States and have Jews fleeing Hitler receive this instead. To this under-secretary Welles responded: "I reminded the Ambassador that the President stated there was no intention on the part of his government to increase the quota for German nationals. I added that it was my strong impression that the responsible leaders among American Jews would be the first to urge that no change in the present quota for German Jews be made...The influential Sam Rosenman, one of the "responsible" Jewish leaders sent Roosevelt a memorandum telling him that an 'increase of quotas is wholly inadvisable. It will merely produce a 'Jewish problem' in the countries increasing the quota.'"[5]
In February and March 1940 Welles visited Italy, Germany, and England to discuss peacemaking proposals. Hitler feared that the purpose of the visits was to drive a wedge between Germany and Italy.[6]
Roosevelt was always close to Welles and made him the central figure in the State Department, much to the chagrin of secretary Cordell Hull, who could not be removed because he had a powerful political base. Historians give the credit to Welles for designing the United Nations. FDR made Welles the key person and Welles had "a dominance over UN planning" that was "starting to embitter Hull." [7]
Welles did not have a political base, and this proved his undoing when political opponents discovered that Welles had solicited homosexual favors from two African-American Pullman car porters in 1940, while riding a train ride back to Washington, D.C., from Huntsville, Alabama, where Welles had attended the funeral of Speaker of the United States House of Representatives William B. Bankhead.[8]
As his rivalry with Welles intensified, Cordell Hull despatched an FDR confidant, Ambassador William Christian Bullitt, Jr., to leak details of the homosexual incident to Maine Republican Senator Owen Brewster. Brewster in turn leaked the details of the incident to journalist Arthur Krock, a venomous Roosevelt critic, and Senate isolationists Styles Bridges and Burton K. Wheeler. Brewster threatened to initiate a senatorial investigation into the incident when FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at first would not release the file on Welles.
Roosevelt was embittered by the attack on his friend, believing they were ruining a good man, but he was obliged to accept Welles's resignation in 1943. First, though, the President took Bullitt "to the woodshed" and fired him. Bullitt ought to "burn in hell" for the stories he was circulating about Welles, Roosevelt told Vice President Henry A. Wallace, but not even Roosevelt could stop Bullitt.[9] Bullitt's implacable jealously of and vendetta against Welles helped to end not only Welles's career but his own: Bullitt would never again serve in the federal government.
Welles became a prominent commentator and author on foreign affairs, but he never returned to government.
Sumner Welles died on September 24, 1961 at age 68 in Bernardsville, New Jersey. He is interred in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C..
| Diplomatic posts | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Harry F. Guggenheim |
United States Ambassador to Cuba 1933 |
Succeeded by Jefferson Caffery |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by William Phillips |
Under Secretary of State 1936–1943 |
Succeeded by Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. |
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   | Sumner Welles' Photo & Gravesite - Sumner Welles (1892 - 1961) - Find A Grave Memorial |
| | U.S. Embassy - U.S. Embassy - Tokyo, Japan |
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