Michael Hodder and Q. David Bowers
Life in the Foreign Service (1918-1948)
For the next 30 years, from 1918 until 1948, Mrs. Norweb acted principally as the wife of a rising young diplomat and the mother of three growing children. These were roles she enjoyed and found personally fulfilling. The observation that her own story is hard to pick out from the background of her husband's diplomatic career at this period would not have troubled her. She wrote in her diary, in a poem celebrating her marriage, that she had found in her husband the stability and security she never had before, and so, in most ways, their life together became more important to her than any separate life she might have imagined for herself.
Besides, life with Henry Norweb was very exciting and took her to places in the world and introduced her to people in it she may not have encountered on her own. There were new challenges to be met with every new posting Henry received, a new social circle to meet and fit into, and new places to explore. By the time she finally returned to Cleveland for good, in 1948, she had met two American presidents and nine other heads of state. She had lived in ten different foreign capitals and could communicate, in varying degrees of fluency, in four different languages. Along the way she had seen German and American secret agents at work, and her support had contributed to her husband's success in negotiating an extremely important treaty. She knew the Portugese dictator Salazar and the Cuban strongman Batista. In Havana she shared a pleasant afternoon painting, seascapes with Winston Churchill.
Wherever the family was stationed she collected the art of the country in which she was living. Her collection of Peruvian textiles, of Incan manufacture, became quite noteworthy, and some of her Japanese and Chinese works of art are historically important. She later donated much of her collection to the Cleveland Museum of Art, just as her grandmother Delia Holden had done earlier.
Moving frequently from station to station could create unexpected difficulties. Her childrens' education was a problem at first, but the addition of a tutor from England to the family provided some continuity from one school system to the next. Both R. Henry, Jr. and his sister Jeanne went to local high schools in Holland and Chile, for example, where they had to deal with two very different sets of educational standards. Jeanne was sent away to a boarding school at one point. R. Henry, Jr. and his brother Albert were corresponding students with the Milton Academy, located outside Boston. Milton sent instructional materials and guidelines to the family tutor, Mr. Thomas Langdon, who taught the boys and returned their grades and papers to Milton. The presence of Mr. Langdon assured the quality of the children's education: Jeanne received her master's degree from St. John's University, R. Henry, Jr. graduated from Harvard with a degree in American history, and Albert studied archaeology at Harvard.
The family spent four years in Paris attached to the American Embassy there, from 1917 until 1921. In May, 1921 R. Henry Nor-web was called to Washington to the Department of State's division of Western European affairs, and assigned work in connection with the Washington Conference on Limitation of Naval Armaments. After the close of the conference, in February 1922, the family remained in Washington for another year.
In August of 1923 Henry was offered the post of secretary to the embassy in Tokyo (his official rank was Foreign Service Officer Class Four, in the old classification). Like an assignment to Moscow would be today, Tokyo was then considered a challenging and potentially dangerous post. The Japanese military had joined with the political right and was steadily taking over the reins of government. Political assassinations were commonplace. Foreigners were universally considered to be spies and were escorted through the streets by soldiers with bayonets fixed to their rifles. The State Department told Henry that he must leave his wife and children behind if he took the position. Mrs. Norweb refused this order, and called on anyone she thought might persuade the department to change its decision. After some consideration, the State Department relented and allowed her to accompany her husband to Japan. The children were absolutely forbidden to go with them, however. They were sent to live with relatives in Cleveland.
The Far East
Mr. and Mrs. Norweb sailed for Yokohama early in September 1923 and arrived there on the eleventh of the month, just ten days after a devastating earthquake leveled the port and the nearby city of Tokyo. The earthquake, which occurred on September 1, killed or injured over 800,000 people; 13,000 were never found again. Both cities were destroyed, with over half a million buildings burned in the fires that followed the tremor. Property damage was estimated at $3 billion at the time. So extensive was the damage that Tokyo had to be entirely rebuilt.
Mrs. Norweb recorded with her camera what they found on their arrival, and some of her photographs of Yokohama accompany this section of the book. The city was still burning ten days after the earthquake. The local American consul had been killedwhen the consulate collapsed, and Henry may have been the ranking diplomat on the scene. His "consulate" was a tent, over which flew the American flag. Both he and Mrs. Norweb lived in tents for the first few weeks in Japan. The embassy building in Tokyo was in ruins, as well.
Earthquake tremors continued for months afterward. When they arrived in Tokyo, Mr. and Mrs. Norweb were housed in a wing of a summer palace, as the embassy had not yet been rebuilt. They kept their bags packed, in case of another earthquake. Mrs. Norweb told her daughter Jeanne that their bedroom was an ornate reception room, and that their bed was placed directly beneath a fancy chandelier. The earthquake everyone feared came in the middle of a night. The chandelier fell on top of her as she lay asleep, becoming entangled in her hair, but she was not hurt. Henry extracted her from it, and together they ran from the room, just in time, for as they crossed the terrace outside their bedroom windows and reached the open garden, the whole house came down. They were both shaken by the narrow escape.