Blog Posts

Exhibit: Corporate Letterhead

The correspondence of the US Consular Service contains a wide range of documents, including myriad letters from American businesses. When I was conducting research at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland this summer, I photographed quite a bit of it, mostly from file 125.064 (American consular offices. Commercial reading and sample rooms.) and dating to 1911 or shortly thereafter. The letterhead can certainly be used as evidence of graphic design, but it also provides insight into many aspects of social and economic history and raises questions for future research. I’ve created an exhibit that presents and interprets some of my best finds. Enjoy!

Digital Humanities at UVM

My colleague Melanie Gustafson and I presented some of our work as part of the series of events at UVM organized by our Humanities Center Collaborative Faculty Fellowship Group on the Digital Humanities. Thanks to all who attended!

I showed some of the maps and visualizations I have made as part of my research on the Consular Service. (You can see them as part of my 2015 SHAFR presentation.)

Prof. Gustafson and I both stressed the time commitment involved in digital humanities projects, the need to work collaboratively to bring all the essential skills to the table, and the intellectual work of categorization and organization. We agreed that, not only do digital humanities exhibits/projects need to be considered as part of departmental promotion and tenure guidelines, but properly curated datasets made available to the public should be counted as well.

The Register of the Department of State

The initial source I’m using for constructing my list of consular posts and personnel is the Register of the Department of State. The Register was printed annually (sometimes more often) and listed the current employees of the Department of State posted in Washington and in the field. Additional contents varied over time, but one can often find information about where foreign governments maintained posts in the United States, brief biographical sketches of DOS personnel, legislation relating to the conduct of US foreign policy, and more.

Here’s the table of contents from the 1900 Register:

DOS Register 1900 TOC

And here’s a sample page from the section in which US consuls are listed, also from 1900:

DOS Register 1900 Sample

I’m still trying to get a definitive answer as to when the DOS Register began publication, but it was definitely published almost continually from 1869 until 1997, when it shifted to an online publication. As far as I have been able to discern, it wasn’t published in 1881, 1885, 1889, 1890, 1891, 1904, 1905, 1919, 1920, and 1921. (Apparently the Cleveland administration wasn’t too concerned about it? And I suspect the absence in the immediate aftermath of World War I is due to the US government’s failure to normalize its relations with the successor governments of the Central Powers.)

Many issues are available on the Hathi Trust or in Federal Depository Libraries. I have digital copies of the whole run from 1869 to 1942 and will consider requests to share.

For the missing years, I’m using the US Register, which began publication in 1816 after Congress passed a law demanding it. It’s a list of all US government employees. Initially, it was supposed to come out once every two years, but there were some irregularities, and then it became an annual. Many years have been digitized and made available online. (Sadly, at the time of this writing, the Google Books scan of the 1816 and 1818 editions are missing huge sections.) After the Civil War, there were often two volumes in a year, one for postal employees and one for everyone else. The US Register does list DOS personnel, but it focuses on those who drew salaries, so consular agents are not well represented, and all of the other cool stuff that’s in the DOS Register is missing.

The DOS Card File

In the early 1870s, staff at the Department of State in Washington created an index card system to keep track of where posts were located and who was in charge of them. Likely created as part of preparation for printing an historically oriented special edition of the Register of the Department of State for the department’s centennial, the original creator looked at departmental records to fill in historical data back to the earliest days of US foreign relations. The cards were maintained until 1969, and they are available on microfilm through 1939. They are organized by post and then by rank of personnel. As an example, here’s the first card for US consuls posted to Vienna, Austria:

DOS Card Vienna

If one typed up a list of all the places in the card headings, wouldn’t that provide a comprehensive list of posts? Sadly, no. In checking the cards against other records, I’ve found several dozen additional posts, although most of what I’ve found are consular agencies, rather than salaried posts. (The government kept good track of salaried posts!) The authors of the cards didn’t handle place name changes consistently, either. In some cases, when a post’s name changed — from Saint Petersburg to Leningrad, for example — the list was continued on the original card and a “see also” card was inserted for the new name. In other cases, they created a card for the new name and started a new list there. Sometimes they created new cards for minor spelling differences, too. In sum, there’s a lot of overlap.

I haven’t delved deeply enough into the cards to comment on whether the personnel data is accurate, but it’s certainly an extremely good place to start.

Here’s the citation for the microfilmed version of the consular cards:

US Department of State, List of U.S. Consular Officers, 1789-1939, National Archives Microfilm Publications: Microcopy no. 587, 21 vols. (Washington DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1964). OCLC Accession number: 7908593.

There are also cards for the diplomatic posts. Here’s the first card for the legation in Vienna:

DOS Card Austria

Here’s the citation for the microfilmed version of the diplomatic cards:

US Department of State, List of U.S. Diplomatic Officers, 1789-1939, National Archives Microfilm Publications: Microcopy no. 586, 3 vols. (Washington DC: National Archives and Records Service, 1964). OCLC Accession number: 397282.

I have had the consular and diplomatic cards digitized and am willing to consider requests to share.

For more on the history of the DOS card file, see Smith’s America’s Diplomats and Consuls.

Walter Burges Smith’s Dataset

In 1986, US Foreign Service Office Walter Burges Smith created a database of US diplomats and consuls who served between 1776 and 1865 and wrote a book interpreting the results and commenting on the source base.

Here’s the full citation:

Walter Burges Smith, America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776-1865: A Geographic and Biographic Directory of the Foreign Service from the Declaration of Independence to the End of the Civil War (Arlington VA: Center for the Study of Foreign Affairs, 1986).

The book is available as a free PDF via the Hathi Trust.

C. S. Kennedy’s The American Consul

Scholarship directly focused on the US Consular Service is in short supply. The main book is Charles Stuart Kennedy’s The American Consul: A History of the United States Consular Service, 1776-1914, originally published in 1990 by Greenwood Press. It is now out in a revised second edition that takes the story to 1924; that version was published in 2015 by New Academia Publishing.

Kennedy, a former US Foreign Service officer, provides an account of the institution’s divided temporally and geographically. It focuses on the issue of professionalization and provides many vignettes featuring some of the most famous — or, indeed, infamous — US consuls, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper.

Presentation: FRS 2015

I was fortunate to kick off the UVM History Department’s Faculty Research Seminar series yesterday, sharing a presentation on “Bureaucracy and Humanity: Exploring the Records of the US Consular Service” with terrific colleagues and graduate students. I resisted providing an actual title until the last possible moment — the start of the presentation — but my advertising blurb promised “tales of fraud and death, bureaucratic grandeur, and State Department attempts at art, plus a new gadget.” I won’t put the whole thing up here, but here are some highlights, minus most of the analytical bits:

THE NEW GADGET: The ScanSnap SV600 Contactless Scanner, which was what caught my eye in terms of new technology when I was at Archives II in College Park this summer. I’m looking forward to really using it when I return this fall, but so far, so awesome.

BUREAUCRATIC GRANDEUR: Members of Congress, the public, and some central office personnel at the Department of State certainly had lots of suggestions about how to improve the US Consular Service, but a lot of ideas came from consuls themselves. After the creation of inspectors — holding the title Consuls General At Large — in 1906, there were more and grander suggestions, most aimed at improving efficiency and uniformity of practice. Many of the ideas were very much in line with contemporary efforts for Taylorist or similar reforms of business processes. Most were deemed impracticable — or even “revolutionary” — by the central office, but they did push through a reform that required US consulates throughout the world to be open to the public from 9 am to 4:30 pm Monday through Friday and from 9 am to 1 pm on Saturdays. The discussion began in 1913 after one of the At Larges expressed his dismay that the consulate at Riga was only open from 10 to 3. The central office solicited opinions from the rest of the At Larges, who split on the issue: some thought local customs and the discretion of individual consuls should prevail, while others emphasized the need to match the norm in the United States and thus accommodate the expectations of members of the American public traveling abroad. The central office went for the latter position and sent rather harshly worded instructions to specific consuls to conform with the new rules. I’m not sure (yet?) how effective the reform was, especially because it was done in 1916 in the midst of World War I — the very definition of “extenuating circumstances” — but the documents clearly evidence the frustrations of all parties.

STATE DEPARTMENT ATTEMPTS AT ART: There was a visualization — poorly photographed on my part — of one of the reform plans, plus an At Large’s drawing of what a proper US Consular Agency office should look like. But my personal favorite still remains the oversize scrapbooks of consular forms assembled for as yet unknown reasons in approximately 1890:

200-742 - Scrapbook Cover 1

184-742 - View of Scrapbook with six forms 2

Sadly, even though they promise a “Complete Set of Blanks” — and, thus, potentially, an expression of all of the service’s bureaucratic functions — it isn’t actually complete. There is quite a bit in there, however, though they definitely don’t deserve points for effective or aesthetically pleasing use of space.

DEATH: When an American died abroad, consuls were responsible for reporting the death to the State Department and ensuring the proper handling of the body and the deceased estate/personal property. I showed some examples of the reports generated by consuls stationed in England in 1913; they’re especially easy to find for the Decimal File years (1910-29; see this post for more information). They could be useful sources for scholars interested in a variety of historical subfields, as they provide information about citizenship, the circumstances of death, familial relations, travel patterns, and mortuary practices, among other things. I was struck by the number of women evident in the records. There’s a lot of very raw emotion in there, too.

FRAUD: Consuls also worked to protect US citizens from various kinds of fraud. In Anglo-American relations, a great deal of time was spent attempting by various means to communicate to Americans that “THERE ARE NO GREAT UNCLAIMED ESTATES IN ENGLAND.” It was popular scam for people who claimed to be British attorneys to put advertisements in newspapers announcing that they were looking for the heirs to “the [insert common surname here] estate,” valued at however many millions of pounds. The victims of the fraud paid for copies of wills, attorneys fees, genealogical reports, and other things in pursuit of claims. Requests for assistance in furthering the claims or establishing the legitimacy of the advertisements came to the legation and consular staff so often that, in 1884, they had a form cover letter and a circular printed to send in response. (And still in use in 1914.) While many circulars I have seen are quite tactful, this one isn’t; if nothing else, the ones I’ve read before have been addressed to specific members of Congress, while this began as internal State Department communications. You can view the original on pages 224-29 in the 1884 volume of Foreign Relations of the United States here.

Presentation: SHAFR 2015

For the 2015 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) conference, I organized a panel on “Patterns and Problems: The US Consular Service in the Nineteenth Century.” Joining me in presenting papers were Prof. Lawrence Peskin of the Morgan State University, who spoke about his research on the Montgomery family, a trading family who provided the US consul in Alicante, Spain from 1793 to 1823; and Prof. Mattew Raffety of the University of Redlands, who spoke about Nicholas Trist’s time as a – very loquacious – US consul in Havana between 1831 and 1845. Our chair was Prof. Nancy Shoemaker of the University of Connecticut, and our commentator was Prof. Kristin Hoganson of the University of Illinois.

Here’s my paper on “Charting the US Consular Service in the Long Nineteenth Century”:

Phelps – SHAFR 2015 Presentation

Records: NARA Finding Guides

Department of State records pertaining to the US Consular Service records are in the Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of State and Record Group 84: Records of the Foreign Service Posts. It’s important to keep in mind that not all consuls kept good records, and even if they did, many have been lost during wars, natural disasters, and similar catastrophes. There’s all sorts of great stuff in consular records, but it isn’t always as complete or as well organized as one might like.

Some of the consular records — along with some diplomatic corps records — covering the period from 1789 until 1906 have been microfilmed and are available at some research libraries, through Interlibrary Loan, or in the microfilm room of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) building in College Park, Maryland. They are organized by post, then chronologically. Here’s a PDF of the published finding guide:

NARA Diplomatic Records – Blue Microfilm Guide

Keep in mind that place names may have changed, so you’ll want to look under alternate names if you don’t find what you’re looking for on the first pass.

The period from 1906 to 1910 is the Numerical File, and it’s sort of a black hole. I’ll post more information about finding things there at some point in the future. Most of it has been microfilmed, though; the trick is figuring out where the documents you want actually are. They’re somewhere, pretty much randomly, in those ca. 1,500 rolls of film.

Then the Decimal File kicks in, covering the period from 1910 to 1929, gifting the researcher with a relatively nuanced filing system. The main finding guide, including country codes, is here:

NARA RG 59 Decimal File Guide

There are post codes for the consulates, too; my transcription from the list in the finding guide available in the textual records reading room at NARA is available here:

NARA RG 59 Consulate Numbers

Record Group 59 also includes a bunch of other great stuff that hasn’t been microfilmed and is held in College Park. It ranges from the early days of the department through roughly World War II. The finding guide is available in four parts:

NARA Inventory 15 Pt I – Guide to DOS Central Files

NARA Inventory 15 Pt II – Guide to DOS Central Files

NARA Inventory 15 Pt III – Guide to DOS Central Files

NARA Inventory 15 Pt IV – Guide to DOS Central Files

Then there’s Record Group 84. The Diplomatic Records guide mentioned above does have some information about the records here that have been filmed, but only a small number of the records fall into that category. The guide is also a bit misleading in that regard, giving the impression that the filmed records are all that exist. But there’s lots more at College Park! Most posts have some sort of records there, from account books to letter files to registers of American citizens. The basic finding guide is here:

NARA Guide to RG 84

If you go to College Park, you’ll use the information gleaned from these finding guides to consult the box lists to figure out what exactly you need to order. At this point, I don’t believe the box lists are accessible from anywhere but the textual records reading room at College Park.