On his return home in 1924 after thirty years as a U.S. Consul in the Near East , and most of the preceding decade as Consul General at Smyrna , George Horton wrote his own " account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers ; with a True Story of the Burning of Smyrna " ( 1926 subtitle , '' The Blight of Asia '' ) . Horton 's account quoted numerous contemporary communications and eyewitness reports including one of the massacre of Phocea in 1914 , by a Frenchman , and two of the Armenian massacres of 1914/15 , by an American citizen and a German missionary . It also quoted U.S. businessman Walter M. Geddes regarding his time in Damascus : " several Turks , whom I interviewed , told me that the motive of this exile was to exterminate the race . " Many Americans spoke out against the genocide , including former president Theodore Roosevelt , rabbi Stephen Wise , Alice Stone Blackwell , and William Jennings Bryan , the U.S. Secretary of State to June 1915 . In the U.S. and the United Kingdom , children were regularly reminded to clean their plates while eating and to " remember the starving Armenians "
massacre of Phocea
Massacre of Phocaea
Armenian Genocide