The Foreign Service Journal, May 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2014 31 including the pen Pres. Coolidge had used to sign the bill into law. In public Carr maintained his customary modesty. But in his personal diary, he confided: “It was I … who drafted the legisla- tion and who carried through most that we have that is valuable.” While the Foreign Service Act specified what was to be done and set in place the framework for the modern Foreign Service, it required executive orders and administrative regulations to come to life. Accordingly, Executive Order 4022 of June 7, 1924, estab- lished the Foreign Service Personnel Board and named the under secretary of State as its chairman. Other board members included the assistant secretary for consular affairs—Carr—and an assistant secretary from the diplomatic branch so that both former services would be represented. The order also provided for the creation of a Board of Examiners and a Foreign Service School. Now that the institution’s basic structure was defined, the Personnel Board went to work. In its first major action, it retired older officers and jettisoned other “dead wood” in the united officer corps, clearing the way for more meritorious officers to rise through the ranks. The board acted with remarkable unanimity on a multitude of matters, following a tacit understanding that consular members would generally leave final decisions on diplomatic questions to their diplomatic colleagues and vice versa. It established stan- dards for entry tests and efficiency reports, assigned members to promotion review boards and clarified the requirements for entrance to the Foreign Service. Of particular note, it opened up the institution to women and African-Americans. The first woman to enter the Foreign Service after passage of the Rogers Act was Pattie H. Field, who was sworn in on April 20, 1925, and served as a vice consul in Amsterdam. However, Field was not the first woman in the United States Foreign Service. That honor belongs to Lucile Atcherson, who was appointed to the Diplomatic Service in 1922. (See “Lucile Atcherson Curtis: The First Female American Diplomat,” by Molly W. Wood, in the July- August 2013 Foreign Service Journal .) According to the State Department’s Office of the Historian, the first African-American to join the U.S. Foreign Service fol- lowing passage of the Rogers Act was Clifton R. Wharton, whose diplomatic career spanned nearly 40 years. Before 1924, some African-Americans had been admitted, but were assigned only to a handful of countries in Africa and the Caribbean, such as Haiti and Liberia. Now assignments of African-American FSOs were to be made worldwide—at least in theory. (See “African-American Consuls Abroad, 1897-1909,” by Benjamin R. Justesen, in the September 2004 Foreign Service Journal. ) To the continuing concern of Grew and his fellow diplomats, some issues were left unresolved. But as Carr commented, “The law is only the instrument which we are authorized to employ to the end we wish to obtain. We shall have only the kind of Service we are willing to make.” Unfortunately, a rocky road lay ahead for the system, due in large measure to the State Department’s failure to aggressively pursue congressional funding for training, allowances and other requirements. Congress even cut previously granted post allow- ances. This timidity seriously debilitated the Foreign Service, both in terms of efficiency and morale. One story that made the rounds told of a London bobby who encounters a solitary man sitting on a curb. The bobby asks him, “Gov’nor, why don’t you go ‘ome?” The man replies, “I have no home. I am the American ambassador!” Ironically, interchangeability between the services, a key stick- ing point prior to passage of the legislation, proved almost totally non-controversial. Just before its May 1924 passage, Grew wrote in a letter to a fellow diplomat that Carr “realizes … the branches must represent two separate professions” and there must be “no weaving back and forth” between them. His judgment about Carr’s views was essentially correct. The Personnel Board subsequently made clear that “indiscriminate transfers from one branch to the other clearly would not be in the interest of the government or of the officers themselves.” Carr had to agree. Foreign Service officers “particularly adapted” to one branch were expected to serve in it permanently, while officers with equal talents in both fields would be given their choice. How- ever, Grew and his fellow diplomats also recognized that there had to be some exceptions. As an indication of its acceptance of interchangeability, the Personnel Board decided that most For- A rocky road lay ahead for the system, due in large measure to the State Department’s failure to aggressively pursue congressional funding for training, allowances and other requirements.