Hiram Bingham IV, son of a US senator and great-grandson of the founder of Tiffany & Co., was the perfect stereotype of the snooty rich ivy-league WASP kid who ties the arms of his sweater around his neck while carrying his tennis racket (I mean, really, what else would you expect from someone named "Hiram Bingham IV?"). Raised in Massachusetts, he attended Yale University and then obtained his law degree from Harvard. His classmates characterized him as having a stick-up-his-butt rule-following personality.
In 1929, he sought and received employment with the State Department, which at that time was saturated with employees of similar high-level socioeconomic status. His career progressed nicely on course, and he was appointed in 1937 as a vice consul in Marseille, France. However, in 1941, his rising star status at the State Department inexplicably plummeted, and he was transferred to various dead-end posts during the remainder of World War II. After the war, he finally gave up altogether on foreign service and lived for the remainder of life in genteel poverty as an ineffective farmer in Connecticut and a substitute school teacher. He died in 1988.
Several years after his death, his children discovered what had torpedoed Bingham's State Department career. Bingham had had the audacity in 1940 and 1941 to save the lives of over 2500 Jewish refugees (including artist Marc Chagall) and other persecuted persons by issuing them exit visas in Marseille for passage to the United States. He also traveled around to internment camps, attended secret meetings with refugees, and personally hid fugitives from the pro-Nazi Vichy French government. He even pressed the US government to provide official assistance to the refugees in the camps. All of these activities were directly contrary to the policies of the State Department at that time, who thought that it would be politically undesirable for the Democratic administration to be perceived as being possibly pro-Jewish. The State Department therefore got mad, and Hiram found himself in a situation not unlike that of Custer giving the finger to Crazy Horse.
Bingham is now being venerated for his good works and has received posthumously several awards as a result, although obviously now it is a little late for him to enjoy it.
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| By Kaltj (Public Domain) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
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