Duty v. Love

As the British Government last week offered its King a choice between love and duty (see p. 18), the U. S. Government created exactly similar dilemmas for most of its diplomats when Acting Secretary of State R. Walton Moore released a Presidential executive order designed to discourage officers of the U. S. foreign service from taking alien wives. The order was in accord with the State Department's anxiety over heightening national animosities, which has caused widespread reshuffling of its representatives who seemed likely to be unduly affected by attachments in the lands of their assignments Italy, France, Brazil, Mexico, Belgium Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Portugal and Turkey have similar regulations against diplomatic marriages to aliens. But most informed observers traced the U. S. order's origin to the inconvenience to which Ambassador to France William Christian Bullitt was put during his Ambassadorial stay in Moscow.

Warm State Department friends as the New Deal began were bald Mr. Bullitt and John C. Wiley, able career man renowned for his grave wit. Both wifeless, they were the liveliest members of the U. S. delegation to the London Economic Conference whiled away many a happy shipboard hour dancing with the delegation's young stenographers. When President Roosevelt made Friend Bullitt first U. S. Ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Friend Wiley went along as Counselor of Embassy. Then came a rift in the diplomatic comradeship. Counselor Wiley married a Polish sculptress named Irene Baruch. Relations between Ambassador and Counselor soon cooled to the extent that John Wiley was transferred to Antwerp as Consul General. But the distress of Ambassador Bullitt was not so easily ended. There was not a single U. S.-born wife among the career men on his staff. Beset by thoughts of tattling tongues and divided loyalties, he complained to his good friend President Roosevelt that his staff dinners resembled League of Nations functions, that he could not speak his mind in comfort.

The 53 Ambassadors and Ministers are exempt from the new marriage regulation. All other U. S. foreign servants desiring to marry aliens must henceforth ask permission of the Secretary of State, accompany such application with their proffered resignations. Anyone who marries an alien without the Secretary's permission will be dismissed for insubordination. No person already married to an alien will be permitted to take foreign service entrance examinations.

Of the foreign service's 684 married officers, 127 are now wed to foreign-born women, as are 202 of the service's 724 U. S. clerks. Until passage of the Cable Act in 1922, a foreign woman marrying a U. S. citizen automatically acquired his citizenship. Since then, such mates have been forced to seek naturalization. Partly because of their difficulties in fulfilling residence requirements, the wives of only twelve of the 76 foreign service officers who have wed aliens since 1922 have become U. S. citizens.

'"The Department," observed the State Department in its promulgating letter to diplomatic and consular officers last week, "has fully realized the problems of those who by reason of long-continued residence away from the land of their birth and separation from their former acquaintances often find it increasingly difficult to contract marriages with Americans. . . . In the past certain men . . . have reached high positions in the service and have been aided by the valiant, loyal women of foreign birth to whom they were married. In the present condition of world affairs, however, any tendency further to increase the number of marriages of this character must be regarded with concern."

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