William Morgan Shuster, a banker who had also served in the US government with integrity and candor, was recommended at a time when Iranian finances were suffering from diminishing income, the obligation to service foreign loans, and growing expenses. The Iranian public finance, fiscal policy, and tax collection, though partially improved by greater centralization, still suffered from the arcane practices of the state accountants. Employing an American expert was thought to be prudent because it would have saved Iran from pressures exerted by the neighboring powers. Shuster’s arrival stirred excitement among nationalists while causing anxiety to representatives of both powers and their Iranian associates.
A man of frank demeanor and daring initiatives, Shuster and his American team represented the first serious involvement of the United States in Iran, albeit as a purely private initiative. Before then the US presence in Iran had been limited to a few nongovernmental areas, including American Presbyterian missionaries who had been active in northwestern Iran among the Nestorian Christians since the 1830s. Later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modern American missionary schools in Orumiyeh, Tabriz, Hamadan, and Tehran educated non-Muslims and eventually Muslim girls and boys. Though negotiations to establish diplomatic relations went back to an unratified treaty of commerce and navigation from 1856, it was only in 1883 that formal relations between the United States and Iran materialized. Even then, despite Iran’s repeated attempts under Naser al-Din Shah to engage the United States in trade, finance, and security—even offering the right to a naval presence in the Persian Gulf to counter British predominance—there was a serious reluctance on the side of the Americans to cross into the traditionally recognized Anglo-Russian zones of influence. Recommending Shuster, even though he was first cleared with the British embassy, indicated a cautious change in American attitudes toward the emerging democratic regime in Iran.
From the start, Shuster rebuked Iran’s chaotic finances, political vacillation, and infirmity of the government and the Majles. He was outspoken in his critiques of the imperial powers and their discriminatory practices. In his 1912 The Strangling of Persia, published just after his forced departure from Iran, he gave a vivid portrayal of the Iranian plight in the face of European aggression. He dedicated his book to the Persian people, who by “their unwavering belief, under difficult and forbidding circumstances,” employed him to help with the task of the “reorganization of their nation.” In the foreword to the book, he expressed deep disappointment at “being forcibly deprived of the opportunity to finish [this] intensely interesting task in that ancient land,” where “two powerful and presumably enlightened Christian countries played fast and loose with truth, honor, decency, and law, one at least, hesitating not even at the most barbarous cruelties to accomplish its political designs and to put Persia beyond hope of self reorganization.” In a passionate plea to his American readers, he then stated: “The Constitutionalists of Modern Persia will not have lived, struggled, and in many instances, died entirely in vain, if the destruction of Persian sovereignty shall have sharpened somewhat the civilized world’s realization of the spirit of international brigandage which is marked the welt-politik of the year 1911.”
The lightly veiled reference to Britain and Russia, and especially the latter’s hostility toward Iran’s constitutional regime, reflects not only Shuster’s anti-imperialist sentiments but also the nature of troubles that he and his American colleagues faced the moment they set foot on Persian soil. Even before he began the financial reorganization, most of his time and energy during his stay—from May 1911 to January 1912—was wasted resisting greedy high officials and the intrigue of the two powers. Preying on the bankrupt treasury, the old elite hoped to secure even more loans, this time £4,000,000 ($20,000,000) from a private English financier. Moreover, Shuster’s effort to organize a new gendarmerie force under the treasury led to an acute crisis that threatened the very survival of the constitutional regime.
Shortly after Shuster’s arrival, a counterrevolutionary movement reached its peak in July 1911, when the deposed Mohammad ‘Ali Shah, who had resided in Odessa in the Ukraine since his abdication, arrived in the small Caspian port of Gomish Tappeh in northeastern Iran, near Astarabad, aboard a Russian steamship. Aided by a few thousand Turkmen tribesmen, he marched toward Tehran. At the same time his brother, Abol-Fath Mirza Salar al-Dowleh (1881–1961), mobilizing the Kurdish tribes of the northwest, occupied the western city of Kermanshah and advanced toward Tabriz and Hamadan. The initiative to restore Mohammad ‘Ali or his brother to the Qajar throne enjoyed more than an implicit blessing from St. Petersburg. Predictably, the news of these advances plunged Tehran into panic. The revolutionary government feared the vim of a Russian reprisal more than the vigor of Turkmen and Kurdish horsemen. Moreover, it could not secure from the representatives of the two powers even verbal condemnation of the pincer assault on the constitutional government, despite their commitments to bar the deposed shah from ever returning to Iran. The government in Tehran, surrounded by remnants of old Qajar loyalists in the capital, in desperation mobilized an assortment of Bakhtiyari horsemen fresh from Isfahan, police detachments under Yeprem Khan, and Armenian volunteers from the Caucasus to march against the counterrevolutionary hordes, who were less than thirty miles from the capital.
Persuaded by Shuster, Tehran also issued a public warrant for Mohammad ‘Ali Shah dead or alive, setting a prize of 100,000 tumans ($237,000). In a brief engagement the commander of Mohammad ‘Ali Shah’s forces was captured and shot. Even before his retreating horsemen arrived back to their base north of Astarabad on the Russian side of the frontier, the deposed shah boarded the same steamship and fled back to Russia, then Europe. He died in 1925 in exile in San Remo, Italy. Soon after his retreat, Salar al-Dowleh was defeated south of Tehran and fled abroad. The deployment of a Maxim gun operated by a German artillery instructor who was serving with Yeprem’s troops inflicted swift military defeat on Salar al-Dowleh’s forces. A major blow to the constitutionalists, however, was the loss of Yeprem Khan, who in May 1912 was killed in the course of engagement. By October 1912 all aspirations for restoring the ancien régime had dissipated.
Rival Revolutionary Factions and Further Conflicts
