The Foreign Service Journal, November 2007

was formed to help prominent Jewish artists and intel- lectuals win exceptions to American immigration policy. While Bingham continued to issue normal visas, he and Fry worked closely on contacting the people Fry had been sent to rescue and issuing them emergency visas. Bingham, Fry, French partisans and like-minded Americans ran an underground railroad out of Bingham’s villa, hiding refugees and coordinating their escape to America. Bingham is estimated to have saved 1,500 people before his reassignment to Buenos Aires in 1941, where he remained for the next four years. There, he added to his nonconformist reputation by complaining in increasingly strong terms to his superiors about the growing Nazi presence in Argentina. In 1945, he was denied promotion and, ultimately, was hounded out of the Service. Written by Bingham’s son Robert, Courageous Dissent is illustrated with family photos, mementoes and quotes from Bingham’s diary. The author led a successful campaign to have a commemorative stamp issued with his father’s image (released in 2006 as part of the “Distinguished American Diplomat” series). In 2004, AFSA honored Harry Bingham posthumously with a Constructive Dissent Award. Peter Strickland: New London Shipmaster, Boston Merchant, First Consul to Senegal Stephen H. Grant, New Academia Publishing, 2006, $20.00, paperback, 236 pages. In 1883, the State Depart- ment appointed Peter Strick- land as U.S. consul in Gorée Island, Senegal. He was the first American diplomat to work in West Africa, a major French colonial area. Born in 1837 to a comfortable farming family in New London, Conn., Strickland became a merchant marine on ships going to Europe. He made his first visit to Africa during the last year of the Civil War. Later, after some hesitation amid con- cerns about the “African fevers,” he accepted an offer of a long-term assignment on the coast of West Africa. Initially unimpressed with Gorée Island— infamous as the place where slaves were loaded onto cargo ships for N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 25