The Foreign Service Journal, April 2018

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2018 25 The Service, by and large, had little sympathy with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration that took office in March 1933. The Service at the time was, indeed, as it was later called, pale, male and Yale. Photographs of all 683 Foreign Service officers published in the Journal in November 1936 showed 681 white men and two white women. A table published in June 1940, when there were 850 FSOs, identified 211 (25 percent) as graduates of Harvard, Yale or Princeton. An FSO, writing to the Journal in 1954, commented: “Anyone who knows the Service also knows that in the main it is composed of very conservative and cautious men and that during the 20 years of the Demo- cratic administration it never contained more than a handful who were personally in sympathy with the social objectives and attitudes of the New Deal and the Fair Deal.” In 1937 Selden Chapin, who would later design much of the structure of the Foreign Service Act of 1946, contributed a two-part article propos- ing major changes in the operation and administra- tion of the Foreign Service and its personnel, with the goal of promoting greater training and specialization among officers. Chapin’s articles in the November and December issues received the Journal ’s sup- port in an “Editors’ Col- umn” (which in mid-1937 became a regular Journal feature), but neither Secretary of State Cordell Hull nor the White House showed interest in the topic. The White House found it easier to ignore the Service than to take on the task of reforming it. Discussions of Foreign Service reform faded from the Jour- nal ’s pages. In 1939, the closure of the separate foreign agricul- tural and commercial services led to the transfer of more than a hundred outsiders into the Foreign Service at the Department of State. The Journal published the names of the newly com- missioned officers, but otherwise said not a word. Throughout the 1930s, neither AFSA nor the Journal would have described itself as the voice of the Foreign Service. That role belonged, without question, to the Department of State. The Journal published, almost always without comment, full texts or summaries of statements by department officials on matters affecting the Service, particularly legislation, appro- priations and allowances. The Journal also reprinted a good deal of third-party content—editorials and articles from vari- ous U.S. newspapers and magazines, and speeches by notable figures—generally favorable to the Service and complimentary of its performance. Except in these official documents and third-party pieces, matters of foreign policy were almost never broached, at least not until the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939. Discussions of fascism or communism were limited to book reviews, of which there were many. The war pushed civilian diplomacy to the side. Aging under a hiring freeze and unable to operate in combat zones, the For- eign Service spent the war years in a kind of hibernation and the Journal in an editorial torpor (coverage of posts in Latin America, where diplomatic routine was largely maintained, was never again so intense). Only issues of personnel and institutional reform seemed to generate excite- ment. Peace and Persecution In March 1944 the Jour- nal woke up its audience with a contest that offered a donated top prize of $500 (about $7,000 today) for the best essay by an active- duty officer on the topic “Suggestions for Improving the Foreign Service and Its Administration to Meet Its War and Post-War Responsibilities.” (George V. Allen, then a vice consul but later National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan, had won a similar but even more lucrative contest in 1935.) Sixty officers—an extraordinary number—submitted essays to a panel of judges that included two serving members of Congress and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, the highest-ranking career Foreign Service officer at the time. The winning essay, by James Orr Denby, appeared in the February 1945 Journal (see excerpt The Foreign Service is a profession which has been called a science, in that it concerns itself with the observation and classification of facts. It can also be a fine art, when, in intricate international negotiations, great judgment is called into play. Somewhat less pretentiously, it has been thought of simply as a trade. If it is a trade, then words are its tools, and these should be used effectively, as precision instruments. … Young men and women entering a career in which shades of meaning can disturb or strengthen the relationships among nations should be aware of this fact. They should be indoctri- nated in semantics and gain reverence for precision in speech and writing. —James Orr Denby, from his winning entry in AFSA's 1944 essay contest, February 1945 FSJ Suggestions for Improving the Foreign Service