Consuls, Diplomats

When Consul General Robert Piet Kisner climbed aboard the Orient Express at Paris one night last week, bound for his new post in Athens as U. S. Minister to Greece, he was performing an act of far more significance than taking a train ride. It was the first time a consular officer had proceeded to a new post without going to Washington to confer with the Department of State; furthermore, Mr. Kisner's appointment was the first important application of the Rogers Act of 1924, which combined the consular and diplomatic services into a single "Foreign Service."

Chiefly responsible for the Rogers Act and for the rising efficiency of the U. S. foreign service within the last two decades is Wilbur J. Carr, now Assistant Secretary of State. He is an earnest man of 56, with a high forehead and hard-worked eyes; he might have been a minister in Hillsboro, Ohio, if his parents had had their way. Instead he studied shorthand and soon found his way into a clerkship in the Department of State. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (then a confidential secretary to Secretary of State Gresham) picked him up as an able stenographer, then lost him when he went into the bureau of indexes and archives. By day, young Clerk Carr rummaged around among the dusty State documents with a wide-eyed, temperamental youth named Francois Jones who had worked in Paris; by night, the two became wrought up over the evil effects of politics on the diplomatic and consular services. Finally in 1895 they drew up a bill for the organization of the foreign services on a merit basis. Politicians laughed heartily, wondered who this young Zealot Carr was. Senators Morgan of Alabama and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts introduced the bill regularly from 1895 to 1905, and saw it tossed aside equally regularly. In 1905 Elihu Root became Secretary of State with a desire to reform the consular service. He discovered that Mr. Carr, then at the head of the Consular bureau, had "a mind stuffed full of ten years' accumulation of calm, well-balanced, orderly ideas for improvement." So Secretary Root and Senator Lodge redrafted the schemes of Mr. Carr and Mr. Jones into a new bill and pushed it through Congress in 1906. By this act the consular service adopted the merit system. In 1915 both the consular and diplomatic services were reorganized and the merit basis further extended.

Secretaries of State came and went, but Mr. Carr remained the faithful, almost everlasting servant of the Department of State. In 1924 he saw the seed of 1895 reach its full bloom in the Rogers Act. The diplomatic and consular services became one; at last, the U. S. consulate became something more distinguished than a passport and visa office. Thus, able men such as Mr. Kisner, trained in the consular service, can readily step up into ministerships and ambassadorships. Probably the great ambassadorships to the Court of St. James's, to France, to Germany, to Japan will always remain political plums, but at least Mr. Carr has injected the merit system into many another so-called plum.