The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2012 19 of embassies, on the other hand, was restricted to the number of countries where bilateral relations were suffi- ciently active that a resident diplomatic representative was required. Merit Becomes a Consideration As the 19th century drew to a close, Washington policymakers came to the realization that the business of government was becoming too impor- tant and complex to be left entirely to inexperienced political appointees, who changed from one administration to the next. Career officials, hired and promoted on the basis of merit, started to become the norm for both the Civil Service and the Foreign Service. President William Howard Taft gave the process of professionalizing the diplomatic and consular services a big boost. In each of his four State of the Union speeches, from 1909 to 1912, he described what he had done to improve the efficiency of the State Department and urged Congress to help institu- tionalize reform. This process eventu- ally bore fruit with the passage of the Rogers Act of 1924, which combined the diplomatic and consular services into a unified United States Foreign Service. The dramatic change that these efforts brought about during the first half of the 20th century is reflected in the statistics. The number of consular posts peaked at 368 in 1920, then began a precipitous decline due to the replace- ment of freelance consular agents with paid bureaucrats. At that time the United States only maintained 45 embassies, but the total quickly began to climb. Even so, it was not until the 1970s that the number of embassies exceeded the number of consular posts. As the number of diplomatic mis- sions went up, more of them were headed by an ambassador. By 1950, they accounted for more than three-quarters of the total. At the same time, the pro- portion of ambassadors who were career officers jumped from 10 percent in 1920 to 68 percent in 1950. These trends reflected several developments. First, as decoloniza- tion increased the number of nations, our consulates in the former colonies were replaced by embassies. In addi- tion, the emergence of the United States from World War II as the most powerful nation in the world and the onset of the Cold War both required diplomatic rep- resentation in nearly every country to protect American interests and to wage worldwide struggle against communism. During the Eisenhower administra- tion, the percentage of career ambas- sadors reached about two-thirds of the total. It has stayed at roughly that level Ever since the Eisenhower administration, the proportion of career ambassadors has hovered at about two-thirds of the total, regardless of the party in power.