The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

24 APRIL 2018 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Readers seem to have found the Journal boring. In October 1929, five years into its run, the Journal noted a decision by AFSA’s Executive Commit- tee (the predecessor of today’s Governing Board) to take the publication in a different direction, toward “greater frankness” in discussing “problems and difficulties that may confront the Service.” For the first time, the Journal hired a full-time editor, a retired consular officer. The statement of purpose disap- peared. An opinion piece, pub- lished in December 1929 and signed by the chairman of the association’s executive committee, confirmed the change. After several years of budget cuts, Dana Munro wrote, many Service members “are profoundly discouraged … about the future of the Service,” as shown by “the appalling number of recent resignations.” Munro, who considered the despairing mood seriously over- blown, urged Service members to contribute to a “frank and full discussion” of the problems of the Service “in the privacy of the Journal ’s columns.” Despite Munro’s appeal, echoed occasionally in plaintive letters to the editor, the next few years saw little in the way of debate about active issues confronting the Service. According to Smith Simpson’s account of the Journal ’s first 60 years (Novem- ber 1984 FSJ ), signed articles in the early years came almost exclusively frommembers of the old consular service. “Diplomats virtually boycott the Journal ,” he wrote, blam- ing their attitude on “their dislike of the Rogers Act [the Foreign Service Act of 1924] and anything associated with it.” Nevertheless, the historian Hugh de Santis, in a book excerpt published in the Journal in 1979, said the Journal , despite its “breezy, gossip-style format … reinforced organizational cohesion” and helped “to cement the diplomat’s professional identity.” Henry Stimson, who took office as President Herbert Hoover’s Secretary of State in March 1929, was more intense and demanding than his prede- cessor, and the Journal ’s tone took on some of Stimson’s seri- ousness. The number of articles on the work of the department and its diplomats increased, and coverage of social trivia diminished. Stimson persuaded the president and Congress to raise salaries and allowances for the Service and authorized an increase in hiring. Depression and War But the respite was short-lived. As the Great Depres- sion deepened, President Herbert Hoover and Congress put together an austerity budget in 1932 that imposed deep cuts across the government, including in the department and the Service. The Journal accepted austerity as inevitable, as politi- cally it no doubt was; but bitterness was evident in a sarcastic item hidden like a want-ad in the September 1932 Journal : “WANTED: A nice poorhouse, with all modern conveniences, where a Foreign Service officer can spend his 30-day furlough without pay.” T he State Department found the idea of an independent publication deeply unsettling and insisted on prepublication review of every issue. Full-page ad in the May 1919 Journal .