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Bob Rackmales of Belfast is retired from the U.S. Foreign Service with the rank of minister-counselor, with assignments including director of the Office of Human Rights and charge d’affaires of the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. He has taught courses at Belfast and Coastal Senior Colleges since 2005.
May 24, 2024, will mark the centenary of two important national laws, whose common roots are frequently overlooked. The better known is the Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act or the National Quotas Act), which drastically reduced U.S. immigration levels, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. In the words of immigration historian Erika Lee, the act “legitimized immigrant exclusion and restriction on the basis of race as an acceptable policy — even a respected tradition — in the United States.”
On the same day that President Calvin Coolidge signed the immigration bill, he signed the Foreign Service Act of 1924 (also known at the Rogers Act). It achieved the amalgamation of what had been separate services — diplomatic and consular — into a U.S. Foreign Service.
That these two pieces of legislation reached the president’s desk at the same time was no accident. Wilbur Carr, the head of the Consular Service, played a central role in the drafting of the Rogers Act and was equally active on behalf of immigration restriction legislation. In 1920, he provided Congress a document using racist language to oppose the admission of such groups as Sicilians or Polish Jews. It characterized prospective immigrants from Sicily as “inimical to the best interests of the United States… For the most part they are small in stature and of a low order of intelligence.”
The newly created Foreign Service took strong steps to insure that both the letter and the spirit of the Johnson-Reed Act were enforced. Diplomatic historian Robert Schulzinger described how lectures in the Foreign Service School “were permeated with a nativist social outlook, offering a militant justification for the strict enforcement of the quota system.” For example, the U.S. ambassador to China told the diplomats that immigration restriction was a first step to achieving racial homogeneity. “I think if we had it to do all over again we would not admit Negroes to citizenship. We do not propose at present to grant that right to yellow people.”
This mindset of the “pale, male and Yale” Foreign Service lingered for years. It accounts for the premature end to the career of Hiram Bingham IV. Despite being the son of a U.S. senator and meeting the skin color, gender and academic criteria noted above, Bingham’s issuance of travel documents saving an estimated 2,000 individuals threatened with deportation from France to German extermination camps resulted in the termination of his assignment as consular officer in Marseilles in 1941, and his leaving the Foreign Service under a cloud in 1945. He achieved wide public recognition posthumously only in 2006, with the issuance of a U.S. postage stamp in his honor.
The 1960s marked the beginning of a slow but steady transformation away from institutional attitudes shaped in the 1920s. Partly, this reflected generational change, with the departure of influential officers steeped in the anxieties of that era. The passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, banning discrimination on the basis of race, sex or nationality, was a step forward. Ultimately, it may have been the rise of individuals who were neither pale, male nor Yale to top positions in the Foreign Service that may have done the most to bring about change.
In recent years perhaps the clearest indication of the extent of this change happened at the end of January 2017 when around 1,000 members of the Foreign Service signed a dissent cable protesting a presidential executive order that would have banned entry into the United States from seven predominately Muslim countries. As the Foreign Service celebrates the legacy of 100 years of service to the country, its ability to overcome the limitations of its founding fathers, as well as the memory of heroic individuals like Bingham, should be near the top of its list of achievements.
