THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 19 At its inception in 1924, the American Foreign Service Association was a small, quiet club dedicated to fellowship, good works, and professional improvement. One hundred years later, AFSA is a large and often noisy organization that shapes and protects the U.S. Foreign Service while enhancing the lives and careers of its members. AFSA’s story of growth and transformation is a tale worth telling and—or so this writer hopes—a tale worth reading too. The Early Years: 1924-1940 In the early years of the 20th century, the U.S. consular service—the greater part by far of the country’s official overseas representation—emerged from a long history of patronage and incompetence. A growing sense of pride in their work and their institution led a group of consular officers in 1918 and 1919 to form the American Consular Association and publish a monthly American Consular Bulletin, “an organ by which information of interest to the Service might be disseminated.” As soon as the Foreign Service Act of 1924 merged the consular and diplomatic services, the consuls invited members of the smaller (and, it must be said, snootier) diplomatic service to join their organization. The American Foreign Service Association took shape that August. The new association, called AFSA from the beginning, was open to “all career officers of the American Foreign Service.” It was to be “an unofficial and voluntary association” formed to foster “esprit de corps … and to establish a center around which might be grouped the united efforts of its members for the improvement of the Service.” The American Foreign Service Journal replaced the American Consular Bulletin with no gap in publication. In the period immediately following passage of the Foreign Service Act of 1924, the Service saw itself as the State Department’s creation, its ward. That the two institutions might have different or conflicting interests was unthinkable and unthought. The association had no interest in conflict. The Journal’s masthead carried this statement: “Propaganda and articles of a tendentious nature, especially such as might be aimed to influence legislative, executive, or administrative action … are rigidly excluded.” The appeal of the association lay in forming and maintaining connections among the scattered members of the Foreign Service, 90 percent of whom were overseas. Much space in the Journal was devoted to lists of transfers, promotions, appointments, weddings, births, and deaths, along with occasional social trivia. (“Consul Tracy Lay recently motored to the Berkshires. He caught some good fish.”) But the absence of conflict did not exclude good works. Three early AFSA initiatives—the scholarship fund, the insurance program, and the memorial plaques—have had a lasting impact. • In 1926, Elizabeth Harriman (spouse of a cousin of future diplomat W. Averell Harriman) gave AFSA $25,000 to establish a scholarship fund in honor of her late son, a Foreign Service John Jacob Rogers, the “father of the Foreign Service,” was a Republican congressman from Massachusetts. Born in Lowell, Mass., in 1881, he was first elected to the House of Representatives in 1912. After a brief stint in late 1918 as a private in the Field Artillery, Rogers introduced a series of Foreign Service reform bills, drafted largely by Wilbur Carr. He finally won passage in May 1924 of the act that bears his name. Less than a year later, he was dead. His wife, Edith Nourse Rogers, succeeded him in Congress. She worked for passage of the Moses-Linthicum Act and was a key sponsor of bills creating the Women’s Army Corps, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, and the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944, commonly known as the GI Bill. Rep. Nourse Rogers served in Congress for 35 years until her death in 1960. Opposite page: This artwork appeared as the cover image for the early precursor to the FSJ, The American Consular Bulletin, in its first two years of publication (1919-1920). The epigraph is from the French diplomat and writer Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1935). LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
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