The City of New York slipped into Liverpool harbor, already jam-med with ships seeking refuge from the submarines lurking outside. Shortly after dawn, a tender came alongside, and the American consul and the British port officers climbed aboard and led the American off the steamship. Even though he had traveled on a darkened American ship and the U.S. was not at war in October 1916, the voyage's last night had been filled with tension.
The American, Wilbur J. Carr, pushed on to London where his work began. When Secretary of State Robert Lansing had ordered him to Europe, Carr was secretly thrilled. Although he had been the director of the U.S. Consular Service for seven years, he had never been abroad. He confided delightedly to his diary in his tiny pinched scrawl: "Here is the oppty I have wanted for years ... it is a long way to have travelled in 25 years -_ from the plow to all this!"
In London, Carr visited the consulate general in New Broad Street. He was shocked to see the staff still wearing top hats and long-tailed coats to work each day; the quarters were dingy and cramped. And worse than that, they were miles from the embassy. Carr was appalled, according to Robert P. Skinner, the American consul general at the time, to see the two branches of the foreign services in locations so distant and competing with each other.
It made trouble, Carr discovered. He wrote in his diary: "...there is some latent feeling between Emb & Consulate. No open clash. Emb. evidently ... has blocked Consulate with FO [Foreign Office]."
Tensions built up because, at this time, men (never women) followed one of three career paths. They became officers in the Department of State in Washington, diplomatic secretaries in embassies abroad, or consular officers in ports and commercial cities. These were distinct universes, and cross-overs from one to another were extremely difficult.
Beyond the Spoils System
A spoils system, which President Theodore Roose-velt called "wholly and unmixedly evil," had dominated the consular and diplomatic services since the early days of the American republic. Barely a decade before Carr's trip, Presidents Roosevelt and Taft had inaugurated written and oral examination for entering consuls and diplomatic secretaries. And only in 1915 had Congress given the presidential executive orders the force of law. In London, seeing how the system actually worked, Carr became convinced that the times demanded change.
Until World War I, the nation had overlooked lax standards in its foreign services. Young men entering the diplomatic service usually came from the affluent, fashionably-educated East Coast elites. One American diplomat called them "the boys with the white spats, the tea drinkers, the cookie pushers." Their professionalism, a scholar wrote decades later, was "shadowy and incomplete in many respects, and somewhat spurious."
Salaries were so low, many said, that only a son of wealthy parents could aspire to a diplomatic career. Hugh Gibson, the outspoken U.S. minister to Poland, told a congressional committee: "We are far too largely dependent upon the class of men who are not only incompetent in the service, but who could not make a decent living in private business if they had to." His view was shared by many who blamed "professional diplomacy" for the Great War and its aftermath.
Postwar America had become, suddenly, a world power, a burgeoning empire, and a global trader _ it could no longer afford the luxury of what was called "outdated courtier diplomacy."
Consular Service on Top?
Carr felt, quite correctly, that the Consular Service he ruled was better organized _ a tighter ship _ than the Diplomatic Service. And he was nothing if not dogged. By May 1918 he was asking all consular officers for recommendations on how to improve their own service. As the Great War ended, reform was in the air. In 1919, the National Civil Service Reform League recommended a long list of changes to curtail patronage in the overseas services: entrance by examination, merit promotions, higher salaries, and, most radical of all, transfers between the diplomatic and consular services.
That same summer, young Congressman John Jacob Rogers visited London and dined with a Harvard Law School friend, Keith Merrill, and his boss, Consul General Robert Skinner. Over dinner, Skinner persuaded Rogers to propose legislation that would unite the two services by folding the Diplomatic Service into the Consular Service. When Rogers returned home, he introduced a bill in Congress that would recommission all diplomatic secretaries as consular officers. The career diplomats were horrified.
Carr must have relished the idea of giving his Consular Service dominance, but he wisely suggested something more practical _ and politically astute: Combine the two services into a single Foreign Service. Let it be unified for pay and promotion purposes, but have the diplomats and consuls continue to function separately. Of course, this would work only if their salary scales were equalized.
So, Rogers introduced a second bill, and thus began the long, embattled journey that Rogers and Carr traveled together. Rogers became the driving force that kept bringing reform of the foreign services before Congress. Carr was the architect who kept hammering each new version to fit his vision of what the foreign services might become. Every revision of the Rogers bill was written and rewritten in Carr's office in the Department of State.
Rogers -- a 37-year-old Republican representing Lowell, Mass., and in 1919 just back from brief wartime duty in the Army -- had been interested in international affairs since his undergraduate days at Harvard (in the same class as Franklin D. Roosevelt '04). He became an advocate of career diplomats and professional diplomacy. (He would die at age 45 and his wife Edith Nourse Rogers would replace him in Congress.)
Carr grew up on a farm near Taylorsville, Ohio, and now, at 49, was already a veteran of 30 years in the Department of State. Photographs show Carr as a bespectacled, balding man with a neat mustache and a long neck; he seems awkward with his colleagues. Although he was without experience in foreign policy, he was a canny, ambitious bureaucrat dedicated to professionalism at a time when the spoils system was in flower. Carr's biographer Katherine Crane, a thoughtful observer, wrote: "Punctual, methodical, prudent, and disciplined, he was the typical bureaucrat. ... Carr amassed extraordinary power."
John Rogers and Wilbur Carr became the fathers ofthe modern U.S. Foreign Service. And it is quite to the point that neither of them was a member of the Diplomatic Service. Rogers' first two bills went no-where. But he persisted. He promised the House of Representatives thatif his proposals were adopted, "we shall have laid the foundation of a thoroughly progressive, modern, and businesslike foreign service. We shall go far to eliminate from the diplomatic side the idle rich young man who thinks in terms of silk hats ... and afternoon teas."
Events began to swing in his direction in January 1920 when only 12 candidates sat for the Diplomatic Service entrance exam (and the following October, only 18). Secretary of State Lansing, sensing the urgency for change, agreed for the first time that the two overseas services should be brought closer together and made interchangeable. Business and industrial associations, needing help to compete overseas, began to rally round. And the following year, President Warren G. Harding declared: "American diplomatic appointments should not be regarded as mere temporary results of political football in the United States."
Watertight Boxes
But the foreign services had been marked for political football from the beginning. The Constitution said the president alone shall "nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls. ..."
In an attempt to control the worst of the spoils system's abuses that developed, Congress, in 1856, had enacted a law establishing salary scales. And in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt put the consular service under civil service law. TR's reforms also created a Board of Examiners to pass on candidates for the Consular Service. Three years later, President Taft ex-tended civil service status to the Diplomatic Service.
Four main issues were still to be solved after World War I, when, as Walter Hines Page, America's war-time ambassador to Britain put it, the United States would "play a part in the world whether we wish to or not."
The Diplomatic Service had to attract the best and the brightest, not only the best of the wealthiest. The separate watertight boxes in which the Diplomatic Service and the Consular Service operated had to be unlocked _ politics and business were becoming interlocked. The two salary structures had to be brought into harmony so that officers could be shifted between diplomatic and consular assignments. And provision had to be made for envoys' old age to retard the "brain drain" of able men into better paying private sector jobs.
By the summer of 1922, Rogers had learned enough to drop Skinner's unpalatable proposal of merging the Diplomatic Service into the Consular Service. Rogers and Carr fashioned a bill to which Sec-retary of State Charles Evans Hughes, who succeeded Lansing, gave his crucial support. And when Hughes got President Harding's endorsement, Rogers introduced the new bill. It began: "That hereafter the Diplomatic and Consular Service of the United States shall be known as the Foreign Service of the United States."
A Question of Breeding
This was the key. Rather than enroll candidates as diplomatic officers or consular officers, all of those below the rank of minister would be commissioned -- and paid -- as Foreign Service officers. But no such term existed under the international rules by which nations had agreed, back in 1815, to send represen-tatives abroad. So the president would assign the "Foreign Service officers" to duty as either diplomatic officers or consular officers -- or both.
This "interchangeability" was new -- and controversial. Rogers' bill proposed to re-commission all 120 diplomatic secretaries and 520 career consular officers as Foreign Service officers, or retire them. If the bill were adopted, the United States, for the first time in its history, would have a formal and unified Foreign Service.
Although this proposal was a tide that raised all boats and would raise diplomats' salaries, the diplomats were bitterly opposed to being linked to consular personnel. A good number of senior career diplomats were quite outspoken. Among them were Under Secretary William Phillips; Lewis Einstein, minister to Czechoslovakia; Ulysses Grant-Smith, minister to Albania, and Hugh Gibson, minister to Poland. William R. Castle, scion of a wealthy American family on Hawaii, believed simply that no man who did not have a large income should be admitted to the diplomatic service; one had to have a certain upbringing to succeed in diplomatic circles.
These men cherished the pre-war formal diplomacy. They thought intellect was less important than personality, social status and poise. They revered breeding and background. A diplomat joked that the definition of a man in a "sweat" was a consul at an embassy dinner. And they feared being assigned dull, pedestrian work in ugly industrial cities and unhealthy ports.
More realistically, Joseph C. Grew, the minister to Denmark, voiced a widespread concern that Wilbur Carr would be put in charge and would "bureaucratize" the Diplomatic Service. It would disappear into the larger Consular Service. Grew, Castle and Gibson actually met in Berlin in 1922 and sought to counter this threat by proposing a powerful chief of personnel identified with neither branch.
A "Rich Man's Club"?
Secretary of State Lansing had another criticism of the bill: It failed to cover the officers of the State Department in Washington, who did not belong to either overseas service.
At times the critics grew quietly spiteful. Hugh Gibson tried to persuade Grew to appear before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Gibson said someone had to show that American diplomats spoke American and could "find their way in and out of a drawing room without the use of a monocle." Grew refused and wrote Gibson that "people who talk through their nose and spit on the floor will cut a lot more ice than those who try and talk like Englishmen." In the end, it was Gibson who went home from Switzer-land and testified.
In December 1922, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, of which Rogers was a member, held six days of hearings. Secretary Hughes himself made the opening argument: Low salaries are keeping out men who might invigorate the Diplomatic Service and are "creating the impression that it is a rich man's club." He championed "democratization."
In answer to a question, Carr admitted the president already had the power to move a man back and forth between the diplomatic and consular services, but, he pointed out, their salary scales were so disparate that this was impractical and rarely done.
As to the "cookie pushers," Rogers told the committee, "I have seen some of these young secretaries, who have had exceptional social opportunities and advantages in the capitals abroad, become the most abject followers of the social regime in the foreign capital. One of the things that I hope is going to follow from this bill is to send some of these de-Americanized secretaries to Singapore as vice consul, or to force them out of the service."
Carr interjected: "I am grateful to Mr. Rogers for expressing a sentiment that up to the present moment I had not had, perhaps, the courage to voice. His views coincide with my views exactly. If this bill has any purpose whatever, it should have the purpose of putting more Americanism into our foreign service, in both branches of it."
Rogers added: "One of the most intolerable things that I have come across in connection with inquiries into the foreign service is the fact that some of the little [diplomatic] secretaries who have the background of a social position and money have the effrontery to look down on big men in the Consular Service who have grown distinguished and experienced in that work."
Carr was too cautious to be quoted on that; but he must have chafed, knowing that his beloved Consular Service was larger, better paid, and better organized -- but it did not command the respect that the Diplomatic Service did.
Consul General Skinner, who had arrived the night before from London, took another tack to gain the support of the Republican-dominated Congress. He began: "Mr. Chairman, this bill is a business bill." He promised it would assist commercial relations and do it in a businesslike way.
Congressman Tom Connally, Democrat from Texas, asked: "What is the matter with our foreign service? Is it so serious?"
Skinner answered him: "It lacks stability; it lacks unification; it lacks special training among the higher diplomatic officers where such training and experience are most necessary. It is not properly housed, and in the higher diplomatic offices the rate of pay is such that only rich men can accept the positions."Connally retorted that if salaries are inadequate they should be raised. "If it is, I am for big salaries. I want to know what this bill is about."
Carr shrewdly emphasized that while Congress could not tie the president's hand in appointing or promoting diplomatic secretaries and consuls, it could regulate the new class of Foreign Service officers. And, Carr predicted, the president would fill appointments from among them.
A Penniless Old Age
When the committee met again the following Tuesday, John W. Davis, the former ambassador to the Court of St. James's, pleaded for reform of the entire foreign services. In London, he said, serious young diplomatic officers often came and asked his advice about staying in the service, and he had to tell them that, in justice to themselves, they should get out because it was a blind alley. There were no incentives, salaries were inadequate to support a family, and they faced the "fear of a dependent and penniless old age."
Rogers' bill would raise the ceiling on diplomatic officers' salaries and face up to the gap between diplomatic and consular salaries. The then current scale for diplomatic officers rose in four steps from $2,500 to $4,000; the scale for consuls had 25 levels, with salaries climbing from $1,500 to $12,000. Rogers protested: "Four is too few, just as 25 is ... absurd."
The new Foreign Service would have one scale with nine steps for both diplomatic secretaries and consuls. Everyone would start at $3,000 a year and could climb to $9,000 for the rank just below that of minister. Rogers asserted: Promotion up the nine-rung ladder would be "one of true merit -- an American ladder."
The bill did not touch diplomats of the rank of minister or above, except that they would benefit from the so-called "representation allowance" that embassies would receive to help pay for entertainment expenses.
Congress Has It Out
Tom Connally rose in the House to oppose the bill. He attacked it on the very grounds on which Rogers had sought to defend it. He contended that the designation of Foreign Service officer became meaningless "the moment the foreign-service officer leaves the shores of the United States and comes in contact with the diplomatic or consular officers of other countries." The caste distinctions between the diplomatic and consular services are created by the customs of other countries, he warned. "We are not going to change that system."
Connally also criticized the bill's retirement plan as more liberal than the government could afford. He and his colleague, Congressman Thomas L. Blanton of Texas, both objected to the bill because, as they figured, under it salary increases alone would cost the government an additional $528,000 annually.
The ranking Democrat on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Congressman J. Charles Linthicum of Mary-land, spoke for the bill; he cautioned that "the turnover in the diplomatic service is tremendous and extremely injurious to the service and to the country." Diplomats going overseas often returned poorer than when they went, and young diplomats could not provide for a family. Rogers supported the point with the story of one diplomat who had resigned after 16 years service because he wanted to have something left for his wife when he died.
And at the same time, Linthicum said, older men were not being retired; they were clogging up the rolls and blocking the promotions of younger men. Under present salaries, he said, young men could not hope to raise a family. He asked, "Shall our government be a party to a service which compels celibacy?"
On Feb. 8, 1923, the House passed the Rogers bill by 203 to 27. The Senate's Committee on Foreign Rela-tions swiftly and unanimously reported it out without amendment. The Senate was ready to pass it by unanimous consent, but Sen. Thomas Sterling of South Dakota objected and not even a letter from President Harding changed his mind. The 67th Congress adjourned on March 4 without the Senate having acted on the bill.
Starting Over
Its sponsors had to start over. The following Oct-ober, Secretary of State Hughes obtained President Coolidge's endorsement of the bill, and on Dec. 5, Rogers introduced it once again. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, like Rogers a Massachusetts Republican, intro-duced an identical bill in the Senate.
In January 1924, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs again held hearings and reported the bill to the House, which debated it on April 30. This time, each side was limited to one hour. Connally immediately claimed the hour against the bill. The fight was not over.
Rogers used much of his time to assure the House that the proposed reforms were affordable. For the previous fiscal year, he said, Department of State expenditures totaled $8,435,000 and receipts -- from passport and visa fees and the like -- totaled $7,981,000. The net cost to the taxpayers was less than a million.
He predicted his bill would increase that cost by only $345,000 a year. Observing that a large coast-defense gun installation in Boston cost $2 million, he said, "We must have proper defense, but, gentlemen, in my judgment, if you can give us the best foreign service that the country can provide, you are doing a lot more toward peace insurance than you are by multiplying munitions of war." He was greeted by applause.
"What are we going to do under this bill?" Rogers asked. "Every young man, when he is originally appointed to the unified foreign service is going to be sent to a consulate. He is going to be sent to Singapore, perhaps, or to the West Coast of Africa or to some point in the Transvaal or to Saigon. He will not find social opportunities awaiting him in those cities. He will rather find an opportunity for the hardest kind of work." And, Rogers concluded, he will become a better public servant for it.
Rogers defended the proposed retirement program; under it, he said, the career Foreign Service would for the first time be treated like the Army and Navy and federal judges. He pointed out that Civil Service employees are taxed 2.5 percent of their annual salaries for retirement; but the Foreign Service officers will be asked to contribute 5 percent of theirs.
Congressman Blanton of Texas pointed out that long-time House Speaker Joseph G. Cannon, who had served for 44 years in Congress, retired without a single dollar contributed by his government. "Why are these people entitled to more consideration than Uncle Joe Cannon?"
Linthicum responded with numbers: the British ambassador to Portugal receives $19,466 and the British ambassador to Uruguay is paid $29,439 while in both cases the American ambassador receives $10,000.
Connally came back to the attack. Our representation abroad is "not dependent for its standing upon expensive diplomatic entertainment. ...We do not need to provide salaries sufficient for every little secretary to hold parties and levees and to entertain abroad. ..."
He argued also that a lot of poor men serve in the Consular Service and the bill does not materially help them. But, he said, his greatest objection was to the high rate of the proposed retirement pay. A secretary of embassy could retire under it after 30 years' service with $5,400 a year. "That is too high, gentlemen."
And Connally warned that the interchange of diplomatic and consular personnel should not make them "selling agents and salesmen."Blanton from Texas had one more argument: the bill would hurt farmers who want the government to spend less.
Henry W. Temple, Republican of Pennsylvania, came to the bill's defense, pointing out that the government spends more than $300 million for the Army and a similar amount for the Navy and only $8 million for the conduct of foreign affairs.
Reform at Last
After a motion to recommit was defeated 201-110, the House passed the bill -- again with 27 negative votes. This time, only two days later, the Senate approved it by unanimous consent. The House concurred with four minor Senate amendments.
In its final form, the Rogers Act accomplished the most fundamental reform in American history of the system by which the United States is represented abroad:
It established a single Foreign Service that allowed officers to be assigned on an interchangeable basis between diplomatic and consular branches.
It created the first uniform salary scale for both branches, making interchangeability feasible and re-ducing the need for private income.
It granted American missions abroad representation allowances to reduce the demand on the private resources of ambassadors and ministers, thus making it possible to promote more trained career people to those ranks.
And it initiated a program of retirement payments that promoted efficiency by retaining able Foreign Ser-vice officers for a full career, with a pension awaiting them at retirement.
On the sunny Saturday afternoon of May 24, 1924, President Coolidge signed the Rogers Act into law and brought the United States Foreign Service to life. American diplomacy became a profession.
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