The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

surge of applicants subsided. The emergence of the “lily white” Repub- lican faction, followed by McKinley’s assassination in September 1901, ended lingering hopes for a second large round of African-American appointments. New president Theodore Roose- velt, who depended heavily on the cautious advice of Booker T. Washington, was generally apathetic toward black appointments. But Roosevelt retained many McKinley appointees and made limited efforts to appoint other black consuls during his first term. When he took office in 1901, the consular service was a vast, far-flung operation, with 39 con- sulates general, 255 consulates and 23 commercial agencies. According to a State Department report described the next month in the Evening Star , the consular service had 1,100 employees, compared to a work force of 99 for the department proper. Roosevelt’s most well-known appointment was probably that of future civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938), a Florida native and attorney who entered consular service in 1906. Between 1906 and 1913, he served as consul in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and in Corinto, Nicaragua. During the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1912, he helped stall rebel fighters from entering Corinto until U.S. military forces could arrive to shore up the regime of President Adolfo Diaz. His performance was highly rated, leading to his serious consideration for two more demanding posts outside the Western Hemisphere (Goree-Dakar and Nice). Johnson’s efforts to gain a European posting, particularly after his marriage, may have undermined his chances to continue as a consular officer after the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in November 1912; tentatively slated for reassignment to the Azores, he resigned six months after Wilson’s inauguration. But Johnson went on to fame as an attor- ney, teacher, author and secretary of the NAACP. Both Johnson’s credentials and ref- erences had been impeccable. But in some cases, the political patronage associated with consular appoint- ments made selection a riskier task. The disgrace of Roosevelt’s first major African-American ministerial appoint- ment, Dr. John R. A. Crossland (1864-1950) of Missouri — sent to Monrovia in 1902 — may have damp- ened his already limited enthusiasm for black appointees. Crossland eager- ly accepted the posting as minister to Liberia, but his diplomatic career ended abruptly, just eight months later, when a spicy local scandal forced his hasty departure and replacement. His successor, Ernest Lyon (1860-1938), a minister and naturalized U.S. citizen born of African parents in Honduras, served more creditably — and circumspectly — as U.S. minister to Liberia for seven years, from 1903 until 1910. Most notable among the new con- suls was Christopher Harrison Payne (1848-1925) of West Virginia, a minister, editor and lawyer named in 1903 to the consulship at St. Thomas, Danish West Indies. Payne, 55 when he succeeded Van Horne at St. Thomas, remained there for the rest of his life. After the U.S. government purchased the islands from Denmark in 1917, Payne retired from federal service to practice law there, also act- ing as prosecuting attorney and police judge in the capital, Charlotte Amalie. Also appointed in 1903, Dr. G. Jarvis Bowens (b. 1869), a Norfolk, Vir- ginia, physician, became consul in Guadeloupe, where he remained for nearly five years. Former Kingston consul Louis Dent , once a favored aide to Secretary of State James G. Blaine, sought to return to consular service in 1904. He had resigned the Kingston consulship in 1899, after an admirable perfor- mance during the war with Spain, to be appointed as D.C. Registrar of Wills. Offered an appointment with less appealing geography this time — Dawson City in Canada’s Northwest Territories — Dent accepted, but two months later chose to resign rather than proceed to post. Another 1904 appointment went to New York jour- nalist Jerome Bowers Peterson (1860-1943), who became consul in Puerto Cabello, but resigned a year later. Two early Liberian appointments below the rank of consul were also notable. In 1902, Roosevelt selected 25-year-old lawyer George Washing- ton Ellis (1875-1919) of Washington, D.C., later confirmed by the Senate, to succeed James Robert Spurgeon (dates not available), the outgoing legation secretary in Monrovia. Ellis was induced to accept the post pri- marily because of his passionate inter- ests in the ethnological, sociological and linguistic characteristics of Liberia’s inland tribes. In addition to S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 75 Of all the appointees during the 12-year period, only four continued their careers into the 1920s. Two went on to serve as Foreign Service officers, under the terms of the 1924 Rogers Act.