By Thomas F. Schwartz
Darryl Byrd, great-niece of Walter Coleman, recently donated an elaborately decorated folio case presented by local officials to Coleman for his services to the Kirghiz District in the remote southeastern Russia during the 1921-1923 famine. The leather case has inscriptions in English, Russian, and Arabic. The rough translation provided by Professor Bertrand Patenaude of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution reads:
The Kir[ghiz] region and the children saved
From death by starvation will never forget
The work of famine relief of the director of the ARA in the Kirg[hiz]
SSSR, the energetic, honest citizen of America
Mister Walter
Coleman
President of the Kir[ghiz] C[entral] E[xecutive] C[ommittee]
City of Orenburg 28/IX/1922
Coleman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 30, 1892. Upon graduating from business school, Coleman worked as an engineer for the Pennsylvania Railroad. In June 1915, he joined the Navy, trained at Newport, Rhode Island and served in the destroyer flotilla based in Queenstown, Ireland. After the war, he served briefly as a clerk in London at the United States Embassy. He then applied for service in the American Relief Administration listing as his vocations: “Railroading—Diplomatic Service—Engineering.”
Assigned to serve as District Supervisor in Orenburg, Russia, “…where he had complete charge of our [ARA] operations covering two million people in an area larger than any of the States. His work was not only that of actual feeding but held administrative duties as well which involved dealing with the Government officials, warehousing, distribution and the actual employing of some few thousands [of] Russians.” Coleman served from September 16, 1921, to July 31, 1923, throughout the period of the Russian famine.
Bertrand Patenaude’s The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, describes in detail and humor the frustration Coleman and other ARA workers in Russian encountered daily dealing with Soviet officials. Coleman had an ongoing battle with Comrade Klimov. So sarcastic had become Coleman’s descriptions of local officials in his dispatches that he received the following admonishment from his superiors:
This is going to be a very frank and rather unpleasant letter, but I feel that your letters 389 and 399, which arrived by the last courier, cannot go without comment.
Such a bombastic statement as contained in the last paragraph of you 389 is entirely out of place in an official letter as is also the reference in your 399 to ‘the local Henchmen of Moscow.’ We doubt if this sort of insulting observation is necessary and leads us to wonder if part of the trouble in the relationship with the Government Representative in Orenburg is not your fault.
We do not doubt that you have had difficulties with Klinoff and that his actions have been very exasperating, but I would wager that the situation is not much different than in other districts as all of them have a certain amount of the same type of trouble.
Despite ongoing battles with Klimov, Coleman had greater success with locals, especially in improving sanitation. Using corn as payment, Coleman created “corn gangs” whose tasks were to bury the dead, clean streets and sewer systems, and repair a broken water plant and pumps. Improved hygiene was a necessary compliment to having sufficient food to provide healthy bodies.
Coleman persevered and at the end of his Russian service, was given a salary increase as well as the ARA’s “very sincere appreciation of the devoted and successful efforts you have put forth on the job.” He later went on to serve in the State Department at various European posts until his death in 1945.