Mute film from the US National Archives, © 1919 Soundtrack by Lucineh Hovanissian, 2023 In August 1919, Woodrow Wilson appointed Major-General James G. Harbord to lead a commission investigating conditions in the Near East, and to advise on the feasibility of creating a U.S. mandate in the fledgling Armenian state, in the wake of the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire in 1915.