20 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2024 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL FSJ DIGITAL ARCHIVE (JUNE 1933 EDITION) On March 3, 1933, President Herbert Hoover’s last day in office, Secretary of State (and AFSA honorary president) Henry L. Stimson stood next to AFSA Chairman Homer L. Byington and unveiled this tablet in the lobby of the State, War, and Navy Building. Inscribed on the tablet were the names of 65 “diplomatic and consular officers of the United States who while on active duty lost their lives under tragic or heroic circumstances.” As of January 2024, there are 321 names on AFSA’s memorial plaques in the lobby of Main State. officer who died while on duty overseas. In 2022 the fund awarded $263,000 in need-based financial aid to 74 students, and $143,000 in merit awards to 38 students. • Also in 1926, AFSA and the Equitable Life Insurance Company of New York set up the American Foreign Service Protective Association (AFSPA) to contract with underwriters to offer AFSA members group health, life, and accident insurance. Today, AFSPA, with a board of active or retired members of the Foreign Service and other executive agencies, insures more than 87,000 active-duty and retired civilian employees of the Departments of State and Defense and members of the Civil Service with an overseas mission, regardless of agency. The Senior Living Foundation, established by AFSPA in 1988, assists Foreign Service retirees confronting the problems of old age. • In 1929, at the urging of one of its members, AFSA began to put together an “honor roll” of “those in the American Foreign Service who, since the earliest days of our national existence, have died under tragic or heroic circumstances.” Sixty-five names were inscribed on a plaque that Secretary of State Henry Stimson unveiled in the lobby of the State, War, and Navy Building on March 3, 1933, the last day of Herbert Hoover’s presidency. Today, there are 321 names on the memorial plaques at Main State. Growth and Conformity: 1941-1967 Like other Americans born in 1924, AFSA and the Foreign Service grew up fast in the years after Pearl Harbor. The career Service numbered 840 in 1940; 10 years later, the count was 7,610. Much of the growth came through the Foreign Service Act of 1946, which brought thousands of non-career employees—clerks, secretaries, couriers, certain vice consuls—into a career Foreign Service staff corps and hundreds of “technical specialists,” most of them wartime hires, into a Foreign Service reserve corps for officers on time-limited commissions. AFSA abandoned its passivity to take part through its executive committee in the drafting of the act, which established unique rules for the Foreign Service on hiring, assignment, promotion, pay, dismissal, and retirement. The act sharpened differences between the Civil Service and Foreign Service. In the years after World War II, anti-communist and anti-gay fervor seized much of the country: it seemed the moral exaltation of wartime could not be demobilized but had to find a new mission. Congress gave the Secretary of State “absolute discretion” to fire any employee deemed a “security risk,” a term the department defined to include people with “sexual peculiarities, alcoholism, or … an indiscreet and chronically wagging tongue; [regardless] of the individual’s loyalty to this country.” Between 1947 and 1952, constantly goaded by Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisc.) and his allies, the department fired more than 600 employees. An unknown number of others simply resigned. In the face of these shocks and humiliations, AFSA, with a few courageous exceptions, was silent. By the end of the decade, AFSA was an afterthought, “an effete club of elderly gentlemen whose headquarters could not be located and who took care never to fight for any cause,” in the words of an AFSA member. This harsh judgment was only half true: AFSA’s headquarters could in fact be located, in a couple of rented rooms on G Street Northwest. Harry W. Kopp, a Foreign Service officer from 1967 to 1985, was deputy assistant secretary of State for international trade policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations. He is the author of The Voice of the Foreign Service: A History of the American Foreign Service Association (2015) and co-author with John K. Naland of Career Diplomacy: Life and Work in the U.S. Foreign Service (fourth edition, 2021). The centennial second edition of The Voice of the Foreign Service will be published by AFSA’s imprint, FS Books, in May 2024.
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