Gutman|291market panic that had gripped the US economy the previous year. Mavroyeni’s
confidence was bolstered by Iasigi being in close contact with a prominent mem-
ber of the Armenian community in Boston, Hagop Bogigian, who was more than
happy to aid in the search.
The educated and erudite middle-aged Bogigian had arrived in the United
States in 1876. A native of a village near the eastern Anatolian city of Harput,
Bogigian arrived in the Boston area more than a decade before his fellow coun-
trymen, most of whom came from within a fifty-mile radius of his home village,
began migrating to the United States en masse. Benefiting from his close con-
nections to merchants and producers back home and his impeccable command
of English, Bogigian had become rich in the United States as an importer and
purveyor of fine oriental rugs. He was proud of his Armenian heritage and regu-
larly gifted large sums of money to support the education of Armenian children
back home. Thus, Bogigian’s decision to aid Ottoman diplomatic officials in the
United States did not reflect, at least from his point of view, a desire to turn his
back on his own people.
Instead, like Mavroyeni, his social and economic status was at least as cen-
tral to his political identity as his ethnoreligious background. The success of his
import business relied heavily on a close relationship with the Ottoman govern-
ment. Throughout the late 1880s and early 1890s, Ottoman officials regularly ar-
rested Armenians suspected of returning to the empire from the United States.
For Bogigian, the success of his business hinged on his ability to travel to the
empire to restock his wares. According to his own estimation, in all his travels
between the United States and the Ottoman Empire, he had traversed the Atlan-
tic Ocean eighty-seven times. Maintaining a close relationship with the Otto-
man government helped ensure that his regular business trips back home went
smoothly. At a more fundamental level, however, Bogigian was troubled by what
he saw as the radicalization of Armenian politics in both the United States and
the Ottoman Empire. Also like Mavroyeni, he felt at home in American high so-
ciety where, despite his strange and exotic provenance, his wealth and education
aided his integration. He agreed with the prevailing sentiment among Ameri-
can elites that growing support for anarchism, socialism, and other politically
subversive ideologies, especially among newly arrived immigrants to the United
States, posed a major threat to political stability. The growth of the Hunchakian
Revolutionary Party and organizations like it among Armenians both within
and outside the Ottoman Empire deeply disturbed him. He felt strongly that any
political activism on behalf of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire should be
done under the tutelage of wealthy and well-connected Armenians like himself.
In this way, he shared much in common with his wealthy American Jewish coun-
terparts who opposed the growing radicalism of many poorer Jewish immigrants
in the United States.