The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

26 MAY 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Jim Lamont, a Foreign Service officer from 1965 to 1991, wrote about the Rogers Act for his doctoral dissertation, which he completed 50 years ago. In studying the legislation, he became curious about what hap- pened to the Foreign Service after its enactment, so he took the Foreign Service exam to find out. Larry Cohen, a Foreign Service officer from 1980 to 2007, is currently AFSA’s vice president for retirees. He and Jim Lamont served together in the economic section of Embassy Tegucigalpa from 1983 to 1985. The Foreign Service Act of 1924, known as the Rogers Act, created the U.S. Foreign Service as we know it today. Here is the story of how it happened. BY J I M LAMONT AND LARRY COHEN The Rogers Act of 1924 N inety years ago this month, the Rogers Act, officially known as the Foreign Service Act of 1924, merged the Department of State’s Diplomatic Service and Consular Service—sepa- rate institutions since the nation’s earliest days—into the United States Foreign Service. Equally important, it established a meritocracy-driven personnel system, and established or extended vital allowances and benefits that had been either lacking or seriously inadequate. The need for such sweeping reform had been evident many years before Representative John Jacob Rogers, R-Mass., intro- IN THE BEGINNING 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF AFSA AND THE FOREIGN SERVICE duced his first Foreign Service reform bill in 1919. A decade earlier President Theodore Roosevelt had declared: “The spoils system of making appointments to and removals from office is so wholly and unmixedly evil, is so emphatically un-American and undemocratic, and is so potent a force for degradation in our public life, that it is difficult to believe that any intelligent man of ordinary decency who has looked into the matter can be its advocate. As a matter of fact, the arguments in favor of the merit system against the spoils system are not only convincing; they are absolutely unanswerable.” The status quo was also inefficient. Although the Consular Service was in dire need of modernization, it was widely seen as business-oriented and was the more respected of the two divisions. The Diplomatic Service lacked many attributes for an effective professional career and was perceived by the public as elitist and snobby. Little interaction occurred between the two divisions, whose members followed unrelated career paths. Both suffered from a dearth of essential benefits. Salaries were discour- agingly low for consuls and ridiculously low for diplomats. The leading internal catalyst for reform at State during the early years of the 20th century was Wilbur John Carr. Born in Ohio in 1870, Carr entered the State Department as a shorthand FOCUS