Yesterday I wrote about success and failure, and the need to let go of a rather shallow view of success.
When I moved into my current home, I discovered that it had previously been owned by some members of the Bingham family. Hiram Bingham III is famous for being the real-life Indiana Jones who brought Machu Picchu to the world's attention in 1911, and married Alfreda Mitchell, granddaughter of the founder of Tiffany & Co. Plenty of success and glitter there.
But a more intriguing story is that of their second son, Hiram Bingham IV, known as Harry.
Harry was educated at Harvard and Yale, and then entered the US diplomatic service where he seemed to have a glittering career ahead of him. But he was demoted to dull, lowly desk jobs, and then resigned from his diplomatic post prematurely. His family never understood the reasons for this until, after his death, one of his sons discovered a bundle of papers in the family house that revealed the story of Bingham's "failed" career.
Hiram Bingham IV effectively ended his own career in the diplomatic service by defying both US State Department policy and French law to save hundreds of people whose lives were endangered under the Nazi regime. As a diplomat in the south of France, Bingham was in charge of visas, and used his powers to create visas for escapees, working together with the French resistance to smuggle people over borders.
The US government, however, initially took a dim view of Bingham's activities, believing that he would create at least embarrassment, or serious trouble. He was asked to stop helping people to flee, and when he refused he was demoted, and after a few months he was transferred to Latin America.
But by then he had been involved in the escape of more than two thousand people, both Jews and non-Jews. Many were artists and writers who were considered "dangerous" by the Nazi regime. These included Salvador Dali, Fernand Leger, Hannah Arendt, Max Ernst and Marc Chagall. Chagall had been arrested in Paris, and knew he was destined for a concentration camp. With Bingham's help he was released, and he and his wife went south to the diplomatic villa where they hid out until Bingham and his contacts in the Resistance secured their escape.
In Latin America, Bingham was far from his war activities; nevertheless he found himself in - according to his son William - "a succession of meaningless, low-level, unimportant desk jobs," and denied promotion, because his superiors feared it would cause trouble, or at least significant embarrassment, if it came to light that he had broken the laws of another country while acting as a diplomat.
His children never knew the reasons for the demise of their father's career until after his wife's death, when the papers were found. Then he was honoured posthumously when a new generation realised that he had been a hero, not a troublemaker. Colin Powell (Secretary of State) made one award to his family, saying that Bingham, "...defied State Department
policy during World War II by surreptitiously issuing...visas to Jews
desperate to flee Nazism."
More of Hiram Bingham IV's story is told by his son William Bingham in the clip below, at this website, or in this 2001 article from the LA Times.