Howard Conklin Baskerville photographed in 1907 on the eve of his departure for Persia (Iran)

I HAVE ALWAYS known the name Howard Baskerville. For as long as I can remember, his name was a flash in the corner of my eye. When I was a child growing up in Iran, there were schools named after him. His face, cast in bronze, was prominently displayed in a museum in Tabriz, the city in which he died and was buried. His tomb is still there, pressed up against an overgrown apricot tree, in a long-abandoned cemetery. The edges of the sarcophagus are smooth and worn — not from the elements, but from a century or so of curious hands. People used to come here from all over the country to honor the American who gave his life for Iran. These days, hardly anyone comes at all. Those few who still visit his tomb know little about the man lying inside, save for the bare facts of his life and death.

He was twenty-two years old, a Christian missionary. He came to Persia (modern day Iran) in the fall of 1907 to teach English and history and to preach the Gospel. He took up arms and fought alongside his students in a bloody revolution against a ruthless tyrant. He died a martyr in the cause of freedom and democracy.

Howard Baskerville’s tomb in Tabriz, Iran

Howard Baskerville arrived in the northwest city of Tabriz in the fall of 1907. It was a politically turbulent time. In December of 1906, the Persian monarch, Muzaffar ad-Din Shah, signed a constitution establishing the rule of law and creating an independent parliament that would severely limit his unchecked powers. Three days later, he died in his bed. The throne was now in the hands of his petulant thirty-five year-old son, Muhammad Ali.

Furious with his father for making what he viewed to be his God-given authority suddenly contingent upon the will of the people, Muhammad Ali Shah launched an all-out assault on the constitutionalists. He tore up the constitution his father had signed, declared martial law, and rolled canons to the threshold of parliament, destroying the building with the parliamentarians still inside. With the help of his Russian trained Cossack Brigade, the young shah violently reclaimed every city in Persia for the crown — every city, that is, except Tabriz.

Baskerville had been serving as missionary in Tabriz for only short time when the shah’s troops arrived. But he had already immersed himself in the politics of the revolution. The soapbox preachers standing in the square extolling the masses to rise up against a godless tyrant. Farmers and factory workers willing to die for a constitution none of them knew how to read; the women dressed as men, and ready to die with them. Late-night political debates held in packed teahouses, bodies pressed against each other, the air thick with sweat and smoke and the subtle scent of rose water.

Nevertheless, Baskerville had been repeatedly instructed by both the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and the State Department not to engage in any activity outside of his responsibilities as a missionary and teacher. So that is what he did.

Then the siege began.

Unable defeat Tabriz militarily, the shah ordered his army to blockade it instead. If he couldn’t defeat the residents militarily, he would simply starve them into surrendering.

What followed was months of unspeakable suffering. By the spring of 1909, there was no wheat or grain left anywhere in the city. The poor began to descend upon the orchards and meadows. They crawled on their hands and knees, chewing grass and weeds. They picked clover and alfalfa by the handful and stuffed them into the mouths of their starving children. A few enterprising residents had begun disassembling old shoes and unused saddles and boiling the leather in a pot until it was soft enough to chew. Others had been reduced to eating dung.

“The sufferings of the town are increasing daily, and it is not doubted that a great tragedy is approaching,” read a report in the New York Times. “If Tabriz holds out, thousands must die of starvation, while if it falls probably tens of thousands will be massacred.”

Witnessing the abject suffering of the people he had come to Persia to convert, being told that it was none of his business, that he was not to interfere with any “temporal matters” but keep his focus solely on the work of evangelization, became too much for Baskerville to bear. Standing in class one day, he confessed to his students that he could no longer bear to watch from a classroom window the starving inhabitants of the city who were dying for the same rights that he took for granted as an American. The best way he knew to help his students was to abandon his teaching post and go fight for them.

The class was speechless. Incredibly, after Baskerville bid them goodbye and turned to leave, a number of his students rose from their seats and walked out with him. “We left the class pledging to follow our teacher who was ready to give his life for our country,” one of them recalled years later.

When the American consul in Tabriz tried to dissuade Baskerville of his present course, reminding him that, as an American citizen, he was prohibited from taking part in a foreign war, Baskerville gestured to the mass of volunteers who had come to Tabriz from all over the world, ready to give their lives for the cause of freedom. “The only difference between me and these people is the place of my birth,” he said, “and that is not a big difference.”

He then gave up his American privilege by handing over his passport. “I am Persia’s” he said.

On the morning of April 20, before the sun rose, Baskerville and eleven of his students launched a daring assault on the western barricades of the shah’s forces. The battle did not last long. He and his students were quickly outgunned and outnumbered. While trying to divert the soldiers’ fire away from his students, Baskerville was struck by a bullet in the back.

“I am shot,” he said, with a little laugh. Those were his final words.

Meanwhile, the Russian and British delegations, horrified at the reports being sent from Tabriz, finally forced the shah to call for an immediate ceasefire in order to allow food and supplies to be sent to the population. The siege was over. But the revolution was not. With the fighting paused, the revolutionaries in Tabriz took the opportunity to regroup and march on Tehran. They removed Muhammad Ali Shah from his throne and reinstated the constitution. New elections for parliament were held in the fall; its first act was to officially recognize the young American missionary who gave his life to help free Persia from autocracy.

Here we are now, a century removed from Baskerville’s death, and Iranians are still fighting for their basic rights. Indeed, beneath the widespread protests that have engulfed Iran over the last few weeks, is long-simmering frustration over the same issues that compelled Baskerville to join his Iranian students on the battlefield: that people should be masters of their own fate; that they should be free to act and think without coercion; that they should have a say in the decisions that rule their lives.

Iranian schoolgirls letting the Supreme Leader know exactly what they think about him

I wrote this book because I believe every American and every Iranian should know the name Howard Baskerville, and that name should be a reminder of all the two peoples hold in common. My hope is that his heroic life and death can serve in both countries as the model for a future relationship — one based not on mutual animosity but on mutual respect.

But his story is so much more than that. It is a powerful reflection on the universal ideals of democracy — and to what degree America, and Americans, are willing to support those ideals in a foreign, even non-European, land. It makes us think about what we owe to others around the world today.

We may not be able to physically fight alongside Iran’s brave women and men, as Baskerville did a century ago. But we can still fight for their freedom.

To read more about Howard Baskerville, you can order a copy of my book An American Martyr in Persia here.